Mark Coddington » twitter

To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant

Mark — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 15:36:10 +0000

Most of America’s newsrooms have been aboard the Twitter bandwagon for at least a year, though few of them have found a way to directly make money off of social media. But one small daily newspaper in Nebraska has brought in a small but steadily growing stream of revenue this summer by creating and consulting for its own social media network for local advertisers.

The paper is the 20,000-circulation Grand Island Independent (disclosure: I worked as a reporter there until April, just before this project was formally launched), and the service is called the giNetwork. Here’s how it works: Companies pay for The Independent’s web editor to set up their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, with synchronized posts between the two. Their posts are then aggregated and displayed with a Twitter lists widget on The Independent’s homepage (about midway down) and on a dedicated giNetwork page. The deal includes on-demand social media consulting during business hours and a regular email newsletter with tips and success stories.

The giNetwork was added on top of an existing local search service developed by the newspaper that boosts local advertisers’ search results on Google and other search engines, as well as the paper’s own local business listings. The search service, FindNEthing.com, had been offered to businesses for $79 per month, and the giNetwork is now included in the FindNEthing package for a total of $99 per month. (Businesses are required to sign on for at least 12 months in order to prevent them from quickly parlaying the paper’s network support and free social media setup into their own independent social media campaign.)

The two services together give advertisers a strong presence on Google, Facebook and The Independent, the area’s most-visited website. “You get the two most popular sites in the world and the most popular site here — it’s what I call the holy trinity of ‘onlineliness,’” said The Independent’s new media director, Jack Sheard. “You can’t get it anywhere else. There’s no other product that’s going to give you all three of those things.”

Advertisers seem to be buying into Sheard’s pitch: The network launched this spring with about a half-dozen businesses and now includes 37 in the rural town of about 50,000 — this after FindNEthing had struggled and flatlined, Sheard said. Here are the project’s main selling points, and how they’ve worked in practice.

— It makes social media simple for businesses. When Sheard, web editor Stephanie Romanski and The Independent’s sales reps talked to local advertisers, they found that few of them knew how to set up Facebook fan page for their business, and even fewer understood Twitter. “A lot of them, when we talk to them, say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I know I need to be a part of that, I just don’t have the time. I know the way things are going; I just don’t understand it,’” Sheard said. So the giNetwork makes it simple: The paper sets their account up, gives them a single place to put in messages (usually Facebook; sometimes Twitter for the smartphone-attached) and provides help and advice along the way.

Sheard said the network’s been much more popular among older business owners than younger ones, largely because older ones tend to be unfamiliar with the technology while their younger colleagues are skeptical of paying someone for something they’re capable of doing themselves. Romanski’s expertise — she runs The Independent’s creative social media efforts and has done consulting for others in the newspaper business — is a major draw for advertisers and an important part of the program. “If [the businesses] are not successful with this, then we just have a dead product, and we’re just spending money on something that doesn’t work,” Sheard said.

— It gives targeted access to devoted local audiences. The key to this selling point is the aggregation of the Twitter lists widget on the homepage and the giNetwork landing page. That widget expands the business’s audience beyond the business’s few hundred Facebook fans or few dozen Twitter followers to potentially include the paper’s thousands of unique visitors per week. And, of course, a streaming list of constantly updating local deals draws a much more interested audience than a banner ad. To that end, the paper is hoping to make the giNetwork the hub of local-deals-of-the-moment — a sort of shaggier Groupon — as the network grows, attracting a devoted following of bargain-hunters. Joining the network is the only way to gain access to that following.

— Other local businesses have used it to attract new customers. The paper has plenty of small success stories. The local franchise of the Mexican fast-food chain Qdoba reached nearly 500 Facebook fans in its first two weeks with a giveaway offer; it now uses its page to spread word of its regular promotions, like kids-eat-free Mondays. A local florist started with a special deal for customers who came in and said “I love my dog,” and was getting new customers from the promotion months afterward. A tire shop has drawn new customers with its regular oil change deals.

The most successful local social-media user is a grocery store that actually launched its Facebook page independently, as the giNetwork was in the planning stages. It quickly gained thousands of followers with deep daily discounts, though it limited the deal to Facebook fans, necessitating a messy system in which customers printed out proof of their Facebook fandom, then exchanged it for a voucher at the customer service desk.

When the store joined the giNetwork, Sheard eliminated the Facebook fan requirement over the initial objections of the store’s manager. The Facebook fan page was merely a means to an end — increased business, Sheard said. ”We’re not in the business to sell Facebook fans,” he said. “We will help you build them, and that’s great, but we are in the business of getting people in your door. That’s what the giNetwork does that Facebook, maybe, is limited on.”

In the newsroom

So what has this meant for The Independent? Despite the relatively meager revenue, it’s come out a plus in the paper’s cost-benefit analysis; the initial setup is simple, and the project requires even lower maintenance after that point. The paper had initially discussed a much more intensive program in which Romanski would actually run the social-media efforts for local businesses, but that idea was scrapped because of ethical (the newspaper’s web editor also being the online voice of numerous advertisers) and time issues. This project has struck a much happier balance, Sheard and Romanski said.

The network won an award this year for best new revenue idea in the online group of The Omaha World-Herald Co., The Independent’s owners, and The Hays Daily News in Kansas has picked up the idea after talking with Romanski.

But don’t expect the giNetwork to look the same a few months from now; the paper plans to keep incorporating new technologies and services into it, such as Foursquare and Shoutback, a Groupon competitor. In a late-adopting social media city like Grand Island, that means the paper itself plays a role in pioneering those new products — a refreshingly unfamiliar role for the local paper. And while the numbers are small, Sheard and The Independent’s executives are excited about the fact that they’re making real money directly from their social media efforts. “We’ve started, and that’s the key,” Sheard said.

This Week in Review: The FTC’s ideas for news, Apple’s paid-news pitch, and the de-linking debate

Mark — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:09:04 +0000

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on June 4, 2010.]

The FTC’s ideas for journalism: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has spent much of the last year listening to suggestions about how they might change antitrust, copyright and tax laws in order to create the best possible climate for good journalism, and this weekend it posted its “discussion draft” of policy proposals to “support the reinvention of journalism.” It’s a 47-page document, so here’s a quick summary of their ideas:

— Expand copyright law to protect news content against online aggregators, including “hot news” legislation, further limits to fair use and mandatory content licenses.

— Allow antitrust exemptions for news organizations to put up paywalls together and develop a unified system to limit online aggregators.

— Enact direct or indirect government subsidies through a variety of possible means, including a journalism AmeriCorps, more CPB funding, a national local news fund, tax credits to news orgs for employing journalists, university investigative journalism grants, and newspaper and magazine postal subsidies. These subsidies could be paid for through taxes on broadcast spectrum, consumer electronics, advertising, or ISP-cell phone bills.

— Tax code changes to make it easier for news organizations to gain tax-exempt status.

— Pass various FOIA-related laws to make government data easier to access and search.

It’s worth noting that the FTC isn’t explicitly endorsing these proposals; the draft reads more as a list of possible proposals that might be worth exploring further. Still, j-prof and new media pundit Jeff Jarvis saw a perspective of old-media protectionism running through the draft, as he tore it apart point by point. The FTC is defining journalism through established news organizations and looking to prop them up instead of supporting visionary startups, he wrote. “If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here.”

Jarvis’ charges were seconded by two newspapermen, the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott and the Los Angeles Times’ Andrew Malcolm, who likened the proposals to the government trying to save the auto industry by reviving the gas guzzlers of the 1960s. Steve Buttry of the new Washington news site TBD chimed in, too, homing in on the assertion that newspapers provide the overwhelming majority of our original news.

Free Press’ Josh Stearns responded by cautioning against “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” noting a few of things that he liked about the FTC’s proposals. And at the Huffington Post, Alex Howard praised the FTC’s open-government proposals. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen chipped in his own tweet-length proposal for the FTC: “Subsidize universal broadband; fight for sensible net neutrality.”

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Steve Jobs’ pitch for paid news: The folks from the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital interviewed Apple chief Steve Jobs on stage this week as part of their D8 conference, and Jobs had a few words for the news industry: Yes, he wants to help save journalism, because, as he put it, ““I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself.” But if they’re going to survive, news organizations should be more aggressive about getting people to pay for content, Jobs said, like Apple did in helping raise e-book prices earlier this year.

As it turned out, there was something for everybody to pick apart in that exchange: Ex-Saloner and blogging historian Scott Rosenberg took issue with Jobs’ “nation of bloggers” jab, and Steve Safran of the local-news blog Lost Remote said that what Jobs really wants to save is paid, professional journalism. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram argued that an “iTunes for news” model that Jobs proposed might benefit Jobs, but probably won’t work for news outlets. And here at the Lab, Laura McGann pointed out a statement Jobs made elsewhere in the interview that rejected Apple app applicants (sorry, couldn’t resist) should simply resubmit their apps, unchanged.

Meanwhile, we got another diatribe about Apple’s app censorship from Advertising Age’s Simon Dumenco, and a few other interesting pieces of app news: Statistics showing just how big game apps are on the iPhone and iPad (though content apps aren’t doing bad on the iPad), lessons for iPad news apps from Hacks/Hackers’ recent app-creating binge, and a cool iPad news reader designed by Stanford students.

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To link or not to link?: Author Nicholas Carr, who’s about to release a book about how the Internet is hurting our ability to think, highlighting one of the points from that book in a blog post this weekend: The link, Carr argues, hurts our ability to concentrate and follow an argument, and in some cases we may be better off without them. He calls links a high-tech version of the footnote, like little distracting textual gnats buzzing around our heads. “Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it’s there and it matters.” Carr approvingly noted a couple of experiments in leaving links to the bottom of articles.

ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick responded with a thoughtful look at the purpose of links, wondering if they really might be better off at the end of articles, and the Columbia Journalism Review’s Ryan Chittum was sympathetic to Carr’s point as well: “It’s not a trivial question to ask what the Internet is doing to our attention spans,” he wrote. “I know mine, for one, is shot to hell.”

Carr, who’s had his runins with the Internet cognoscenti in the past, predictably caught some flak for his post too, including from Mathew Ingram, who argued that links are at least as much an intellectual discipline for the writer as the reader. The Scholarly Kitchen’s Kent Anderson noted that links are part of a long academic tradition that includes footnotes and inline citations: “Do they distract? Of course they do. … But it’s distraction through addition, if done well.” And author Scott Berkun brings up a few variables that others missed, including the skill of the author, web design, and the “open in new tab” function.

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‘The Twitter of news’: The link-sharing site Digg gave a preview of its new version, which will implement some Twitter-like features and emphasize the news links that the people you follow have shared, rather than just the top overall links. The net effect is an attempt to become, as GigaOm’s Liz Gannes put it, “the Twitter of news.” That, of course, raises the question, “Isn’t Twitter already the Twitter of news?” But Digg’s advantage, founder Kevin Rose says, is that it does away with the status updates and Justin Bieber memes and gives you purely socially powered links and news.

Tech pioneer Dave Winer was intrigued by the concept, and The Next Web’s Zee Kane lauded Digg for integrating more deeply with Twitter. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, a competitor of Digg’s, bashed Rose for “just re-implementing features from other websites,” and TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington knocked both Rose and Ohanian down a peg in response.

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Bidders for Newsweek: Wednesday was The Washington Post Co.’s deadline for formal expressions of interest in buying Newsweek, and it received three offers: OpenGate Capital, a private equity firm that bought TV Guide for $1 in 2008; hedge fund manager and failed Chicago Sun-Times bidder Thane Ritchie; and conservative magazine and website Newsmax. On Twitter, Jeff Jarvis called the bidders “tacky” and wondered whether Newsweek would be better off dead.

Earlier in the week, The New York Times’ David Carr offered an explanation for why Newsweek and other magazines seem to be worth so little to potential buyers: “In the current digital news ecosystem, having ‘week’ in your title is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative equity.” At its Tumblr blog, Newsweek responded by arguing that while everyone seems to have the perfect idea of what Newsweek should have done, no one can change the simple business reality that Newsweek is no longer alone in its niche for readers and advertisers.

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Reading roundup: A couple of updates on stories from last week, plus a bunch of interesting articles and resources.

— There wasn’t much new said in the continuing argument over Facebook and privacy, but Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave a couple more interviews defending its privacy policy and last week’s changes to NPR, All Things Digital and Wired, the latter of which included the revelation that Zuckerberg donated to Diaspora, Facebook’s open-source startup competitor. Wired’s Fred Vogelstein also defended Facebook’s privacy stance, and Jay Rosen took him to task for it.

— An addendum to last week’s Publish2 News Exchange launch: Publish2’s Ryan Sholin told the Lab’s Megan Garber that it only intends to disrupt the AP, not kill it. The exchange is aimed at the content distribution side of the AP, not the production end, he said. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds gave some more explanation of Publish2’s plans.

— The New York Times announced it will host Nate Silver’s political polling blog FiveThirtyEight, one of the web’s top operations at the intersection of data and journalism. Yahoo News’ Michael Calderone examined the fact that Silver’s been open about his liberal political views and asks how that will work out at the Times.

— Several smart, thought-provoking analyses here: journalism researcher Michele McLellan surveyed online local news publishers, news business expert Alan Mutter looked at Yahoo’s hints at a challenge to local newspapers, search guru Danny Sullivan examined a case of traditional media stealing his blog’s story; and media analyst Frederic Filloux explained why online advertising is so lousy.

— Finally, a ‘why’ and a ‘how’ for a couple of aspects of digital journalism: MediaShift’s Roland LeGrand gives journalists the reasons they should learn computer programming, and Poynter’s Jeremy Caplan has a great list of tips for crowdsourcing in journalism.

This Week in Review: Facebook’s privacy tweak, old and new media’s links, and the AP’s new challenger

Mark — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 21:59:30 +0000

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 28, 2010.]

Facebook simplifies privacy control: After about a month of loud, sustained criticism, Facebook bowed to public pressure and instituted some changes Wednesday to users’ privacy settings. The default status of most of the data on Facebook — that is, public —hasn’t changed, but the social networking site did make it easier for users to determine and control their various privacy settings. For some social media critics, the tweaks were enough to close the book on this whole privacy brouhaha, but others weren’t so satisfied with Facebook. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber seized on the theme of “control” in Facebook’s announcement, arguing that the company is acknowledging that online sharing is as much individual and self-interested as it is communal and selfless.

Before rolling out those changes, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg penned a Washington Post op-ed that served as a defense of Facebook’s privacy policy masquerading as an apology. “If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected,” he wrote. The reaction was swift and negative: It was called “long on propaganda and short on news,” “disingenuous” and “missing the point” by several media and tech critics.

Their comments were part of continued attacks on Facebook’s privacy stance that began to shift from “Facebook is evil” to “So what do we do now?” Facebook’s new, more private rivals escalated their efforts to provide an alternative, while social media researcher Danah Boyd argued that leaving Facebook would be futile and instead urged users to “challenge Facebook to live up to a higher standard.” Several legal and web thinkers also discussed whether the government should regulate Facebook’s privacy policies, and the Harvard Business Review’s Bruce Nussbaum made the case that Facebook has alienated the generational principles of its primary user base of millennials. (Mathew Ingram of GigaOm disagreed.)

But amid all that, Facebook — or at least the sharing of personal information — got another defender: The prominent tech thinker Steven Johnson. In a thoughtful essay for Time, He used the example of media critic Jeff Jarvis’ public bout with prostate cancer to argue that living in public has its virtues, too. “We have to learn how to break with that most elemental of parental commandments: Don’t talk to strangers,” Johnson wrote. “It turns out that strangers have a lot to give us that’s worthwhile, and we to them.” Of course, Johnson argues, being public or private is for the first time a decision, and it requires a new kind of literacy to go with it.

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Paywalls and the links between old and new media: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study examining the way several big news topics were discussed across several online news platforms, and as usual, it’s a whole lot of discoveries to sift through. Among the headlines that Pew pointed out in its summary: Twitter users share more technology news than other platforms, the traditional press may be underemphasizing international news, blogs and the press have different news agendas, and Twitter is less tied to traditional media than blogs. (Mashable has another good roundup, focusing on the differences between the traditional media and the blogosphere.

The study did take some heat online: TBD’s Steve Buttry took issue with the assertion that most original reporting comes from traditional journalists, and the Knight Digital Media Center’s Amy Gahran dug into the study’s methodology and argued that Pew selected from a list of blogs predisposed to discuss what the traditional media is reporting, and that Pew’s definition of news is shaped by circular reasoning.

Gahran was looking at what turned out to be the most attention-grabbing statistic from the study: That 99 percent of the stories blogs link to are produced by the mainstream media, and more than 80 percent come from just four news outlets — the BBC, CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post. DailyFinance media columnist Jeff Bercovici used that statistic to caution that the Times may be giving up a valuable place as one of the top drivers of online news discussion by implementing its paywall next year. Reuters’ Felix Salmon echoed that warning, adding that if the Times is truly keeping the doors to its site open to bloggers, it should be trumpeting that as loudly as possible. And wouldn’t you know it — the next day the Times did just that, reiterating that links to their site from blogs won’t count against the limit of free visits.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper the Times and Sunday Times unveiled plans for its soon-to-be-erected paywall, including the fact that all of the sites’ articles will be blocked from all search engines. The Times and New York Times’ paywalls were almost tailor-made for being contrasted, and that’s exactly what the Lab’s Jason Fry did, using them as examples of an open vs. closed paradigm regarding paid content.

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A challenger to the AP’s model: We found out about a fascinating news innovation this week at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference, where the online news sharing company Publish2 revealed News Exchange, its new content-sharing service for publishers. Essentially, News Exchange is a way for media outlets, both online-only and traditional, to send and receive stories to each other for publication while retaining control of what they share and with whom.

If that sounds like a free, open version of The Associated Press, it’s because that’s exactly what Publish2 sees it as. At the conference, Publish2’s Scott Karp came out against The Associated Press with both guns blazing, calling it “a big enemy of newspapers” and “an obsolete, inefficient monopoly ripe for destruction.” Publish2’s goal, he said, is to “Craigslist the AP.” (In a blog post, Publish2’s Ryan Sholin went into some more detail about why and how.)

Publish2’s bold idea was met with mixed reactions among both the tech and media crowds: A few of TechCrunch’s panelists wondered whether print publications were worth building a business around, but they were impressed enough to advance it to the final round of the conference’s startup competition anyhow. NYU j-prof Jay Rosen called it “an extension into print of ‘do what you do best and link to the rest,’” and CUNY j-prof C.W. Anderson said he was thrilled to watch Publish2 take on an irrational system but concerned that the tangle of CMS’s could trip it up. But media consultant Mark Potts noted that much of what the AP transmits is news it reports and produces, something Publish2 isn’t going to try to do. It’s rare that we see such a bold, explicit attempt to take down such an established news organization, so this will doubtless be a project to keep a close eye on.

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A disappointing iPad app and an open-web debate: A couple of iPad-related developments and debates this week: While publishers cautiously awaited the iPad’s international release this week, Wired magazine released its iPad app this week — an eagerly awaited app in tech circles. The app is $5 per month, significantly more than the $10 per year that the magazine charges subscribers. Gizmodo Australia’s John Herrman called it “unequivocally, the best magazine for the iPad,” but still wasn’t entirely impressed. It’s too expensive, takes up too much space, and doesn’t deliver the reinvention of the magazine that we were expecting, he said. Lost Remote’s Steve Safran was harsher — calling it a magazine dropped into an app. “Simply taking your existing magazine and sticking in some video does not make it a more attractive offering; it makes it a website from 2003,” he said.

The New York Times Magazine’s Virginia Heffernan ruffled a few feathers this week with a short essay on “The Death of the Open Web,” in which she compared the move into the carefully controlled environs of Apple’s products like the iPhone and iPad to white flight. Web writers Stowe Boyd and Tim Maly refuted Heffernan’s argument, pointing primarily to the iPhone and iPad’s browser and arguing that it keeps the door open to virtually everything the web has to offer. And blogging pioneer Dave Winer said the phrase “death of the open web” is rendered meaningless by the fact that it can’t be verified. In a final quick iPad note, the journalism and programming site Hacks/Hackers hosted a conference in which attendees built an impressive 12 iPad apps in 30 hours.

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Reading roundup: This week, we’ve got two news items and a handful of other thoughtful or helpful pieces to take a look at.

— The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit local news site based in San Francisco, launched this week. The San Francisco Bay Guardian took a look at the challenges in front of the Bay Citizen, Poynter used it as a lens to view four trends among news startups, and the Chicago Reader examined the Chicago News Cooperative, another nonprofit news startup that also provides stories to The New York Times. The Lab’s Laura McGann also gave some tips for launching a news site the right way.

— Forbes bought the personal publishing site True/Slant, whose founder, Lewis Dvorkin, is a former Forbes staffer. Dvorkinexplained his decision to sell, and Felix Salmon expressed his skepticism about True/Slant’s future.

— Longtime journalists Tom Foremski and Caitlin Kelly both wrote thoughtful posts on what happens when pageviews become a high priority within news organizations. They’re not optimistic.

— Two pieces to bookmark for future reference: Mashable has a thorough but digestible overview of five ways to make money off of news online, and TBD’s Steve Buttry gives some fantastic tips for landing a job in digital journalism.

— Finally, NewsCred’s Shafqat Islam has a wonderful guide to creating effective topic pages for news. This one should be a must-read for any news org looking seriously at context-driven news online.

This Week in Review: Newsweek on the block, Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall rumblings

Mark — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:06:25 +0000

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on May 7, 2010.]

Has Newsweek’s time come?: This week was a relatively quiet one until Wednesday, when The Washington Post Co. announced that it’s trying to sell Newsweek, which it’s owned since 1961. A possible sale doesn’t always signal the demise of a news organization, but in this case, as the folks at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital noted, this move was the equivalent of “hastily scrawling out a ‘Going Out of Business–Name Your Price’ sign and plastering it on the front window.” The New York Times has the details, including a j-prof’s pronouncement that “the era of mass is over, in some respect.”

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer talked to Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham, who boiled Newsweek’s profitability problems to one telling statistic: Newsweek’s staff split its time about evenly between print and digital last year, but print brought in $160 million in revenue, while the digital side drew $8 million. Newsweek’s digital operation was good, Graham said — just not good enough to stand out from the hundreds of other news sites out there. Still, he was confident the Post would find a buyer (though he hasn’t talked with anyone seriously), and that Newsweek and newsweeklies in general would live on.

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham talked to the New York Observer, saying he’s going to see if he can save the magazine, possibly by rounding up bidders to buy it. Meacham’s conversation with Jon Stewart the day the news broke was laced with both optimism and gallows humor, and New York magazine examined Meacham’s decision to try to make Newsweek the American equivalent of The Economist.

In a well-written piece, The New York Times’ David Carr summed up two bits of conventional wisdom about Newsweek’s downfall: The economics of weekly publishing simply aren’t feasible anymore, and the Washington Post Co.’s Slate, with its snarky, knowing tone, has taken Newsweek’s place. MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman suggested that the Post combine the two. Slate’s Jack Shafer said it wasn’t the Internet that killed Newsweek, but instead an ongoing game of musical chairs that someone had to lose. (Slate and Time, for example, seem to be doing just fine, thanks.) Meanwhile, Derek Powazek, who’s edited several web magazines, gave his recipe for newsweekly success in the digital age.

The next question, of course, is who will buy Newsweek. News business analyst Ken Doctor examined two possibilities: TV-based news orgs like ABC, CBS and NBC looking for a print distribution point, and “firebrand owners” like media moguls Mort Zuckerman or Marty Peretz. Either way, Doctor said, Newsweek will probably be all but extinct before long. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds, Media Alley and Mediaite all throw out some combination of Zuckerman, Meacham, Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch. as possibilities.

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Committing journalism with Twitter: Many of Twitter’s users have understood and used it as a medium for breaking, spreading and consuming news for quite a while now, but some research presented within the past week adds some backbone to that idea. Four Korean researchers collected all of Twitter’s data over a month’s time last year and released their research on it — the first quantitative study of the entire Twitterverse.

What they found, according to PC World, was that both the structure of Twitter (with its asymmetrical following system, creating a world with some incredibly influential users and many other more peripheral ones) and its messages (85 percent are about news) give it more of a resemblance to a news medium than to its fellow social networks online.

MIT’s Technology Review zeroed in on two particularly interesting findings illustrating the breadth of this new news system: First, two-thirds of Twitter users aren’t followed by anyone that they follow, meaning they use it for information consumption rather than social connections. Second, despite the wide disparity between the Twitter “stars” and typical users, anyone’s tweet still has the possibility of reaching a wide audience, thanks to the usefulness of the retweet function. “Individual users have the power to dictate which information is important and should spread by the form of retweet,” the researchers wrote. “In a way we are witnessing the emergence of collective intelligence.”

Also this week, Canadian j-prof Alfred Hermida put forward his argument in an academic paper for Twitter as an “ambient form of journalism” — a medium in which the former news audience creates, disseminates and discusses news, performing acts of journalism that were once performed only by professionals. In a more technical paper, Alex Burns delved into the definition of “ambient journalism,” especially as it relates to Twitter. Here at the Lab, Megan Garber also looked at the way news organizations in several countries are using Twitter and other social media for news.

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The paid-content beat goes on: A few quiet indicators this week of the move toward news paywalls: Rupert Murdoch said News Corp. will be announcing their paywall plans in a few weeks. Those plans apparently include anchoring a consortium of paid-content systems across various media companies, using technology that powers the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, the Los Angeles Times reported. Meanwhile, the number of publications that Journalism Online’s execs say they’re working with on paywall plans has increased to 1,400, including the sizable MediaNews chain of newspapers.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s new publisher/CEO, Mike Klingensmith, talked to MinnPost about his plans for a new metered-model system (like what The New York Times announced in January), and from the sound of it, he’s looking at charging primarily for local news — the paper already charges for some of its Minnesota Vikings coverage — and wants to allow traffic from links to come in fairly uninhibited. A decision on the specific plans sound like they’re at least a year off, though.

Advertising Age’s Nat Ives also took a look at paywalls for smaller newspapers (here’s the link, but Ives’ article is also under a paywall). Ken Doctor says that for smaller papers, a paywall may be a good short-term wait-and-see strategy, but papers still have to be proactive about ensuring long-term growth.

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The pros and cons of Facebook’s spread: There wasn’t a lot of news involving Facebook this week, but the grumblings about its privacy issues rolled on. The New York Times used Facebook’s latest (relatively minor, it seems) privacy glitch to give another overview about those concerns, and TechNewsWorld pegged their overview to a Consumer Reports survey about Facebook information sharing that was released this week.

Social media guru Robert Scoble wrote a depressing piece about why Facebook’s disregard for privacy can’t be regulated, concluding that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won.” New media expert Jeff Jarvis suggested that Facebook turn their bad privacy PR into a service for users (with some help from their ubiquity), offering them a simpler way to see what’s being written about them across the web and manage their online reputation.

The New York Times’ digital chief Martin Nisenholtz, was pretty impressed by Facebook’s spread across the web, giving a sharp analysis of the importance of engagement and identity to publishers online. Those are things that Facebook has mastered, he said, but news organizations haven’t, and that’s a shame when the Times’ most valuable asset is “our audience as knowledgeable participants in the life our web site.”

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Reading roundup: This week, I’ve got two news items and a few other good ideas to chew on.

— EBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched his new local news site, Honolulu Civil Beat, this week. It’s being run by John Temple, who was at the helm of the Rocky Mountain News when it shut down. The biggest distinctive of this project: It’s almost entirely behind a paywall. PaidContent and NPR both have the details.

— The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported the most recent set of newspaper numbers a couple of weeks ago, and here at the Lab, newspaper vet Martin Langeveld punched a few holes in the Newspaper Association of America’s declaration that the results are the sign of a turnaround. And after the announcement of the first quarter’s newspaper profit numbers, the Lab’s Ken Doctor explained why newspapers aren’t going to be investment those profits in much-needed innovation.

— Publish2’s Greg Linch put together a great case for incorporating more of a computational mindset into journalism, identifying several common elements between journalism and programming and urging the two groups to work more closely together. English professor Kim Pearson followed that post up with some proposals for ways to integrate computational thinking into curriculums.

— We’ve been hearing a lot about online comments over the past few weeks, and Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore took a close look at the ways several news organizations are working to improve them.

— I’ll close with two simple but thoughtful pieces on online media, one from the production standpoint, and the other looking at consumption. First social media entrepreneur and blogger Ben Elowitz gave a fine summary of the way the definition of quality has changed in online media versus traditional publishing, and Slate’s William Saletan had some helpful tips to make your media consumption broader, deeper and altogether smarter. It’s hard work, but it’s necessary, Saletan said: “In the electronic echo chamber, it’s easier than ever to shut out what you don’t want to hear. Nobody will make you open the door and venture out. You’ll have to do that yourself.”

This Week in Review: News talk and tips at ASNE, iPad’s ‘walled garden,’ and news execs look for revenue

Mark — Mon, 31 May 2010 03:01:04 +0000

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on April 16, 2010.]

Schmidt and Huffington’s advice for news execs: This week wasn’t a terribly eventful one in the future-of-journalism world, but a decent amount of the interesting stuff that was said came out of Washington D.C., site of the annual American Society of News Editors conference. The most talked-about session there was Sunday night’s keynote address by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who told the news execs there that their industry is in trouble because it hasn’t found a way to sustain itself financially, not because its way of producing or delivering news is broken. “We have a business-model problem, we don’t have a news problem,” Schmidt said.

After buttering the crowd up a bit, Schmidt urged them to produce news for an environment that’s driven largely by mobile devices, immediacy, and personalization, and he gave them a glimpse of what those priorities look like at Google. Politico and the Lab’s Megan Garber have summaries of the talk, and paidContent has video.

There were bunches more sessions and panels (American Journalism Review’s Rem Rieder really liked them), but two I want to highlight in particular. One was a panel with New York Times media critic David Carr, new-media titan Ariana Huffington and the Orlando Sentinel’s Mark Russell on the “24/7 news cycle.” The Lab’s report on the session focused on four themes, with one emerging most prominently — the need for context to make sense out of the modern stream of news. St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans and University of Maryland student Adam Kerlin also zeroed in on the panelists’ call to develop deeper trust and participation among readers.

The second was a presentation by Allbritton’s Steve Buttry that provides a perfect fleshing-out of the mobile-centric vision Schmidt gave in his keynote. Poynter’s Damon Kiesow had a short preview, and Buttry has a longer one that includes a good list of practical suggestions for newsrooms to start a mobile transformation. (He also has slides from his talk, and he posted a comprehensive mobile strategy for news orgs back in November, if you want to dive in deep.)

There was plenty of other food for thought, too: Joel Kramer of the Twin Cities nonprofit news org MinnPost shared his experiences with building community, and one “where do we go from here?” panel seemed to capture news execs’ ambivalence about the future of their industry. Students from local universities also put together a blog on the conference with a Twitter stream and short recaps of just about every session, and it’s worth a look-through. Two panels of particular interest: One on government subsidies for news and another with Kelly McBride of Poynter’s thoughts on the “fifth estate” of citizen journalists, bloggers, nonprofits and others.

—

Is a closed iPad bad for news?: In the second week after the iPad’s release, much of the commentary centered once again on Apple’s control over the device. In a long, thoughtful post, Media watcher Dan Gillmor focused on Apple’s close relationship with The New York Times, posing a couple of arresting questions for news orgs creating iPad apps: Does Apple have the unilateral right to remove your app for any reason it wants, and why are you OK with that kind of control?

On Thursday he got a perfect example, when the Lab’s Laura McGann reported that Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore’s iPhone app was rejected in December because it “contains content that ridicules public figures.” Several other folks echoed Gillmor’s alarm, with pomo blogger Terry Heaton asserting that the iPad is a move by the status quo to retake what it believes is its rightful place in the culture. O’Reilly Radar’s Jim Stogdill says that if you bought an iPad, you aren’t really getting a computer so much as “a 16GB Walmart store shelf that fits on your lap … and Apple got you to pay for the building.” And blogging/RSS/podcasting pioneer Dave Winer says the iPad doesn’t change much for news because it’s so difficult to create media with.

But in a column for The New York Times, web thinker Steven Johnson adds an important caveat: While he’s long been an advocate of open systems, he notes that the iPhone software platform has been the most innovative in the history in computing, despite being closed. He attributes that to simpler use for its consumers, as well as simpler tasks for developers. While Johnson still has serious misgivings about the Apple’s closed policy from a control standpoint, he concludes that “sometimes, if you get the conditions right, a walled garden can turn into a rain forest.”

In related iPad issues, DigitalBeat’s Subrahmanyam KVJ takes a step back and looks at control issues with Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google. Florida j-prof Mindy McAdams has a detailed examination of the future of HTML5 and Flash in light of Adobe’s battle with Adobe over the iPad. Oh yeah, and to the surprise of no one, a bunch of companies, including Google, are developing iPad competitors.

—

News editors’ pessimism: A survey released Monday by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism presented a striking glimpse into the minds of America’s news executives. Perhaps most arresting (and depressing) was the finding that nearly half of the editors surveyed said that without a significant new revenue stream, their news orgs would go under within a decade, and nearly a third gave their org five years or less.

While some editors are looking at putting up paywalls online as that new revenue source, the nation’s news execs aren’t exactly overwhelmed at that prospect: 10 percent are actively working on building paywalls, and 32 percent are considering it. Much higher percentages of execs are working on online advertising, non-news products, local search and niche products as revenue sources.

One form of revenue that most news heads are definitely not crazy about is government subsidy: Three quarters of them, including nearly 90 percent of newspaper editors, had “serious reservations” about that kind of funding (the highest level of concern they could choose). The numbers were lower for tax subsidies, but even then, only 19 percent said they’d be open to it.

The report itself makes for a pretty fascinating read, and The New York Times has a good summary, too. The St. Pete Times’ Eric Deggans wonders how bad things would have to get before execs would be willing to accept government subsidies (pretty bad), and the Knight Digital Media Center’s Amy Gahran highlights the statistics on editors’ thoughts on what went wrong in their industry.

—

Twitter rolls out paid search: This week was a big one for Twitter: We finally found out some of the key stats about the microblogging service, including how many users it has (105,779,710), and the U.S. Library of Congress announced it’s archiving all of everyone’s tweets, ever.

But the biggest news was Twitter’s announcement that it will implement what it calls Promoted Tweets — its first major step toward its long-anticipated sustainable revenue plan. As The New York Times explains, Promoted Tweets are paid advertisements that will show up first when you search on Twitter and, down the road, as part of your regular stream if they’re contextually relevant. Or, in Search Engine Land’s words, it’s paid search, at least initially.

Search blogger John Battelle has some initial thoughts on the move: He thinks Twitter seems to be going about things the right way, but the key shift is that this “will mark the first time, ever, that users of the service will see a tweet from someone they have not explicitly decided to follow.” Alex Wilhelm of The Next Web gives us a helpful roadmap of where Twitter’s heading with all of its developments.

—

Anonymity and comments: A quick addendum to last month’s discussion about anonymous comments on news sites (which really has been ongoing since then, just very slowly): The New York Times’ Richard Perez-Pena wrote about many news organizations’ debates over whether to allow anonymous comments, and The Guardian’s Nigel Willmott explained why his paper’s site will still include anonymous commenting.

Meanwhile, former Salon-er Scott Rosenberg told media companies that they’d better treat it like a valuable conversation if they want it to be one (that means managing and directing it), rather than wondering what the heck’s the problem with those crazy commenters. And here at The Lab, Joshua Benton found that when the blogging empire Gawker made its comments a tiered system, their quality and quantity improved.

—

Reading roundup: This week I have three handy resources, three ideas worth pondering, and one final thought.

Three resources: If you’re looking for a zoomed-out perspective on the last year or two in journalism in transition, Daniel Bachhuber’s “canonical” reading list is a fine place to start. PaidContent has a nifty list of local newspapers that charge for news online, and Twitter went public with Twitter Media, a new blog to help media folks use Twitter to its fullest.

Three ideas worth pondering: Scott Lewis of the nonprofit news org Voice of San Diego talks to the Lab about how “explainers” for concepts and big news stories could be part of their business model, analysts Frederic Filloux and Alan Mutter take a close look at online news audiences and advertising, and Journal Register Co. head John Paton details his company’s plan to have one newspaper produce one day’s paper with only free web tools. (Jeff Jarvis, an adviser, shows how it might work and why he’s excited.)

One final thought: British j-prof Paul Bradshaw decries the “zero-sum game”attitude by professional journalists toward user-generated content that views any gain for UGC as a loss for the pros. He concludes with a wonderful piece of advice: “If you think the web is useless, make it useful. … Along the way, you might just find that there are hundreds of thousands of people doing exactly the same thing.”

Trying to keep up with the future of journalism? 11 people to follow on Twitter right now

Mark — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:19:08 +0000

For many people at the intersection of the journalism-tech-media discussion, Twitter has moved well beyond the “What I had for lunch” cliche (if it ever was that in the first place), past being a fun new technology to experiment (read: waste time) with, and into a place by itself as the essential distributed source of news and commentary on the web.

I’m no different. In my own web use, Twitter has long since supplanted RSS as my primary means of finding out what’s going on in media and technology, and, as my thousands of unread Google Reader posts have evidenced, it’s now become virtually my only gateway into that conversation.

Yet my net of information is getting larger, not smaller. The magic of this curated-web use of Twitter is that it constantly points outside of itself; what’s so exciting about Twitter is not so much what’s within those 140-character updates, but where else on the web they take me.

In my case, it’s especially important that Twitter gives a deep and wide entry into the world of the web: I write weekly roundups for the Nieman Journalism Lab on news and discussion in the journalism-in-transition field, which touches on journalism, media and more than a few areas of technology. I’m counting on Twitter as a news source to ensure that those weekly reviews are comprehensive, contextual and, to some extent, authoritative.

To that end, I jealously guard my “journalism/media” Twitter list, since it’s the door through which I access all of those conversations. I haven’t made the list public, but I thought I’d share some of the best linkers and thinkers from that list, since they’ve proven to be the most helpful in illuminating the future-of-journalism discussion on the web. Follow all of these folks, and you should catch a pretty good chunk of what’s going on in that discussion. I’ve never done a Follow Friday, so consider this my extended one-time Follow Friday recommendations, in no particular order:

Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu)
Who he is: Journalism professor at NYU
Why he’s worth following: For six years, Jay was among the best journalism bloggers on the web at PressThink. But in the last year and a half, he’s moved much of his trenchant, sharp-tongued commentary onto Twitter, where he’s once again found his sweet spot. He’s referred in the past to his work as an attempt to provide a free journalism education to the public, and he seems to be accomplishing just that. If there’s a center of this discussion on Twitter, it’s Jay.
Typical tweet: “Intriguing story of two college news providers at Penn State. Shows how the old media/new media divide is NOT generational http://jr.ly/ybi8″

Nieman Journalism Lab (@NiemanLab)
Who they are: A Harvard-based, foundation-funded “attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.” The Twitter feed is run, I believe, by Laura McGann and Megan Garber right now.
Why they’re worth following: I’m not just sucking up because I write for them. The folks at the Lab are relentlessly scouring the Internet to find all kinds of links that might be helpful for people who care about the future of journalism.
Typical tweet: “Collaboration in action: Frontline, Planet Money, NewsHour team up for a multimedia project on Haiti http://j.mp/9WtBEb”

Mathew Ingram (@mathewi)
Who he is: Senior writer at GigaOm and former journalist with the Globe and Mail in Toronto.
Why he’s worth following: Mathew always ends up in the middle of important journalism/media discussions, especially since he began his work for GigaOm a few months ago. Passes on a lot of nifty links from all corners of the field.
Typical tweet: “interesting post on ChatRoulette and the social need that it fills, from the social psychologist behind Trendspotting: http://bit.ly/9cIG9w”

Mindy McAdams (@macloo)
Who she is: Journalism professor at the University of Florida
Why she’s worth following: McAdams is a top authority on multimedia journalism, and her Twitter feed is pretty nearly essential for people interested in that area. Links to bunches of tips on using a variety of journalism tools, as well as examples of those tools used well.
Typical tweet: “Maps and Adobe Flash – Iditarod – Have you seen this coverage of Alaska dog sled race? Anchorage Daily News -
Vadim Lavrusik (@lavrusik)
Who he is: Graduate student in digital media at Columbia, also working on social media at The New York Times
Why he’s worth following: He’s one of the best linkers I’ve seen on digital media and social media, especially with a strong journalism-oriented undercurrent. Very high signal-to-noise ratio — he’s always pointing you to good stuff.
Typical tweet: “Wikipedia’s redesign is coming soon: http://bit.ly/adXECA Not dramatic, but more emphasis on search.”

Steve Yelvington (@yelvington)
Who he is: New media strategist for news organizations
Why he’s worth following: Steve’s one of Twitter’s best journalism opinionators. He’s got a knack for summing up big ideas about journalism in 140 characters.
Typical tweet: “We no longer have masses, just niches. This confuses politicians as much as it does mass media people.”

Cody Brown (@CodyBrown)
Who he is: NYU undergraduate student, founder of NYU Local and Kommons.com
Why he’s worth following: Like Yelvington, Cody does more opining on journalism than linking. But his wisdom belies his age: He’s got a sharp mind and a fantastical intuitive understanding of the way digital media works.
Typical tweet: “Can someone please explain why following a nyt journ from their byline is that much more innovative than including a hyperlink @anywhere?”

Howard Owens (@howardowens)
Who he is: Founder and publisher of The Batavian, an online local news org in upstate New York
Why he’s worth following: For all our talk about hyperlocal news being the future of journalism, Howard’s one of the few actually on the ground running a news organization and tweeting about it. He’s a refreshing “libertarian/localist” counterpoint to the mostly liberal political leanings of other future-of-journalism folks on Twitter, and he’s not afraid to mix it up.
Typical tweet: “@mathewi @kyigit anon=more frank? Can I respectfully call BS on that. Just not true. There is simply no virtue in anon on a news site.”

C.W. Anderson (@Chanders)
Who he is: Digital culture professor at CUNY-College of Staten Island
Why he’s worth following: Anderson’s one of the few people who are somehow able to cram academically oriented insights about journalism into 140 characters. He asks a lot of provocative questions that force you to think about things a bit differently.
Typical tweet: “What would a j-school that proclaimed its fidelity to “understanding journalism” rather than “serving the journalism industry” look like?”

Judy Sims (@Judy_Sims)
Who she is: Independent Toronto-based online media consultant
Why she’s worth following: An ideal combination of a sharp wit, interesting links and provocative insight. When you on occasion get all three in a single tweet, you’re golden.
Typical tweet: “I give credit to Viv Mag innovation, but their iPad app just looks like an annoying flash intro to a crappy website. http://nyti.ms/a8kCij”

Steve Buttry (@stevebuttry)
Who he is: Director of community engagement at Allbritton’s startup Washington online local news org.
Why he’s worth following: A great linker. Finds loads of interesting stuff, and usually adds some insight as he’s passing it along.
Typical tweet: “Newspapers’ scorn for TV could hurt themselves. RT @jacklail Newspaper paywalls would be a ratings hit for local TV http://goo.gl/fb/39UQ”

Related posts:
This week in media musings: Fort Hood, citizen journalism and Twitter lists
This Week in Review: Newsweek on the block, Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall rumblings

This Week in Review: The New York Times’ paywall plans, and what’s behind MediaNews’ bankruptcy

Mark — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:48:22 +0000

[This review was originally posted at the Nieman Journalism Lab on Jan. 22, 2010.]

The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s how it’ll work: you can view an as-yet-unidentified number of articles for free each month before the Times requires you to pay a flat, unlimited-access fee to see more; this is known as a metered system. (If you subscribe to the print edition, it’ll be free.) Two Times execs answered questions about the plan, including whether you can still email and link to articles (you can) and why it’s different from TimesSelect, the abandoned paid-content experiment it tried from 2005-07. Gabriel Sherman of New York’s Daily Intel, who broke the rumor on Sunday, has some details of the paywall debate within the Times.

There’s been a ton of reaction to the Times’ plan online, so I’ll tackle it in three parts: First, the essential reading, then some other worthwhile opinions, and finally the interesting ephemera.

Four must-reads: It makes sense to start with New York Times media critic David Carr’s take on the plan, because it’s the most the thorough, cogent defense of the Times’ paywall you’ll find. He argues that Times execs “have installed a dial on the huge, heaving content machine of The New York Times,” giving the site another flexible revenue stream outside of advertising. If you’re up for a little algebra, Reuters’ Felix Salmon has a sharp economic analysis of the paywall, arguing that the value of each article will become much greater for subscribers than nonsubscribers. For the more theoretical-minded, CUNY prof C.W. Anderson has some fascinating thoughts here at the Lab on how the paywall turns the Times into a niche product and what it means for our concept of the “public.” And as usual, Ken Doctor thoughtfully answers many of the practical questions you’re asking right now.

Other thoughtful opinions: Poynter’s Bill Mitchell poses a lot of great business questions and wonders how the Times will handle putting the burden on its most loyal online-only users. Steve Yelvington reminds us that we’re not going to learn much here that we can apply to other papers, because “the Times is fundamentally in a different business than regional dailies” and “a single experiment with a single price point by a single newspaper is just a stab in the dark.” Before the announcement, former Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing, Forrester Research’s James McQuivey, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon gave the Times advice on constructing its paywall, almost none of which showed up in the Times’ plans. Two massive tech blogs, TechCrunch and Mashable, think the paywall won’t amount to much. Slate’s Jack Shafer says people will find ways to get around it, NYU’s Jay Rosen echoes C.W. Anderson’s thoughts on niche vs. public, and CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis doesn’t like the Times’ sense of entitlement.

The ephemera: The best stuff on Twitter about the announcement was collected at E&P In Exile and the new site MediaCritic. Steve Outing and Jason Fry don’t like the wait ’til 2011, and Cory Doctorow is skeptical that that’s even true. Former E&Pers Fitz & Jen interview a few newspaper execs and find that (surprise, surprise) the like the Times’ idea. So does Steven Brill of Journalism Online, who plans to roll out a few paywalls of his own soon. Dan Gillmor wants the Times to find out from readers what new features they’d pay for, and Jeff Sonderman makes two good points: “The major casualty of NYT paywall is sharing,” and “Knowing the ‘meter is running’ creates cautious viewing of the free articles.”

—

Apple’s tablet to go public: Apple announced that it will unveil its “latest creation” (read: its new tablet) next Wednesday. Since the announcement came a day after word of the Times’ paywall plans broke, it was only natural that the rumors would merge. The Daily Intel’s Gabriel Sherman, who broke the story of those Times plans, quoted Times officials putting the Times-tablet-deal rumors to rest. The Wall Street Journal detailed Apple’s plans for the tablet to do to newspapers, magazines and TV what the iPod did to music. Meanwhile, Columbia j-student Vadim Lavrusik and TechCrunch’s Paul Carr got tired of the tablet hype — Lavrusik for the print industry and Carr for tech geeks. (The Week also has a great timeline of the rumors.)

—

MediaNews goes bankrupt: Last Friday, MediaNews Group — a newspaper chain that publishes the Denver Post and San Jose Mercury-News, among others — announced it would file for bankruptcy protection. (A smaller chain, Morris Publishing Group, made the same announcement the day before.) For the facts and background of the filing, we’ve got a few sources: At the Lab, MediaNews veteran Martin Langeveld has a whole lot of history and insight on MediaNews chief Dean Singleton. News business analyst Alan Mutter tells us about the amazing fact that Singleton will come out of the filing unscathed but Hearst, which invested in MediaNews to save the San Francisco Chronicle, stands to lose $317 million in the deal. And MinnPost reports that the St. Paul Pioneer Press was the only MediaNews paper losing money.

Looking at the big picture, Ken Doctor says that bankruptcies like these are just a chance for newspapers to buy time while adjusting their strategy in “the fog of media war.” Steve Outing takes a glass-half-full approach, arguing that the downfall of old-media chains like MediaNews are a great opportunity for journalism startups to build a new news ecosystem.

—

How much do Google News users read?: An annual study by research firm Outsell and Ken Doctor on online and offline news preferences made waves by reporting that 44 percent of Google News users scan headlines without clicking through to the original articles. PaidContent noted that Outsell has a dog in this fight; it openly advocates that news organizations should get more money from Google. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan was not impressed, giving a thorough critique of the study and its perceived implications. Syracuse j-prof Vin Crosbie also wondered whether the same pattern might be true with print headlines.

In a similar vein, BNET’s David Weir used comScore numbers to argue that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft support big newspapers, and Jeff Jarvis made one of his favorite arguments — in defense of the link.

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Heartbreak in Haiti: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the journalism and media connections to the largest news story in the world for the past two weeks — the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Several sites noted that Twitter led the way in breaking news of the quake and in raising money for relief. The money aspect is new, but as Columbia j-prof Sree Sreenivasan noted last June, Twitter came of age a long time ago as a medium for breaking global news. That’s what it does. The coverage also provided an opportunity for discussion about the ethics of giving aid while reporting.

—

Reading roundup: In addition to being out in front of the whole New York Times paywall story, Gabriel Sherman authored a nice, long think piece for The New Republic on the difficulties of one of America’s other great newspapers, The Washington Post. For what it’s worth, Post patriarch Donald Graham thought it was “not even a molehill.”

Over at Snarkmarket, Robin Sloan uses the economic concept of stock and flow to describe the delicate balance between timeliness and permanence the world of online media. It’s a brilliant idea — a must-read.

Finally, a promising new site named MediaCritic, run by Salon veteran Scott Rosenberg, citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor, and Lucasfilm’s Bill Gannon, had its soft launch this week. It looks like it’s going to include some nifty features, like Rosenberg’s regular curation of Twitter commentary on big media subjects.

Related posts:
This Week in Review: What the iPad might do for news, a leaky New York Times paywall, and the Newsday 35
This Week in Review: The iPad’s skeptics, Murdoch’s first paywall move and a ‘Chatroulette for news’
This Week in Review: Newsweek on the block, Twitter as a journalistic system, and more paywall rumblings

This week in media musings: Tablet madness, and ideas for Sunday talk shows

Mark — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:40:59 +0000

I hope you’ve recovered well from all your holiday and year-end festivities (here in Nebraska, we’re just now starting to shovel out). Meanwhile, the flood of new media ideas continued (almost) unabated, so we’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. I’ll try to have you in and out of here in a hurry. As always, if you want to know what this is about, an explanation is here.)

— It’s not often we see veteran media critics go ga-ga over new technology, so when at least three of them gushed about the landscape-altering potential of the tablet this week, it’s probably best that we sit up and take notice. First, we had New York Times media critic David Carr getting giddy over the unreleased Apple iSlate, saying it “represents an opportunity to renew the romance between printed material and consumer.” (Elsewhere in the Times, Alice Rawsthorn says that the iSlate could explode the e-reader market, just like the iPod did for MP3 players.)

Then, longtime-journalist-turned-consultant Mark Potts said the iSlate “has the potential to strikingly transform large swaths of the media business, from newspapers to television to movies, pretty much all at once.” Finally, the biggest surprise: News-business guru Alan Mutter, possibly the most sober critic out there, declared that tablets “will the rock media as much, if not more, than the Internet.”

Wow. That’s a lot of praise being poured on a product that no one has seen yet. (Not everyone’s on the tablet bandwagon, though. Slate’s consummate contrarian, Jack Shafer, decried the tablet hype just before Christmas.) The always-sensible Ken Doctor weighed in with nine good questions about the iSlate and tablets. And by the way, Hearst also introduced its own e-reader this week: The Skiff. (Slate’s The Big Money looks at the details.)

I think the hype’s at least a bit overblown. It seems absurd to me to suggest that just about anything, let alone a new version of existing type of product, will change media as much or more than the Internet did. Some of the bolder statements about the iSlate may end up being embarrassing a few years down the road, the product more of wishful thinking than level-headed prescience.

But I don’t necessarily want to debunk the hype, either: To me, it seems more helpful to think of all of these media sea changes as something the tablet could do, not something it will do. I read Mark Potts’ medium-by-medium list of the effects of iSlate as a sort of call to action for people in those media to do some serious thinking, planning and developing to be on the front end of that revolution if it comes. This could be traditional media’s second chance to be more proactive in finding ways to (gasp!) use technology to its advantage, after its first chance with the Internet was largely squandered.

— NYU’s Jay Rosen has long railed against the Sunday morning talk show format on Twitter, but a couple of weeks ago, he took the opportunity to lay out his case and offer a fix. His case, in a nutshell: Sunday talk shows bring on a hyper-partisan rep from both sides then faux-interrogate them, so the public is no closer to the truth and is left throwing up their hands in cynicism. His solution: Fact-check the guests’ statements and post a midweek review online, as well as making it a segment on next week’s show.

Both The Huffington Post and Media Matters called Rosen’s solution “modest.” Instead, the HuffPo’s Jason Linkins advocated a real-time fact-check that would at the end of each show (ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption does a light-hearted version of this), and Media Matters’ Jamison Foser called on hosts to fact-check guests’ talking points ahead of time, then jump them if they tried using any of those points. The political blog Crooks and Liars has a few other ideas, including a “three strikes and you’re out” rule.

My response: Yes, please — to just about all of the above. And let’s apply it to 24-hour cable news while we’re at it. As Jon Stewart has so deftly pointed out, there are way, way too many patently absurd statements going unchallenged because hosts either don’t have the resources or the cojones to take them on. But lest we get too optimistic about things, one of Linkins’ readers, a veteran broadcaster, interrupts us with the reality of the TV news biz: “Such a program will have no commercially viable audience to sell and, if through some miracle it got on-the-air, it would soon be canceled for lack of revenue.” Call me an idealist, but I’m still hopeful that someone will try it anyway.

— Several interesting Twitter pieces the last couple of weeks: Anil Dash, a top Web entrepreneur and thinker who’s now working within the Obama administration, chronicled life on Twitter’s Suggested Users List, a magical ticket to hundreds of thousands of followers that’s both coveted and reviled. Dash’s counterintuitive conclusion: “Being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.” He later declared that no one on Twitter has a million legitimate followers.

Two other Web/media luminaries offered sterling defenses of Twitter: New York Times media critic David Carr opined on why Twitter will endure and writer and net-neutrality activist Cory Doctorow took down common criticisms of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. Good stuff to beat your anti-social media friends over the head with.

— We’re now nine days into the new decade, but I’ve still got plenty of year-end/2010 preview leftovers for you. Actually, only one year-end review left — Ken Fang has a very detailed review of 2009 in sports media. As for 2010, Jason Fry has already tied several of the forward-looking pieces together in a good post, so check him out first. Here’s a quick summary:

Several folks take their shots at predicting the next year in media. Rachel Sklar of the Daily Beast says we’ll see bylines become brands and niche media explode; The Economist calls 2010 “the year of the paywall“; Poynter’s Rick Edmonds says we won’t find meaningful online ad revenue this year; Alan Mutter gives a very “maybe, maybe not” preview of 2010; and the Boston Phoenix hits all of the basic hot-button issues.

Others got much more practical, with some useful resolutions. Judy Sims has resolutions for news executives; and Gina Chen, Adam Westbrook, John Thompson and Adam Sullivan all have some tips for journalists to improve and adapt in the new year.

— We’ll probably be reading much more about this in the next week, but I wanted to get the front end of this news in the review yet this week: Rupert Murdoch looks like he’s officially beginning to act on all those fightin’ words about aggregation and paid content. He blocked UK aggregator NewsNow from his Times Online site. Meanwhile, Google News, his main target, has stopped hosting new content from Associated Press, one of Murdoch’s allies in his fight against aggregators. (Danny Sullivan has thoughts on both developments.) These are relatively small moves, but I believe they mean this fight is officially on.

— Writing for The Atlantic, Slate founder Michael Kinsley urged newspaper journalists to write shorter, pointing out numerous examples of unnecessarily verbose language in The New York Times. He got a lot of pushback: The Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx and Megan Garber defended long stories (Garber’s critique is a little more thorough and thoughtful), and political blogger Spencer Ackerman proposed modular journalism — covering one topic per story, and linking to the rest — as a solution.

I think Reuters’ Robert MacMillan hits on it the best, though: What Kinsley really has a problem with is not length, but bad writing that’s overblown and doesn’t get to the point. That’s the root cause; long stories are only a symptom, and kind of a red herring at that.

— I’ve gone way long, so I’ll make these last few links quick. In order of awesome-ness: 1) The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles has a wonderful post on journalism as community organizing (You don’t just show up online and get read, he says); 2) longtime Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing writes his last piece, an alternative history of newspapers and a look to the future; and 3) ReadWriteWeb has a great primer on the real-time Web. Enjoy.

Related posts:
This week in media musings: RIP E&P, and Google’s and Rosen’s story ideas
This Week in Review: News talk and tips at ASNE, iPad’s ‘walled garden,’ and news execs look for revenue
This week in media musings: Obama v. Fox News, and NPR’s social media tact

Podcast: How social media works at one small newspaper

Mark — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:17:16 +0000

The future of journalism and new media is fun to talk about in the abstract, but things get a little hairier when we start talking about actual projects tried out at actual news organizations, especially the small, local ones that make up the vast majority of our journalistic ecosystem. So I thought it’d be helpful to survey how one small daily newspaper uses social media to engage with its community and gather and disseminate news.

The easiest paper to do with is, of course, my own — The Grand Island Independent. We’re a 20,000-circulation paper covering a city of 45,000 in the middle of Nebraska, along with 16 rural counties around it. I talked with Stephanie Romanski, our awesome web editor, who has spearheaded bunches of creative uses of the web and social media, including daily Cover it Live chats with readers and a personal voice for the newspaper on Twitter and Facebook. (She writes in more detail about those efforts on her blog, so make sure to check it out.)

Steph and I talked last week for a half hour about those initiatives and others, along with the differences between social media at small news orgs and large ones and tons of Steph’s advice for people jumping into social media at smaller outlets.

Have a listen — Steph’s got some great stuff to share.

Download

Related posts:
To make money from social media, a newspaper plays consultant
What Facebook and small-town weeklies have in common: A value for social news

This week in media musings: The Demand Media invasion, and ‘objectivity’ trumps transparency

Mark — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 23:36:30 +0000

I started this post thinking it had been a slow week, but by the time I was done, I had the longest week in review yet. Enjoy it over a nice, tall glass of egg nog. (Want to know what I’m doing? It’s here.)

— The discussion about Demand Media has been simmering since NYU’s Jay Rosen made it (or, more specifically, calling attention to how “demonic” it is) his cause du jour following the publication of this Wired profile of the online content factory. Early this week it reached a boil after both TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb sounded the alarm about the coming onslaught of cheap, superficial “content farms” or “fast food content” like Demand Media. Here are the highlights, the miscellaneous commentary and my take.

The highlights: Pioneering tech thinker Doc Searls tells TechCrunch to stop hyperventilating, arguing that “Nothing with real real value is dead, so long as it can be found on the Web and there are links to it.” Rosen interviews Demand’s founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt, and while Rosenblatt makes things sounds a lot less scary than Rosen does, his statements are so filled with corporate platitudes and empty CEO-speak that they’re tough to take at face value. Two people with experience working for Demand Media weigh in: Andria Krewson says the work is low-paying but well done, and in a thoughtful post, John Zhu says companies like Demand Media might be the inevitable outgrowth of all media’s marginalization of quality.

The other commentary: And common (and very salient) point among much of the commentary was best put by Fred Wilson, who wrote that our friends and other trusted sources will play a big role in helping us separate the good stuff from the crap. Cody Brown and others noted that it’s tougher to “game” social networks like Twitter than search algorithms. In a related point, a few others noted that Google seems to be losing its battle against SEO-gaming spammers. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis says news orgs might have something to learn from Demand.

My (very quick) take: I’m with Doc Searls on this one. The best way to keep crappy content from choking out good content? Keep creating and linking to good content. Google’s search dominance depends (at least in part) on its ability to lead users to the good stuff; makes sense to just produce quality stuff, link to it and pass it around, and let Google’s engineers do their jobs. As Scott Rosenberg points out, it’s not like people actually want to read empty, cynically produced search-bot fodder, anyway.

— We’ve talked about this “transparency is the new objectivity” idea a bit here before, and this week Paul Bradshaw at Poynter provided us with us an intriguing example of the clash between the old and new philosophies in this area. After an email interview with a reporter for a story, Bradshaw asked for permission to publish the exchange on his blog after the story ran. The reporter said no and eventually allowed Bradshaw to post only his side of the email conversation, not hers.

Bradshaw uses the case to ask the question, “Who owns the interview?” Steve Buttry says the reporter loses control over the interview as soon she hits the “send” guys and warns journalists not to put anything into writing that they’re not willing to see published. I largely agree with Buttry on this, though I don’t go as far as he does: The journalist was within her rights to ask Bradshaw not to publish her side of the conversation (and he obviously complied). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an arrogant, controlling thing to do, though.

What I find most interesting about the case is the complete subjugation of transparency in the name of objectivity. In this case, the reporter is willing to go so far to avoid transparency that not only does she choose not to reveal to her readers anything about her news-gathering itself (nothing wrong with not doing that, don’t get me wrong), but she actually refuses to allow a source — who has no obligation to her in this manner at all — to disclose anything about her, either.

And why does she do this? Bradshaw gives us a pretty strong hint when he notes in passing that in her email “she gives her position on the issue.” Aha! This wasn’t about suppressing transparency for the sake of privacy or the final product or anything like that; this was about preserving the appearance of objectivity at all costs. What better way to illustrate the idea of transparency being the new objectivity than by this, its precise opposite?

— This being mid-December, we’re starting to see the inevitable end-of-year, end-of-decade, and preview-of-next-year lists. (I’ll admit it: I’m supposed to hate these kinds of lists, but I can’t stop reading them.) Here’s this week’s review of those lists:

End of year: Editor & Publisher’s Joe Strupp has the top 10 newspaper stories (40,000 jobs lost is appropriately #1); Lifehacker has a rather overwhelming list of all of Google’s developments in 2009; and though I mentioned it last week, C.W. Anderson still has the best year-end snapshot of media so far.

End of decade: The Austin (Texas) Statesman’s Robert Quigley has an insightful piece at Mediaite looking at how the Gawker media empire defined this decade; and About.com, not usually known as a font of quality media criticism, has a surprisingly solid roundup of the major developments in journalism this decade.

2010: Martin Langeveld, Adam Westbrook and Sean Blanda all have predictions for 2010 — Langeveld’s are more newspaper-centric, and Westbrook’s more optimistic and presented in spiffy video format; Save the News has 10 New Year’s resolutions for journalism organizations; and newspaper publishers think advertising will magically flatten next year after collapsing this year, prompting Alan Mutter to wonder, “What the heck are they thinking?”

— In tech-oriented news, Twitter’s API (the interface that allows it to interact with other programs) was added to Wordpress last week and Tumblr this week. Combined with its integration with Facebook’s status API and tons of other programs over the past year or so, that effectively means that, as tech thinker Anil Dash puts it, Twitter’s API is complete. I don’t understand the implications of this quite well enough to summarize it, but fortunately, we have the renowned Dave Winer to explain it to us. So read what he has to say about Twitter’s API becoming a new Internet standard here and here and listen to him here.

— In the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten makes an interesting point regarding the ratings rise of MSNBC and Fox News and decline of CNN. He says that it’s not a sign that most Americans now want their news provided through an ideological lens, but that cable news instead attracts a relatively small niche of news junkies who follow news throughout the day. When evening rolls around, Rutten says, “they’re hungry for analysis rather than recycled reportage, and like most Americans today, they prefer interpretation that reinforces their own opinions.” I think the truth lies somewhere in between conventional wisdom and Rutten’s point of view, but it’s still a valuable corrective.

— I missed this one last week, but Jim Barnett of the Nieman Journalism Lab has a helpful quasi-scientific study of the finances of several significant local and national nonprofit news organizations. He finds a pattern, then looks at why Mother Jones might be an exception.

— Three social media-related links before I send you off for the holidays: 1) The Bivings Group’s study of newspapers’ use of Twitter (would like to see someone look at smaller newspapers, too, but I’m sure that’s coming from someone sometime), 2) A fun look at some reeeaaally early predecessors to modern social networking sites, and 3) Dan Schultz’s nifty survey and map of the participatory web, focusing on scope and individual vs. group focus. Enjoy.

Related posts:
This Week in Review: Google’s Buzz buzz, Demand Media’s plans, and turning relationships into revenue
This week in media musings: Piling on the Post’s new social media guidelines
A quick guide to the maxims of new media