future of news - Cynthia McCune on Diigo

02 Dec 09

Arianna Huffington: Journalism 2009: Desperate Metaphors, Desperate Revenue Models, And The Desperate Need For Better Journalism

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future of news journalism huffpo

29 Aug 09

25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers | Blog | Econsultancy

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journalists future of news new media

Poynter Online - Where are J-Schools in Great Debate over Journalism's Future?

J-Schools: missing the boat.

"...journalism schools too face a crisis of competence and confidence. We have to agree that while much remains that is good, some of what we do is outmoded and badly needs to be fixed. To survive, journalism schools have to become much more intellectually and professionally ambitious."

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J-school journalism future of news

Finally, our profession needs to raise its sights much higher and link our teaching and research to broad issues of media, democracy and societal changes, and eschew the self-referential, inward-looking focus that marks too many academic exercises.
The schools especially need to end the shocking economic illiteracy that marks too much of journalism education today, which makes it harder to get high quality economic reporting, while reinforcing the fire wall between the business and content sides of the profession
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- Third, the academy must begin to produce more high-quality, relevant research that draws on rigorous traditions in the social sciences. These tough times demand big questions and big smart answers -- not puny answers to unimportant questions.
- Second, what we teach and how we teach needs to be deeply informed by more regular conversations with practitioners. Journalism professors need to reach out more systematically to media professionals in the new and the legacy media. We need to go to professionals in their newsrooms and business offices, and to the garages and new media incubators of media entrepreneurs.
- First, the teaching profession needs to admit the extraordinary urgency of our situation. Simply put, we adapt our we die.
- The relations between professors and the profession seem curiously stunted
- journalism schools too face a crisis of competence and confidence. We have to agree that while much remains that is good, some of what we do is outmoded and badly needs to be fixed. To survive, journalism schools have to become much more intellectually and professionally ambitious.
- journalism schools obviously have a huge stake in the survival and future of the media. These are the institutions that hire most of our graduates. If the media markets don't recover somehow, someway, then we may lose half our students, half our revenues and half our faculty positions.
- In a moment of root and branch radical changes throughout the media, where are the open, public debates over radical options coming out of the top journalism schools? Where are the suggestions on how to change our teaching, research and public service practice to contribute to the rehabilitation of American media? After all, the stakes are high –- arguably, democracy itself.
- I find it curious that there hasn't been greater attention to the performance of the nation's leading journalism schools in the midst of the media meltdown occurring all around us every day.
- Yet arguably, the performance of journalism schools has something to do with the current sub-par performance of the profession. And the performance of journalists working in independent, high quality media has a lot to do with the fate of our American democracy.
- journalism schools are not adequately engaged with the great public debates over the future of their core sector.

05 Jun 09

5 iPhone applications that can revolutionize mobile journalism :: 10,000 Words :: multimedia, online journalism news and reviews

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iPhone journalism apps future of news

21 iPhone-friendly news sites and how to format your own
• 6 Ways to create a mobile version of your site
• 10 Essential iPhone apps for bloggers and reporters
• 10 Not-so-essential (but totally cool) iPhone apps
Many media organizations lack the funds or resources to produce iPhone apps, but it shouldn't stop everyone from imagining or working toward the next best thing in mobile journalism.
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- The HearPlanet app is a lot like having a tour guide in your pocket: audio clips that describe thousands of landmarks around the world
- The popularity of the Kindle and its companion iPhone app are proof that users are more than willing to read long passages of text on handheld devices. This is good news for media outlets to looking make lengthy content available to mobile readers.
- iheart radio, which is also available online and for the Blackberry lets users pick a radio station by city or genre and listen directly from their mobile device.

01 Jun 09

Seven reasons charging for content won’t work « Transforming the Gaz

Taking the Tinkerbell approach to the news biz.

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future of newspapers future of news newspapers business model

Paid content has been tried before. One of the biggest myths of the newspaper business today was that we foolishly gave our content away early in the age of the Internet. Many newspapers were either slow to go online because of fear of cannibalization or erected pay walls. We finally got aggressive and free online because holding back our content and charging for it weren’t working.
This meeting is an embarrassment. Our industry fights for openness and accountability in government and we are trying to find a path for success in a digital marketplace where transparency is increasingly important. Can these people not see how foolish and hypocritical it looks to think they can huddle behind closed doors and solve our problems?
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- clapping our hands to save the newspaper industry, like we saved Tinkerbell at the movies when we were children, has more chance of succeeding than the paid-content-cartel approach that newspaper executives are dreaming and talking about

22 May 09

Getting Money from Readers Who Won't Pay for Online News

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future of news newspapers online steveouting

Charging on the Web won't work for general-news publishers, and there are better alternatives.
the current thinking of a growing number of newspaper executives. To paraphrase: "We believe that our local reporting has high value, it costs us a lot to produce it, so we will retrain the audience that they must pay for it."
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- Newspapers' local content is not as important as it once was, or as newspaper executives still believe it to be. The demise of some newspapers (Rocky Mountain News, Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for example) and the degraded quality of many others due to severe cuts and layoffs has opened up opportunities for a wave of fledgling replacement news providers, both for- and non-profit. Generally they are small and/or target niches, but they're getting better and some are growing to represent a looming threat to local newspapers by offering up similar or the same coverage for free.
- The move to hide locally produced content behind a pay wall gives new hope to other competitors, including local TV stations. If the biggest newspaper in town is going to shoot itself in the foot, it gives a savvy TV outlet's executives the chance to grab the dominant spot by creating a free news and community Web site that goes well beyond today's typical local-TV sites. It could even use the laid-off newspaper journalists in its market -- a talent pool looking for something else to do -- to accomplish this, probably at bargain rates.
- Yet another model is to sell a custom news phone app rather than give it away.
- ideas for what to offer to a newspaper's paid members:
- learn to sell something else to support the journalism.

11 May 09

The American Press on Suicide Watch - Columnist Frank Rich - NYTimes.com

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future of news newspapers Colbert internet nytimes

IF you wanted to pick the moment when the American news business went on suicide watch, it was almost exactly three years ago. That’s when Stephen Colbert, appearing at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, delivered a monologue accusing his hosts of being stenographers who had, in essence, let the Bush White House get away with murder (or at least the war in Iraq).
to the Beltway’s bafflement, Colbert’s riff went viral overnight, ultimately to have a marathon run as the most popular video on iTunes. The cultural disconnect between the journalism establishment and the public it aspires to serve could not have been more vividly dramatized.
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- In the last transformative tech revolution before the Internet — television’s emergence in the late 1940s — the pattern was remarkably similar. The entertainment industry referred to TV as “the monster,” and by 1951, the editor of the industry’s trade paper, Variety, was fearful that the monster would “eventually swallow up practically all of show business.” Movies had killed vaudeville a generation earlier. This new household appliance threatened to strangle radio, movies, the Broadway theater, nightclubs and the circus. And newspapers too: “NBC’s New ‘Today’ Attacked by Papers as Competition” screamed a front-page Variety headline in 1952.
- Most movie studios pushed back against the future by refusing to sell their old movies to television or allow their stars to appear on it. Few seized the opportunity to produce programs for the new medium.
- In 1952-53, Cinerama, 3-D and Cinemascope were all heavily promoted to try to retain movie audiences. None of these desperate rear-guard actions could slow the video revolution. Movie newsreels, movie palaces, radio comedy and drama, and afternoon newspapers, among other staples of the American cultural diet, were all doomed.
- And yet in 2009, Hollywood movie studios, radio and the Broadway theater, though smaller and much changed, are not dead. They learned to adapt and to collaborate with the monster.
- It’s not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it’s only journalism that’s essential to a functioning democracy.
- But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day. Those reporters have to eat and pay rent, whether they work for print, a TV network, a Web operation or some new bottom-up news organism we can’t yet imagine.
- But someone — and certainly not the government, with all its conflicted interests — must pay for this content and make every effort to police its fairness and accuracy. If we lose the last major news-gathering operations still standing, there will be no news on Google News unless Google shells out to replace them. It won’t.
- Looking back to the unpredictable social and cultural upheavals brought about by Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, he writes, “We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.” So who will do the heavy journalistic lifting? “Whatever works.”
- The real question is for the public, not journalists: Does it want to pony up for news, whatever the media that prevail?
  It’s all a matter of priorities. Not long ago, we laughed at the idea of pay TV. Free television was considered an inalienable American right (as long as it was paid for by advertisers). Then cable and satellite became the national standard.
- Whatever shape journalism ultimately takes in America, make no mistake that in the end we will get what we pay for.

06 May 09

Greg Mitchell: How Media Will Pay for Poor Warning on Financial Collapse

... a new Rasmussen poll revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the "faux" news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing "real" news sources as viable outlets.

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future of news newspapers news

But to miss a story of this enormity, with consequences that will echo (like Iraq) for decades, only adds weight to the warnings of doom for the "old" media.
"No one knew" and "we're only as good as our sources" or "they lied to us" are the common excuses. That sounds exactly like the media defending its Iraq miscues.
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- I speak, of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown.
- But in the wake of the financial collapse, I wonder if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for good. Yes, the delivery platform of the future will change — the Kindle, iPhone apps or rubbery plastic may replace paper everywhere — but the content still has to be credible. And now it must be said: The media blew both of the major catastrophes of our time.
- Several leading newspapers announced new layoffs, furloughs and/or pay cuts. A few hours later, a new Rasmussen poll revealed that one in four Americans now believe that the "faux" news delivered by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert is replacing "real" news sources as viable outlets.

05 May 09

Jeff Jarvis: No Newspapers at Any Price

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future of news newspapers online

The insane response to this change is to resist it and mourn it. The sane response is to find the opportunity in it.

Don't bail. Build.

It may be too late for newspapers to find that opportunity. But others will find it. That's not doomsaying. That's optimism.
It makes less sense every day to try to preserve and protect - to invest in - what is obviously a failing model. Every day that papers keep printing is a day that they haven't reinvented themselves for a new reality.
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- Their cushion is gone, and only those papers that can move decisively to the Web will survive.
- We're clearly now seeing a path to the end of the printed daily newspapers -- a trend that is escalating much faster than we had anticipated," Cole said.

03 May 09

Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to Be Web Curators - Publishing 2.0

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future of news newspapers editors

If I were a wire or feature editor in a newsroom, instead of waiting to become obsolete, I would start immediately learning how to be a top notch web curator. I’d ask myself — how can I become the Jim Romenesko or Matt Drudge for my community.
Wire and feature editors are already skilled content curators — they just need to adapt those skills to filtering the web.
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- Helping readers find the best of the web could help local news sites remain daily destinations rather than just a host for content to be aggregated by someone else — which could help those news operations get back into the content distribution business, which is how they made money in print, and how they could make a lot more money on the web.
- Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.
- Yet there is a HUGE opportunity in this shifting landscape. Just because there’s a wealth of content a click away doesn’t mean that news consumers know where to click in order to find it.
  
  Instead, we have what Clay Shirky describes as “filter failure”:
- On the Internet, we have no need of wire editors; if we wish to have wire content on our websites, we can plug in AP Hosted News

30 Apr 09

Reflections of a Newsosaur: A tale of two very different journalism start-ups

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future of news start-ups

So there you have it: One new firm seeks to generate much-needed revenue by building a platform for subscription services, another seeks to generate new forms of journalism with a platform to share and distribute content. It’s hard to reconcile those two visions of journalism’s future.
Crovitz believes a coordinated effort to build subscriptions could bring scale and lower costs.
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- In the media business, he says, “it’s the package that’s valuable, not the individual article. … Newspapers used to own the distribution channel; they used to be at the front end.” But now, “Google and others have taken over distribution. And newspapers are at the tail end, which is the least profitable.”
- Karp wants news organizations to get back to the distribution business by sharing their own content broadly and surfacing others’ content aggressively.
- Publish2 enables sites to fuse content sharing with the reporting process, and it also provides ways for journalists to surface the links they gathered in the reporting process. “Collecting links should be a work product,’’ Karp says. “Newsrooms can use and publish those links instead of throwing away that research.”
- As Crovitz demonstrated at Dow Jones, a subscription strategy can generate substantial revenue and define a uniquely valuable audience.
  
  But as I wrote a few weeks ago here, it’s very hard to ask readers to pay for a publication you’ve trained them for more than a decade to expect to be free.
- But what Publish2 also represents is a vision of how journalists can take advantage of each other’s strengths and readers’ knowledge, creating content that transcends what any one newsroom can do.

27 Apr 09

The key lesson I learned building PolitiFact: Demos, not memos | mattwaite.com

Another testimonial for "show, don't tell."

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future of news writing fact-checking politics

a demo cuts down on meetings. You don't have to spend time explaining what you want to do. You just show it.
PolitiFact succeeded technologically because the guy with the vision and the guy who could build it worked together.
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- Requirements documents say here's what we want, go build it and nothing more. Thinking that way means never being any better than your document.
- my bosses thought PolitiFact was a good idea from the start. But there was a material difference between how they reacted to memos and how they reacted to seeing it working.
- The sales job got easier. The abstract became concrete. The conversations changed from "what do you mean by" to "what if we did this."
- Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Execution is hard.
- If you're really passionate about your idea, building a demo makes yours stand out from the blizzard of ideas that are spawned every day.

Slouching Towards Oblivion - Columnist Maureen Dowd - NYTimes.com

I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond. Papers are still big. It's the screens that got small.

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newspapers future of news sfchron nytimes

I keep thinking of newspapers as Norma Desmond.
Papers are still big. It’s the screens that got small.
Now that everybody can check their iPhones and laptops for news that personally interests them, now that they can Google, blog and tweet, as well as shop — and stalk — on Craigslist, old-school newspapers seem like aging silent film stars, stricken to find themselves outmoded by technology.
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- Calling his purchase of The L.A. Times and The Chicago Tribune “a mistake,” Sam “The Sham” Zell said, “It’s very obvious that the newspaper model in its current form does not work and the sooner we all acknowledge that, the better.”
- A lot of readers think we’re biased, and because we think we’re unbiased, we think they must be stupid. But they’re not. They’re just opinionated.
- “That’s the most hopeful thing you can say about print journalism, that old people are living longer.”

21 Apr 09

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire - WSJ.com

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bloggers business model future of news WSJ

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.
the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.
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- Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall. It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.
- As a job with zero commuting, blogging could be one of the most environmentally friendly jobs around -- but it can also be quite profitable. For sites at the top, the returns can be substantial.
- Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging.
- As bloggers have increased in numbers, the number of journalists has significantly declined.
- The implications of bloggers for hire are substantial. While many bloggers probably support unionization in general, they have no union of their own. Most have no benefits, yet they work long hours in front of computer screens which could cause a variety of health ailments. And the owners of the big sites most often pay their bloggers as freelancers, avoiding all of those taxes and benefits that newspapers have to pay for their writers.
- Not since eBay opened its doors have so many been able to sit at their computer screens and make some money, or even make a whole living.
- Maybe it will create a resurgence in the art of writing and writing courses.
- But for how long can nearly 500,000 people who are gradually replacing whole swaths of journalists survive with no worker protections, no enforced ethics codes, limited standards, and, for most , no formal training?

20 Apr 09

BarCampOrlando: “What kind of journalism would you pay to support?” | Etan Horowitz

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future of news business model barcamp journalism

“So, how are newspapers dealing with the fact that they’re dying because everyone is reading them for free online and they are losing so much advertising revenue?”
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- yes, the industry is in a time of immense change, crisis and chaos, but it’s also a time of experimentation. Finally, some of the solutions that have been talked about for years will be tried for real.
- there are very few general interest, one size fits all publications that people pay for. Instead, they tend to pay for publications that are specialized and have an in depth focus on a particular subject, often one that helps them get a leg up in their careers.
- For other journalists reading this, I encourage you to try and hold similar discussions.

18 Apr 09

True/Slant Tests Web Journalism Model - WSJ.com

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future of news business model online WSJ AOL advertising

True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It is launching with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These "headline grabs" link back to the originating outside site.
True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.

It is launching with 65 journalists, or "knowledge experts," assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These "headline grabs" link back to the originating outside site.

16 Apr 09

Don't Stop the Presses! - Newspaper Association of America: Advancing Newspaper Media for the 21st Century

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future of news future of newspapers reinvent

many publishers are looking at how to reinvent the core newspaper, whether by cutting sections or days of distribution or more closely tying their print and online products together
If I am starting a newspaper from scratch, I may consider doing a robust Sunday edition, then creating the ultimate online newspaper for daily. I may even consider a very short, one-section, printed daily edition, but acting more like a companion to the online than a self-standing newspaper. I would print it in an A4 compact format, and I would make a sort of navigational tool to [information] that readers must know that day.
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- Traditional storytelling morphs into a combination of alternative story forms for short, explanatory information and narrative storytelling for compelling human stori
- More newspapers ought to be asking where are the holes in my media market, and how can I fill them?
- Let’s not, above all, fool ourselves. Cutting back the core product doesn’t strengthen it. It may be a necessary evil, but pitching a less-is-more approach to readers won’t fool them. Rethinking and reorganizing the core product (and coming clean with readers about the impetus for the changes) is the way to go.
- Ideally, a paper in Kansas City should not look, act and feel like a paper in Orange County, Calif., or Orange County, Fla. Yet, apart from the datelines on the local stories, they mostly do. That’s because newspaper people are more comfortable copying each other than taking the risk of trying something new.
- What will the core newspaper look like in two, five and 10 years?
- In some communities, the core printed product will not be around in two, five or 10 years. In others, it will publish less often, as [only] Friday and Sunday, for example. The daily ones will be compact formats, some even the A4 format, already popular in many countries in Europe. They will be inspired by magazines and books, and less by traditional daily fare.
- In less than a year, there will be very few seven-day-a-week newspapers. In less than five years, newspapers will print for Sunday only. In less than 10 years, no newspapers will be printed.

15 Apr 09

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Along the lines of "What if you threw a party and no one came?" ... what if AP blocked access to its stories and no one cared?

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future of news newspapers reporting

just as a wide range of journalistic enterprises are conducting investigative reporting (including online news outlets, television stations, and advocacy groups), so too will we get our news from a variety of different sources. In fact, we already do.
AP and other Wire: 5 secondary

Radio: 4 primary
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- While newspapers were the most common source of information, they accounted for just 123 out of 628 total original information sources, or just shy of 20 percent. And a huge chunk of that, up to half, came from links in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup, which is specifically designed to track what some of the nation's top pundits are yammering about.

14 Apr 09

Spare change for news | Salon News

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future of news newspapers news media non-profit

newspapers have been driven to the brink by the expectation of making the kind of double-digit profits that large corporate owners demand, and by the financial shenanigans, including loading up on debt, that corporate ownership has brought.
The challenge for nonprofit journalism is both daunting and exciting. Long before the current recession and radical cutbacks, many newspapers had lost their community watchdog function, no longer bothering with the expensive and time-consuming work of investigative reporting. A 2005 survey by Arizona State University of the 100 largest U.S. dailies found that 37 percent had no full-time investigative reporters, and the majority of the major dailies had two or fewer.
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- The Center for Investigative Reporting signals one way forward for nonprofit journalism. Founded in 1977, it has a long history of collaborating with other news organizations, including Salon, to conduct and publish original reporting.
- It funds reporting that finds a home in multiple outlets -- on the Web, in print, and on TV and radio. And it's now starting a California-focused reporting initiative to try to pick up the slack as Golden State newspapers shrink.
- Recently the buzz has been about the Huffington Post, which recently launched an "Investigative Fund" with an initial budget of $1.75 million. More flush is ProPublica, founded in 2007 and edited by Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. It's underwritten mostly by the family foundation funded by billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler's mortgage fortune, which has committed $10 million a year to the project. The newsroom consists of 28 journalists, producing stories given away free to other media outlets, including newspapers and Web sites.

‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers - NYTimes.com

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future of news hyperlocal web newspapers

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.
- As the saying goes, "Lead, follow or get out of the way."
  If news organizations don't lead on the web, others will...and they'll bypass newspapers. - on 2009-04-14
Add Sticky Note
The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources.
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- The news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be,” said Gary Kebbel, the journalism program director for the Knight Foundation, which has backed 35 local Web experiments.
- One problem is that the number of readers for each neighborhood-focused news page is inherently small.
- One of the most ambitious hyperlocal sites is EveryBlock, a six-person start-up
- Backed by a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, it has created sites for 11 American cities, including New York, Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco.
- In some ways the environment is right for these start-ups.
- Unlike most hyperlocal start-ups, Patch, based in New York, hires reporters. It was conceived of and bankrolled by Tim Armstrong, the new chief of AOL, after he found a dearth of information online about Riverside, Conn., where he lives. Patch has created sites for three towns in New Jersey and plans to be in dozens by the end of the year.
  One journalist in each town travels to school board meetings and coffee shops with a laptop and camera. Patch also solicits content from readers, pulls in articles from other sites and augments it all with event listings, volunteer opportunities, business directories and lists of local information like recycling laws.
- One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content.
- many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.
- “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish,” said Mr. Holovaty of EveryBlock.

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