Journalism versus “the other stuff”
The small daily Post Register of Idaho Falls, Idaho is not USA Today, and its editor Roger Plothow is not a famous media commentator, but he’s just written an inspiring little defense of the purpose of journalism from a principles perspective. It’s a nice relief from arguments about journalism’s role so often couched in terms of politics, technology, economics, specialized training, and even education.
An excerpt:
In a way, journalism can best be defined by what it’s not. It’s not a shouting match. It’s not just holding out a microphone. It’s not even just who, what, when, where, why and how. It’s the work of committed people who actually believe that what they do is important.
NY Times to staff: watch those anonymous sources
From Gawker.com: the New York Times’ standards editor, Phil Corbett, has issued a memorandum reminding writers to beware “boilerplate” explanations or no explanations at all when using unnamed sources. Corbett suggests that reporters include a “thoughtful sentence or paragraph” to illuminate the pressures leading to anonymous sourcing, and he lists sample explanations:
- “out of fear for his safety.”
- “out of fear of retaliation from X.”
- “because parties to the negotiations had promised to keep them confidential.”
- “because the company has threatened to fire workers who speak to the press.”
- “because Politician X insists that his aides not speak to reporters.”
- “to avoid antagonizing Official X.”
- “because disclosing grand jury testimony can be illegal.”
And how did Gawker get this memo, by the way? An unnamed source, of course.
Handwriting already on the paywall?
Not that this is news to us, but it turns out the paywall dream may far fall short of what at least some not entirely obscure publishers hoped. According to a new report from the hardline, no-punches-pulled British telecommunications consultants Enders Analysis, paywalls will never be able to compensate for the death by a thousand bites that newspaper revenue streams continue to suffer:
… A newspaper pay wall subscriber is worth only a quarter to a third of a print buyer: even if every single print buyer is successfully converted to the pay wall, newspapers will still face a basic problem of scale. … Pay walls will not be able to compensate for lower revenue per reader by expanding the audience for paid news, due to the long term decline of circulation, free online news, 24-hour broadcast news and free-sheets. … Future change will be radical: publishers may need to consider producing a newspaper its loyal readers recognise and value with just 200 rather than 500 journalists …
At the same time, News Corporation/News International magnate Rupert Murdoch seems to be standing firm in his dedication to the paywalls recently erected around his English flagship broadsheets, the Times and Sunday Times, despite a raft of really bad news. Says the Independent:
Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”
He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”
So, Murdoch’s looking uncharacteristically willing to invest significant resources into a (so far, apparently) failing venture. Is this sheer entrepreneurial hubris, an unwillingness to admit a bad move? I doubt it. My guess is that the revenues and stature lost at the Times Online simply don’t add up to enough for Murdoch to pull the plug on the experiment. Time and page visits will tell.
Still the Newspaper Division?
Here are the links to this summer’s discussion of the Newspaper Division’s name, both in comments on Bill Cassidy’s call for discussion and the e-mail listserv conversation on the same topic — discussion from July and continuing discussion post-conference in August.
To add anything to the blog comments, Register, login, then click the blog’s title and follow this link back to the original discussion.
Its Speak Your Mind box is at the end of the earlier comments, or click a blue “Reply” tag to respond to a specific comment.
Additional notes from Bill appear in the Summer 2010 LeadTime. Links to the 2008 e-mail discussion of the same subject are at the end of the comment list.
For the stay-at-homes and back-at-homes
updated Aug. 9 and 11
This is a page-in-progress of links related to the AEJMC 2010 convention in Denver…
Here’s the Twitter hashtag link for the convention, where there was a whole lot of Tweeting going on…:
https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23AEJMC10
And, more specifically related to newspapers, here’s J-Lab’s video of the “Networked Journalism” luncheon:
“Five news organizations around the country are participating in a yearlong pilot project, funded by J-Lab, to see if they can collaborate with at least five hyperlocal sites in each of their communities. They are the Seattle Times, Charlotte Observer, MiamiHerald, Asheville Citizen-Times and TucsonCitizen.com. “
If the embedded video player doesn’t work for you — it may have to load for 15 seconds or more — one or more of these links will get you to the information…
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8755484
Conference News Site
Aug. 9 update
The address looks similar to the one for this blog, but http://aejmcnews.net is a news site for proceedings at the conference, staffed by students at four Colorado universities.
Newspaper division readers may be most interested in this item about a Friday panel, written by Amanda Keller, a Colorado State senior…
Strong local news coverage & community connections keep small papers healthy.
(The text-formatting problems mentioned in the original version of this post have been fixed.)
Aug. 11 update
Vin Crosbie, whose blog post about AEJMC and research I linked to last week, has an Aug. 8 follow-up ‘Regarding Academic Research and Fatuous Reporting About Trouble Media Industries’.
Meanwhile, the discussion of his original Aug. 2 post now includes additional comments from folks with significant experience in the newspaper and online newspaper industries.
Any more to share with Newspaper Division members? Add a comment here or send me e-mail and I’ll add it to the blog.
Needed: Industrial-Weight Academic Research?
Member of a newspaper family, online media consultant and Syracuse faculty member Vin Crosbie isn’t at AEJMC’s Denver conference this week for a variety of reasons…
Those who are filling in time at the convention browsing the Web will find food for thought in his item, The Media Academic Research Treadmill at Digital Deliverance, recalling newspaper industry exec Earl Wilkinson‘s visits to AEJMC six or seven years ago.
Vin’s item has drawn a few interesting comments on the relative merits of “industry research” and “academic research.”
Further food for thought: I remember posting some of Wilkinson’s materials back then on the original AEJMC Newspaper Division site, where they’re still available under the heading “Research Material”:
http://aejmc.net/newspaper/resources.html
The INMA list of AEJMC research Wilkinson DID find promising is no longer on the INMA.org site at the address we linked to back then, but I did find a copy by using the Archive.org Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030920053327/http://www.inma.org/academicpapers.cfm
From the Newspaper Division’s own Web archives, here are the 2003 documents Wilkinson shared with us:
- Newspapers and Academic Research INMA letter to the Newspaper Division head, Clyde Bentley.
- Results of a research-interests survey of newspaper industry executives (17 pages including 139 comments)
That same year, the Newspaper Division surveyed its members on the question of research interests. Here are quantitative results and Full-text answers
Maybe it’s time for a fresh try at that member survey… It might help with the “What should we call the division?” discussion that has been going on for the past month.
Personal disclosure: My own newspaper-related research is mostly historical, which I have to admit doesn’t do “the industry” much good, except by pointing out that innovation coupled with ethical lapses has sometimes looked good for business, but failed in the long run.
Footnote: For more on current research, check out that same Clyde Bentley’s posts at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, University of Missouri, a regular research roundup.
The latest bad news
From USC Annenberg via Editor & Publisher:
Study: Newspapers Sink Below Internet and TV as Information Sources
“Newspapers continue to be seen as less important at their primary job — being sources of information – according to the latest edition of the nine-year-old Digital Future Project from the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.
“The study found that just 56% Internet users ranked newspapers as important or very important sources of information for them, down from 60% in 2008 — and below the Internet (78%) and television (68%).
“And while newspapers also regard themselves as being in the entertainment business, just 29% of users consider them as important sources of entertainment, down from 32% two years ago, and last among principal media.”
Gannett Tries Pay Walls at Three Papers
Eagle-eyed Doug Fisher at South Carolina spied “a low-key announcement buried in the business briefs of my local (McClatchy) paper” announcing the coming of pay-per-view to Gannett’s Greenville News, one of three papers the chain is taking to pay-per-view on the Web. See his commentary.
Pay Walls Debut at Three Gannett Papers Testing ‘Journalism as a Service’ is the headline on Poynter Online’s NewsPay column by Bill Mitchell.
Included are The Tallahassee Democrat, The Greenville S.C. News and The St. George, Utah Spectrum.
Mitchell notes that Gannett called this "a small-scale test."
Gannett publishes 82 daily U.S. newspapers, including USA TODAY, the nation’s largest-selling daily newspaper, and more than 600 magazines and other non-dailies including USA WEEKEND. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in 19 U.S. markets.–Corp.HQ
At http://tallahassee.com, for an example of the pay system, the Web front page headlines and summaries are still visible, but clicking through to read a full local story results in a table of pay rates.
Original Tallahassee.com stories require one of several subscription plans or a $2 day pass. Options include a $9.95 monthly Web-only subscription or various Web/Print combinations.
Still free are stories from USA Today and other sources woven into the site, such as those under the heading “From our news network” on the “Topic: Oil Spill” pages.
It probably goes without saying that the local business directories and ads are still free, too.
What’s a ‘newspaper’ when random Twitter feeds build the contents?
(This item was originally misleadingly headlined, “What’s a ‘newspaper,’ division?”
The Newspaper Division name-change discussion is elsewhere. )
So does “a newspaper” now mean any page of glowing bits that has frequently changed information organized into sections, with headlines and short summaries linked to more detail?
That appears to be the definition over at Paper.li, whose motto is “read a Twitter stream as a daily newspaper.”
So today I “founded” two newspapers. All I had to do was login using my Twitter I.D. (“bobstep”) and type the feed names into a box.
Well, maybe I just “found,” not “founded,” the first one. I went through the Paper.li form to create it, but it may have been there already.
In both cases, the page is built of headlines and summaries from the Twitter feeds subscribed to by the owner of a feed — “AEJMC” for the first one, and “BobStep” for the second.
This may be important: Note that the contents of our “newspapers” aren’t items that the group or person named on top wrote — or even read; they are just the latest Twitterings from sources we thought might have something interesting to say once in a while. Perhaps we haven’t been watching closely enough to see that they really don’t. Nothing like running their stuff under your name to make you sit up and take notice.
Selections from the owners’ own posts are in a sidebar off to the right of those screen images, where the feed owner is called “curator” of the page.
Anyhow, if those are “newspapers” then the name "Newspaper Division" is broader than some of us thought!
Meanwhile, I can’t help wondering what The New York Times thinks about having a page at paper.li headed “The New York Times Daily” with “as shared by nytimes + 199 followed people on Twitter” in smaller type beneath.
More on this over on my personal blog.
Newspapers ‘strange survival’ in Economist
“Newspapers have escaped cataclysm by becoming leaner and more focused” according to The Economist‘s Newspapers: The strange survival of ink, a story rich in European examples.
But even in the U.S., it says, “some companies are now worth ten times as much as in the spring of 2009, although they remain far from pre-recession heights.”
(See the article for some interesting details on McClatchy and Gannett, including a report that more Gannett papers using USA Today material.)
“The survival of newspapers is by no means guaranteed,” the article concludes, after discussing business strategies that involve iPads and smartphones, more local news and sports, etc. Emphasis added below:
“They still face big structural obstacles: it remains unclear, for example, whether the young will pay for news in any form. But the recession brought out an impressive and unexpected ability to adapt. If newspapers can keep that up in better times, they may be able to contemplate more than mere survival.”
