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

Posts Tagged ‘Old Media’

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.

Read the rest of this post →

Feb 23, 2010 | Journalism, 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.

Read the rest of this post →

Apr 18, 2009 | tumblr post | 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.

Read the rest of this post →

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

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

Hear Hear

I’m still shaking my head over the American Press Institute’s announcement of a closed-door, invitation-only emergency meeting of only CEO-level newspaper executives to, in the words of E&P “ponder ways to revive the newspaper business.”

This is the last thing the newspaper industry needs.

-BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The last thing newspapers need

This will be a quick post. I'll get more on the topic of old media vs. new in a while but I wanted to share this little tidbit of news.

A closed door meeting by the old heads and bean-counters who have constantly failed to create any solutions for newspapers in the first place is a terrible idea. I'd present my list of what needs to be done, but I'll refer to A Photo Editor instead (the list is decent, but more on that later.)

Here are my 5 easy steps to making the transition to a new media economy:

1. Plow all of your profits back into the your company. Then get into the savings account an grab some of the profits from the 90’s when you were getting obscenely rich off your advertisers and plow some of that back into the product. Use it to make mistakes.

2. Gather all the employees you were about to fire because they don’t fit in so well with your organization or because they are too green to have mastered traditional publishing and give them promotions. Put them in charge. Gather all the people you’ve trained to say no to change and yes to whatever you say is good and fire them (ok I know this will mean there is nobody left in accounting and IT so keep a few of them around but maybe go for the junior ones).

3. Now, add staff and make everyone spend half the day doing traditional print work and half the day working on the online thing (it’s not a magazine). Make sure they try lots of crazy ideas and make lots of mistakes.

4. Invest in your contributors. You spend a tiny fraction of your production costs on the contributors yet the product without them is worthless. If you don’t start building some loyalty with your content creators they will leave you when a better deal comes along.

5. Photography is the key. Figure out how to use it. Video online is TV. We already know that works. Text online is, well, it’s great to read at a certain length but you know, it’s always going to work better printed. Photography is the perfect medium for communication online.

Change or die. It’s up to you.

-A Photo Editor – A Call For Change In The Publishing Industry (emphasis added)

Nov 11, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

Quick Post: Layoffs Laid on (a Map)

Paper Cuts maps Newspapers journalists laid off.

Jul 02, 2008 | Media Industry | View Comments

Connecting Another Dot(s)

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has posted an article entitled Contecting the Dots of the Web Revolution. A quick summary of his points on how the internet has affected media creators:

  1. Shorter reads. People don't want to invest the time to read long articles online. Get the gist of what's going on, move on to something else.
  2. Old media needs to credit their online sources. Most major news outlets post their stories verbatim. Blogs link off to their sources.
  3. Traditional media is too attached to long form writing. New Media relies on links, and therefore, multiple sources to address a broad issue. Old media would write a book.

Its easy enough to agree with the first two points. It's the last point that is the interesting one.

The obvious flaw in the logic is that there are some stories that need to be addressed in a longer form. Karp specifically mentions books as an example of old media that is out-of-date.

It's not a problem for me to get behind the idea that New Media needs to adopt a short format style. But, the idea that books are going out of fashion doesn't sit right with me. Several points:

  • Books make the authors money. eg: Scott McClellan.
  • Books are still seen as a reputable academic resource.
  • Pick one:
  • That's because books are reviewed and their worth is determined.

    • Strike that one. This is possible to this online too. Wikipedia is a good example of it in action.
    The problem then, is that the internet is just not recognized yet as a legitimate source. That's happening, slowly, but it's got a ways to go yet.

  • Anyone can write anything online. Getting a book published means that the author has convinced the market that they has ideas that are worth paying for. This guarantees a minimum standard of quality that isn't yet achievable online.
  • There are some topics that do take the length of a book to address.
  • Applying Karp's point that people don't like to read long form online, it's reasonable that an alternative, books, are a better medium to present long form topics.

    • If you have read my post immediately before this one, in which I argue that the print newspaper is dead, it might seems as though I've contradicted myself.The question then, is where does this leave the newspaper industry, which I've said is not going to be able to rely on it's printed form much longer.

    In the same place.

    Newspapers are not long form writing. True, there are the occasional long articles. But, these will continue to work fine online. The occasional in-depth article is a good to see, but as a whole, the business of producing daily (hourly) news belongs online. The business of presenting long thesis belongs in book form.

    Jun 21, 2008 | Journalism | View Comments