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Office of the President Lee C. Bollinger: 2009 Commencement Address

Lee C. Bollinger's commencement address to the 2009 Columbia U. graduating class, with a special focus on globalization and freedom of the press/ media: "...the very same technology - the Internet - that is making global communication so pervasive - is simultaneously undermining the financial model of the traditional press, as we've known it."

Many great insights. Some excerpts:
QUOTE
...you have been here at a pivotal moment in history. You came in texting and you're going out with a twitter. And regardless of whether you're a fan of digital downloads or old fashioned ink on paper, while you've been here you've seen the value of dialogue, and of access to timely, credible, independently generated information and ideas. In August, 2005, just as many of you were settling into your first semester here, Hurricane Katrina was ravaging the city of New Orleans, amid accusations of gross government mismanagement and misinformation. Your Columbia years have coincided with two brutal and still unfinished wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan - shaped by our own government's far too extensive control over information. You will tell your children about the unprecedented economic crisis that erupted during your time here - a global event fueled by inadequate disclosures and regulation. From the standpoint of our ability to acquire a full understanding of things that matter, we clearly have a long way to go before we can rest.

Meanwhile, you have been witness to and strengthened by participating in the process of vigorous open debate - on issues such as gay marriage, the conflict in the Middle East, and climate change. And you have played a role in one of the most exciting political campaigns in American history - a campaign waged like never before through online media and social networking.

Through it all, you have lived in the most privileged intellectual environment on the planet, perhaps of all time. Nothing compares to this - to the freedom you have felt - and possibly taken for granted - to consider every idea and t

Tags: columbia_university, lee_bollinger, commencement_speech, media, journalism, press on 2009-05-23 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromwww.columbia.edu

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Why journalists deserve low pay | csmonitor.com

Christian Science Monitor opinion piece making the case that journalists aren't pulling their weight in creating value for readers/ consumers.
QUOTE
Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren't creating much value these days.

Until they come to grips with that issue, no amount of blogging, twittering, or micropayments is going to solve their failing business models.
UNQUOTE
Picard then divides his piece into three parts:"Where does value come from?" and "What are journalists worth?" with "Adapt or Die" as conclusion.

QUOTE
Robert G. Picard is a professor of media economics at Sweden's Jonkoping University, a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University, and the author and editor of 23 books, including "The Economics and Financing of Media Companies." This essay is adapted from a lecture Professor Picard gave at Oxford. He blogs at http://themediabusiness.blogspot.com/
UNQUOTE

Excellent must-read article.

Tags: journalism, csmonitor, value, robert_picard on 2009-05-23 and saved by 17 people -All Annotations (45) -About

more fromwww.csmonitor.com

Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of
themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement,
including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself,
but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.
The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don't care about journalism –
only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.
Moral philosophers differentiate intrinsic and instrumental value. Intrinsic value involves things that are good in and of
themselves, such as beauty, truth, and harmony. Instrumental value comes from things that facilitate action and achievement,
including awareness, belonging, and understanding. Journalism produces only instrumental value. It is important not in itself,
but because it enlightens the public, supports social interaction, and facilitates democracy.
To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional,
and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas. Emotional
benefits include a sense of belonging and community, reassurance and security, and escape. Self-expressive benefits are provided
when individuals identify with the publication's perspectives or opinions, or when they're empowered to express their own
ideas.

These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. That's because producers and providers have less control
over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution
severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value
is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.

The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately,
that value is now near zero.
The total value is the value of content plus the value of advertising. However, advertisers don't care about journalism –
only the audience that it produces. Thus the real measure of journalistic value is value created by serving readers.
If value is to be created, journalists cannot continue to report merely in the traditional ways or merely re-report the news
that has appeared elsewhere. They must add something novel that creates value. They will have to start providing information
and knowledge that is not readily available elsewhere, in forms that are not available elsewhere, or in forms that are more
useable by and relevant to their audiences.
One cannot expect newspaper readers to pay for page after page of stories from news agencies that were available online yesterday
and are in a thousand other papers today. Providing a food section that pales by comparison to the content of food magazines
or television cooking shows is not likely to create much value for readers. Neither are scores of disjointed, undigested short
news stories about events in far off places.

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From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution | Media | The Guardian

Great article by Clay Shirky on the changed status of media production, who owns it, who controls it, with an astute take on abundance. ("That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.")

Tags: clay_shirky, newspapers, journalism, business_model, online_media, the_guardian on 2009-05-19 and saved by 4 people -All Annotations (5) -About

more fromwww.guardian.co.uk

Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.
The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.
Add Sticky Note
- - bingo.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-05-19
Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.

Open forum: Journalism students lead way

Terrific article by Neil Henry, professor and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, about the J-School's initiatives around local news reporting. Focusing on Linjun Fan's success with Albany Today (albanytoday.org), Henry explains how the students cover local news and use cutting edge multimedia tools.
QUOTE
For nearly every story over the next two years, Linjun was first on the scene, using the most highly advanced digital tools to file her work to her site from all over town.

Most of the time she was the only reporter at any of the events she covered, a stark reality shared by most of her classmates in their own coverage of places as varied as El Cerrito, Emeryville, and West Oakland.
(...)
Today, as they learn multimedia and community-based journalism, so do all of our students practice it, providing fresh content throughout the year to our other thriving digital news sites, Oakland North (oaklandnorth.net) and Mission Loc@l (missionlocal.org), which won a national award for Internet excellence recently for its coverage of San Francisco's Mission District.

And we continue to grow. In August we will launch a new digital news site devoted to the people of Richmond.
(...)
We want to partner with other local sites run by people similarly committed to covering Bay Area communities. We envision legions of small businesses and other potential advertisers in the Bay Area finding tremendous new audiences through these ties. We are filled with excitement and purpose, fueled by the idealism and dedication of young students who increasingly are showing the way.
UNQUOTE

Tags: local_news, uc_berkeley, journalism on 2009-05-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.sfgate.com

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The Root Of The Matter: Emily Bell on The Future of Journalism

Excellent summary of a lecture by Emily Bell (head of digital content at Guardian News and Media). Bell gave the lecture at University College Falmouth, where she was just appointed visiting professor in the media degrees program. Her topic: "Journalism Ten Years From Now" - excellent insights. Bell also discusses the business model for journalism of the future: where will the money come from to support it? And there are some very surprising insights here, starting with "News has never been profitable."

Tags: newspapers, emily_bell, journalism, business_model on 2009-05-08 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (17) -About

more fromweb2watch.blogspot.com

Unlike net-culture visionary Clay Shirky, though, Emily doesn't think that print journalism has no future. Print will remain an important part of reaching the audience - but it will not be the primary conduit for journalism in ten years' time. Instead, going by the 'clues' we can pick up from the way journalism is changing today, journalism in ten years will have some or all of the following characteristics:
1. It will go where the audience is.
2. Journalism will be networked, not siloed.
3. Journalists will need to be very reliable and trustworthy.
4. Journalists will need to be ready to share information whenever they have it and in whatever way will communicate it best to the audience.
5. Journalism will no longer be possible without the audience.
Emily pointed out that all this is well and good, but what most people want to know is: where will the money come from to pay for all this professional, multi-platform, 'always-on' journalism?
1. News has never been profitable.
2. There is no point asking people to pay for online content; they won't.
3. Advertising won't go away
There followed a Q&A, which covered questions including:
1. Will we see an increasing in 'entrepreneurial journalism'?
2. What is Emily's view of user-generated journalism?
3. Here in Cornwall there is a big digital divide - a lot of people do not have broadband/internet access. How will journalism serve their needs in the digital age?
The real challenge - for journalists and politicians - will be how to get information to those who currently choose not to receive it.
Add Sticky Note
- BINGO! She nails it.
  posted by lampertina on 2009-05-08
4. How does Emily deal with information overload?

Kenneth Lerer: How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here

Transcript of Kenneth Lerer's speech at the Columbia Journalism School Annual New Media Lecture Series, April 23, 2009.
QUOTE
A lot of what we're seeing online today is actually a return, full circle, to the way things were when American newspapers began; a mixture of advocacy and investigative in-your-face journalism. There is a long and distinguished history of such newspapers -- from the papers that were fiercely loyal to Jefferson or Hamilton, to the abolitionist broadsheets, to the activist newspapers at the turn of the century. As my partner Arianna Huffington says, the mission of journalism has always been "truth-seeking, not striking some fictitious balance between two sides."
UNQUOTE

Tags: huffington_post, kenneth_lerer, newspaper, business_model, journalism, web2.0 on 2009-04-28 and saved by 2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.huffingtonpost.com

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Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs - NYTimes.com

Article about attempts by some alternative news organizations to recreate themselves as non-profits. Lots of interesting angles, from the demise (or at least being under siege) of traditional newspapers to the rise of alternative business models (embodied by the "watchdog" sites referenced by the article's title) for paying journalists/ newsrooms to stay in business.

Tags: nyt, newspapers, journalism, business_model on 2008-11-20 -All Annotations (13) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.
Here it is VoiceofSanDiego.org, offering a brand of serious, original reporting by professional journalists — the province of the traditional media, but at a much lower cost of doing business. Since it began in 2005, similar operations have cropped up in New Haven, the Twin Cities, Seattle, St. Louis and Chicago. More are on the way.
The fledgling movement has reached a sufficient critical mass, its founders think, so they plan to form an association, angling for national advertising and foundation grants that they could not compete for singly. And hardly a week goes by without a call from journalists around the country seeking advice about starting their own online news outlets.
That is a subject of hot debate among people who closely follow the newspaper industry. Publishing online means operating at half the cost of a comparable printed paper, but online advertising is not robust enough to sustain a newsroom.
And so financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising.
But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.
Nonprofit news online “has to be explored and experimented with, but it has to overcome the hurdle of proving it can support a big news staff. Even the most well-funded of these sites are a far cry in resources from a city newspaper.”
The people who run the local news sites see themselves as one future among many, and they have a complex relationship with traditional media.
So far, their audience is tiny, about 18,000 monthly unique visitors, according to Quantcast, a media measurement service.
The biggest of the new nonprofit news sites, MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors in a month, but even that is a fraction of the Internet readership for the local newspapers.
MinnPost is rich compared with its peers — with a $1.5 million bankroll from Mr. Kramer and several others when it started last year, and a $1.3 million annual budget — and it has been more aggressive about selling ads and getting readers to donate.
The full-time editors and reporters earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, Mr. Kramer said — a living wage, but less than they would make at the competing papers. MinnPost has just five full-time employees, but it uses more than 40 paid freelance contributors, allowing it to do frequent reporting on areas like the arts and sports.
“There’s room for a whole range of approaches, and we’re living proof that you can do meaningful journalism very cheaply,” Mr. Bass said.
Crosscut.com, a local news site in Seattle, does reporting and commentary of its own, but also aggregates articles from other news sources. It began last year as a business, but is changing to nonprofit status.
Add Sticky Note
- had no idea they were changing to non-profit!
  posted by lampertina on 2008-11-20
VoiceofSanDiego took yet another approach, hiring a crew of young, hungry, full-time journalists, paying them salaries comparable to what they would make at large newspapers and relying less on freelancers. Mr. Donohue and Mr. Lewis earned $60,000 to $70,000 last year, according to the VoiceofSan Diego I.R.S. filings.
On a budget under $800,000 this year — almost $200,000 more than last year — everyone does double duty. Mr. Lewis writes a political column, and Mr. Donohue works on investigative articles. But the operation is growing and Mr. Woolley says he has become convinced that the nonprofit model has the best chance of survival.
“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” he said. “It should be thought of the same way as education, health care. It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

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How do we fund journalism in future? | Greenslade | Guardian Unlimited

Roy Greenslade reporting from a "future of journalism" conference in Australia, asking after 'the business model' for newspapers / journalism of the future. He mentions Jay Rosen, who joined the conference via satellite hook-up, and this in turn sparks some interesting conversation on the comments board (particularly by Rosen himself).

Tags: greenslade, the_guardian, journalism, business_model, newspapers, jay_rosen on 2008-05-03 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromblogs.guardian.co.uk

The key question that cropped up throughout was about whether journalism can be funded if newspapers - or broadcasters - collapse due to the loss of advertising revenue.
"I can't see a funding model for serious journalism in future, not one that will pay for large staffs with specialists, and foreign correspondents and stringers, everywhere. I can't see ads paying for big operations that costs tens of millions of dollars. Websites can attract millions but not the necessary tens of millions."
John Cokley, a journalism lecturer at the University of Queensland, in accepting that situation, urged journalists to do much more to market their work, to understand the demand and then discover a business model to fund it.
Jay Rosen
said, more than once: "I have no commercial aspirations whatsoever". Instead, his concern is to uncover the social value, rather than the financial value, of participatory journalism.
Add Sticky Note
- - see Rosen's rebuttal/ clarification in comments
  posted by lampertina on 2008-05-03
takes us back to the main question: who will fund them? I don't buy Cokley's entrepreneurial idea. I like the idea of philanthropy but I know it's idealist. I think advertising will still raise a lot of money, enough to fund small staffs. It still may not be enough.
Having studied the press and the history of the public sphere over a 300 year stretch, I know how critical marketplace success has been in securing a free, independent and powerful press. Those who went into the business of providing information have been pushing the development of the press along for hundreds of years. It was true in the eighteenth century; it's true today.
However, I knew going in that "open source" reporting projects aren't--realistically--going to be money-makers because we are still at the stage of trying to figure out whether it's even viable to do this kind of pro-am journalism. We need to know what the puzzles and problems and practical challenges are. It's far better for our developing knowledge if we do not burden the experiment with commercial goals and targets that may not apply.
Furthermore, I haven't noticed that the people who jump up and down, shouting, "where's the business model? where's the bloody business model?" are moving any closer to a working business model. Have you? Realistically, it seems to me we are at a place when there is no business model for news right now. Too often, "where's the business model?" isn't really a discerning question, but a club with which to beat the Internet.
To me it's the wrong question if you want to find a way to pay reporters. We have to start further back in the inquiry: how do we create editorial value online, using the strengths of the Web?

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