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Newspaper Death Watch

South Idaho Press

In the Florida case, the judge banned a reporter from live blogging because he said the noise was distracting. A second reporter who was texting notes from the courtroom on a cell phone was also told to cut it out. However, a third reporter who was writing notes on paper was not disciplined. The tweeting journalist had drawn a more than 1,300 followers on Twitter for her coverage of the trial.

David Coursey looks at the iPad from more of a technologist’s perspective with Six Reasons You Want an iPad, Six Reasons You Don’t. He notes, “Apple wants you to pay $829 for the 64GB device, plus monthly wireless fees for AT&T’s 3G. The first year total: $1,189.” Of course, the iPhone was also vastly overpriced when first announced.

2 Comments –> Publishers Find a Tenuous Balance By paulgillin | February 12, 2010 - 11:45 am - Posted in Advertising, Business News, Circulation, Future of Journalism, Newspapers, Solutions

New Image Protection

Three new studies document the changing way in which journalists practice their craft, for better and for worse:

Mutter is outraged that people contact him asking “to commission an article or reprint a post in exchange for the ephemeral compensation known as ‘exposure,’” but the reality of the market is that a lot of people are willing to work for that (full disclosure: we recently approached Mutter about contributing to a for-profit website in exchange for a modest fee; he politely declined). For example, many book authors write extensively about their expertise for free in exchange for exposure in major publications.

Capital Times

Even if the Times‘ paywall experience is successful, there’s no guarantee that other newspapers will be able to duplicate it. The newspaper enjoys a cachet that few other titles can duplicate and it’s likely that some readers will support the initiative in the name of keeping the hallowed title afloat. The same can probably not be said for the Chicago Tribune.

5 Comments –> In Case You Haven’t Seen It… By paulgillin | February 9, 2010 - 7:27 pm - Posted in BusinessModel, Future of Journalism

Journalists can try to charge what they think they’re worth, but they’ll ultimately live or die by what the market is willing to pay. With the arrival of Web 2.0-style publishing, millions of people have started playing at journalism and it turns out some aren’t half bad at it. The trouble is that many of these casual journalists don’t make a living as reporters. Their journalism is a sidelight to their day jobs. They may be happy to work for a vague reward defined as “exposure” if it pays off in speaking jobs, consulting work or book contracts.

Union City Register-Tribune

We don’t get a lot of e-mail from Pulitzer Prize winners, so we were pleased and intrigued when David Cay Johnston sent a lengthy response to our recent comments on the shortcomings of American journalism schools. Johnston is a reporter’s reporter in the classic mold of “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”

There’s never an excuse for plagiarism, but an understanding of the environment in which young reporters like Kouwe work can at least explain his acts, if not excuse them.

The standards of intellectual property ownership that have been broadly accepted for so long are also growing fuzzier. Many bloggers don’t even post copyright information on their sites or they choose from one of an assortment of Creative Commons licenses that can themselves be confusing. The nonprofit culture of the blogosphere largely looks the other way when people lift content from each other. Many people use blogs as essentially online notepads, posting everything up to and including their shopping lists. Even if they cared about plagiarism, it’s difficult to spot violations and usually not worth the trouble of chasing the offenders. This works okay in the blogosphere because few bloggers practice their craft for money. In some cases, theft of content is actually considered a compliment to the author.

Top journalism blogs

The parent company of MediaNews Group, Inc. will file for bankruptcy, the 13th such filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the last 13 months. But it doesn’t look like MediaNews plans to stay in Chapter 11 for long. It has a debt restructuring plan in place that will cut its debt from about $930 million to $165 million and swap senior debtors’ paper for stock. The 116 creditors will have a majority of stock but not voting control. The Hearst Corp. and the family of MediaNews co-founder Richard Scudder are reportedly giving up interests in the company. Hearst took a $300 million stake in MediaNews in 2006 and that investment is now effectively worthless. ?MediaNews said newspaper operations, employees and suppliers wouldn’t be affected and that the debt restructuring plan would enable the company to quickly emerge in better financial condition.

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. More on his blog.

The Greenwood Lake (N.Y.) News is shutting down after 46 years, idling a small staff. The weekly had been honored for? editorial quality by the New York Press Association.

A Q&A on the Times‘ website sounds almost apologetic in tone. It points out that readers will continue to have full access to Times content from search engines but will not be able to click through to other stories on the website without paying a fee. Readers will be entitled to access a certain number of articles each month at no charge, but the limit was not specified. The decision to announce the paywall a year before implementation gives the Times some breathing room to assess reaction and set thresholds that readers can live with. The article in the Times notes that most readers still arrive at NYTimes.com via search engine, meaning that their experience will be undisturbed. The piece also notes that reader reaction on the Times’ website has been modestly favorable toward the move.

Ken Doctor evaluates the pluses and minuses of yesterday’s announcement. The good news for publishers is that readers will finally carry around a device that delivers an experience similar to what they have traditionally received from a magazine or tabloid newspaper. That can’t be bad for publishers who are accustomed to working in that format. Doctor also sees the iPad as a “magnet for marketing dollars” from companies that can finally deliver a television-like experience to a handheld device. The tablet may also rejuvenate long-form reading, which has suffered as continually distracted readers have learned to consume information in sips rather than draughts.

2 Comments –> Newsday Paywall Nets Just 35 Subs By paulgillin | January 28, 2010 - 11:29 am - Posted in Business News, BusinessModel, Demographics, Local news, NewMedia, Newspapers, OnlineMedia, Paywalls

Indianapolis-based freelance journalist Christopher Lloyd sees things our way. He’s passionate about movies and has contributed free movie reviews to some area newspapers since being laid off by the Indianapolis Star. “I knew I wasn’t going to drop my passion for film criticism. If I was going to do it, I might as well have it published,” he writes. Plus, movie studios won’t pay attention to a journalist whose work isn’t being read by anyone. He’s still plugging away and some of his clients are now paying a modest fee. He’s also got a site for film buffs called The Film Yap, where contributors work for, you guessed it…

Speaking of careers, a university professor has analyzed six months worth of recent job postings and discovered that traditional and non-traditional news outlets differ in their criteria for hiring journalists. Dr. Serena Carpenter, an assistant professor in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, looked at 664 online media job postings and concluded that established media organizations such as newspapers tended to favor candidates with solid writing and reporting skills while new media operations looked favorably on what she calls “adaptive expertise.” That includes broad-based experience and creative thinking.

Seth Lewis, a former Miami Herald editor and Ph.D student at the University of Texas, has joined the Nieman Journalism Lab as a contributor (paid?) specializing in journalism education and he’d like to know your ideas for what J-schools should teach. Perhaps stealing a line from the research noted above, Lewis is inclined to recommend a focus on adaptability. He defines that as the skills “to work in unpredictable settings, to generate their own funding as needed, and otherwise learn as they go.” In the process of interviewing for a faculty position at various academic institutions, Lewis says he was often asked what journalism schools should teach, which indicates that the profs at those schools are perplexed as well. Maybe you can provide him with some guidance.

Miscellany

“What’s more old-school than the print-on-paper newspaper we both love?” she writes. “The theater, of course. I’ve been working on and off for the past 18 months on a script that I’m about to start submitting to play competitions around the country. The title is ‘Dash Thirty Dash: An Allegory for the End Times.’ The piece celebrates the fun and beauty of the business and documents the suicide of newspapers.

Things are getting worse at the Boston Globe, though. The newspaper, which failed to sell for a reported asking price of $25 million last year, suffered a 20.3% drop in advertising revenues in the fourth quarter. Full-year revenue was down nearly 16%. The only glimmer of good news was an increase in circulation revenue, but the Globe, which has been frantically slashing costs since its near-death experience a year ago, continues to sink while it’s much smaller crosstown rival, the Herald, is reportedly earning a small profit.

Publishers who cheered The New York Times decision last week to build up a wall in front of its content should be considerably less cheery about the news emanating from Newsday. The Long Island daily has admitted that it has signed up just 35 paying subscribers since it put most of its content behind a pay wall in October. At $260 per subscriber per year, that amounts to just $9,000 in annualized revenue for a relaunch that reportedly cost $4 million.

Following up on today’s earlier post about the changing job environment…

The cases illustrate the discomfort that new media is creating in the trial courts. The capability of anyone to relate the events of a trial would seem to comply with the founding fathers’ desire for legal transparency, but the fact that those narratives can now be communicated worldwide makes some jurists nervous. Both of these issues are likely to need a Supreme Court resolution.

New research by the Society for New Communications Research and Middleberg Communications finds that seven in 10 of journalists are using social networking sites for research and reporting, a 28% increase over the previous year. Twitter use was up 25% and two in three journalists read blogs. Maybe more importantly, 80% of the journalists surveyed “believe that bloggers have become important opinion-shapers in recent years” and more than 90% “agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.” Researchers surveyed 341 journalists but didn’t say if the sample base was US-only or international.
Another new study, this one by media monitoring company Cision and Don Bates of The George Washington University, finds that nearly nine in 10 journalists use blogs for story research, 65% turn to social media sites and 52% tap into Twitter. Remarkably, the survey also found that 61% use Wikipedia despite popular doubts about the crowdsourced encyclopedia’s reliability. There’s a caveat, though. While reporters turn to social media for sourcing, they don’t necessarily trust the information they find there. Researchers noted that 84% of respondents said social media sources are “slightly less” or “much less” reliable than traditional media, with half said social media suffers from “lack of fact checking, verification and reporting standards.”
Finally, a Columbia Journalism Review survey of 665 consumer magazines finds that online content isn’t fact-checked or copy-edited as rigorously as printed content. Nearly half the respondents to the survey said their copy-editing standards are lower for online content compared to print and 11% don’t copy-edit online material at all. More than one-quarter of the respondents also said they’re less careful about fact-checking the information they publish online. CJR researchers attribute this to the primacy of speed in the digital publishing world, which causes publishers to cut corners on little things like getting stuff right. On a side note: only one-third of the online magazines are profitable and of those that are making money, nearly two-thirds give away all their content. Here’s a link to the full report on the CJR site. Miscellany

The Times is diversifying its revenue through a novel partnership with four institutions of higher learning that deliver Times expertise as online courses. This spring, the Times will start awarding certificates to paying students. For example, Ball State University just launched a six-week course on video storytelling that bestows certificates in “emerging media journalism” co-validated by the Times and Ball State. We love this idea. While tuition will never be a major revenue stream for the old Gray Lady, it is at least a diversification out of the declining advertising business. And with more citizens wanting to learn the craft of storytelling, perhaps a course with Times reporters and editors is something they’d be willing to pay for.

Internet Out of the Courtroom

How advertising efficiency is devastating the media economic models that are based on the inherent inefficiency of mass-market advertising;
The irony that newspaper readership is at an all-time high even as the industry craters;
How the efficiency of online publishing permits new media organizations to operate much more cheaply than their predecessors;
Why the 57-year-old average daily newspaper reader is an undesirable target for advertisers;
Why advertising costs will continue to go down and why this is a problem for traditional media;
Why Craigslist has devastated newspapers’ most profitable revenue source;
How the need to sustain high circulation levels has made newspaper editorial content bland, inoffensive and, ultimately, vulnerable to competition.

Journalism schools need to become small business foundries if they are to continue in their mission of preparing students for the real world. Unfortunately, most of them change slowly, and the rapid decline of media institutions has caught them flat-footed. They need to move quickly to adjust their curricula in order to avoid sending their students unprepared into the tumultuous job market that awaits them.

This week’s sorry tale of a New York Times reporter being forced to resign for plagiarizing content from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources, apparently over a long period of time, raises questions about how traditional practices can survive the pressures of the online age.

3 Comments –> NY Times Swallows Paywall Pill By paulgillin | January 22, 2010 - 9:48 am - Posted in Advertising, Best/Worst, Business News, BusinessModel, Newspapers, OnlineMedia, Paywalls

10 Comments –> « Previous Entries

Newsday is sticking by its guns and saying that the slow ramp up is neither surprising nor a problem. “Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday’s web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option,” the company said in a statement that called into question why such a strategy was desirable in the first place.

It’s an excellent point. Social network practitioners who frequently refer their friends and followers to content from the same source should, in theory, be more likely to become paying subscribers to that source. The tricky part is how to find these people. Amid the deafening social cacophony of the Internet, pinpointing fans can make the task of searching for a needle in a haystack look trivial.

Meanwhile, Amazon last week revised its royalty policy for self-published authors and small presses. Amazon could be ready to make a play for the loyalty of publishers who were shut out of the Apple party. Its licensing terms need to be friendlier, but it’s already showing a willingness to make those changes.

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The funny folks at 10,000 Words are back with their collection of Valentines for journalists. Although vaguely suggestive, they’re mostly G-rated and should be good for a laugh if your beloved happens to end his or her love letters with “-30-.”

Christian Science Monitor

The failure of the economic model is the reason most news organizations are in such trouble today. Journalists are mostly unprepared to help. The church-state separation that is intrinsic to the culture of newsrooms prevents them from understanding why the business is in trouble. Most journalists I have met still show alarming ignorance of the business that pays their salaries.

My material wasn’t the type of stuff these students are used to hearing, judging by their reactions. About 2/3 of my talk was about economics and business. Among the topics I addressed were:

19 Comments –> Spreadsheet Journalism By paulgillin | February 3, 2010 - 7:12 am - Posted in Advertising, Business News, BusinessModel, Circulation, Citizen Journalism, Classifieds, Future of Journalism, Journalism, Newspapers, Regulation

Miscellany

We think Ochs made a good choice, though his choice of words probably didn’t anticipate the Internet.

Yesterday I visited with a journalism class at a major university. This institution’s journalism program is considered one of the finest in the country and its faculty boasts notable veterans of the newspaper and broadcast field. I spoke to a small class for about 90 minutes, devoting the first hour of that time to a discourse on the state of the US media: Why it’s in a predicament, how the story is likely to play out and what it all means for aspiring journalists. The rest of the time was discussion.

We get some unusual requests at the Death Watch and always try to be helpful, but we were stumped by this inquiry from Amy Wimmer Schwarb, a 15-year journalism veteran:

I’ve written before about the need for young journalists to develop entrepreneurial skills. This doesn’t necessarily mean going door-to-door selling ads, but it does mean understanding how advertising works, how audiences can be monetized and how diversified revenue streams can build a sustainable income. These topics are distasteful to veteran journalists, who have never had to worry about such things. Unfortunately, they’re very relevant to the students they teach.

Although Johnston considers himself to be an optimist, he’s anything but cheerful about the state of American journalism and its culture of celebrity-mongering, lightweight lifestyle pieces and regurgitation of factoids spoon-fed to junior reporters by executives and government officials.

Optimize Socially

Cincinnati Post

Our reaction to Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday was summed up in our tweet: “It’s a big iPod Touch? Really? That’s it??”

This career path isn’t going to work in the future. Newsroom staffing levels today are 55% of what they were eight years ago. While elimination of high-paying jobs has created some entry-level opportunities, the path for career journalists will increasingly be up and out into the freelance world where they will have to compete on speed, agility and business skills.

The craft of note-taking has also changed. In today’s cut-and-paste world, journalists assemble background information from snippets published elsewhere. Notes are typed rather than hand written. In a document made up of first-person interview notes mashed together with clips from other sources, it’s not surprising that the origins of information can become confused. That’s not an excuse for shoddy note-taking, but it is an explanation for how errors can happen.

Two amusing closing items today:

PicScout is trying to do something about this. Founded in 2002 to market an image recognition and classification technology, the company has a new platform that analyzes images and stores ownership information in a registry. That information travels with the image wherever it’s reproduced, thanks to technology that is capable of recognizing certain patterns within the bitstream. With one click, a potential user of the image can be connected to the license holder to work out terms.

News organizations are starting to figure out how to monetize social networks. The Austin American-Statesman is charging for tweets and actually booking revenue. Local businesses can buy two tweets per day of up to 124 characters (to allow for retweets). The messages are labeled as ads and must prompt the reader to take action. Huffington Post is experimenting with the same idea. The New York Times is also selling packages of ads against visitors to its Facebook site. Nobody’s making much money at this yet, though.

Gannett executives demonstrated a rarely-seen attitude during this week’s earnings call: Optimism. “”We are very excited by what we are seeing,” said CEO Craig Dubow. Circulation is beginning to recover and profitability is returning to the income statement, enabling Gannett to pay down some of its debt. Profitability was still driven more by cost-cutting than by revenue growth, however. Classified revenues were down nearly 22% in the quarter and digital revenues fell 7.2% due largely to the dismal picture state of employment advertising. More coverage.

Newspaper readership continues at record levels when you factor in online traffic, according to the latest results from Nielsen Online and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). More than 72 million people — about one quarter of all Internet users, according to the NAA — visited a newspaper site in the fourth quarter, racking up 3.2 billion monthly page views. The NAA declined to provide year-to-year comparisons, citing a change in Nielsen’s measurement technique.

The Death Watch on Facebook

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Detroit News/Detroit Free Press

It was 113 years ago yesterday that the phrase “All the News That’s Fit to Print” first appeared on the front page of The New York Times. The phrase was actually being used in marketing and advertising prior to that date and had assumed a modest place on the Times’ editorial page, but it was a slogan contest organized in late 1896 by publisher Adolph Ochs that catapulted the now-famous slogan to the banner. W. Joseph Campbell, whose 2006 book entitled The Year That Defined American Journalism documented the momentous events of 1897, recounts some of the entries that didn’t win the contest and its $100 prize.? They include:

Always decent; never dull;
The news of the day; not the rubbish;
A decent newspaper for decent people;
All the world’s news, but not a school for scandal.

The commentators we read see more potential, however. Nicholas Carr, who’s been documenting the shift of data and applications from the desktop to the cloud, sees the iPad as a potential paradigm shift. In Carr’s view, this product completes the transformation of the end-user device from personal computer to window on the Internet. Unlike a laptop, the iPad relies upon software delivered over the Internet for most of its functionality. The large screen and persistent connection could change user behavior, he observes. People will get into the habit of expecting words, images and sound to be delivered whenever they need it in a slim device that fits in a briefcase, although not a purse.

Langeveld analyzes the earnings announcement so far and finds scant reason for optimism. Publishers are talking of “stability” rather than growth, which means that their dramatic cost cuts of the last year are finally generating some profits. The good news is that this will enable them to finally pay down some of their huge debt burdens, but any growth into new areas still seems a long way off given that most publishers still derive less than 15% of their revenue from online advertising. The sole bright spot was Media General, which reported that total revenues in December “were essentially even with December 2008.” Langeveld takes that to mean that they were only down in the single digits. Still, any stability is a good thing. There’s much more on the Nieman site.

Our day job is helping businesses understand and adapt to the social Web, so it seems only natural that the Death Watch should go up on Facebook. Well, here we are. We’ll use this platform to point to the many stories we read but don’t get ?a chance to summarize in our occasional blog entries. We’ll also post some discussion topics and would like to hear your comments on the choices we make. Fan us! It’s hot in here.

This 24-minute audio interview covers the decline of investigative reporting, hopeful signs from early philanthropy-backed experiments and the passive culture of many American newsrooms that has contributed to a dumbing-down of content. “I’ve discouraged a lot of young people from going into journalism,” he told us. But he also noted that if you can make a living in the field, “It’s fun, there’s a lot of freedom and a cachet to it.”

The Berkeley Daily Planet, which isn’t daily, will cease print publication and go online only, although the owners held out the possibility of a return to the newsstands. Distribution was only one of several problems the paper faced. The city of San Francisco’s recent ban on freestanding newspaper stands hurt distribution, and the Daily Planet’s often critical reporting on local businesses didn’t help with advertising sales. The newspaper also suffered from a campaign by a group of East Bay Zionists to dissuade businesses from advertising because of editorials that criticized Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

We have enormous respect for Alan Mutter, but we find ourselves in complete disagreement on this one. In our view, journalists who draw lines in the sand and start charging only what they think they’re worth will find themselves practicing a lot less journalism.

We couldn’t help, but perhaps you can. Post any ideas below as comments, or e-mail us using the contact box on the right and we’ll put you in touch with Amy directly.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School turns one of its professors loose on The New York Times’ paywall plans. Marketing Professor Peter S. Fader says the Times shouldn’t have abandoned Times Select three years ago; it was a decent service that could have given management valuable experience in how to generate reader revenue streams. Now it’s starting from square one in a very visible and risky position. Fader thinks the Times is doing the right thing in making most of its content free to the casual reader, but announcing the pay wall a year in advance with so few specifics is a “terrible mistake.” The Times is “being completely vague about the pricing, about the specific timing, about the name of it, about what kind of content is or isn’t covered,” Fader says. It’s also focusing on the negatives – what you can’t read – as opposed to the benefits of a subscription system. However, he doesn’t offer up any benefits that the Times can talk about, other than the brand’s continued viability. It sounds like the short-term perspective is dominating the Times’ thinking, Fader says. “They need to be thinking, ‘How can we delight our customers three, five, ten years from now?’ as opposed to, ‘How can we squeeze revenues out of them to stay afloat over the next month?’”

And Finally…

During fourth-quarter earnings calls, several newspaper executives tried to put a positive spin on their financial situation, noting that the rate of decline in advertising revenues has slowed. That’s true, says Martin Langeveld, but it’s still a dismal situation overall. Langeveld totes up the numbers from the five publishers who have reported earnings so far and forecasts that the US industry as a whole will show a decline of 16% for the quarter. That’s better than the average 28% decline of the first three quarters of last year, but the overall trend is still in the wrong direction. It’s even uglier when you look at the last five years in aggregate: Total revenues for 2009 will come to about $28.4 billion, compared to $49.4 billion in the boom year of 2005. That’s a decline of 43%.

Miscellany

Tucson Citizen

Zachery Kouwe (right) walked the plank after editors at the Wall Street Journal complained that passages in a post on the Times’ DealBook blog substantially duplicated material published in the Journal a couple of hours earlier. The Times published a correction and later suspended Kouwe. He resigned on Tuesday.

Finally, software tools now enable ?someone to republish entire articles on multiple sites without even copying and pasting. Posterous is just one that makes this process automatic. A person using this feature may be violating someone else’s intellectual property without even knowing it.

Baltimore Examiner

The problem with paywalls is that they cannibalize Web traffic that could otherwise be monetized with advertising. ClickZ reports that Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey predicts that ad revenues for NYTimes.com will drop by up to 50% after the paywall is erected. It also notes that Newsday saw website traffic drop 21% in the month after it built a limited paywall last fall. The trick is to find the right balance and The New York Times, with its history of online innovation, is the best candidate to reach a happy medium.

Flint Journal; Bay City Times; Saginaw News

Opponents of government subsidies for media organizations overlook an important detail: US media has been subsidized for 200 years, reports The New York Times. Citing a report released last week by the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, the Times notes that government support of newspapers has actually been declining in recent years as mailing discounts have diminished laws requiring businesses to buy newspaper ads for certain kinds of legal notices have been dropped. In fact, the study’s authors estimate that annual government support has declined from more than $4 billion in 1970 to less than $2 billion today.

This is not an excuse for Kouwe’s transgressions. A professional reporter should understand the fundamentals of the craft. However, the freewheeling nature of the democratized information landscape creates all sorts of gray areas. Journalism schools and editors need to do a better job of giving young journalist the tools to living with the growing pressures of deadlines and information overload without violating basic principles of ownership.

Deadlines in Minutes

Catskill Daily Mail/Hudson Register-Star

There’s more to the story, of course. The total audience of potential online subscribers to Newsday is pretty small, given that the service is free to subscribers to Optimum Cable, which is owned by Cablevision. Cablevision bought Newsday for $650 million in May, 2008 after a bidding war. Newsday said Optimum Cable cover 75% of Long Island, meaning that just about everyone who would want to read Newsday online can already read it. The company also said? its goal was never to amass a huge audience but rather to increase engagement and improve advertiser value by focusing on local residents.

In other good business news, McClatchy’s debt ratings were upgraded by two major credit ratings agencies. While the upgrades were small, they moved McClatchy out of the “highly speculative” category. The company just concluded a sale of $875 million of senior secured notes that pays off impending loans and stretches maturities out to 2017, giving it some breathing room.

Changing Views on Copyright

Rocky Mountain News

1 Comment –> Interview: Young Journalist Makes Online Transition By paulgillin | February 24, 2010 - 5:36 pm - Posted in BusinessModel, Future of Journalism, Journalism, NewMedia, OnlineMedia

The Times is stepping with characteristic caution into territory that its own coverage acknowledged has both “tempted and terrified” publishers. The most well-read newspaper in America is under pressure to set a precedent that others can follow while at the same time preserving its dominance and an online revenue stream that is a growing part of its business.

You can read much more about his accomplishments in the biography accompanying his book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and StickYou with the Bill). It’s one of three bestsellers he has authored, a list that also includes Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super-Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else and Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Give Newsday credit for being a pioneer, though. The industry has been buzzing about paywalls for the last year and the company at least had the cojones to do something.? You do have to wonder about the timing, though. Publisher Terry Jimenez reportedly told the staff last week that Newsday lost $7 million in the first three quarters of last year. It’s now embroiled in a labor dispute with unions that are refusing to accept a 10% pay cut. under the circumstances, this seems like an odd time to make a bet-the-business decision.

Halifax Daily News

Then there are the proliferating forms that online communications take. Are Twitter messages copyrightable? If so, then isn’t the coveted retweet a form of copyright infringement? Google Voice has a feature that transcribes phone messages and makes it easy to embed those transcriptions in websites. Is that also a legal problem?

The New York Post reports that New York Times Co. minority owner Carlos Slim is a big fan of paid content and has been? pushing Times Co. executives behind the scenes to take the plunge. TimesSelect was an early stab at paid content that floundered when columnists complained that their visibility plummeted when a price was put on their work.

And Finally…

Newspaper Death Watch

It wasn’t long ago that reporters at a big paper like the Times had the luxury of turning out a story a day or even less. Print deadlines measured in hours offered an opportunity to check sources and rewrite notes in a timeframe that seems positively leisurely today. A few skilled professionals, mostly wire reporters, excelled at deadline reporting. Their expertise in synthesizing and contextualizing large amounts of information, often in chaotic environments, was the product of years of experience.

With his characteristic eye for detail, Mutter figures such factors as the self-employment tax and capital expenses in his calculations. The sample shows a fictional reporter charging about 55 cents a word to cover his/her fully loaded costs figuring an average pay rate of about $30/hour, which is union scale in Pittsburgh. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Those are just three of the gems from?Ruminations, a website that accepts short, funny, original observations or anecdotes and then encourages its members to vote them up or down the popularity scale.

Melissa Massello is the 31-year-old “Stealfinder in Chief” at Shoestringmag.com, an online magazine for people who want to live a frugal but socially responsible and healthy life. She manages a loose federation of freelance contributors, many of whom barter their services, while writing more than 5,000 words each week and also handling the business affairs of the bootstrap operation.

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“There is nothing more frustrating than having a perfect comment for a conversation the two strangers in front of you are having.”

“My concern about submitting this play through traditional channels is that I want it to be seen NOW, and sometimes, such channels have long lag times. Through your online travels and contacts, do you have any suggestions for how I might distribute this work? In my dreams, it will be performed in small independent theaters around the country.”

If you think the demise of newspapers has killed good journalism, take a look at the list of the 13 winners of George Polk Awards for 2009. The awards, which have been administered by Long Island University for more than 60 years, cover a wide range of national and international accomplishments, ranging the New York Times reporter who documented his seven-month captivity by the Taliban to a ProPublica journalist who reported on the dangers of a natural gas-drilling process that yields carcinogenic byproducts. While the honorees include the usual lineup of mainstream media sources, a few surprises crept into the group this year. They include a team of Stars and Stripes reporters that unearthed a Pentagon campaign that profiled journalists in order to steer them toward positive coverage of the war in Afghanistan and a group of Bloomberg reporters who documented abuses of the government’s bank bailout program.

In his career, Johnston has certainly done plenty of afflicting. Starting with a staff writer job at the San Jose Mercury in 1968, he progressed through reporting positions at the Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer before landing at The New York Times, where he reported on economics and tax issues until his retirement in 2008. He was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting “for his penetrating and enterprising reporting that exposed loopholes and inequities in the US tax code, which was instrumental in bringing about reforms,” according to his Wikipedia bio. ?He was also a finalist for the prize in 2000 and 2003. Today, he writes, teachers and consults.

For a product that was generating over 200 tweets per minute in the hours leading up to the launch event, the reality of the iPad underwhelmed us. Perhaps we’ve just learned to expect bigger things from Apple (although the iPad certainly is bigger than the iPhone – by several inches).

W.I.P. Works In Progress: Former print dailies that have adopted hybrid online/print or online-only models.

Newspaper Death Watch Chronicling the Decline of Newspapers and the Rebirth of Journalism R.I.P.

The New York Times is building a paywall despite the 2005-2007 disaster that was TimesSelect. On Wednesday, the Times announced the decision to start charging for access beyond a specified number of articles beginning in 2011. Details, including the fee and the access threshold, weren’t revealed. The Times is leaving itself plenty of leeway to modify or even call off the program, knowing that the eyes of a $35 billion industry are upon it. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right,” said Times Co. publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

The California case is important because it involves a highly polarized issue that has implications in other states. A 5-4 conservative majority ruled that the judge in the case had erred by initially allowing video of the trial to be streamed to other courtrooms even though that practice is usually denied in federal cases. However, the justices did not address the bigger constitutional question of whether live video is permissible in legal proceedings.

Are media organizations taking advantage of plummeting freelance rates? You betcha. Is what they’re doing wrong? We don’t think so. Supply and demand is the underpinning of a capitalist economy, and if the rules have changed in a way that devalues quality journalism, well, those are the cards we’re dealt. It sucks, but it’s how the system works.

Still, you have to wonder about the wisdom of the paywall strategy, given the sacrifices? made to implement it. Editors Weblog says traffic to the site is down by a third since October. However, PaidContent.org says the drop off is only on the order of 10%. Either way, Newsday has traded off a lot of eyeballs for a small number of credit card numbers and unless its advertising rates have increased proportionately, the paywall is probably a net loser at this point.

(Be the first to comment) –> J-Schools Get an F in Finance By paulgillin | - 8:46 am - Posted in BusinessModel, Future of Journalism, Journalism, Newspapers, Revenue20

“The old gatekeepers are disappearing. We’ve become our own and one another’s editors.” That’s one of the gems from Ken Doctor’s post this week on Nieman Journalism Lab in which he weighs in on Google Buzz and the rapid socialization of the Web. Noting that the bit.ly URL shortening service, which is one of about a dozen on the Internet, is now processing about 2 billion link referrals a month, Doctor suggests that news organizations must tap into the link-sharing patterns of social networks to identify new readers. “Are Facebook users of a certain kind more likely to convert to become regular users of NYTimes.com (or Dallasnews.com or VoiceofSanDiego.org) than Twitter users?” he asks, citing one example.

iPad is Here. You Can Breathe Again

Miscellany

“I don’t understand the purpose of the line, ‘I don’t need to drink to have fun.’ No one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?”

Dramatic Effect

1 Comment –> Research Dramatizes Changing Practices By paulgillin | March 2, 2010 - 10:47 am - Posted in Future of Journalism, Journalism, NewMedia, Newspapers, OnlineMedia, Solutions

The students were aware that they’re stepping into an uncertain world but they didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of the media business. Looking at the journalism department’s website later, I could see why. The curriculum lists 29 courses in the journalism program, and not a single one is about the economics of publishing or how to sustain a career as a journalist.

A new study funded by the Newspaper Association of America finds that newspaper sites are considered the most reliable sources local information, including classified advertising. Local newspaper Web sites were identified as “the top online source for local information” by 57% of the 3,050 respondents to the survey, which was conducted by ComScore. Four in 10 respondents also agree that the source of an online advertisement is an important factor in its trustworthiness and in that category, newspapers (36%) bested local television (23%) and online local portals (12%) by a significant margin. Newspapers also beat all other local channels in credibility and value information, although the principal challenger – television news – isn’t much competition.

Rutgers professor Benjamin Davis wants to reinvent the inverted pyramid with a digital touch. In a piece in Online Journalism Review, the educator recounts some interesting historical facts about the news reporting style that places the most important information at the top and proceeded backward from there, including the fact that telegraph messages during the Civil War cost as much as a penny apiece. His “Digital Media Pyramid” still leads with the most critical information but then proceeds through layers of aggregated and multimedia content. It even accounts for advertising awareness, which Davis explains as teaching “the writer to be aware of any ads automatically placed near or inside a written story, so the writer can inspect a story’s presentation and seek to maintain objectivity.” We’re not sure what that last part means but trust that doesn’t involve pulling punches to avoid embarrassing and advertiser.

Robin Good interviews three futurists about the evolution of journalists into what he calls “newsmasters.”? All three commentators agree that the problem that media was created to solve — lack of information — has been displaced by the opposite problem; we’re now swimming in information. This means that the role of media must change to provide aggregation and filtering rather than pushing out more original information. The best example of this evolution comes from educational technologies researcher George Siemens, who notes that when Microsoft was originally planning to bring its Encarta encyclopedia to market, it envisioned prices of over $1,000. When the company finally shuttered Encarta last year, it was charging just $19.95.

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Alan Mutter is stirring things up again with a spreadsheet that journalists can use to value their work. His thinking: Stop debasing yourself by working for peanuts. Figure out what your time is worth and charge accordingly.

By the way, Ken Doctor’s new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get, will be available next week. We just received our review copy in the mail and while we haven’t had a chance to pore through it yet, we’re confident will contribute important new insights on the transformation of news from print to digital format.

Miscellany

Print journalists can take some heart – while new-media advocates roll their eyes – at two court decisions last week that limit the dissemination of trial coverage over the Internet. First, the U.S. Supreme Court overrode a trial judge’s decision and blocked video coverage of a federal trial about the constitutionality of California’s law banning gay marriage. Then a Florida judge ruled later in the week that a Florida Times-Union reporter couldn’t live blog a capital murder trial.

Gerald Posner resigned from the Daily Beast this week amid a swirl of charges of serial plagiarism. In a post on his blog, Posner admitted that he had copied material from the Miami Herald, among other sources, but insisted that the plagiarism was inadvertent. Posner’s shame highlights a risk of the copy-and-paste nature of Web publishing, in which original information quickly becomes intermingled with notes lifted from other sources. While that’s not an excuse, it’s an explanation of how the need for speed, combined with the portability of printed words, can be a recipe for disaster. When in doubt, select the text and copy it into Google. You’ll quickly see if you’ve violated someone else’s property.

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We sympathize with journalists who have seen the market value of their work collapse over the last couple of years. We’ve experienced some of that pain personally and we have many friends and colleagues who are suffering because of it. However, the market has spoken, and the solution to collapsing fees isn’t to insist on getting a rate that employers will no longer pay.

Photographers have a particularly difficult time tracking copyright violations. Search engines don’t index images and the content embedded within tags gets lost as pictures are copied and redisplayed around the web. Watermarking affords some protection, but it also can make the image unattractive to potential publishers.

“It’s never more important to me to look my best than when I’m gonna be around someone I can’t stand.”

Journalism schools are essentially trade schools. When I was going through a J-school program in the late 1970s, everything was focused on getting the students out into the working world with the skills and savvy needed to get to the top. Judging by my recent experiences with journalism schools, the same career path that was advised 30 years ago is still being recommended today. This begins with a low-paying job at a small daily and proceeds through a series of staff positions at increasingly larger publications. The Holy Grail is to land a job on the staff of The New York Times, which itself has laid off 200 journalists in the last year.

This university is failing its students. I suspect that so are a lot of others.

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Today, everyone who writes news online is a wire service reporter. Deadlines are measured in minutes and anyone who wants to compete has to put speed at the top of the agenda. Not everyone is good at working under that kind of pressure, so it’s not surprising that the quality of deadline news reporting is becoming more erratic. Budget cuts at newspapers have also forced a lot of young, relatively unseasoned reporters to the front lines where their work nevertheless carries the moniker of a 150-year-old trusted brand. Such was clearly the case with Kouwe who, at 31, has developed his journalism skills inside the culture and pressure of the Internet.

If journalists “don’t put a value on what they do, then no one else will, either,” Mutter declares, noting that media organizations are using the explosion of blogs and citizen media operations to “pick off writers, photographers and videographers on the cheap.”

East Valley Tribune

When Nielsen orphaned Editor & Publisher in a sale of several of its titles to e5 Global Media last month, the staff at the venerable newspaper industry trade publication held out for a rescue. It came. Duncan McIntosh Co., an Irvine, Calif.-based publisher of trade magazines that ironically include FishRap News (which has nothing to do with newspapers), has picked up E&P and will continue more or less uninterrupted publication. “We’re all very excited around here about the news,” said staffer Mark Fitzgerald, who gains a promotion to editor in the process. Monthly print publication will resume next month and entries on the magazine’s two blogs – Fitz & Jen Give You the Business and the E&P Pub – have already resumed. Hooray.

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Reading Ruminations is like listening to a nonstop Steven Wright standup routine. Many of the contributions are hilarious, but some of them make you ponder the odd, illogical and bizarre things that humans do. “How many times is it appropriate to say ‘What?’ before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?” asks one contributor. The site was started by author and comedian Aaron Karo (above), who has a?newsletter by the same name.

The business side of the equation is where the greatest disconnect occurs. Journalism schools mostly disdain the moneymaking side of the house. Students are taught that revenue is somebody else’s job; they are in the position of delivering information. In fact, the ad sales department is often portrayed as a den of evil, full of conniving capitalists who only want to bastardize the product journalists so lovingly nurture.

“Young journalists need to learn techniques for getting people to open up and especially to check, cross-check and re-cross-check facts; they need to learn how to mine documents which J schools do a lousy job of teaching; they need to become adept at numbers, which goes virtually untaught; they need to learn the underlying principles of whatever issue they cover,” he commented in his e-mail to us. “Use your independent judgment and you stop letting sources tell you what is news.”

With 140,000 monthly visitors, Shoestring is beginning to turn the corner toward profitability. Melissa’s background is in newspaper journalism, but she has successfully navigated the transition to the online world. The work is hard and the rewards modest, but she loves her job. She shares some advice for up-and-coming young journalists.

Publishers that seemed to be ready for the toe tag at this time last year are staging some remarkable comebacks. Following hot on the heels of MediaNews Group Inc.’s announcement last week that it will enter a controlled bankruptcy and quickly reemerge in better condition, McClatchy said it has reached a debt restructuring deal with its creditors that will give it more time to get its debts under control. The owner of the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee,? Kansas City Star and 27 other dailies has shifted its obligations to extend its repayment deadlines for a couple of years and says that 90% of its creditors have agreed to the plan. Year-over-year revenue is still falling at an alarming rate of 20%, but McClatchy said the rate of decline has slowed and it is getting its expenses under control. Its stock closed at $5.60 yesterday, up 1,600% from its 2009 low of 35 cents. Don’t you wish you could turn back the clock?

Newspaper Death Watch

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