newspapers - Yule Heibel on Diigo

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
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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.

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
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- 4. How does Emily deal with information overload?

18 Apr 09

Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter - O'Reilly Radar

Fabulous short video clip of Monica Guzman explaining how to be an awesome news commenter

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local_news blogging business_model newspapers ignite seattle monica_guzman news o'reilly

13 Mar 09

Poynter Online - Centerpieces: "Ex-WaPo Editor Jim Brady to News Sites: Experiment More, Now"

Interview with Jim Brady, ex-Washington-Post executive editor, about the state of newspapers today, online v. print, etc.

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jim_brady washington_post newspapers

One of the ways people describe successful online ventures is saying that they're "of the Web," not merely "on the Web." Those sites use the unique advantages of the Web to present information and connect with users, rather than transferring traditional approaches online. Are major news sites these days "of the Web"?

Brady: I think more and more sites fit that description every day. But it's a big shift, and I'd be lying if I said I felt like everyone had made that leap. To me, it comes down to this question: Do you view the Web as a platform or a medium? If you work at a paper or TV station that merely views the Web as a way to distribute content from your legacy product, then I think you're doomed on the Web. If you view it as a platform, as a way to tell legacy stories differently, to share the floor with your audience, to consciously inject your content into the broader ecosystem of the Web, then I think you'll be fine.
The business model is clearly trailing, of course, but the business model on the print side is in free fall, and I don't see it coming back. So digital has to pick up the slack, and it's on us to figure out how to make that happen.
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- the Post did a terrific job -- supported at the highest levels -- transforming itself from a site that was "on the Web" to one that was "of the Web." We were pretty aggressive on opening the site to readers, experimenting with new storytelling forms, embracing database journalism and trying to experiment with new sites and platforms that emerged over the years.
- But I do firmly believe that the pace of experimentation has to increase. Launching blogs in 2009 isn't innovative anymore. Launching comments on articles in 2009 isn't innovative. But a lot of sites are just getting to that point now.
- Among all the discussion lately about revenue models, some argue that the news industry should reverse course and start charging for content online. Was it wise for news sites to embrace a free content, ad-supported model?
  
  Brady: I was there when this all started, and I can tell you that the second-guessing on not charging misses some key facts: 1) I don't remember this for sure, but I'm relatively positive we didn't have the technology in-house to charge people for content when we launched washingtonpost.com in 1996. 2) Almost no one was willing to enter credit card information in 1996, so adoption rates on charging probably would have been low. 3) If half the papers had charged, the other half probably would have gone free for competitive advantage, so the idea -- as I've heard it posited -- that "we all should have charged" ignores the basic fact that media organizations would never have agreed to act unilaterally. And as long as any good sites were free, the pressure would have been on all of us to pull down the pay walls.
- People working on news sites with vastly fewer resources than washingtonpost.com may think there isn't anything they could learn from how your site operated. Can you tell me three successful strategies or methods of running a news site that could be emulated by a site with a limited budget?
  
  Brady: I've heard that a lot over the years. My belief is that the ability to experiment in new areas isn't really a function of staff size, though scale is. We can produce 20 to 30 original video pieces a week; I realize many news sites can't do that. But there's no reason a site can't do four to six a week. So I don't think small staff size is an excuse not to experiment.

10 Mar 09

The Online Experiments That Could Help Newspapers - BusinessWeek

Business Week takes a look at how print media are going niche/ specialty/ local - and surviving/ making money. "The Bakersfield Californian is an anomaly in the newspaper business. While other papers are shutting their doors and filing for bankruptcy, it's expanding. The reason is the paper's 2005 launch of an online social network, called Bakotopia.com..."

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businessweek online_media magazines newspapers business_model outside.in kachingle

The Web site has caught on to the point where Bakersfield Californian now publishes 20,000 copies of a free magazine with content from Bakotopia twice a month. The articles range from reviews of the local theater scene to goings-on at various hot spots.
Newspapers had hoped that their Web sites would help them replace evaporating print revenue. But an online ad typically garners one-tenth of the revenue of a print ad, estimates Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute. "The phrase in the industry is, 'You are trading dollars for dimes,'" he says.
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- But in the middle of it all, the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. "If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer]," Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. "This is cheap and targeted," Pacheco explains. "Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads."
- The idea is to reach out to new audiences, cut costs, and attract new kinds of advertisers.
- This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content.
- Content Aggregated from Other Sources
  
  Alternatively, some media companies, such as the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and NBC, are posting ads to their own sites, but are using others' aggregated content. They work with a startup called Outside.in that aggregates blogs and discussions around specific locations—by state, city, ZIP code—and serves the links up onto a map located on sites such as NBCChicago.com. There, users click on their neighborhood and find blogs and video related to happenings in the next block. Partly thanks to this feature, the overall audience for NBC's Web sites has doubled between December and February. "Our old strategy [of using only our stations' content] just had a limited growth opportunity," says Brian Buchwald, a senior vice-president at NBC. "Now, it's really about focusing on the growth of the market and being trusted by a particular user base."

09 Mar 09

Bring on the techies: How Silicon Valley can help save newspapers | Media | guardian.co.uk

A Silicon Valley CEO addresses the newspaper business model. While not written in response to David Carr's NYT piece, it's a great riposte and refutation of same. Favorite bit:
QUOTE
Companies in Silicon Valley depend on having a fast-paced culture of innovation where no ideas are bad ideas, all voices are heard, technology is embraced not feared, and you are irrelevant if you aren't open to change. To achieve aggressive goals in competitive environments, teams have to work together without hidden agendas or obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originates.
UNQUOTE
I especially like the last clause in the last sentence. That "obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originate(d)" has dragged many a good idea into the Kingdom of the Cynical.

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the_guardian nathan_richardson newspapers business_model media

One day I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm about, of all things, the width of the Wall Street Journal. After I made a suggestion that was somewhere between novel and off the wall, the then-publisher leaned on the table, looked at me and said: "How old are you, young man?" The suggestion was clear: If you're under 40, you can't possibly understand the newspaper business. I still wish my response, though impolitic, had been: "How old is your thinking?"
While I don't have a quick fix for the newspaper industry's problems, I know one thing: The very companies that are ensuring newspapers' online traffic/existence should be leading the dialogue on their survival. Yahoo, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and AOL (NYSE: TWX) - not the editors, journalists and cadre of analysts who have led the newspapers to the brink - should be put in charge of identifying ways to keep a select number of news outlets viable.
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- There are three reasons why the tech leaders should be driving this bus: their culture of innovation; their dependence on newspapers; and their track record of creating and growing sources of online revenue.
- Companies in Silicon Valley depend on having a fast-paced culture of innovation where no ideas are bad ideas, all voices are heard, technology is embraced not feared, and you are irrelevant if you aren't open to change. To achieve aggressive goals in competitive environments, teams have to work together without hidden agendas or obsessive attention to where in the chain of command a new idea originates.
- Top news sites such as WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com and Marketwatch.com derive an average of 50% to 65% of their traffic from the big portals. Consumers have spoken, and they prefer going to the portals to be directed to their news sources.

outside.in » Newspapers Should Leap, Not Stand

Rebuttal by outside.in's CEO to David Carr's NYT wishful thinking piece on locking down content and throttling the aggregators.

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outside.in newspapers business_model aggregators

“no more free rides to aggregators”. This one hits a bit close to home. At Outside.in we aggregate local media, but we also add value to that media by organizing by location to make it easier for consumers and for newspapers themselves. (We then pass all that extra metadata onto anyone who wants to use it: newspaper or blogger.) The problem with Carr’s idea here is that consumers have already decided that they expect an incredibly customized and personal news experience. It’s “Me-centric” not “newspaper centric”.
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- Consumers are disaggregating the newspaper and folks like Outside.in, the Huffington Post and others are putting it back together in a format that works better.
- “no more commoditized ads”. Carr bemoans the rise of networks and ad exchanges but glosses over the fact that there are billions of impressions in every market that are not being sold by the best sales teams in those markets — the local media companies themselves! They’ve ceded their leadership in the local market by trying to hang on for too long to high cpms and scarcity. That’s not going to last.
- Local sales needs to embrace the fact that ad networks are a good thing. They roll up audience at scale that sales teams can bring to their advertisers.

The Media Equation - United, Newspapers May Stand - NYTimes.com

This is the article everyone agrees is all wrong: David Carr argues that newspapers should lock the barn doors even though the horse has long left the stable...

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nyt david_carr newspapers business_model

¶No more free content. The Web has become the primary delivery mechanism for quality newsrooms across the country, and consumers will have to participate in financing the newsgathering process if it is to continue. Setting the price point at free — the newspaper analyst Alan D. Mutter called it the “original sin” — has brought the industry millions of eyeballs and a return that doesn’t cover the coffee budget of some newsrooms.
The big threat would be that newspapers could lose the readers they have, lots of them. The mitigating factor is that a lot of those readers aren’t paying anyway.
¶No more free ride to aggregators. Google announced that it would begin selling ads against Google News, with almost no financial accommodation to the organizations that generate that news. The book industry — of all Luddites — has extracted cash from Google, as did the wire services. Google, The Huffington Post and Newser have built their audiences and brands on other people’s labors.
Most aggregators are not promoting newspaper content; they are repurposing it to their own ends. Newspapers’ audiences are harvested and sold divorced from the content that attracted them in the first place.
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- ¶No more commoditized ads. Ad markets and remnant sales have been a lose-lose proposition, ginning up more and more ads for less and less revenue, turning a grim dollars-into-dimes model into a hopeless dimes-into-pennies proposition. Newspapers once thrived by selling scarce ad positions. The downside is turning down ads, and who can afford that right now?
- ¶Throw out the Newspaper Preservation Act. Regulatory reform will allow the industry to consolidate to an economically feasible model and preserve newsgathering. Does Seattle need two newspapers? Did Denver? Sure, it’s preferable for all kinds of reasons. But one is better than none.

Hello, My Name Is Steve And I Have Hyperlocalbloggeritus

Blog post by Steve Sherron on why and how to do hyperlocal blogging.
QUOTE
"...I am convinced that my best chance for success is going to be in my local market. I have discovered since I began this journey that local folks are starving for attention and publicity for their business or organization. Most do not understand SEO. Few have web sites. There is a gap and a need just waiting to be filled."
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Interesting tips on SEO etc.

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hyper_local blogging media newspapers steve_sherron hyperlocalblogger how_to

My main concern from day one has been to research and select a few keywords and keyword phrases and start building content. Google found my site immediately and now I’m slowly ranking for my selected keywords. I’ve managed to rank #1 for a few longtail keywords.
My hometown paper does not do such a hot job covering local news and events. This lack of coverage creates an opportunity for a hyperlocal blogger: Who is covering your local Crime Stoppers BBQ? Who is covering your local weather events?
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- I published my first local article on December 4, 2008. By January 11, 2009, I had published my 30th article. On January 12th, I find my web site on three locations on page two of Google for my targeted keywords. I’m not an SEO Doctor by any stretch of the imagination. If I can do this, so can you.
- In this short amount of time, I have received great support from my community. I’ve had three separate inquiries about advertising on my site. I recently received an e-mail from our mayor thanking me for my National Guard article and video. One of our city councilmen contacted me and is interested in involving me in some work for the city. I’m happy with my progress in such a short time. I must confess though, I still do not have an actual plan mapped out yet. However, my direction is becoming a little more focused. Having Hyperlocalbloggeritus is starting to be cool.
- My advice to you is to go local. Believe me, your community is starving for coverage. Doors will open for you. Just start posting, using your local community keywords and phrases. Tell your friends, family and neighbors that you have been struck with the disease. The word will get out. Print up some business cards and hand them out everywhere you go. Come out of the closet.

02 Mar 09

Man Bites Blog: Hey, You Media Wimps! If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones, Then Go Join Facebook | The New York Observer

QUOTE
Contributing to this catastrophe has been newspapers’ stubborn refusal to consider any news-gathering and -analysis model other than the one that they were used to, one that, most crucially, relegated consumers to the role of passive readers instead of engaged users. It’s a mistake that happens all over the Big Media Debate: misinterpreting the limitations of our print past as prescriptions for our media future.
UNQUOTE

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media business_model newspapers

(1) Media platforms should be bundled into technology platforms;

(2) Premium access—one better than the failed TimesSelect project—will bring in revenue;

(3) Publishers should work more on matching advertisers with users, which is a suggestion that might finally help break the growing, pernicious primacy of Google in raking in Internet ad dollars.
It’s also a holistic point of view that does not raise the phony dichotomies publishers have been beating their heads against for more than a decade: paid content versus advertising; print versus digital; professional journalism versus “user-generated content”; blogging versus reporting.
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- “I think a lot of the conversation these days is myopic,” said Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post. “The problem is how to monetize all content, which is not simply how to solve newspapers problems. Our problems are ultimately the same as the movie industry’s, the book industry’s, the magazine industry’s, the music industry’s. We all meet on a vast, flat digital plane, which is a sort of Hobbesian, anarchic, unordered place.”
- Advertisers and Web sites signed up for AdSense because it made advertising easy and cheap. Google’s program matches text, picture and video ads to the particular site’s content and users. Publishers earned money from clicks or “impressions,” or loads of an ad on the site. But Google essentially cut the revenue of newspapers by adding themselves in as middle men.
- “Everybody loves to hate Google and I think that’s quite frankly an excuse,” Ms. Warren said. “You have to figure out how to generate revenue from your readers and/or from your advertisers. And you have to be focused to get that done. To blame Google? Or anyone else? To me, it’s kind of a waste of energy. We don’t do that.”
  
  So perhaps instead of fighting Google for that 60 percent of the pie, news media ought to make themselves first on the next wave of advertising revenue possibilities. That means that The News must make itself a player in the larger online business.
  
  They are already falling behind.
- It’s all about giving users attention, because that’s mostly what people are looking for when they’re online these days.
- Newspapers can also learn something from Facebook’s preference toolbar by making their user experiences more personalized. How about customizable home pages for users? So when they go to NYTimes.com, it will display, say, only international news and science headlines, and eliminate maybe sports- and style-related articles. Users could set preferences to display more new podcasts or video posts and drag and drop any reporters' column into a specific space on their home page. And if they want their Twitter feed or del.icio.us links integrated into their home page, so they can see what their friends are reading, let them set that preference as well.
- Unless newspaper sites can become facilitators of the new status culture, they will be left outside of it. And they will no longer be the places where advertisers want to meet customers.
- “It’s really quite remarkable how much our future is going to be driven by information exhaust from the devices we carry around with us,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “We have to think about that future.”
- The idea is this: The news must go mobile.
  
  And if the news is to attract rather than follow advertisers, it must do so right now.
- News won’t be a once a day update or even once an hour, like on blogs. It will be continuous and ambient—all around us through our handheld devices, according to Bill Spencer, an evangelist for mobile technology and co-founder of viaPlace, a location-based data service for mobile users.
- “As events occur they’ll stream right to the individual,” he said. “You’re going to become entwined with information. Information is no longer a thing that you go to. It’s threaded into the technology.”
- So how will all of this get monetized? Well, if Apple’s iPhone 3G has shown us anything, it’s that people will pay for convenience.
- But publishers can also partner with advertisers to create innovative, interactive applications. For example, on Feb. 2, Lucky magazine released their Lucky At Your Service iPhone application. Designed to supplement their March issue, Lucky app users can browse through more than 70 shoes listed in their shoe guide, including ones chosen by editors and advertisers.
- The irony of news that follows you wherever you go is that it is intensely local—just the kind of stuff news sites are jettisoning these days.
- Consider Patch, the New York–based start-up co-founded by Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales. Funded by Polar Capital Group, Mr. Armstrong’s private investment company, Patch launched three hyperlocal news sites in three New Jersey towns on Feb. 5: Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange. Each individual site combines hard-nosed journalism from professional reporters, information from local government on everything from health department services to volunteer opportunities and various platforms for user participation with pictures, stories and blogs. Patch’s sites don’t just dispatch news articles—they are information portals.
- “It’s the year 2009 and the way people are getting community-news specific information is largely through corkboards and bagel stores and kiosks in town squares,” Jon Brod, Patch’s chief executive officer and co-founder, told The Observer over coffee earlier this month. “There’s a huge opportunity there to really include people’s local lives and strengthen communities through information and that’s really what we’re trying to do.”
  
  “It was a problem everytown, everycommunity U.S.A. was experiencing,” he continued. “Community level news and information was really sparse, fragmented, disorganized and in a bunch of level, archaic.”
- After work, local happy hours and drink specials will be pinged to your phone as soon as you step back outside. This kind of feature is already being developed by small New York-based startup Coovents. In fact, most of these features are already available in various iPhone applications, but perhaps newspapers should start partnering with the start-ups making these new applications so they can add the data sets to their Web and mobile libraries.
- And if Patch came to this town—if it were the new business model for The New York Times, aggressively social, hyperlocal and therefore geo-targeted for advertisers and a better overall service for readers—but on a larger scale, with top-flight reporting and seriously breaking news at every zoom level, would people pay to read the “paper?”
  
  One of the most boring disputes over the future of the media is whether a pay model or an advertising model will ultimately work. Even very hidebound print people forget that they “serve” ads in print only to readers who have already paid. The argument is that readers won’t pay to read content; therefore no eyeballs; therefore no advertisers.
  
  But if news sites entered these other areas—became social, hyperlocal, mobile—perhaps they could retake the center stage and bring paid readers and advertisers to the same place?
- He pointed out that subscriptions and newsstand sales have never been able to support print journalism without serious advertising revenue. So how can any pay model be expected to cover the costs of journalism online?
- So, this promised land, on the other side of the print/advertising divide, with news organizations acting as social networking sites and offering interactive advertising opportunities that work for advertisers, hyperlocal service content delivered to mobile devices and the devices that are yet to come: how do media organizations interested in preserving the future of a free press operating at the highest level of quality?

11 Feb 09

“BREAKING NEWS”: Why the New York Times and Harvard Should Merge « What’s the Big Idea?

"The business model – which is another way of saying the underlying purpose – of just about everything is changing right now, and that includes the university and the newspaper."

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bob_massie newspapers ideas harvard business_model

19 Dec 08

From magazine warehouse to a printing facility « Manifest Magazine

Interesting idea by Manifest Magazine (Wahyd) to "replace" Cambridge MA's Out of Town News (which will close 1/1/09) with a print-on-demand shop.

Related to this: I left comments on Scripting.com and Doc Searls' weblog (both blogged this).

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manifest_magazine newspapers business_model harvard cambridge_ma

17 Dec 08

Newspaper revenues to plummet in 2009 says new study

QUOTE
Newspaper revenues in 2009 will plummet while online revenue will grow, states Preview 2009 - a survey of 400 daily newspaper executives by Toronto-based marketing research firm Kubas Consultants.

The online survey of both US and Canadian newspapers, of all sizes, revealed that more executives projected a downward spiral rather than increases in seven out of eight ad revenue categories -including employement classifieds, the "next disaster area," at - 16% projected change, says the report. While online ad revenues appear to grow at 13.6%, automotive and real estate classifieds, among other categories, will see decreasing growth in ad sales of -15.5% and -13.8% respectively.
UNQUOTE

But what are Canadian newspapers doing? "...they are more focused on improving sales technology and upgrading printing equipment." Upgrading *printing* equipment???

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2009 kubas newspapers revenue advertising

"Preview 2009: Newspapers' Outlook on Ad Revenue Growth and Strategic Initiatives" (PDF Kubas)

Read later.

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kubas newspapers advertising revenue 2009

Citizen journalism will shape the new face of the Oakland Press - The Oakland Press Opinion: The best place for news in and around Oakland County

Must read later; filed for now.

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oakland citizen_journalism newspapers

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.

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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.”

13 Nov 08

The Canadian Press: Canwest cuts 560 jobs in financial streamlining

More grim news for newspapers (and MSM, including TV), this time the Canadian monopoly CanWest owned by Winnipeg's Asper family.

In Victoria, 18 people at CanWest-owned CHEK-TV were laid off, over lunch. Indigestion gratis...

canadianpress.google.com/...M5g4kqC6le8VPCB4SdjpyBa4oUcFNg - Preview

canwest newspapers

18 Aug 08

New breed of 'net newsers' shape US media habits, says Pew report | Media | guardian.co.uk

Jemima Kiss writes about the recent Pew report that describes how "well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research."

Interesting findings on education levels and TV-watching *and* interest (lack thereof) in science and technology, too.

www.guardian.co.uk/...digitalmedia.usa - Preview

newspapers television media news the_guardian jemima_kiss reference aggregators pew trends

A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research.
"net newsers" - web users under 35 who read more political blogs than watch national news coverage, rely heavily on web-based news during the day and have a strong interest in technology and technology news.
6 more annotations...
- Net newsers are typically affluent and 80% are graduates, making them a highly desirable demographic for advertisers.
- They do favour some traditional media brands, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic and the BBC, the Pew survey of 3,600 adults found. But only 47% watch TV news on an average day.
- The research paints a picture of steady decline in the US newspaper industry, with the percentage of Americans who regularly read print titles falling from 58% in 1993 to 34% in 2008.
  According to the long-running survey, respondents saying they listened to radio news fell from 47% to 35% over the same period. As for network TV, the national news dropped from 60% to 29% and local news from 77% to 52%.
- However, TV is still the most popular medium for the US, with 46% of the public classified as "traditionalists" who watch throughout the day, but are likely to be older and less well educated than net newsers.
- More than 40% of this traditionalist group are unemployed, and were found to prefer visual news stories to audio and have little interest in science or technology news.
  A further 14% are described as "disengaged", a poorly-educated group with little interest in current affairs.
- The research also found that the proportion of young people in the US getting no daily news has increased from 25% in 1998 to 34%, with only 10% of people using social networking sites for their news.

07 Aug 08

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Getting local coverage in gear

Wow, lots of excellent suggestions in this blog post, and nice discussion of how the newspapers aren't covering the local news AT ALL.

newsosaur.blogspot.com/...ng-local-coverage-in-gear.html - Preview

newsosaur local_news newspapers business_model

Denver metros can't (or won't) take the steps necessary to report the news in their own backyards. And local news is the only thing they have to sell.
I can't get local news online.
8 more annotations...
- I define "local" news as the type we use to see in zone sections.
- We filled them with all the stuff that readers were interested in but couldn't find anyplace else: births, deaths, divorces, marriages, anniversaries, engagements, school-lunch menus, school calendars, zoning hearings, local city council meetings and meetings of the subcommittees, school news, lots of prep sports, features and “business of the week” profiles. We crammed in as much as possible. It was all relevant to readers because it happened in their neighborhoods or suburbs.
- Zone sections were an invention of the ad departments, which were convinced that if you offered a small business an ad that didn't have to go ROP, they would buy in.
- The sections fell into disfavor and disappeared – and all the good LOCAL stuff that readers wanted also disappeared.
- To the credit of the Post and Rocky, they have tried some zoning (both print and Web) using “citizen” journalists, but the stories are what you’d expect: warm and fuzzy feature stories.
- So, if I don't get my national and international news from the Post, and the paper makes no attempt to cover anything about where I live and work, then why should I subscribe to a newspaper that is not relevant to my life?
  
  It gets worse. The Rocky Mountain News, the Post’s partner in the Denver joint-operating agency, pretty much hews to the same line as the Post in regard to what gets covered. I read the same stories in both newspapers.
- I'd hate to be a newspaper editor today, but if I were. . .
  
  Instead of spending time bemoaning how my owners are going to kill my paper, I'd make real sure that the people on my staff were covering news relevant to the communities where subscribers live.
  
  I'd fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I'd send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.
- What do I do with all this news? Put it on my web site as a zone section.

06 Aug 08

Lobdell's OC: 42 things I know

William Lobdell's entry about leavng the Los Angeles Times after 18 years of working there, and his list of 42 things he knows re the newspaper industry (and its moribund state).

lobdellsoc.blogspot.com/...42-things-i-know.html - Preview

william_lobdell newspapers

the business model for newspapers is broken.
The idea that your daily news is collected, written, edited, paginated, printed on dead trees, put in a series of trucks and cars and delivered on your driveway — at least 12 hours stale — is anachronistic in 2008.
6 more annotations...
- Entrepreneurs — for example, Kevin Rose at Digg — have developed news sites in just a few years that have drawn far more readers than the Los Angeles Times. Digg doesn't feature original content, but The Times (and other newspapers) could have added a Digg element to its site.
- First, the editorial department. We operated as though we had a monopoly on truth and great journalism for far too long. We didn't listen to our critics and sometimes our readers. That cost us.
- The Times could extend its lifespan significantly with some innovative leadership in sales.
  If I were publisher (a job I wouldn't take, thank you), I’d explore a partnership with Google or, more realistically, Yahoo or another proven Internet company that would combine news gathering and advertising forces.
- If I were publisher, I'd have a clear mission statement for The Times' editorial department (if you ask 100 journalists at The Times about their mission, you'd likely get 100 different answers).
- I’d take the very talented journalists I had and develop a SERIES of websites that provided the best information for that beat/subject matter. The Web is all about niches. The Times, for instance, could have the premiere sites for every professional and college sports team in Southern California. It could be THE place to turn to for news on City Hall, Los Angeles Unified School District, and Los Angeles Police Department. Not to mention Southern California environmental issues, LAX and the coast.
- You could combine all these different blogs/websites under the www.latimes.com banner, but make it simple for readers to navigate to the sites they want to become attached/devoted to.

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