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This week in media musings: More Murdoch fallout, and Dallas tears down that wall

Mark — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:28:14 +0000

After taking Thanksgiving week off, we’ve got two weeks to catch up on, instead of just one. And while that first week was relatively slow, this week has been a pretty eventful one, both in terms of media happenings and in important thoughts about journalism.

— Almost a month after Rupert Murdoch first said he plans on removing News Corp.’s sites from Google, that declaration (and its aftermath) are still the top item of discussion in journalism/new media circles. The story got another boost just before Thanksgiving when word spread that News Corp. was in talks with Microsoft about creating an exclusive search deal with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. (Yup, exactly as Cory Doctorow predicted.)

Much pondering ensued from just about every corner of the Internet, but here’s the most important stuff: On Tuesday, Murdoch gave attendees at an FTC conference the rationale behind his plans, during which he bashed online news aggregators and also said he’s against a U.S. government subsidy for news, but wants them to rewrite copyright law to stop aggregators. Arianna Huffington, the most prominent of those aggregators, followed him up at the conference with a speech that 1) noted that News Corp. sites do quite a bit of aggregating themselves, 2) defended the free-content model, and 3) extolled the virtues of citizen journalism.

Meanwhile, one of Murdoch’s top execs, Dow Jones CEO Eric Hinton, gave a speech in India that amounted to: “All these new-fangled future-of-media ideas might be great, but they’re not going to make any money.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to the hubbub with an op-ed in Murdoch’s own Wall Street Journal that amounted to: “Why can’t we be friends?” Oh yeah, and then a Microsoft exec told the Financial Times they’re not planning on paying any news organizations to leave Google in the first place. Clear as mud?

A few of the smarter pieces of commentary on the whole ordeal: Search engine guru Danny Sullivan and new media entrepreneur Umair Haque explain why a News Corp.-Bing deal wouldn’t work. As usual, Ken Doctor has some really sharp questions on the issue. And Sullivan also prompted an interesting discussion on whether infrequent visitors to news sites through Google News are worth anything. Sullivan and Jeff Jarvis say yes, and news orgs are blowing an opportunity; Steve Yelvington says no, not really.

— If the last four paragraphs have you feeling overwhelmed, reset for a while with two beautiful elegies for journalism as we knew it, focusing on two cities on either side of the country. In an essay for Harper’s, Richard Rodriguez examines the importance of local news orgs providing a sense of place through a look at the history and decline of San Francisco and its two longtime papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner. (Official/incomplete version here; illicit/full version here.)

And New York Times media columnist David Carr gives a picture of the collapse of the traditional media model (with a helping of hope for the future) by looking through the eyes of the young go-getters who flood New York’s media landscape. Both essays are lyrically written, and both highly insightful.

— The Dallas Morning News, one of the nation’s best newspapers only a decade ago, internally announced a reorganization plan this week in which some news section editors will report to sales managers, now called “general managers.” From the memo, this looks like one of the biggest breaches of the long-standing wall between news and advertising we’ve seen at a major traditional American news organization. The memo’s writer, Editor Bob Mong, its publisher, and other editors have backpedaled from that idea over the past few days, saying it’s not really much of a change from what a lot of other traditional news orgs are doing and won’t affect the integrity of the paper’s reporting.

A bit surprisingly, the commentary on the move from media and journalism thinkers has been cautiously optimistic. Alan Mutter thinks the news folks’ tenacity could rub off on the ad side, Canadian j-prof Mark Hamilton thinks the collaboration could help fund better reporting, and the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Jim Barnett says this may simply be a case of traditional news catching up to the online world.

I wish I could share their optimism, but there are far too many question marks for me to be anything but concerned about this deal. I don’t think the news/advertising wall should be sacrosanct (as Barnett notes, online news does fine without a wall), but there’s a huge difference between journalists working with someone who’s spent their entire career in advertising and working for that person. And there’s also a big difference between that superior being a seldom-seen, corner-office publisher and a hands-on immediate supervisor. But it’s not impossible for this to work well; a lot of it depends on how well these sales managers mesh with the news folks, and how well they understand the need to keep their hands off editorial judgment when it counts.

— A weird, weird incident involving Tiger Woods, Elin Nordegren, an SUV, a golf club, extramarital affairs and the Florida Highway Patrol transfixed much of the media world for about a week. Just about every columnist in America took the opportunity to write about celebrity, privacy, the 24-hour news cycle and tabloid journalism. Not much of it was very interesting. Two exceptions: Time media critic James Poniewozik wrote a sly critique of the traditional media’s ambivalence about covering tawdry stories like this, and St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans expressed his concerns about those media outlets outsourcing celebrity stories to organizations whose ethics they wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

— After months of leadup, the cable company Comcast agreed this week to buy a majority of the media empire that is NBC Universal from General Electric. A few quick takes on various angles of this deal: The New York Times’ Brian Stelter looks at the Internet/TV divide and reviews Comcast’s new news holdings, paidContent’s Rafat Ali says the deal’s not about digital media, and the Times’ Richard Sandomir and former ESPN.com writer Dan Shanoff say this deal gives ESPN a legitimate competitor in sports media.

— Two great journalism school discussion-starters during the past two weeks: Steve Buttry offers some comprehensive advice for journalism schools on how to overhaul their curriculum for the 21st century (Buttry covers it well here — it’s worth a read), and tech pioneer Dave Winer makes the case for a semester of journalism education for everyone, framed as “How to be a citizen in the 21st century.” Wonderful idea.

— Before we’re done, there’s some nifty statistics and graphs that are worth a look. Slate tech columnist Farhad Manjoo marvels at Facebook’s relentless growth, The Awl has a magnificently depressing graph of magazine revenue, and Steve Yelvington and Damon Kiesow graph news sites’ users and wonder where a paywall is supposed to go. Enjoy.

This week in media musings: What real-time search means for news, and journalism subsidies get a hearing

Mark — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:06:10 +0000

As The New York Times’ media critic, David Carr, noted on Friday, this last week has been a rather momentous one in future-of-journalism happenings. That means I’ve got a ton to cover, so I’ll try to keep it digestible for you. (Explanation of what I’m doing, as always, is here.)

— First off, this was the week real-time search officially took off. On Wednesday morning, The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital broke the news that Microsoft had reached an agreement to give its Bing search engine the ability to include Twitter and Facebook status updates. Four hours later, we found out that Google, too, had reached a similar agreement with Twitter (no Google-Facebook marriage, though — that would have been a surprise).

So now we have Twitter status updates available on Google and Bing, and Facebook updates on Bing as well. The tech blog ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has a handy-dandy chart to help us keep all the companies’ search strengths and weaknesses straight. He and Adam Ostrow from the social media blog Mashable both note that Microsoft’s plan for Facebook search is dependent on Facebook’s ability to persuade its users to make their status updates at least semi-public — and Facebook users have a history of fiercely guarding their privacy.

There’s a few different ways to examine the impact of these deals: The New York Times has focused on money, noting that this is likely a huge part of Twitter’s answer to the ubiquitous “But how are you going to make money off of this?” question, and then, in turn, wondering, “How are Microsoft and Google going to make money off of this?”

Several others have been talking about the value of this data. Catharine Taylor at Social Media Insider thinks most of it is “simply unimportant,” which is, well, nuts. (You seriously can’t see how finding out what people are saying right now about a given topic might be slightly valuable?) TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld posits (rightly, I think) that the greatest value of this data will be at the aggregate, “firehose” level in the ability to refine search results to reflect real-time results — sort of like an integration of a far more sophisticated version of Google Trends.

Then, of course, there’s the journalism angle. The Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum asks the same question that I can just about bet Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley were asking when they heard about the deals: “If tweets are worth money to a search engine, why isn’t the news?” Meanwhile, tech pioneer Dave Winer, in the most insightful post I’ve seen on these deals, argues that we should be beyond thinking about what this means for traditional news organizations: Google, Microsoft and Twitter are now in the news business themselves.

This is the dawn of a system, Winer says, where all of our news “flows through the same pipes, and curators pick off the good stuff and route it to people who are interested.” And instead of jumping in on this while it’s beginning, the moguls of traditional media are sitting on the sidelines, hoping someone will just stop by and decide to pay them — not because they’ve provided any serious value in this new media ecosystem, but only because they’re complaining loud enough. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Just read Dave’s post.

— The other big development this week was a report released by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie and UC-San Diego/Columbia University journalism prof Michael Schudson, which was followed by an avalanche of reactions from journalism pundits and scholars. The Nieman Journalism Lab has a fine summary of the report and the Cedar Rapids Gazette’s Steve Buttry has a comprehensive roundup of the reaction, so I won’t duplicate their work here.

The aspect of the report that got the most attention was Downie and Schudson’s recommendation of several avenues for increased government funding for journalism, summed up nicely by Michele McLellan here. And that may be the most valuable thing to come out of this report — it’s the first proposal of expanding public funding for journalism to be engaged with seriously by many of The People Who Think About Journalism, probably because it’s the first proposal that deserves to be taken seriously.

I have my own deep skepticism about publicly funding journalism — though I’m slightly more amenable to starting up new initiatives under the public-media banner than to using subsidies or tax breaks to prop up flagging newspapers — but it seems that Downie and Schudson’s report has finally gotten us past the knee-jerk “Over my dead body!” response to publicly funded journalism, even if the right answer is “No way — but here’s why, and I’m still open to hearing some ideas from the other side.”

— This week included a watershed moment for the sports blogosphere, too. Deadspin, a Gawker Media blog that towers over the sports blogging world, launched a daylong offensive against ESPN after, according to Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio, a PR rep for the network brushed aside his questions last month about a rumored affair and suspension by ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips. When the story turned out to be true and was broken by the New York Post last week, Daulerio retaliated by publishing reports of sexual misdeeds by a mid-level ESPN Radio host and an unknown-to-the-public marketing VP.

The reaction from the sports blogosphere was almost universally negative (though there were exceptions), which is notable because so many of those blogs generally operate with a very similar M.O. If you had to boil the sports blogosphere down to just a few of its defining characteristics, one of them would be its fixation on sexual scandals that only tangentially involve sports. Yet this week we found out that even regarding that, those blogs have a line. And when even the most powerful sports blog on the Web crossed that line, they heard it from their fellow bloggers. If you’re interested in diving deeper into this, the National Sports Journalism Center has a roundup of reactions, Midwest Sports Fans has an audio interview with Daulerio about the flap, and lawyer and former Deadspin associate editor Clay Travis uses the episode to give us a lesson on libel law.

— In the wake of the past few weeks’ adventures in news orgs’ social media guidelines, veteran journalist Gina Chen has an extremely helpful personal guide to the ethics of social media for journalists, complete with case studies. Over at MediaShift, meanwhile, Stephen Ward has some tips for news orgs crafting social media policies.

— The nation’s 12th-largest newspaper, Newsday on Long Island, has put a paywall around its online content. Newsday execs explain the move at Editor & Publisher, and news business expert Alan Mutter cautions that Newsday’s being owned by a cable company makes this move a tough one to replicate.

— Finally, two professors argue at SEED magazine that social media and the explosion of online publishing mean that soon, our society will be characterized not only by nearly universal literacy, but by nearly universal authorship as well. And if you’re a journalism student (or a working journalist, for that matter), Publish2’s Ryan Sholin has some helpful advice: Be great at one analog craft and one digital craft. Sounds about right.