The ‘new media’ evolution according to a millennial photographer.

Posts Tagged ‘newspapers’

Objectivity: The Mortal Ethic That Started The ‘Quest for Innocence’

Couldn't resist this photo of Prof. Rosen. Seemed apt.

While newspapers, TV journalists, and news radio bemoan the internet as an attack on journalism, Jay Rosen’s excellent piece, The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism explores the failures of journalists themselves. In an attempt to cling to the standards of an obsoleted era, journalists, not the internet (read: those of us who use the internet) are failing as the Fourth Estate. The 'quest of innocence,' that stems from the need for objectivity seems to run counter to the mission of reporting facts. This leaves Prof. Rosen to end with a question: “How the hell could this happen?”

There are of course, far too many reasons to answer the question succinctly, but let me posit a few observations in an attempt to respond:

The need to remain relevant

If “sources are going direct” then one of the roles of the traditional news institutions, to report fact, has become obsolete. To remain relevant, newsorgs are left with three possible methods of covering the news: a) present an opinion on events, b) cover parts of the story the sources themselves will not reveal, c) curate the sources into a digest. Traditional journalists feel the need to remain objective (more in a bit), which eliminates opinion and leaves only a combination of behind-the-scenes reporting and factual curation as a means of covering news. Since access is the easiest way to cover what the sources won’t self-reveal, newsorgs live in fear of angering any one party and cause them champion the shield of objectivity.

Objectivity means detachment

If the only way newsorgs can provide value is to gain access and curate, the desire to use the blanket of objectivity has never been so strong. Seemingly, only objectivity can persuade sources to provide access to a reporter. A strong reputation for only reporting facts … and who a fear of reporting any facts that might run counter to the source’s interest is always best. The ethical tenant of objectivity is perhaps the greatest hinderance to reporting ever conceived.

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Feb 23, 2010 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

Newsorgs Should Offer Freemium Live Interviews

Through Steve Outing’s blog I discovered a video interview of Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. The interview is a short seven and half minutes long, but is insanely interesting. So interesting in fact, that I’d be willing to pay to see the full, unedited interview. Especially if paying meant I could have watched it live and asked questions during the interview.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Which lead me to the following idea – newspapers are very good at interviewing people. Further, their brand recognition can get them access to folks that the typical blogger doesn’t have access to.
Interviews of industry leaders talking about things they don’t typically present in public is certainly premium content that people would be willing to pay for – especially if they can write it off as a business expense.

What a great application of freemium to newspaper online content. Offer a shorter video like the one above for free, and then charge a monthly rate if people want live access.

Of course, there’s a major problem. People are already doing this and providing the content for free. This Week in Startups (TWiST), started just a few weeks ago by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.com . The show concept is very cool: he uses ustream to livestream an hour long interview with founders and CEOs of interesting startups. He uses a Twitter hashtag as a backchannel to the whole show, allowing people to converse and ask questions. Best of all, this is free.

If Calacanis, who is undoubtedly a busy man, can do this, for free. There must be countless other examples of the same. Just check the iTunes Podcast directory for more.

Mark another lost opportunity for newspapers.

TWiST Episode 1

May 21, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | View Comments

An Economist Approach to the Newspaper Industry

You should really hear my brother and me argue.

It sounds sounds a lot like we disagree on everything, but sit and listen to us, and you realize that we often have the same point of view, just different ways of expressing it.

My brother is the guy who got me inspired/angry enough to write You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce. Phill Baker (who has no online profile to link to), who studies economics and engineering at UPenn and was assigned a massive project – to write a 80 page paper on an industry effected by technological change.

I’m pretty certain that his decision to write on the newspaper industry was in part to piss me off, but in reality, I’m glad he’s doing it. It’s interesting to see how an economist approaches the industry from a macro perspective.

He’s asked me to publish the paper when he’s done, mostly to see what the “industry insiders” think. I’ve agreed, so look for it in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, we're in the process of another email exchange, in which I play futurist and defend us blogging “ilk.”

What follows is excerpts from his email (small edits), interspaced with my responses. Any emphasis or links are my own.

Uh, yea, definitely, as to the last point you made. It's interesting b/c this is a 'classic' example of how success breeds failure under the pressure of technological change. There's some fascinating literature in that topic, but the poignant example is Kodak: they were so focused on being a film camera company, that they completely missed digital. They thought they were in the business of film (they were a pretty sophisticated chemical engineering company), whereas they should have seen themselves in the photography business.

Where we differ is the extent of the change. So the business model has lost its exclusivity and newspapers missed the boat. Now they're facing established competitors in their markets with serious competitive advantages and the benefits of network effects through first mover status (e.g. if the NYTimes had been craigslist, we wouldn't be hearing of the end of newspapers).

Newspapers are not going anywhere. Print will not disappear, there's simply too much demand. 15% profit margins (20% is a bit high, actually the industry average is about 17%), should disappear (they can be maintained at the cost of cutting everything in the paper, but that'd be stupid). Circulation will likely stabilize in the next few years as the cannibalization of the print edition by the internet edition faces diminishing returns.

What's fascinating is that their business model has been co-opted by search. I don't think, and the research backs me up here, that display advertising online will ever come close to replacing the lost advertising revenue that was enjoyed in print. The 'national' papers, or those that are big enough to scale and aren't trapped under burdens of debt due (some serendipity comes into play there), will likely find stability first as they can portray themselves as the replacements to the four TV networks. At the head of long tail, they'll be able to differentiate themselves from commodity news through designer websites, cool visualizations, (hopefully) good journalism and (hopefully) their brand names.

  • Agreed. Ads will very likely not be able to fund the entirety of a newsorg in the future. I can say this with maybe… 90% certainty.
  • Newspapers enjoyed a profit margin of 20% and higher.
  • The issue here is largely mindset. Newspapers are used to thinking of themselves as …newspapers. As they realize that they are really just a specialized subset of the tech sector, they'll come to have a revenue model that is more inline with the industry. Which is to say, one that relies on multiple sources of revenue.
  • We really agree on your last three points here. Newsorgs need a great UI, ability to inform using data, and to maintain a solid reputation.

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Apr 28, 2009 | Battle, Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Down With the AP?

Image representing Associated Press as depicte...
Image via CrunchBase

There's been a growing feeling that the AP is not our friend in the media industry, but this week, that feeling seemed to bubble over. We've got some rough numbers to show that they're not helping us, and with the rise of ESPN local sites, the AP is rapidly loosing it's marketplace.

I don't know if I'm ready to sign their death sentence yet, they do seem to have some smart people working for 'em (I look to the New Model for News study and their iPhone app). Yet, it's painfully obvious (after the youtube fiasco) that the AP is a classic case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.

These are my links for April 14th through April 18th:

The AP is outdated and increasingly irrelevant; so are Printies


AP thinking of future:http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf - Interesting 'atomization of news' but still top-down publishing model. –@GregElin on March 23

Numbers

Engagement is high, now we just need to harness it.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="158" caption="Apparently, there's more demand for opinionated news than unbiased news."][/caption]

Lest there be any doubt, the internet is used by all age groups.

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Apr 18, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

The Wall Street Journal Has Their iPhone App All Wrong


Alan Murray is executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online. This interview was taped on April 4, 2009 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

This is the first video in this series great series by Nieman Labs where I've really disagreed with Alan Murray. His logic that "when you're done, you're done" with a newspaper just doesn't hold. Especially with a paper like the Journal that is intended to have a huge depth of information. I'd predict that very few people actually sit down with the paper for 45 minutes to get that 'completed' experience.

Further, regardless of either of our opinion on print, the iPhone is a different medium as Mr. Murray points out. It's not a blackberry, but it's certainly not print! With constant web access and push notifications coming in full force with iPhone OS 3.0, why limit your app to the 'you're done' feeling?

Instead, recognize that a cell phone, and an iPhone in particular is a uniquely customizable experience. Especially for a paper like the WSJ, which is trying to follow the freemium model, that want for customization is something that can be capitalized on.

Allow users to select what kind of business news they want to receive, maybe even allow them to pick stocks to have news alerts on. Heck, you could even micro-charge for that feature, 15 cents for every company you track, 3 bucks for each industry. Then, deliver them the news on that particular topic, instantly. Use push, use the notification system of the phone to alert them of the most important stuff.

Utilizing the iPhone medium the way it's intended to be used (it is opinionated design after all) is really the only way to have good odds at a successful app. Mobile is and is increasingly a huge deal for the media industry. It would be great to see someone get it right.

Apr 16, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Generation Y Has Inherited the Media

“Maybe, just maybe, the existing model for generating, distributing and monetizing content could benefit from a Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot.”- Can the Statusphere Save Journalism?

It's been two weeks since my last one of these, which is in part due to laziness, and in part due to my wanting to get a good list going on a contentious topic: Generation Y needs to take over the media.

I'm increasingly convinced that the 'old media' model is broken largely because the old folks just don't get it. Not to say that there aren't people in 30s-70s who don't get 'it,' just that there are too few, too few in a position of power, and too few who get 'it' enough.

These are my links for March 29th through April 13th:

"You blew it"

Apr 14, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

BATTLE | Planning a Budget ‘New Media’ for Feature

The Daily Orange Feature Editor Kelly Outram wants to create a special section of the paper for the Summer. The idea is to have something online that would be relevant all summer while the paper isn’t publishing new content.

I’m supportive of the idea, but just don’t think that the DO has the tech talent to really pull off the interactive graphics and code work required … yet.

More importantly though, was my fear that the proposed budget didn’t follow the ‘do what you do best, link to the rest’ rule. So much of the content was general, and not even timely. I’ll share my the gist of my response to the budget below in the hopes that it might give some guidance to college media.

The A1 main story would be about summer jobs/internships in this economy. What students are doing since many places (seem) to not be hiring, any odd jobs, prospects for the future so its newsy/feature. Ideally, we would like a pull-out where each part (decibel, splice, spice rack, tech, health) would be its own section, where it would get into text to what it was.

Use Facebook to generate data for you. You can do a series of searches on Facebook for Syracuse students by major, and find what they’ll be doing this summer. I presume many folks will update their profiles to have this data very shortly, if not already.

The more I think about it, the more I realize you probably don't need to have someone who can code. Being able to pull data off the API might be faster, but I imagine much of this will require manual work anyway. You can just do a lot of Facebook searches etc, and make the data static. Not quite as cool, but still very useful. It would be a major project, but a real 'new media' clip of sorts – 'specially if you can present it in a cool way online.

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Apr 07, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

You Can’t Make Abundancy Scarce

My brother sent me an email tonight after he heard, Peter Fader speak. Fader is a professor at Wharton School of business at UPenn “doing datamining - they call it marketing.” Apparently, my brother found this talk inspiring, ending his first email in our resulting exchange with:

…he made some damn good points about the subscription model. b2c already is doing ok (campfire, github, etc.), it's time for consumers to pony up. His bottom line: if facebook decided to charge you $10/month, you'd pay it. No questions asked.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or know me, or have listened to some of the top minds in this ‘new media’ business, you’ll be pretty easily pick out how totally my brother has drunk the kool-aid of the bass-akwards mind fuck that the ‘old media’ folks try to sell you.

First there was the stone age

Deep breath.

Let’s try to break this down: We are now in the information age. Where once the pinacle of technology was an iron sword, the new tech is information.

Our economy is based on the trade of IP, and yet, paradoxically, the internet has made information practically infinite. Therefore, attempting to make money by controlling the amount of information is doomed to fail.

Put another way: controlling the scarcity of something that isn't scarce can't work.

History is not a good guide here: The internet is a fundamental shift from anything we’ve experienced before. It’s as revolutionary as the printing press and as radical as the written word.  It’s both asynchronous and instant two-way communication.

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Apr 02, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Generation Y Takes on the World

Things our grandkids will never understand.

Last week has lead me this generalization: Generation Y fundamentally understands the internet, and therefore the current state of the world, in a way that older generations just never will.

It's a generalization and not a maxim, because as folks like John Bryne, Bryan Murley, and even Steve Jobs remind me that us youngin's aren't the only ones who get it, we're just in the majority.

These are my links for March 21st through March 27th:

Generation Y, X, BB…

  • The following are excerpts from #editorchat from John Bryne of Business Week. I'm throughly impressed with his insight. It gives me much hope for the older generations.

“There will be many Born to the Web enterprises over the next few years that will teach the mainstream media a thing or two. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE
“They think that some day online advertising will offset the print decline and help support a broken print model. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE
“Online readers also earn more than print readers and are more likely to be female. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE
“Of our total audience, about 38% are online only; 31% magazine only & 31% are both online and print. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE
“There’s overlap in our print and online readers3 but generally our online users are 10 years younger and more highly educated. #editorchat”- Twitter / JOHNABYRNE

  • On the other hand, the following is a tweet sent by a Syracuse University student during a lecture by Ryan Sholin on 'new media.'

    “@ryansholin I’d prefer that we have fewer citizen journalists. You don’t see me trying to be a citizen software engineer or citizen waiter.”-
    Twitter / benjgc

    Put this up there as Generation Y not “getting it”

    • 10 Ways To Reinvent Your Newsroom Right NowThis is a great presentation. Details some really simple and some more complex things that you could start doing today if you got your newsroom excited about them.

    View more presentations from sjcobrien.
  • 2020 vision: What's next for news: A fantastic bit of futurism on the journalism business.
    • Industry will shrink/re-make itself
    • The semantic web plays a huge role and datamining becomes key
    • Collaboration among local news sites for ads and info
    • New business models like endowments, non-profit, etc
    • copyright law needs a re-think
    • The idealist unbiased journalist dies, starts reporting for interest groups
  • Newspaper ownership and the fourth generation syndrome | yelvington.com: Steve argues that the current generation of newspaper owners are more interested in spending money than their own business.

  • “When I got my first computer back in 1984 or 1985, it was a Mac and there was this program called Hypercard by Bill Atkinson. In a very basic way, Hypercard teaches you the basics of how computers [and software development on them] work.” Being who I am, this obviously struck a chord. I wondered if he has hit upon a simple truth about the evolution of computers… and their users. Early on, the software and tools that were available to users were more about working with the capabilities of the machine than what you could get done with it. That lead to every computer user innately understanding the architecture of the machine. Of course, it also lead to scaring many people off, but for those that stuck around, to this day we all have a very true understanding of the what, why and — most importantly — how a computer can (and can’t!) do the things it does.”- At SXSW Michael Penn Talks iTunes, Film, Music, and Hypercard! - The Mac Observer

  • Newspaper Execs: Still Sleepless in Seattle - ClickZ: Vin speaks from personal experience about the staff and history of the Seattle PI. In Vin’s opinion, the staff is top notch, but the Hearst Corp. has shackled them.

Journalism Business Models

Just plain nifty/WTF?

For the Photogs in the house…


Amy O'Leary is a multimedia producer at the Times. This interview was taped on March 22, 2009, at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, where O'Leary was a speaker.

Mar 29, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Rev2oh | Classifieds: Use a Tiered Selling Strategy

RevenueTwoPointZero is a new group of very smart folks who are trying to rethink the business model behind journalism. After their conference last weekend, they've published a series of blog posts on their brainstorming sessions. I'll be responding to many (if not all of them) with the rev2oh slug.

A mockup from the rev2oh team.

The rev2oh team came up with a really solid plan for how newspaper platforms can redo their classifieds sales online. I was really please to see them include aggregating craigslist as one of the goals. After all, why should newsorgs try to create a new social network when a perfectly good one already exists?

The one concern I had when reading their plan was that the premium content is very much a micro-payment model. This does work, (see: ebay), but it's not very user friendly.

In part, this response is applying Jeff Jarvis’ question: “what would Google do?” Or, more appropriately, “What would Apple do?”

Apple is the master of simplifying their offerings. You can’t buy options for an iphone to get a brighter screen, bluetooth, extra data every month, and a fingerprint-proof backing. That many options is confusing. iPhone comes in two versions that differ in just one way: memory. A customer only has one decision to make, and that simplifies their experience.

And that, after all, is what this entire proposal hinges on: a better user experience.

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Mar 24, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

LINKS | Inspiration Only

Spotted: The Chicago Tribune puts Twitter in their masthead

This has been a really inspiring week for me. Everything from my talks with John Lowe, to activity at CoPress, to a phone conversation with Daniel about the future, to progress at The Daily Orange to this fantastic piece at Nieman Labs. With that in mind, I'm going to limit myself to links that inspire this week. (Also, it's been two weeks since I did one of these posts due to vacation. There's a lot of links.)

These are my links for March 8th through March 20th:

Mar 21, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

Newsflow: How Journalism Is and Will Be Generated

The News Ecosystem according to Steve Johnson. Click for a larger version.

Steven Johnson, co-founder of outside.in, gave a very good, well thought out, speech at SXSW on the state of the news industry last week. In the transcript on his blog, he shares a slide on how he envisions the future of the news industry.

Steven has a good, albeit simplistic break down of how this new paradigm is working. I'm sure I agree with the flow of the information News → Commentary → Curation → Distribution. Seems to me that you'd have to distribute before you can get comments back, and that you'd need to curate the commentary… Forget it, the the chart is simplistic.

Steven does have the right context for this though:

Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever.

I agree whole heartily with his point and I like the broad strokes of his chart. But, I suggest that this diagram far too simple to describe the new paradigm.

As Steven says, “The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” What his model is missing is the intricacies of linking, how data will be distributed to not only the customer, but among all of those gathering and generating news.

Hypothesizing on the new newsflow

newsflow

Licensed under Creative Commons. Click for a larger version.

Yea… not as easy to understand right? I’ve got arrows going all over the place, and there’s not clear rhyme or reason to the way information flows. My apologies, these relationships are chaotic and often have many nodes. Let me make the key points:

Data is key. As Tim Berners Lee has predicted, the future of the web is “linked data.” This is is something that Steven addresses, but only briefly. As the semantic web becomes reality, displaying and accessing data will become the important role for journalism to fill.

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Mar 19, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

Newspapers Should Repurpose Craigslist to Save Their Classifieds

craigslistrssCraigslist has totally changed the way customers approach classifieds. We now expect to get free ads with an unlimited runtime. They must be searchable, and easily browsable. Print newspapers can’t hold an candle to the easy of use, or the price.

RevenueTwoPointZero, a new consortium (@rev2oh) that aims to invent new business models for the news industry has stated that one of their goals is to "build a better Craigslist." I suggest that this is an exercise in futility.

Craigslist is an established social network. Trying to take them on is a bit like saying you want to build a better facebook. The idea that you can build a website, no matter how much better that doesn't use the old social paradigm is ludicrous. No one is going to use both sites, and no one is going to move to a new site that doesn't have all their friends on it. Same applies to a new craigslist.

But, in looking at

newspapers as a platform, a portal to their community, there becomes an obvious way to utilize Craigslist to the mutual benefit of the customer, newsorg, and Craigslist. Read the rest of this post →

Mar 18, 2009 | Media Industry, Reviews | View Comments

LINKS | the Rocky Dies and the Daily Emerald Strikes

So, I'll be on vacation (woot!) for the coming week which means a couple of things:

  1. I'll have limited Internet access, so don't expect a my LINKS post to be very long/exist next week.
  2. I'll have limited Internet access and don't plan on being able to get any work done. At all. Not too sure how I feel about that.
  3. My Thursday resolution to try out TweetDeck for twitter is gonna have to wait a while.

On a similar note, if any of you have any requests on how to better lay this post out or better formating or etc… lemme know.

Here we go: these are my links for February 26th through March 5th:

OMG! (and other news that broke this week)

Journalism, Examples of

Nifty Online Things

Online Journalism

Journalism Business Models

    Pew Research Center: Newspapers Face a Challenging Calculus

    Mar 06, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    LINKS | Google’s Church

    Since I've decided to start giving my links rankings, starting next week, I will only be posting links with a 3 star or greater ranking.

    Lots of links on journalism this week (not unusual). There's a very long article from The New Republic that's very long, but exceedingly good. Also, check out my post on newspapers as a platform – I promise it's shorter. :)

    Photography

    J-School

    • Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist: A list of things that journos aren’t doing right in terms on thinking/training. It a topic that’s been overwritten on, but it’s very well thought out.
    • brightkite.com: Skills all J-Students need to know. A pic of a whiteboard from what I can only presume was a brainstorming session at News Innovation PDX
    • Journalism degree applications up 24%: Apparently, the number of jDegrees are up by 24% in the UK. Makes me wonder how US numbers compare. I suspect that most would guess that US numbers are down, but that never sounded right to me.

    Journalism Business Models

    • A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outletsA suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets:Interview at Times Open with Michael Veytsel, founder of a semantic-web startup he’s tentatively calling Factbox.Cast: Nieman Journalism Lab
    • 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers: A really solid list for creating a successful online newsorg that is user-friendly and “open source”
    • Op-Ed Columnist - Start Up the Risk-Takers - NYTimes.com: Don’t bail out the failed businesses, use the money to start new ones.
    • Printed Matters Paywall madness: Dec. 2008 - Feb. 2009 A roundup of the paywall argument from the last few months.
    • Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance: A good look at the problems facing Mass marketing with the rise of the Internet. Basically: the web allows adverts to cut the middle man out of the picture, taking a lot of the wind out of Madison…

      “The online display advertising paradigm was pulled directly from the print industry, the group that originally designed the Web for media. Assumptions were made that
      simply don’t apply, because the Web is not a one-to-many, mass marketing medium. It’s a place where horizontal connectivity replaces the vertical, top-down model of communications. We weren’t aware of this in the early days of the Web (or at least the media and advertising businesses weren’t aware), so display advertising seemed a logical choice.”
      - Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part XCI, Advertising Loses Its Balance

    • The follow is a list of quotes from a very long, very in depth article in The New Republic on the state of the newspaper industry.

      “The other standard means of supporting the production of public goods is through private non-profit organization. In fact, non-profit support of journalism has recently been increasing. But much of the discussion about non-profit journalism has failed to recognize that it can mean at least three different things. The first, though not necessarily the most relevant, is the conversion of newspapers from commercial to non-profit status as a way of preserving their public-service role.
      …a second approach is philanthropic support of specific kinds of journalism, available through multiple outlets, whether they are commercial or non-profit. The best-known example of this solution is ProPublica.
      …a third use of non-profits—and it is for underwriting new models of journalism in the online environment. A good example of this approach is the Center for Independent Media.”
      -       Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    “When a society requires public goods, the solution is often to use government to subsidize them or to produce them directly. But if we want a press that is independent of political control, we cannot have government sponsoring or bailing out specific papers.”
    -     Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    “News distributed to the public is a public good in two respects. First, from a political standpoint, news contributes to a well-functioning society inasmuch as it enables the public to hold government and other institutions accountable for their performance. Second, news is a public good in the sense economists use that concept.”

    - Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)

    Journalism

    Offbeat

    Common, you know you wanna click on that picture to see where it leads.

    Feb 27, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    LINKS | Micropayments Don’t Work, but Everyone Has a Better Idea

    Somehow, I missed the links from the latter part of last week, and have been bookmarking like crazy this last week. So, ya'll get a ton of links. Apologies for the long, long list, but I've broken it up with some good videos — and I've edited down! These are the cream of the crop from February 10th through February 20th:

    Journalism Business Models

    Web Journalism

    Feb 21, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    How Newhouse Can Become Relevant Again

     This post is in part a response to Lauren Rabaino’s post on how to change the Cal Poly journalism program in part an answer to the #collegejourn call for posts on how to improve college journalism education.

    Lauren’s analysis of the way to overhaul the her journalism program seems to go down the right path. I would take it just a set or two further though and stop the broadcast concentration. I'm looking at:

    • writing track: teaches reporting as any old print/newspaper prof would typically teach it, but with a strong emphasis on writing for the web. This naturally includes social networking, blogging, and audio production.
    • visual-content track These are are photogs, broadcast people, & designers. Teach a little bit of print design, but go 40-60% with web design. Photogs and video folk ought to know most of what each other does. Photogs may get some studio and photoshop time that the video folk won't and the video people ought to focus a little more on how to produce BJ style stories.
    • tech track: We need to be teaching/recruiting coders as journalists. Now that we’re on the web, we need people who are capable of running that infrastructure. We ought to be training people in web site design, database management and display, data-mining, website development, etc

    I mostly agree with Lauren’s idea of scrapping the print track, as I’ve said, teaching print design is a bit like teaching someone esperanto. It’s not like print design is going to go away, but it is far less important that teaching web design to those in the journalism field.

    Video

    I’ll go ahead and cautiously agree with Lauren, video should be taught in some form or another to all the majors. I say again: cautiously.

    Newhouse has a the ‘kid in the candy store’ syndrome when it comes to video. Soundslides are taught in beginning writing and photo classes, video/multimedia has become an integral part of nearly every lesson plan. The thinking is, ‘new media’ involves heavy use of multimedia and video, and therefore every student should be indoctrinated into the ways of ‘new media.’

    This thinking is just … flawed. Beginning photo students just don’t need to know how to shoot video … it’s advanced skill that just doesn’t need to be taught to beginning students.

    Besides, the video that Newhouse emphasizes is short-form, heavily edited video segments that last 1:30. I’m not at all convinced that the ROI is there.

    Instead, Newhouse ought to focus on the basics of shooting video (composition, lighting, uploading, etc) for those not in the visual track and long form video (10 min) for the visual folk.

    Social Media

    Every program should heavily emphasis social media. How to leverage it for reporting, maintaining a personal and professional blog, twitter, podcasting, etc… 

    One nice thing about Newhouse is it is home to a lot of up-to-date, high-end equipment. This  makes the job of learning and reporting much easier, but it’s all for nought if we’re not learning applicable information.

    An active blog ought to be viewed in the same light as getting an internship – a requirement. 

    Old media

    Just like the mainstream media industry, journalism academia is run by Baby Boomers and a select few in Generation X. Generally, these folk just

    don’t ‘get’ social media in the same way that us Generation Y kids do. How can they be expect to teach the value of something that they don’t value? Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 16, 2009 | Uncategorized | View Comments

    Micropayments Lead to Piracy

    Since the TIME cover story that re-rose the micropayment debate last week the topic has been beaten to death across the web, but I want to raise just a few more points that I haven't seen elsewhere.

    Information wants to be free. No matter what, people will find a way to get it online. We’ve proven this time and time again with music, movies, software, and video games. No, don’t laugh – video games are a multi-billion dollar industry, that represent some of the greatest achievements in technology in the past decade.

    These three heavy-weight entertainment industries have proven that charging for content online leads to … quasi success. Yes, iTunes, Netflix, and Steam have been able to deliver paid content to a mass audience, and they do if far easier than if you try to pirate download the same, but piracy is still rampant.

    Make it free, or the pirates will. The TIME article, and others like it, refer to the 'iTunes model' when the talk about micropayments for news. Yet, this analogy is flawed:

    • Music, movies, software, and video games are content that has ‘repeat use’ value. News is read once, then mentally file away.
    • Music, movies, and video games are entertainment, a luxury good that carries a far different intrinsic value than an essential good like news. Software isn’t a luxury good, but it is a productivity tool that also doesn’t have the intrinsic value that news/information has. Besides, software doesn’t really have the micropayment model either.
    • It’s easy to preview content on iTunes, it’s near impossible to provide an accurate preview of information without providing the … information.

    I’d be willing to bet that if a news service tries the paid content model people will find someway to get around the pay wall. If they’ve found a way to steal entertainment goods, trust me, they’ll find a way to steal the news.

    And that sure doesn’t sound like a Fourth Estate to me: a system where the people have to steal their information!?

    Better to let the traditional newsroom die, or run a smaller operation. You can’t tell me that every reporter in a current newsroom actually earns their keep.

    If micropayment schemes ever actually gain traction, people will opensource the news. We can mashup twitter, youtube, blogs, and aggregators to get a reasonable approximation of the information that we get now. Granted, it would be much shorter form content. But since we mostly skim the news right now anyway, the user wouldn’t see much lost.

    Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 15, 2009 | Journalism, Media Industry | View Comments

    LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments

    These are my links for February 6th through February 8th:

    MBB SyrAtUconn

    Newspaper Business Models

    Feb 13, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    BATTLE | What We Need, Is Infastructure

     I’ve challenged myself to battle the management at my school’s newspaper The Daily Orange with a new ‘new media’ topic every week. BATTLE look at the struggle of a college paper trying to evolve to succeed on the Internet.

    As a follow up to my BATTLE post, What we need, is a plan, I'd like to share some the continued converstation between myself, and the ever skeptical (and it's a good thing to be skeptical), staff of The Daily Orange.

    Eight reasons why College Publisher is a problem

    1. I'm worried that other universities that produce a product inferior to our own, are so far ahead of us in the online space. This is ass backwards, and cannot be allowed to continue if we expect to keep bragging about the great tradition of the DO. It very well might become the 'once great tradition'
    2. College Publisher has ceased development of their next generation of software – CP5. No future growth does not bode well for their continued success. I'd be wary of thinking of College Publisher as a platform that will always be there.
    3. Online is both the future and the present reality. Every newsorg needs to exist online in a meaningful way. Many don't get it right, but we blatantly get it wrong.

      Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 11, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

    Newspapers Oughta Sell Their New Expertise

     

    new-media-gears

    Inspired by a small point made by Jeff Jarvis, I left a comment on his blog saying that I thought he had struck gold — a way to supplement ad revenue at local newspapers.

    To adapt to the Internet, newspapers have been forced to evolve, some have become experts in ‘new media.’ A term that I hate because, really what is ‘new media?’ When does it stop becoming new, and what will we call the media that comes after it? Is everything just eternally ‘new media?’

    The current definition means that a ‘new media’ expert is up-to-speed on blogging, linking, short form video, Facebook, Twitter, other social networks, etc… All of this expertise is a real commodity that many businesses would love to tap into.

    Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 11, 2009 | Media Industry | View Comments

    BATTLE | What We Need, Is a Plan

    I’ve challenged myself to battle the management at my school’s newspaper The Daily Orange with a new ‘new media’ topic every week. BATTLE look at the struggle of a college paper trying to evolve to succeed on the Internet.

    My battle this week stems from a series of emails exchanged between myself, the IT staff, and the Business Director that originally stemmed from the ad department securing online sponsorship for a weekly print feature: Thirsy Thursday — a beer (mmh… beer) reviewing column.

    The effort has devolved into a struggle to get the new IT staff up to speed, launch a new blog for Thirsty Thursday, and even redoing parts of the main website. My suggestions on that front were:

    • decisions about web design by non-web designers is usually a poor choice.
    • unilateral decisions about the structure of an editorial site by business staff is not a good move
    • I'd strongly suggest that many of our design issues are centered around college publisher inadequacies. 

    The Way Forward

    This whole process lead me to realize that what the DO needs more than anything else, is a planned approach to the Internet, which until this point, has been haphazard at best. We have no plan for forward growth, and that means that we're likely going to continue to be frustrated with each other and with our own efforts. At this point there are plenty of other colleges out there that have easily surpassed our own efforts to both make money online and leverage it as a platform.

    I for one, find this to be unacceptable. The Daily Orange has a strong tradition of … everything, and it's rather shameful to see us falling so far behind on technology that is both the present and future of the neworg.
    There are already schools that have seen their traditional college newspaper challenged (and in the case of NYU, replaced) by an online only news startup. I do honestly fear that the DO stands to suffer the same fate if things continue at the current pace.

    Feb 10, 2009 | Battle | View Comments

    LINKS | Please, Please Don’t Charge for Free Information

    These are my links for January 30th through February 5th:

    Feb 06, 2009 | tumblr post | View Comments

    BATTLE | Google Juice Your Blog (Repost)

    What is BATTLE?

    I've challenged myself to battle the management at my school's newspaper The Daily Orange with a new 'new media' topic every week.

    I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and have a bit of a backlog of posts on the subjects we've been talking about.

    The following is a post that I just published at copress, that was originally intended for BATTLE. Expect to see more of these posts.

    google-juice1

    Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

    Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among "true" journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of... blogging: consistently producinggood content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

    The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

    Read the rest of this post →

    Feb 05, 2009 | Battle | View Comments