journalism

29 Sep 09

"Fact and Friction" Interview with Jay Rosen in Volume » Page not found

Great interview with Jay Rosen (conducted by Jeffey Inaba and Talene Montgomery) that delves into (and knits together) the "pro" (professional) and "am" (amateur, blogger) divide. Rosen advocates for Pro-Am journalism. And what is "the public"?

"How do journalists decide how to tell stories? What are their responsibilities when reporting a story? And to what extent do they write in the public’s interest?"

The questions revolve around whether journalists represent or create the public.

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jay_rosen jeffrey_inaba journalism volume_magazine citizen_journalism politics talene_montgomery

people involved in arts, culture, education and politics, have to figure out continually how to bring the public alive.’ It’s not just a question of information either, its also one of art. Because engaging people successfully is a social problem we have to figure out. So to me, yes, the public is there to be informed and it is something we have to bring to life. There’s no objective way of doing it; it’s an art and a commitment. I think really good journalists who care about telling the truth, who care about their stories and about having an effect are really saying, ‘I’m going to awaken the public’.
JR: Journalists have a responsibility to tell us what’s going on and tell us the truth and that does require impartiality. We know this from our normal lives. It doesn’t require you to be a journalist. If you went to a contentious meeting – and other people who also have a stake in what you have witnessed couldn’t go and they ask you what went on – you have a responsibility to report to the other people accurately and impartially. Yet you have other responsibilities too. People want to know not just what occurred, but also how they can affect things. Their participation and their power to affect the situation has something to do with their interest in information and there’s a vital connection between those two things.
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- JR: The great press critic AJ Liebling once famously said about freedom of the press, ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’. And blogging means anyone can own one. That is a switch and 'citizen journalism' is simply a name for this fact. People have the tools and therefore they also have the powers of the press. Citizen journalism is when ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’ pick up these tools and use them to inform one another.
- First: we need verified information. The most important reason for having professional journalism is it represents a verification system we otherwise would not have. The essence of what they do is not just that they report stuff, but that they report stuff that's verifiable.
- Second: there are some kinds of stories – investigative journalism, for example – that you can only get if somebody is working on them full-time. Finding out facts requires somebody working on it. That argues for professional journalism. There's a whole class of things for which that is true.
- Third: we need people with power, including and especially people in government, to provide access to the public itself. But it's not practical for them to provide access to the public at large, so we need representative figures to pose questions. And obviously that, in a practical way, argues for people who have that access, because certain stories can only be gotten that way!
- So what is citizen journalism good at? We don't necessarily know entirely yet, because we haven't built good structures for it. But one of the things that it's good at – which really comes from blogging – is that having people who really care about issues guide you to news about those issues is actually a better way of learning about them than depending on, say, the LA Times. What's great about citizen journalism is that it is born from participation and it is created for your participation. The bloggers have been the ones – like amateurs in other new arts – who have actually pushed the craft forward. They’re the ones who learned to write with links; they’re the ones who learned to take the freedoms of the web – which are vast – and bring enough discipline to them through forms that make blogging intelligible.
- JR: I'm interested in this thing people are calling Pro-Am journalism. [1] Ultimately the strongest forms and the best discoveries will be made with ‘pro’ journalists working with networks of amateurs, connected through smart web tools and applications and motivated to produce new information.

10 Aug 09

The New West FAQ for Online Community Journalism Entrepreneurs | Jonathan Weber | NewWest.Net

Although over 2 years old, Jonathan Weber's "FAQ" for starting an online publication focused on local news is still useful and highly informative. Weber covers raising money, staffing, competition, revenue streams/ business models, etc.

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newwest jonathan_weber entrepreneurship journalism online_publishing local_news

Did you raise money from investors? How did you go about that?

Yes, we raised a high-six-figure sum from a group of angel investors. There are some friends and family in the deal, and there are also professional investors who did it as a personal angel investment. The success of the fundraising was very much dependent on my track record and reputation as editor in chief of the Industry Standard, and required relentless networking and cajoling over a period of almost a year.
What is the revenue model for New West? Advertising?

Online advertising is the core of the model, yes. However we also have several other revenue lines, including a small indoor advertising business, a custom-publishing business, and a conference & events business. Multiple revenue streams are a lovely thing. It remains difficult to make money on online advertising alone unless and until you have boatloads of traffic, and it is especially difficult to achieve that with a local site.
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- Do you sell your own ads, or do you use an ad network?
  
  We sell our own ads. We do run Google Adsense on the site and we make some money from that, and we have looked at some of the other ad network options and may try some other things in the future. However, we get much, much higher CPMs on ads we sell ourselves then on anything we have seen from a network, and we expect direct sales to remain the core of the model.
- Who are your main competitors?
  
  Newspapers still dominate the local news and information business, especially outside of the major metro areas. The local newspaper here in Missoula – a Lee Enterprises paper – has been extraordinarily hostile and even unethical in its competitive response to us, though that has not been so much the case in other markets. There are various small, independent local sites that are competitors on some level but few that have any real traction. TV station and yellow pages Web sites are also becoming bigger factors in the market.
- How big a staff do you have? Are your writers paid?
  
  We have a full-time staff of seven, which includes managing editor Courtney Lowery, assistant managing editor Matt Frank, event calendar editor Colin Hickey, sales and marketing associate Jennifer Calhoun, designer Marshall Hibbard, a Webmaster who will start next week, and myself. We have “city editors” in each of our markets who are on contract. We also have a handful of other writers on regular monthly contracts, and we have some people we pay based on the traffic their stories generate. We also have a number of unpaid contributors.
- What about citizen journalism?
  
  We have found that the “if you build it they will come” approach to citizen journalism does not work at all. You can’t simply put up a site and invite people to come in and write stories and expect them to do so. However, we have also found there are a lot of non-professionals out there who can and will do good journalism if we work with them and encourage them. We think of this as a “high-touch” model (which depends heavily on the indefatigable energy and talent of the above-mentioned Courtney Lowery). Overall we think of our approach as “pro-am” journalism rather than “citizen journalism” or traditional professional journalism.
- Have you looked at aggregating local blogs and other kinds of content rather than producing it all yourselves?
  
  Good question! Aggregation is a key function of almost any publication these days; no one can pretend to be the source of all news and information. We have found though that aggregating news and headlines from other publications – even if we do it by hand and try to be clever about it - is not what drives readership for New West. We have also found that simple automated feed aggregation of local bloggers and the like is not very useful; you lose all context. On the other hand there are some very interesting new efforts in this area, including Steven Johnson’s OutsideIn and Lisa Williams’ Placeblogger, and I’m sure different forms of aggregation will be an important part of our future.

23 May 09

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

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columbia_university lee_bollinger commencement_speech media journalism press

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.

www.csmonitor.com/...p09s02-coop.html - Preview

journalism csmonitor value robert_picard

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.
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- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

19 May 09

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.")

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-future - Preview

clay_shirky newspapers journalism business_model online_media the_guardian

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.
- - bingo. - on 2009-05-19
Add Sticky Note
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- 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.

16 May 09

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

www.sfgate.com/...article.cgi - Preview

local_news uc_berkeley journalism

08 May 09

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."

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newspapers emily_bell journalism business_model

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.
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- 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.
  - BINGO! She nails it. - on 2009-05-08
  Add Sticky Note
- 4. How does Emily deal with information overload?

28 Apr 09

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

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huffington_post kenneth_lerer newspaper business_model journalism web2.0

20 Nov 08

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.

www.nytimes.com/...18voice.html - Preview

nyt newspapers journalism business_model

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.
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- 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.
  - had no idea they were changing to non-profit! - on 2008-11-20
  Add Sticky Note
- 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.”

03 May 08

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).

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greenslade the_guardian journalism business_model newspapers jay_rosen

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."
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- 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.
  - - see Rosen's rebuttal/ clarification in comments - on 2008-05-03
  Add Sticky Note
- 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?

Yule Heibel's Library tagged journalism → View Popular

"Fact and Friction" Interview with Jay Rosen in Volume » Page not found

The New West FAQ for Online Community Journalism Entrepreneurs | Jonathan Weber | NewWest.Net

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

Why journalists deserve low pay | csmonitor.com

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

Open forum: Journalism students lead way

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

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

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

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

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