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Morning Links: January 8, 2009
A belated happy new year to everyone trying to do good journalism or enable others to do so.
— Online-video viewing time increased 40 percent in the past year — fodder for anyone who wants to justify more video on their site.
— Those Connecticut papers on the brink have been rescued, at least for now.
— Rick Edmonds says that Atlantic article on the impending demise of The New York Timeshas some basic math problems. “Relax, Times-o-philes. The scenario is not the least bit plausible…corporate finance is not like an auto loan, in which the repo man comes if you miss a few payments.”
No comments | Posted by Joshua Benton | January 8, 2009 | 10:20 am
Tags: Journal-Register, Michael Hirschorn, New York Times, Rick Edmonds, video
More online publishing power in Congress’ hands in 2009
The YouTube stars of 2009 could emerge from the U.S. Capitol.
New rules adopted last fall permit members of Congress to maintain websites and post content anywhere on the Internet, freeing them to blog, vlog, Twitter, and otherwise communicate with their constituents in the virtual world. They were previously prohibited from conducting official business — that is, not personal or campaign-related — on third-party websites.
“You’re going to see, over the next year, every senator and congressman having their own miniature C-SPAN studio inside of their office,” predicted Steve Grove, head of news and politics for YouTube, in a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government last fall.
The new regulations were largely overlooked amid the drama of the presidential election, but they are likely to have an immediate effect on political journalism this year; just as social media has changed the reporting of campaigns, it is now poised to alter the coverage of governance. As the 111th Congress convenes for the first time this week, reporters could find themselves in competition with, say, the Facebook pages of the elected officials they cover.
No comments | Posted by Zachary M. Seward | January 8, 2009 | 8:03 am
Tags: audience, Facebook, political reporting, social media, Twitter
For the record
We’ll post occasionally over the next two weeks, but we’ll mostly be spending our time watching stop-motion reindeer and stuck in airports, cursing the hub-and-spoke system. We’ve got some exciting plans for the new year — so even if you take a holiday break from thinking about journalism, we hope you’ll come back after the first of the year. (As always, our RSS feed is the best way to be notified every time we post something new.) Happy holidays.
No comments | Posted by Joshua Benton | December 22, 2008 | 7:34 am
Tags: inhouse
Registration down, RSS ads still rare on big U.S. newspaper sites
Newspaper websites became a whole lot easier to read in 2008. Just 11 of the top 100 American newspapers require readers to register with a username, password, and other data before viewing at least some content, according to a new survey by The Bivings Group. That’s down from 29 newspaper sites in 2007.
The changes may have gone unnoticed because 4 of the top 10 newspapers — The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Arizona Republic — still require some form of registration on their websites. (Oddly, Bivings ranks newspapers by print circulation. While the Republic is 10th in print, it’s 22nd in web traffic. Maybe because the paper compels its readers to register before they can leave comments on the site?)
Registration can be useful in customizing websites and collecting data for advertisers, but users mostly just find it annoying. Newspaper sites once embraced the technique, and registration actually rose from 23 of the top 100 in 2006 to 29 in 2007, according to Bivings. That trend appears to have completely reversed itself.
TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb have already posted quality summaries of the report, and you can read the full, 28-page PDF here.
Pretty much everything you need to know, however, is found in this chart. Video is universal, podcasting is waning, and mobile is on the rise — just like the rest of the web. Newspaper sites have also largely embraced comments (75 of the top 100) and bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious (92).
One web trend that didn’t extend to newspapers in 2008 is advertising on RSS feeds — which isn’t new but went mainstream in the last two years as several popular websites began running ads in their feeds. Google’s Feedburner service began offering ads this year as well.
Still, just one newspaper site in the top 100 runs advertising on its RSS feeds, according to Bivings. I can’t confirm that it’s truly just one, but if so, it’s The Washington Post, which runs unobtrusive Google ads on some items in its main feed. They’re not particularly useful but not annoying, either, and it’s a little bit of extra revenue for the Post Company. Seems like a no-brainer for other newspapers to follow suit.1 comment | Posted by Zachary M. Seward | December 18, 2008 | 7:03 pm
Tags: bookmarking, podcasts, registration, RSS, social media, video, Washington Post
Citizen media: Not there yet
My Harvard colleague Persephone Miel unveiled the results of months of labor (hers and her associates’) today: an in-depth evaluation of how far along “participatory media” — bloggers, citizen journalists, et cetera — are in complementing (or replacing) traditional Big Media. Her answer, if I may sum up 168 pages in a sentence: It’s just not there yet. Maybe some day. (I think she’s dead on.)If you want more than a sentence but less than 168 pages, here’s how she summarizes her findings:
Participatory media is great, has lots of potential. But it’s not doing everything we have counted on journalism institutions to do and, left to its own devices, it never will. Those journalism institutions, never perfect, are in serious trouble. Many will save themselves, as businesses, but there is no guarantee they will maintain their commitment to doing the journalism we need. People who for whatever reason (time, money, skills, desire) are not taking charge of creating their own online news diet still deserve to have access to comprehensive credible sources of news.
The U.S. media system was not handed down from the heavens on tablets. It’s time to look at models from other countries — stronger public media, newspapers less dependent on advertising, etc. We do a lot of studying of online activity, but we don’t know nearly enough about how real people in the real world take in information from many sources and what that means for how journalism in the public interest needs to evolve. We, the people who care about the public getting the information it needs, must take the best from both worlds to build the media we need.
There’s lots more in the various sections of the study, including case studies of several new-media startups. We’ll have more tomorrow, but start digging into the findings today.
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30 Nov 08
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