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Murdoch says won't make all of online WSJ free
By Ben Hirschler DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch said on Thursday he would not make all online Wall Street Journal content free. Dow Jones & Co has begun opening access to some previously paid-for items...
RSS is how the news flows
Dave Winer counters Sam Diaz's column on ZDNet by saying that RSS is as vital to news reaching us as electricity is vital to running the computer we read news on.
Future of online news may be 'hyperlocal'
You know "hyperlocal" has gone mainstream when CNN publishes a story about it.
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"We don't cover anything unless it's squarely about San Diego, even national trend stories and stuff like that, we tend to steer away from," said Andy Donohue, the outlet's editor.
"Especially the way things are going right now on the Internet, you've got to be really focused on doing something really well -- and if you try to spread yourself too thin, you're not doing anything well."
Do Not Blame Google, Newspapers Have Not Evolved
Louis Gray's got a guest blogger, Rob Diana of "Regular Geek," who offers this semi-outsider's perspective of the newspaper crisis.
Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On - New York Times
The New York Times looks at how young people got their political news via social networks during the 2008 election cycle.
Old Growth Media And The Future Of News
This is the Steven Berlin Johnson speech that I wrote about in my blog post on March 22.
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What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
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Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that we can’t. Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction, reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s proliferating out there in the wild.
If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…
Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called newspapers.
Newsweek Plans Makeover to Fit a Smaller Audience
Newsweek is planning a big redesign and a change in focus from obligingly covering all the week's big stories to focusing on a few with a more offbeat attitude.
Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers
Clay Shirky tells us why micropayments for news will not work.
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mall payments made by readers for individual articles or other pieces of a la carte content — won’t work for online journalism.
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First, the label micropayments no longer makes any sense. Some of the early proposals for small payment systems did indeed imagine digital bookkeeping and billing for amounts as small as a thousandth of a cent; this was what made such payments “micro”. Current proposals, however, imagine pricing digital content in the range of a dime to a dollar. These aren’t micro-anything, they are just ordinary but small payments, no magic anywhere.
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Death Of Print: How Not to Save Newspapers
Owen Thomas argues that people will not pay small amounts for news articles because of the "mental transaction cost": It's too hard to determine how much an article is worth before buying it.
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The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.
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The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.
Can newspapers transition to digital?
Part four in Alan Mutter's series on making the print-to-digital transition in the news industry.
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The problem for publishers hoping for digital reincarnation is that most are seriously unprepared to be full-on interactive competitors.
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newspaper companies in a post-print world would have to rebuild almost every fundamental aspect of their businesses, from their capital structures and revenue streams to their audience bases and products
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Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results
Commenting on news sites is awful, so here are a few suggestions to make it better.
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Don’t make one staffer responsible for comment monitoring and moderation every day — rotate throughout the week.
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add a comment of the day to that message, or tack it up on the bulletin board
Could shrinking the post office help newspapers?
Martin Langeveld discusses the connections between the struggling U.S. Postal Service and the print news industry.
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Now that widespread Internet access is usurping most of the functionality of first class mail (the volume of which is plummeting along a curve similar to that of newspaper revenue) why not cut the delivery schedule in half again, to three times a week, or even twice a week — would anyone care?
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In fact, this could be an opportunity for newspapers, which own a huge single-purpose delivery network themselves, to find ways to actually increase their delivery business by contracting to deliver all manner of periodicals, not just their own.
Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle
What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.
Editing comments does not make you legally liable
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, editing comments does not make a news organization legally liable.
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We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, editing comments does not make a news organization legally liable.
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The only instance in which it is true that a news organization could be held liable for a users comments is if a news organization materially changes a comment to make it libelous.
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The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future
It now seems likely that some newspapers will abandon print, or be forced to. But what might a digital local news operation look like, and what tools and skills will be required?
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We will also likely see some single-publisher towns lose their newspapers. Some of those communities may go newsless, but in others we may see the print edition disappear but re-emerge as a digital news operation with the same brand name.
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Surviving journalists who get the jobs in the reinvented news operation will likely include the most popular columnists and the "star" reporters (those who do the best and most watchdog and investigative journalism, since that will be a key strength of the new news product). Among reporters, it's likely that if more than one person is covering a beat (city hall, the local NFL team, etc.), someone will be cut.
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The three primary roles your local website should play
Steve Yelvington tells us that local newspaper sites should play the town crier, town square and town expert -- and he notes that these roles are "coequal."
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News is not enough. Doing the same thing better and faster is not enough. It's time to look left and right at what's not being done.
When No News Is Bad News
A former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune probes the collapse of the newspaper industry and tries, mostly in vain, to find hope for the future of journalism.
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Add Sticky NoteWithout the local paper, the TV and radio stations would be in difficult shape, despite the good work they often do.
- Newspapers, Warren says, "have been and remain by far the largest source of news coverage and analysis in any city or town." Many of the "news" Web sites, such as the Huffington Post, would be S.O.L. without daily newspapers to fill them with links and ideas. - on 2009-01-26
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Adding to what is essentially an advertising-driven calamity is the reality that though the U.S. population has more than doubled in the past 60 years, absolute newspaper circulation this year will be lower than in 1946.
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An answer to David Carr's question on "how to build an iTunes for newspapers." - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine
Jack Shafer at Slate looks at how one might go about building an iTunes for newspapers.
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What makes the Kindle stink for newspaper publishers is that it's designed to turn their customers into Amazon customers just as the iTunes store was designed to turn the music labels' customers into Apple customers, and did.
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If it had more PC-like features, you'd start comparing it with the technology of a PC, where it loses, rather than the technology of a book, where it offers a light upgrade.
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Can This Org Chart Save Newspapers?
Ten years ago, dot-com divisions within newspapers fought for independence. These days, they are finding that their hard-won separation was only temporary. In several prominent newspaper organizations, print and online are reuniting.
How we'll save the news business, a la carte
Justin McLachlan thinks David Carr's iTunes for news idea is a good one. Such an idea might just be enough to get people to pay for news again.
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I might give you a nickel or a dime or a quarter to read that one article I'm interested in. I might do it more than once a week.
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