From Slate.com, a new public service campaign to sponsor a newspaper employee. It’s just 2 minutes of fabulous satire.
Posts Tagged ‘newspaper’
On YouTube, celebrity correspondents acknowledge the power of citizen journalism
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009YouTube has organized a library of how-to videos for citizen journalists. Much of it won’t be relevant to the vast majority of citizen journalists. But the talent that is now spending time helping ordinary folks to create content is amazing and impressive. I still talk to journalists almost every day who continue to resent the infiltration of their work by “ordinary people.”
In fact, I met this morning with 2 individuals who have been stymied in their efforts to cultivate citizen journalism by “old school” journalists who can, collectively, green-light or red-light their work — and who resent this intrusion by the untrained and unindoctrinated.
These old dogs are already finding themselves on the wrong side of history.
Journalism IS and always has been the work of ordinary people; every journalist is merely a proxy for a larger number of ordinary people. When the local investigative TV reporter asks a zinger to the director of the dysfunctional city water department, that reporter isn’t there because of some special privilege or status; he’s there because it would be impractical to open the doors to anyone and everyone who questioned the director’s management. It’s easy to forget this in the day-to-day melee. But it’s still the truth.
More than that, though, the economics of media essentially mandates the growth of citizen journalism. That Nicholas Kristoff, Bob Woodward and the Pulitzer Center (to name a few), are open to this fact is refreshing to me, and is an encouraging sign that the moribund state of the news is beginning to evolve.
A financial plan for the news’paper’ of tomorrow
Thursday, June 25th, 2009Peter Kafka, former media writer for Forbes and now blogging his own MediaMemo, asks the question (non-rhetorically), “What happens when your newspaper goes digital?” His immediate conclusion: Most of the staff gets canned.
In his blog, Kafka channels Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson whose business is to support local news operations with broad-based content as they make the move to digital themselves.
Josephson tells Kafka that his prototypical digital newspaper would have 6 content people (reporters and editors), 12 sales reps and a total staff of 20 (that would seem to leave room for 1 administrative type and one boss type — and no room for a graphic designer, web developer or I.T. person, which already makes me suspicious that his plan is too lean). He even provides a basic P&L spreadsheet for do-it-yourselfers who want to use his math as a starting point.
If the site does 40 million pages views a month (that’s a big number), augmented by twice that much traffic through third-party agreements, he figures it could earn about $2.6 million/year on $6.3 million in revenue. That’s a great margin — 41%. But compared to the kind of revenues daily newspapers are scaled for, it’s a pretty small business.
Plans like this are about 25% experience and 75% assumption, and anybody who would use such a plan would deviate from it almost immediately once into real operations.
But the takeaway is that, while existing media executives may not be able to swallow hard enough to scale down their businesses that much, they are currently being forced by the economy to cast aside lots of sales and content talent. It’s only a matter of time before that talent starts to challenge traditional newspapers companies with startups that aren’t burdened by guild agreements, large buildings, printing plants and boards of directors that demand every old-line revenue dollar to be replaced.
Back in the ’90s, when bookstores were being driven out of business by a previously unforseen competitor, new-age jargon had it that they were being “Amazoned.”
I’m curious what we’ll be calling it in the future. Journaled? Posted? Picayuned?
If you can’t bring journalists to the computer, then bring geeks to journalism
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism is turning out its first group of graduates in a master’s program that teaches computer geeks to be journalists, according to Time magazine. The idea is to combine advanced programming for computer applications and other interactive tools with reporting and journalism — making data and databases an integral part of the news.
Here’s a paragraph from Medill’s master’s degree course catalog:
The Digital Innovation Project (JOUR 435-0, 435-1)
This project challenges students to answer a specific editorial business challenge by inventing interactive solutions, often with a focus on innovative content delivery. Editorial challenges sometimes are posed by partner media organizations, sometimes by faculty or students. Students in this project have explored new ways of designing content for handheld devices, and new ways of creating interactive community, and in one case wrote a new software program to help a news operation engage more closely with its community.
In other words, if the medium is the message, this is huge. It has potential to change the very nature of how journalists work and what they do. Especially since Medill isn’t alone; among other schools starting to turn out journalist programmers are University of Missoure, Georgia Tech and University of California at Berkeley, according to Time.
Imagine an investigative article on government judicial conflict-of-interest, for example, that includes an application allowing readers to conduct their own searches by judge, defendant and plaintiff.
That’s admittedly a utopian view of journalism creating ultimate and constructive transparency — something it’s always strived to do and has rarely, if ever, achieved.
Or, I suppose, it could go the other direction: creating a bunch of people writing about the programming nuances of Wordpress v. Blogspot. Which would you rather see?
A must-read for all you content types (that’s ‘editorial’) in the old paradigm
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
Here are 7 non-nonsense rules for any editorial types who plan to survive the 2009 Media Meltdown and transform themselves into the content creators of the future. For the detail, read the original blog on Recessionwire, written by Laura Rich, a journalist and regular contributor there.
- Readers are your competitors — and your friends.
- Identify your expertise.
- Build your brand.
- Be transparent.
- Crowdsource (actively seek participation in the development of your story).
- Use self service tools.
- Interact with your readers.
You’ll find the full explanation behind each at the original blog.
Go forth, do good and do well.
American Pie send-up on media
Friday, June 5th, 2009
Anyone living through the media meltdown will enjoy this clever 9-minute rewrite of the old Don McLean anthem.
More than ever, the medium is the message
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
At the time, he was talking about the fast advent of TV. But if you want to see the truth of his statement in action, you’re already in the right place: online.
- A message in Twitter is 140 characters long.
- A message on 12seconds.tv is, well, 12 seconds long.
- You get about 400 characters to express your thoughts on Facebook.
- LinkedIn is businesslike; you can’t get as lost as you can on Facebook, and the variety of activities in more limited.
- Squidoo lets you type in original content, but it’s really about packaging other content — yours or somebody else’s — under a single thematic umbrella.
- A blog is unlimited, but is accepted as “good” only if it gets updated frequently.
There are at least dozens more kinds of electronic media where you can place your messages. I know people who market themselves online using all of the above media and more. But if you want to get people to pay attention to what you’re writing, you can’t just cut and paste your blog post onto Facebook and Twitter and Squidoo, etc.
In some cases, there are limitations such Twitter’s infamous 140-character limit. In all, there is the simple and unarguable feedback from the market. If you do it right, people will pay attention. If you do it wrong, they won’t.
Doing it right means integrating strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities of the medium into whatever it is that you’re writing, videotaping, podcasting, etc. If you want to give a lecture, don’t bother putting it on YouTube unless you have strong visuals to go with it. And don’t simply post the transcript of your lecture as a blog if you want anyone to say anything nice about it.
Today, as newspapers face their toughest economic environment ever, they’re trying to figure out how to get people to pay for content online. When I ask people about this, the usual response is that they aren’t sure they’d find an electronic newspaper to be worth reading, let alone paying for.
But they’re imposing their view of newspapers as a print medium on the coming reality of newspapers online.
To be sure, some publishers will make a mess of it. They’ll try to do exactly what they’re doing now — but without the paper costs. And they’ll fail.
Others will figure it out. The paper of the future may provide headlines to your cellphone in the morning, with updates all day. On a Smartphone, the headlines may link to the full story. You may have the choice whether you want to get one section (world news, for instance) in-depth, and another (perhaps sports) on only a cursory basis. The website might offer configuration and search tools, letting you scan for all articles containing a specific keyword, or filter out stories from the opposite side of town. It could give you Tweets as news breaks, video clips of big events, or full context about ongoing, longterm stories. It may led you contribute news in the form of short video and photos. You might be able to read it on a Kindle, on screen or hear it through your ipod. And somewhere in there, they’ll figure out how to not only collect a critical mass of paid subscribers, they’ll also figure out how to serve advertisers.
In other words, newspapers will survive. But they won’t look like they do today, and they won’t DO what they do today either, because they’ll come to us not just through the same old medium, but through a Dagwood sandwich of media.
So McLuhan’s old saw really is more important than ever. When he wrote it, he was dealing with print, TV and radio. Today, because the medium is the message, it means the message changes many times a day depending on where you happen to be when you choose to accept it.
With apologies to The New Yorker
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009From a New York Times wire story in The Plain Dealer:
This morning, at the American Museum of Natural History, researchers will unveil a 47-million-year-old fossil they say could revolutionize the understanding of human evolution at a ceremony.
A truly epochal event.
Murdoch charges for content; Gannett closes my first paper
Monday, May 18th, 2009Rupert Murdoch is apparently tired of all the talk about how to save newspapers; now he’s taking action. According to a report in Media Buyer Planner, Murdoch is going to begin charging for content in 54 daily newspapers that he owns.
It’s an action few publishers have been willing to take, but Murdoch must be tired of watching profits simply fall out of the bottom of this bottomless boat. At some point, and I guess he’s there, a publisher has to say, “The risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of doing the wrong thing.”
The big fear has been that people don’t want to pay for online content, and that if newspapers start charging online, readers will simply evaporate. I think all of that’s true, as I’ve written before.
But if dozens of newspapers make the switch in a short period of time, it might also simply change the expectation of users who have been getting their news for free.
This very well could be the watershed moment that gives newspapers a chance at a future. And while I am generally pretty sparing in words of praise for Rupert Murdoch, it’s a credit to him that he has the courage to do this.
Meanwhile, on a note of personal disappointment for me, Gannet has folded the Tucson Citizen. It was an improbable product — an afternoon newspaper in a small city with two newspapers. The survivor, The Arizona Daily Star, is the morning paper. It’s owned by Lee Enterprises (when I was in town there, it was owned by Pulitzer) and has operated under an unusual joint operating agreement for at least the last 25 years, in which the two competitors share circulation, printing and a building.
I’m not surprised, but certainly sad to see it go. It’s the first newspaper where I worked, in 1983 as an intern in the Teaching Newspaper program of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It’s like watching them tear down your childhood home and replacing it with a fenced-in, overgrown and rocky lot.
I suddenly miss my editor, Mike Chihak, and my friend Don Rodriguez — niegher of whom I’ve talked with in years, but who taught me a lot while I was there.
Nobody who ever worked for the Citizen could feel right about this. We were always the White Hat, the Star was the opposite. The feeling was confirmed for me the one time I had reason to step into the Star’s newsroom, on the opposite side of the building, with separate doors and an independent security system.
I don’t remember why I needed to go there, but while the Citizen newsroom was bright and cheerful with white linoleum floors, the Star newsroom looked to me like the White House War Room — with indirect lighting and a black tiled floor.
Very mature of me. I know. But it’s a vivid memory, as was my entire time at the Citizen. R.I.P.
