More on the downturn in the fortunes of the newspaper industry and what, if anything, can be done to reverse it.
Newsrooms must get active to survive the economic meltdown
By Robert Niles
The financial trouble throughout the industry is leading many to consider a future without newspapers. Or, at least, without newspapers as we now know them. LA Observed's T.J. Sullivan asked: "Ever wonder what the world would have been like if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein hadn't uncovered Watergate? I fear we'll learn the answer in the next couple decades."
With all due respect to T.J., I fear that we already know the answer. Because we've been living in that world for the past 10 years already, a time when traditional journalists failed to uncover emerging scandals and to warn the public about abuses of power at the highest levels of government and industry. MORE
When A Newspaper Stops Publishing In Print, What Happens To The Print Advertising Dollars?
by Scott Karp
With all the debate over the future of newspapers, here’s a question I haven’t heard anybody ask (much less answer): If a metropolitan newspaper suddenly ceased to publish, leaving the city with no newspaper, what would happen to all of that newspaper’s ad dollars? MORE
French publishers vs Google: ‘You are becoming our worst enemy’
December 16th, 2008
Posted by Laura Oliver
The headline quote comes from a round-up up by Eric Scherer of a meeting involving French newspaper and magazine publishers and Google. The meeting suggests some heavy anti-Google feeling on the publishers’ part. MORE
The Fundamental Problem of Newspapers on the Internet
Robert Ivan December 08, 2008
I introduce you to the fundamental problem of newspapers on the internet: The Krugman Paradox - named by me after watching PetMeds.com (PETS) ads appear next to Paul Krugman for three days after it was announced he won a Nobel Prize.
I couldn't believe there wasn't a better way to monetize his presence on NYTimes.com (NYT). Further investigation revealed that the Krugman problem was not unique.
Here goes. MORE
Glimmers of hope for journalists in a grim world of redundancies
Andrew Keen
In the holiday spirit, two glimmers of new media hope for print journalists depressed by the drip-drip of redundancies, cuts and falling readership. MORE
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Microsoft exec on solutions to cuts in newspapers
An interesting read - it is a strong attack on Google, but does raise some good points on how the media industry can save itself from oblivion:
Microsoft exec maps out online strategy for media
Interesting speech on the online future of media by the Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy at Microsoft on a day when the Associated Press became the latest US media organization to announce job cuts.
Thomas C. Rubin: UK Association of Online Publishers
Prepared Remarks by Thomas C. Rubin, Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
“The Change We Need”
UK Association of Online Publishers
London, England
Nov. 20, 2008
TOM RUBIN: Thank you for that kind introduction, and thank you for inviting me to speak at this important conference focused on creating vibrant business models for publishers online.
It was a sad day last month when we read that after 100 years the Christian Science Monitor will cease print publication next April. The Monitor is an esteemed newspaper with particularly distinguished international coverage. It was the first American newspaper to get a reporter behind the lines with the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan in 1979. And during its long history, it has nurtured generations of young foreign correspondents, including Jill Carroll, who you may remember was held hostage in Iraq. MORE
Microsoft exec maps out online strategy for media
Interesting speech on the online future of media by the Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy at Microsoft on a day when the Associated Press became the latest US media organization to announce job cuts.
Thomas C. Rubin: UK Association of Online Publishers
Prepared Remarks by Thomas C. Rubin, Chief Counsel for Intellectual Property Strategy, Microsoft Corp.
“The Change We Need”
UK Association of Online Publishers
London, England
Nov. 20, 2008
TOM RUBIN: Thank you for that kind introduction, and thank you for inviting me to speak at this important conference focused on creating vibrant business models for publishers online.
It was a sad day last month when we read that after 100 years the Christian Science Monitor will cease print publication next April. The Monitor is an esteemed newspaper with particularly distinguished international coverage. It was the first American newspaper to get a reporter behind the lines with the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan in 1979. And during its long history, it has nurtured generations of young foreign correspondents, including Jill Carroll, who you may remember was held hostage in Iraq. MORE
Associated Press to 'cut 10 per cent of staff'
More cuts, now from the wires. Will Reuters, AFP, Bloomberg be next?
Monday, September 22, 2008
Market goes down, news sites go up
An article on the growth of online news sites that are linked to newspapers, rather than wire agencies, and how they have proved their worth during the current financial crisis.
Online news sites lead the battle for eyeballs
Scott Murdoch | September 22, 2008
The Australian
THE days of financial market traders glued to the screen monitoring wire news feeds could be lessening, with the growth of global online news sites. MORE
Online news sites lead the battle for eyeballs
Scott Murdoch | September 22, 2008
The Australian
THE days of financial market traders glued to the screen monitoring wire news feeds could be lessening, with the growth of global online news sites. MORE
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Tribune journos fight back
Reporters From Paper Suing Chief of Tribune
and a media agency head writes about where journalists should turn to for their next pay check:
Future of journalism may be in private companies
and a media agency head writes about where journalists should turn to for their next pay check:
Future of journalism may be in private companies
Saturday, September 6, 2008
'A problem for the democratic functioning of society'
More editorials and opinion pieces about the changing nature of journalism. The two here focus on the structural problems being faced by the industry as a whole. Can they be overcome? Has the industry past a turning point where there's no turning back?
The winter of journalism's content
THE AUSTRALIAN
David McKnight and Penny O'Donnell | September 03, 2008
NEWSPAPERS in Australia and the world face difficult choices in the next decade. The dilemma can be expressed in a simple question: who will pay for quality journalism in the future? Until now the answer has been obvious. Advertising has subsidised journalism since the mass market press emerged at the end of the 19th century.
But the much-despised advertising is on the move. It's heading for the internet and with it is going one of the main props for journalists' salaries. In the language of economists, the business model for journalism is collapsing. But this is more than a problem for journalists or media owners; it is a problem for the democratic functioning of society.
Techno-optimists will tell you that the dinosaur newspaper industry simply will be replaced. The public will be informed by news on the internet, television and radio.
There are at least three problems with this bright forecast. First, newspapers are by far the main source of news as well as agenda setters compared with radio, TV and online, according to research for the Australian Broadcasting Authority in 2001 (now the Australian Communications and Media Authority). MORE
Loss of deepest diggers
Mark Day Blog | September 04, 2008 | 15 Comments
THE ructions at Fairfax Media have succeeded in putting the future of newspapers and journalism front and centre of debate about future trends in media. Commentary has focused mainly on Fairfax’s policies, its financial modelling and the perception that publishing is a business on a slippery slope.
Precious little has been said about how the industry’s structural problems may be overcome. Will it be by slashing and burning, reducing costs by sacking people in a spiralling game with no end? Or will it be by investing in new ways of doing things in the hope or expectation that they will deliver the profits required to grow?
Fairfax, driven by the cost-cutting experts it inherited from last year’s merger with Rural Press, has opted for the slash and burn model. Of the 550 people earmarked for the sack, about 180 will be journalists, with an expected 120 to go from the company’s flagship titles The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Fairfax is not alone in going down this route. The big US papers, led by The New York Times, have been leading the way in recent years. MORE
The winter of journalism's content
THE AUSTRALIAN
David McKnight and Penny O'Donnell | September 03, 2008
NEWSPAPERS in Australia and the world face difficult choices in the next decade. The dilemma can be expressed in a simple question: who will pay for quality journalism in the future? Until now the answer has been obvious. Advertising has subsidised journalism since the mass market press emerged at the end of the 19th century.
But the much-despised advertising is on the move. It's heading for the internet and with it is going one of the main props for journalists' salaries. In the language of economists, the business model for journalism is collapsing. But this is more than a problem for journalists or media owners; it is a problem for the democratic functioning of society.
Techno-optimists will tell you that the dinosaur newspaper industry simply will be replaced. The public will be informed by news on the internet, television and radio.
There are at least three problems with this bright forecast. First, newspapers are by far the main source of news as well as agenda setters compared with radio, TV and online, according to research for the Australian Broadcasting Authority in 2001 (now the Australian Communications and Media Authority). MORE
Loss of deepest diggers
Mark Day Blog | September 04, 2008 | 15 Comments
THE ructions at Fairfax Media have succeeded in putting the future of newspapers and journalism front and centre of debate about future trends in media. Commentary has focused mainly on Fairfax’s policies, its financial modelling and the perception that publishing is a business on a slippery slope.
Precious little has been said about how the industry’s structural problems may be overcome. Will it be by slashing and burning, reducing costs by sacking people in a spiralling game with no end? Or will it be by investing in new ways of doing things in the hope or expectation that they will deliver the profits required to grow?
Fairfax, driven by the cost-cutting experts it inherited from last year’s merger with Rural Press, has opted for the slash and burn model. Of the 550 people earmarked for the sack, about 180 will be journalists, with an expected 120 to go from the company’s flagship titles The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Fairfax is not alone in going down this route. The big US papers, led by The New York Times, have been leading the way in recent years. MORE
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
ABC's take on the media crisis in Australia
Here are two Australian Broadcasting Corporation stories on the current Fairfax Media cuts and the general decline of the media industry.
1. 7.30 Report
Media industry in crisis as standards decline: Davies
Kerry O’Brien speaks with investigative journalist and author Nick Davies about his new book, Flat Earth News. Davies argues that journalistic standards are declining the world over as cost cutting and government pressures take toll on the industry.
Read transcript.
Watch video of extended interview.
2. Media Watch
Trouble at Fairfax
The rise of the internet and a slowing economy has led to the announcement by Fairfax that it will cut 5% of its workforce in Australia and New Zealand. Will these cuts come at the expense of journalism?
Read transcript.
Watch video.
1. 7.30 Report
Media industry in crisis as standards decline: Davies
Kerry O’Brien speaks with investigative journalist and author Nick Davies about his new book, Flat Earth News. Davies argues that journalistic standards are declining the world over as cost cutting and government pressures take toll on the industry.
Read transcript.
Watch video of extended interview.
2. Media Watch
Trouble at Fairfax
The rise of the internet and a slowing economy has led to the announcement by Fairfax that it will cut 5% of its workforce in Australia and New Zealand. Will these cuts come at the expense of journalism?
Read transcript.
Watch video.
Monday, September 1, 2008
The digital side of Fairfax
Fairfax Digital is growing while Fairfax Media is being cut - that's the latest news coming out of the Australian media company. But how effective are the advertising and profit models at the moment. Can the company evolve into a digital information company?
Bright future for Fairfax Media digital division
Michael Sainsbury | September 01, 2008
FAIRFAX Media's booming digital division -- which provided the only bright spot in disappointing recent financials -- is gearing up to grab a slice of $3.3 billion in television advertising as the Australian internet industry moves towards a cohesive audience measurement system.
The Fairfax digital division, which will escape the axe-wielding announced at its Australian and New Zealand broadsheets, boosted profits by more than 50 per cent in Australia and New Zealand and is adding more staff to its existing 600.
In the days after Fairfax's main newspaper group announced staff cuts of 550 people, or 5 per cent of the workforce, Fairfax Digital chief Jack Matthews said the division had added about 100 people in the 2008 financial year.
Mr Matthews said staff growth would continue next year, although not at such a fast rate, and the group could pick up people who had lost their jobs in the newspaper division.
"We are operating in a very different environment but the same kind of pressures to be efficient and cost-effective exist here," Mr Matthews said.
"It's not like we have a blank chequebook. One difference is that our industry and our market are still high-growth areas and we need to invest in that growth.
"Even though revenue growth slowed a bit in the second half, year on year, the bottom line increased in the second half." MORE
Bright future for Fairfax Media digital division
Michael Sainsbury | September 01, 2008
FAIRFAX Media's booming digital division -- which provided the only bright spot in disappointing recent financials -- is gearing up to grab a slice of $3.3 billion in television advertising as the Australian internet industry moves towards a cohesive audience measurement system.
The Fairfax digital division, which will escape the axe-wielding announced at its Australian and New Zealand broadsheets, boosted profits by more than 50 per cent in Australia and New Zealand and is adding more staff to its existing 600.
In the days after Fairfax's main newspaper group announced staff cuts of 550 people, or 5 per cent of the workforce, Fairfax Digital chief Jack Matthews said the division had added about 100 people in the 2008 financial year.
Mr Matthews said staff growth would continue next year, although not at such a fast rate, and the group could pick up people who had lost their jobs in the newspaper division.
"We are operating in a very different environment but the same kind of pressures to be efficient and cost-effective exist here," Mr Matthews said.
"It's not like we have a blank chequebook. One difference is that our industry and our market are still high-growth areas and we need to invest in that growth.
"Even though revenue growth slowed a bit in the second half, year on year, the bottom line increased in the second half." MORE
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Are journalists just 'content providers for advertising platforms'?
First, the latest news, Australia's federal workplace minister expresses concerns about the strike:
(AAP) Fairfax strike of concern: Gillard
FEDERAL Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says she is concerned about the industrial dispute affecting Fairfax daily newspapers and wants quality and diversity to be maintained in the media.
Journalists from Fairfax are on strike because of management plans to axe 550 jobs.
Ms Gillard told Network Ten today she was "concerned'' by the developments.
"I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market.''
The deputy prime minister called on both parties to talk.
"There's never been an industrial dispute in this country that wasn't solved by talking.
"I think when we look at the Fairfax dispute we need to remember that rule.''
And more editorial in support of The Sydney Morning Herald, this time from its rival paper The Daily Telegraph.
The Fairfax job cuts and the dragging down of an icon
Silver Surfer
Saturday, August 30, 2008 at 09:13pm
The shenanigans of the past week at Fairfax, publishers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald where journos, artists and photographers are on strike over plans for mass sackings, are another example of a big company putting its profits before people, but in this case we’re not just talking about its staff. There’s the loyal core of readers to consider in this as well, and it’s a key issue here because media companies really are a different kind of animal. Be that as it may, it’s still a classic case of the old muddle-headed, knee-jerk reverse thinking that too often seems to provide a quick and easy answer to the executives of corporate Australia, who appear to the average punter more interested in saving their own bonuses and delivering dividends to shareholders than doing the right thing in the first place by their customers, staff and clients.
There’s no doubt here they’ve run out of ideas; advertising revenues are down, no one’s buying the product – at least not in the numbers required to make them highly profitable operations, and readership has been on a steady decline – and so the only answer they can come up with is to make the situation worse by giving everyone the flick. Smart move. The so-called rivers of gold once provided by Fairfax’s classified advertising obviously aren’t translating to a challenging, new era in media brought about by the digital explosion, and even before last week’s announcement, staff numbers had been pared back.
One of the worst things about these kinds of disputes (at any company) is that invariably, the axe falls on the people who are working their guts out to put out a decent product, not the people who’ve either run them into the ground in the first place or who are more interested in stripping them down to increase returns. The staff at Fairfax now face a kind of nail-biting reverse lottery with 550 job cuts on the cards and too many will be wondering in the coming weeks whether they can still pay their mortgages. It won’t be an issue for the executives, though - they’ll still be pocketing the big paypackets and carrying on as usual. For now, anyway. MORE
(AAP) Fairfax strike of concern: Gillard
FEDERAL Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says she is concerned about the industrial dispute affecting Fairfax daily newspapers and wants quality and diversity to be maintained in the media.
Journalists from Fairfax are on strike because of management plans to axe 550 jobs.
Ms Gillard told Network Ten today she was "concerned'' by the developments.
"I am someone who is concerned about the quality and diversity of our media market.''
The deputy prime minister called on both parties to talk.
"There's never been an industrial dispute in this country that wasn't solved by talking.
"I think when we look at the Fairfax dispute we need to remember that rule.''
And more editorial in support of The Sydney Morning Herald, this time from its rival paper The Daily Telegraph.
The Fairfax job cuts and the dragging down of an icon
Silver Surfer
Saturday, August 30, 2008 at 09:13pm
The shenanigans of the past week at Fairfax, publishers of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald where journos, artists and photographers are on strike over plans for mass sackings, are another example of a big company putting its profits before people, but in this case we’re not just talking about its staff. There’s the loyal core of readers to consider in this as well, and it’s a key issue here because media companies really are a different kind of animal. Be that as it may, it’s still a classic case of the old muddle-headed, knee-jerk reverse thinking that too often seems to provide a quick and easy answer to the executives of corporate Australia, who appear to the average punter more interested in saving their own bonuses and delivering dividends to shareholders than doing the right thing in the first place by their customers, staff and clients.
There’s no doubt here they’ve run out of ideas; advertising revenues are down, no one’s buying the product – at least not in the numbers required to make them highly profitable operations, and readership has been on a steady decline – and so the only answer they can come up with is to make the situation worse by giving everyone the flick. Smart move. The so-called rivers of gold once provided by Fairfax’s classified advertising obviously aren’t translating to a challenging, new era in media brought about by the digital explosion, and even before last week’s announcement, staff numbers had been pared back.
One of the worst things about these kinds of disputes (at any company) is that invariably, the axe falls on the people who are working their guts out to put out a decent product, not the people who’ve either run them into the ground in the first place or who are more interested in stripping them down to increase returns. The staff at Fairfax now face a kind of nail-biting reverse lottery with 550 job cuts on the cards and too many will be wondering in the coming weeks whether they can still pay their mortgages. It won’t be an issue for the executives, though - they’ll still be pocketing the big paypackets and carrying on as usual. For now, anyway. MORE
Quality v quantity
With the impending Fairfax cuts in Australia comes more opinion pieces about the future of journalism. This one from Jack Waterford in The Canberra Times is one of the better ones I have read.
I like what he writes right at the end:
"The real test of it all is not with newspaper bottom lines. It is with circulation and readership, bearing in mind that the core readership is of baby boomer age or of the generation above it. By no means does it follow that younger journalists will have lower standards. Or that the simultaneous renewed focus on ''new media'' means that proprietors have given newspapers away. But if 50-year-olds are not comfortable with being informed, or hectored, by 25-year-olds, it is likely the demise of the newspaper will be quicker."
The real threat to newspapers comes from quality not quantity
BY JACK WATERFORD
30/08/2008 10:14:00 AM
The big challenge for any professional journalist, particularly in a city such as Canberra, is that a good proportion of readers probably more than 30 per cent here know more about your subject than you do.
They know the subject because it is their job to know it. That job, perhaps in the public service, or business, or academia, gives them access to a lot of other information, including most of our sources of raw information. If the subject is within their field of interest, they may well have already skimmed the latest information upon it even before they pick up this newspaper, or another one. MORE
I like what he writes right at the end:
"The real test of it all is not with newspaper bottom lines. It is with circulation and readership, bearing in mind that the core readership is of baby boomer age or of the generation above it. By no means does it follow that younger journalists will have lower standards. Or that the simultaneous renewed focus on ''new media'' means that proprietors have given newspapers away. But if 50-year-olds are not comfortable with being informed, or hectored, by 25-year-olds, it is likely the demise of the newspaper will be quicker."
The real threat to newspapers comes from quality not quantity
BY JACK WATERFORD
30/08/2008 10:14:00 AM
The big challenge for any professional journalist, particularly in a city such as Canberra, is that a good proportion of readers probably more than 30 per cent here know more about your subject than you do.
They know the subject because it is their job to know it. That job, perhaps in the public service, or business, or academia, gives them access to a lot of other information, including most of our sources of raw information. If the subject is within their field of interest, they may well have already skimmed the latest information upon it even before they pick up this newspaper, or another one. MORE
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Cuts in Australian media
It seems, not surprisingly, that the move to pear down newspaper staff is spreading from the US and UK to smaller markets like Australia.
Fairfax media is commencing a major restructuring program of the mastheads in its stable in Australia and New Zealand, including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Is it the management's only option - in a climate of declining profit margins - to cut staff and downsize the editorial process? I would venture to say that yes, a restructuring may be necessary, to prime the company towards new media and importantly, other platforms, but that there should be a move towards specialist journalism, eg. more high-end analysis type articles for a market that is willing to pay, rather than towards more general reporting and lifetyle-type features. I think it's important to note that general news and entertainment/lifestyle stories can be eaily obtained from other sources on the internet, mobile, cable TV etc and people will not buy the paper for such news.
On the other hand, more exclusive stories and analysis pieces geared towards an Australian market could possibly give media companies like Fairfax a future. Examples like the success of The Economist are encouraging.
But this might also be a simple case of the demise of the daily broadsheet as a source of general news, local, state, national and international. Who knows - the market might become much more fractured, and people will choose to get information from a wider variety of sources. eg. their mobile phone for breaking news, their e-paper or iphone/PDA for longer stories, their computer at work for photos, multimedia and other feature stories, and the news in the evening on telly for a round-up of the day's news. Once a week, they'll read The Guardian Weekly, National Geographic Magazine or The Economist for a in-depth feature.
As it is, a majority of my peers (in the 18-30 age category) do not buy newspapers. They do read news websites that have articles/images/multimedia for free. They listen to commercial radio and television news, and sometimes watch documentaries on SBS, ABC and on cable television channels like the Discovery network. And some still read the weekend newspapers that have more analysis and feature articles.
I don't deny that I will miss the daily broadsheet. To me, it's like books, having a physical product has a certain attraction. But I myself am more of a news consumer online, on cable news channels like BBC and CNN, and of radio podcasts and television current affairs programs. And I'm a very heavy consumer - most people out that don't care if a newspaper collapses or a journalist loses their job.
So if a media company like Fairfax, which also owns websites like rsvp.com.au, domain.com.au and trademe.co.nz, evolves to become an information company and not a newspaper or news driven company, don't be surprised.
The journalists' union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has set up a Fair Go, Fairfax website and a facebook group, which currently has more than 1000 members.
Articles about Fairfax's cuts:
Fairfax Media legal unit also gets chopped in job axings
Citizen McCarthy swings Fairfax axe
Fairfax newspaper production to be outsourced
Strike paper on Friday, August 29:
Video of Fairfax campaign:
Fairfax media is commencing a major restructuring program of the mastheads in its stable in Australia and New Zealand, including The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Is it the management's only option - in a climate of declining profit margins - to cut staff and downsize the editorial process? I would venture to say that yes, a restructuring may be necessary, to prime the company towards new media and importantly, other platforms, but that there should be a move towards specialist journalism, eg. more high-end analysis type articles for a market that is willing to pay, rather than towards more general reporting and lifetyle-type features. I think it's important to note that general news and entertainment/lifestyle stories can be eaily obtained from other sources on the internet, mobile, cable TV etc and people will not buy the paper for such news.
On the other hand, more exclusive stories and analysis pieces geared towards an Australian market could possibly give media companies like Fairfax a future. Examples like the success of The Economist are encouraging.
But this might also be a simple case of the demise of the daily broadsheet as a source of general news, local, state, national and international. Who knows - the market might become much more fractured, and people will choose to get information from a wider variety of sources. eg. their mobile phone for breaking news, their e-paper or iphone/PDA for longer stories, their computer at work for photos, multimedia and other feature stories, and the news in the evening on telly for a round-up of the day's news. Once a week, they'll read The Guardian Weekly, National Geographic Magazine or The Economist for a in-depth feature.
As it is, a majority of my peers (in the 18-30 age category) do not buy newspapers. They do read news websites that have articles/images/multimedia for free. They listen to commercial radio and television news, and sometimes watch documentaries on SBS, ABC and on cable television channels like the Discovery network. And some still read the weekend newspapers that have more analysis and feature articles.
I don't deny that I will miss the daily broadsheet. To me, it's like books, having a physical product has a certain attraction. But I myself am more of a news consumer online, on cable news channels like BBC and CNN, and of radio podcasts and television current affairs programs. And I'm a very heavy consumer - most people out that don't care if a newspaper collapses or a journalist loses their job.
So if a media company like Fairfax, which also owns websites like rsvp.com.au, domain.com.au and trademe.co.nz, evolves to become an information company and not a newspaper or news driven company, don't be surprised.
The journalists' union Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has set up a Fair Go, Fairfax website and a facebook group, which currently has more than 1000 members.
Articles about Fairfax's cuts:
Fairfax Media legal unit also gets chopped in job axings
Citizen McCarthy swings Fairfax axe
Fairfax newspaper production to be outsourced
Strike paper on Friday, August 29:
Video of Fairfax campaign:
Friday, August 22, 2008
What's next after your broadsheet's gone?
I like this blog post that looks at what happens after a daily paper shuts down in the US. Basically, no one will miss it, because the rest of the media ecosystem will pick up on what it was doing. What's good are the replies to the blog, some of which I'll quote a little here:
"Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.
If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?
Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?
I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it."
and another:
"The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures"
another:
"People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.
Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times."
"Your thought experiment assumes that with the Bugle out of the equation, the rest of the media food chain will pick up the slack. That's where I believe you're being optimistic. Because in the real world, none of those models are making enough money to pay for significant content gathering. The absolute pinnacles of the online model are places like TPM -- tiny staff, many unpaid interns, minimal (though often quite good) content creation; and the HuffPost, paid staff one, content creation minimal.
If those entities, which are widely seen as the best the online world has produced as a business model, can't pay for significant -- particularly local -- content creation, why do you assume the Whoville Daily Trumpet will do any better?
Newspapers on average make abut 7 percent of their revenue from their online product; if the Trumpet captured all of that revenue (unlikely), it could pay for 7 percent of the Bugle's staff. Do you think any major city would be well served by 7 percent of its current newspaper?
I'd love it if you were right; I've been dying to see an online news model appear that thrives financially without taking most of its content from a newspaper. But if there's one out there, I haven't seen it."
and another:
"The layoffs and buyouts have hit newsrooms hard, partly because they are being carried out by managers who want to keep their jobs and think they can still put out newspapers with a dwindled staff. That only results in rewritten press releases, space-filling and mindless whos'-in-who's-out features and skimpy stories with a lot of color pictures"
another:
"People now have other sources and venues for their news. They don't have to read the tainted liberal stories and opinions with so many other available options.
Selling newspapers is not like selling toilet paper. Toilet paper is something that people will always need. People might start buying papers if they started reporting the news the way it happened and not the way the editors and reporters wanted it to happen. In other words, people need toilet paper but they don't need the LA Times."
'Everything's on the table'
Catching up on the latest news ...
FEAR
Some good quotes from this article in the Editor and Publisher.
There's one good reason for the industry's new openness to change — fear, says Drew Davis, president and executive director of the American Press Institute (API): "I have never seen so many senior newspaper executives so depressed and frightened for their future."
"They used to say, 'Tell me who's doing this, and if it's working to increase readership.' Now what they say is, 'Tell me who's doing this — and making money at it.' Everyone wants promises that risks they take will bring in dollars — and, of course, nobody can do that."
"He said, 'We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers' — he meant it in the form of Newspaper Next — 'and we can't even get our hands out of the water to reach them.'
"What we're lacking right now is really philosophical thinking. If this is a seminal crisis, then we have to do some seminal thinking. And it really does have to be radical."
So everything is on the table, anything goes, because everyone's trying to keep afloat, make ends meet (and keep the sceptical shareholders happy).
What's good about this article is that it takes a hard look at the real dire state of the US newspaper industry and how it is struggling to adapt to the cost-cutting and to produce a product with a lot less people.
1. a look at the deep cuts at the Tribune after the change in management
2. suggestions that some days of the week would be dropped (eg. no more Monday papers)
3. getting rid of feature stories on low-circulation days (and maybe even the reporter)
4. there's also cutbacks in marketing, advertising sales and research
5. don't chase non-readers - leave the paper for those who would read it for 25 years or more, and websites for the younger audiences
Another article - this one from Baltimore - looks at how some media companies are turning to niche publications as the way of the future.
FEAR
Some good quotes from this article in the Editor and Publisher.
There's one good reason for the industry's new openness to change — fear, says Drew Davis, president and executive director of the American Press Institute (API): "I have never seen so many senior newspaper executives so depressed and frightened for their future."
"They used to say, 'Tell me who's doing this, and if it's working to increase readership.' Now what they say is, 'Tell me who's doing this — and making money at it.' Everyone wants promises that risks they take will bring in dollars — and, of course, nobody can do that."
"He said, 'We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers' — he meant it in the form of Newspaper Next — 'and we can't even get our hands out of the water to reach them.'
"What we're lacking right now is really philosophical thinking. If this is a seminal crisis, then we have to do some seminal thinking. And it really does have to be radical."
So everything is on the table, anything goes, because everyone's trying to keep afloat, make ends meet (and keep the sceptical shareholders happy).
What's good about this article is that it takes a hard look at the real dire state of the US newspaper industry and how it is struggling to adapt to the cost-cutting and to produce a product with a lot less people.
1. a look at the deep cuts at the Tribune after the change in management
2. suggestions that some days of the week would be dropped (eg. no more Monday papers)
3. getting rid of feature stories on low-circulation days (and maybe even the reporter)
4. there's also cutbacks in marketing, advertising sales and research
5. don't chase non-readers - leave the paper for those who would read it for 25 years or more, and websites for the younger audiences
Another article - this one from Baltimore - looks at how some media companies are turning to niche publications as the way of the future.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
So, back to the future
Playing a bit of catch up on my RSS feeds. So here's a bunch of stuff I've read that might be interesting:
* The changing newsroom: from the Pew Research Centre. It provides a good statistic look at how much things have changed in the US newspaper industry over the past few years.
--eg. that larger papers are much more greater affected by cutbacks than smaller papers, cuts especially in coverage of international news (no surprise there).
--Something one of the editors said that's quoted in the paper is worth mentioning here:
"I hated to make that cut," the editor said. "I read all these things about how
cutting film critics is a good choice because you can get film criticism from other places, but those are the same arguments you hear about foreign coverage, national coverage or state government coverage. Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you’ve done. It’s very troubling."
--Another point that's interesting is that readers don't care too much about the loss of international coverage, or of the science writer, though they are unhappy when their crossword puzzle is cut. Wonder if that will embolden the "toe-cutters".
--I also found this quite interesting: that the cutbacks mean shorter news stories, but that investment continues in investigative journalism. eg. "shorter news stories and richer enterprise".
--And where are the cuts coming from? Here's the bar chart stats:
It seems the cuts are resulting in the loss of the more expensive but also the most experienced and talented journalists. One editor says: "I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not," lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. "I see more stories … that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer."
Here's the intro to the research paper:
Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.
This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally. MORE
* Comment piece from The Economist on the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power. Where are today's intellectual dissident writers?
* An e-reader for newspapers like The Guardian by 2015? And rolled-up too ...
* Five steps to fostering innovation in the newsroom. Not sure how new these ideas are, to be honest, but I guess it's important to keep hammering on these points.
* The wire agency the Associated Press's study on consumption behaviours of young adults, across the United States and the world. Some conclusions were that there was
--more reading of news "above the fold"
--email is very closely linked to news
--constant news checking because of ... boredom!
--way in which people consume news, laptop, TV, all at the same time
--readers WANT depth, especially during breaking news
--consuming news while doing something else, eg. driving
--news fatigue, could explain why Daily Show with Jon Stewart-type shows do well
--people love resolutions to stories (that's why they likes sports and ent)
--packaging is one of the solutions
* The changing newsroom: from the Pew Research Centre. It provides a good statistic look at how much things have changed in the US newspaper industry over the past few years.
--eg. that larger papers are much more greater affected by cutbacks than smaller papers, cuts especially in coverage of international news (no surprise there).
--Something one of the editors said that's quoted in the paper is worth mentioning here:
"I hated to make that cut," the editor said. "I read all these things about how
cutting film critics is a good choice because you can get film criticism from other places, but those are the same arguments you hear about foreign coverage, national coverage or state government coverage. Eventually, you wake up one day and find there is no somewhere else because everyone has done the same thing you’ve done. It’s very troubling."
--Another point that's interesting is that readers don't care too much about the loss of international coverage, or of the science writer, though they are unhappy when their crossword puzzle is cut. Wonder if that will embolden the "toe-cutters".
--I also found this quite interesting: that the cutbacks mean shorter news stories, but that investment continues in investigative journalism. eg. "shorter news stories and richer enterprise".
--And where are the cuts coming from? Here's the bar chart stats:
It seems the cuts are resulting in the loss of the more expensive but also the most experienced and talented journalists. One editor says: "I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not," lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. "I see more stories … that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer."
Here's the intro to the research paper:
Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.
It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.
The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.
Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.
This description is a composite. It is based on face-to-face interviews conducted at newspapers across the country and the results of a detailed survey of senior newsroom executives. In total, more than 250 newspapers participated. It is, we believe, the most systematic effort yet to examine the changing nature of the resources in American newspaper newsrooms at a critical time. It is an attempt to document and quantify cutbacks and innovations that have generally been known only anecdotally. MORE
* Comment piece from The Economist on the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Speaking truth to power. Where are today's intellectual dissident writers?
* An e-reader for newspapers like The Guardian by 2015? And rolled-up too ...
* Five steps to fostering innovation in the newsroom. Not sure how new these ideas are, to be honest, but I guess it's important to keep hammering on these points.
* The wire agency the Associated Press's study on consumption behaviours of young adults, across the United States and the world. Some conclusions were that there was
--more reading of news "above the fold"
--email is very closely linked to news
--constant news checking because of ... boredom!
--way in which people consume news, laptop, TV, all at the same time
--readers WANT depth, especially during breaking news
--consuming news while doing something else, eg. driving
--news fatigue, could explain why Daily Show with Jon Stewart-type shows do well
--people love resolutions to stories (that's why they likes sports and ent)
--packaging is one of the solutions
Sydney tackles online media
New setup that I stumbled across on Facebook. First meeting of Media in the Pub is at Surry Hills on August 26. Let's hope it's a useful discussion about the future of journalism in Australia.
I find, personally anyway, that often these types of discussions focus on "oh, all you have online is stuff about Kylie etc" and don't focus on what can actually be done to save jobs. And of course how our industry is changing. Also big questions. But we can't ignore the internet, or change what's happening in the industry right? So why not work on the solutions, alternatives instead?
I find, personally anyway, that often these types of discussions focus on "oh, all you have online is stuff about Kylie etc" and don't focus on what can actually be done to save jobs. And of course how our industry is changing. Also big questions. But we can't ignore the internet, or change what's happening in the industry right? So why not work on the solutions, alternatives instead?
Saturday, July 26, 2008
I reckon we still need those subs, eh?
I've attached David Marsh's comment on the Giles Coren rant. He does put a good point across that subs are more important nowadays in the digital age. What I wonder though is this - he mentions all these people who diss subs, including, might I add, colleagues in his own paper. No surprise there.
The thing is that if the people who hold the purse strings feel the same way, then the cuts are going to happen anyway right, whether or not the quality of the media product deteriotates or not.
What do you think?
Excoriating the coruscating Coren
Giles Coren's blistering rebuke to a hapless Times subeditor actually highlights what a vital role subs still play in the media
If only Giles Coren had given his email to a good subeditor before sending it, he might have got his point across effectively without revealing himself to be arrogant, petulant, pompous and, frankly, the last person you'd want to be stuck in a restaurant with.
As a sub by trade, it pains me to say it, but the foul-mouthed food critic was actually in the right: the hapless Times sub who removed a harmless sounding "a" from the last sentence of his column did subtly change the meaning and remove a joke (although one so obscure that it must be said Coren poses no immediate threat to the writers of, say, Peep Show).
What the email lacks is a sense of proportion. After ranting at length about his knowledge of Yiddish, laboriously explaining the aforementioned joke ("looking for a nosh has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob" – hilarious!), and comparing the sub to "a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance [sic] fresco and thinking jesus [sic] looks shit with a bear so plastering over it", our tortured artist turns his attention to metre: "Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on 'nosh' is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable." This, apparently, is "pre-GCSE scansion" (what kind of advanced academy of linguistics was Coren attending at 15?).
Then comes the eloquent clincher: "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." Well, to be fair, it scans perfectly.
Putting to one side the thought that being a sub at the Times right now must be about as rewarding an occupation as trying to sell Mother's Day cards to a Canoe Wife's sons, I'm struck by the fact that Coren's onanistic outburst is the latest in a series of recent attacks on subeditors. MORE
The thing is that if the people who hold the purse strings feel the same way, then the cuts are going to happen anyway right, whether or not the quality of the media product deteriotates or not.
What do you think?
Excoriating the coruscating Coren
Giles Coren's blistering rebuke to a hapless Times subeditor actually highlights what a vital role subs still play in the media
If only Giles Coren had given his email to a good subeditor before sending it, he might have got his point across effectively without revealing himself to be arrogant, petulant, pompous and, frankly, the last person you'd want to be stuck in a restaurant with.
As a sub by trade, it pains me to say it, but the foul-mouthed food critic was actually in the right: the hapless Times sub who removed a harmless sounding "a" from the last sentence of his column did subtly change the meaning and remove a joke (although one so obscure that it must be said Coren poses no immediate threat to the writers of, say, Peep Show).
What the email lacks is a sense of proportion. After ranting at length about his knowledge of Yiddish, laboriously explaining the aforementioned joke ("looking for a nosh has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob" – hilarious!), and comparing the sub to "a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance [sic] fresco and thinking jesus [sic] looks shit with a bear so plastering over it", our tortured artist turns his attention to metre: "Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on 'nosh' is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable." This, apparently, is "pre-GCSE scansion" (what kind of advanced academy of linguistics was Coren attending at 15?).
Then comes the eloquent clincher: "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." Well, to be fair, it scans perfectly.
Putting to one side the thought that being a sub at the Times right now must be about as rewarding an occupation as trying to sell Mother's Day cards to a Canoe Wife's sons, I'm struck by the fact that Coren's onanistic outburst is the latest in a series of recent attacks on subeditors. MORE
Full text of Giles Coren's rant to Times subs
Absolutely hilarious and a must read, though not for the subs at that time I suppose ...
For all the poor subs getting axed out there. You matter!
Chaps,
I am mightily pissed off. I have addressed this to Owen, Amanda and Ben because I don't know who i am supposed to be pissed off with (i'm assuming owen, but i filed to amanda and ben so it's only fair), and also to Tony, who wasn't here - if he had been I'm guessing it wouldn't have happened.
I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn't going to happen anymore, so I'm really hoping it wasn't you that fucked up my review on saturday.
It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh."
It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."
There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".
Well, you fucking don't.
This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons.
1) 'Nosh', as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German 'naschen'. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, 'nosh', means simply 'food'. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the 'a'. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, 'nosh' means "a session of eating" - in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of 'scoff'. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.
2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?
3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.
It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i've got a review to write this morning and i really don't feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i'm going to have another weekend ruined for me.
I've been writing for The Times for 15 years and i have never asked this before - i have never asked it of anyone i have written for - but I must insist, from now on, that i am sent a proof of every review i do, in pdf format, so i can check it for fuck-ups. and i must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way i can carry on in the job.
And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.
Right,
Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles
For all the poor subs getting axed out there. You matter!
Chaps,
I am mightily pissed off. I have addressed this to Owen, Amanda and Ben because I don't know who i am supposed to be pissed off with (i'm assuming owen, but i filed to amanda and ben so it's only fair), and also to Tony, who wasn't here - if he had been I'm guessing it wouldn't have happened.
I don't really like people tinkering with my copy for the sake of tinkering. I do not enjoy the suggestion that you have a better ear or eye for how I want my words to read than I do. Owen, we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece, and how that wasn't going to happen anymore, so I'm really hoping it wasn't you that fucked up my review on saturday.
It was the final sentence. Final sentences are very, very important. A piece builds to them, they are the little jingle that the reader takes with him into the weekend.
I wrote: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for a nosh."
It appeared as: "I can't think of a nicer place to sit this spring over a glass of rosé and watch the boys and girls in the street outside smiling gaily to each other, and wondering where to go for nosh."
There is no length issue. This is someone thinking "I'll just remove this indefinite article because Coren is an illiterate cunt and i know best".
Well, you fucking don't.
This was shit, shit sub-editing for three reasons.
1) 'Nosh', as I'm sure you fluent Yiddish speakers know, is a noun formed from a bastardisation of the German 'naschen'. It is a verb, and can be construed into two distinct nouns. One, 'nosh', means simply 'food'. You have decided that this is what i meant and removed the 'a'. I am insulted enough that you think you have a better ear for English than me. But a better ear for Yiddish? I doubt it. Because the other noun, 'nosh' means "a session of eating" - in this sense you might think of its dual valency as being similar to that of 'scoff'. you can go for a scoff. or you can buy some scoff. the sentence you left me with is shit, and is not what i meant. Why would you change a sentnece aso that it meant something i didn't mean? I don't know, but you risk doing it every time you change something. And the way you avoid this kind of fuck up is by not changing a word of my copy without asking me, okay? it's easy. Not. A. Word. Ever.
2) I will now explain why your error is even more shit than it looks. You see, i was making a joke. I do that sometimes. I have set up the street as "sexually-charged". I have described the shenanigans across the road at G.A.Y.. I have used the word 'gaily' as a gentle nudge. And "looking for a nosh" has a secondary meaning of looking for a blowjob. Not specifically gay, for this is soho, and there are plenty of girls there who take money for noshing boys. "looking for nosh" does not have that ambiguity. the joke is gone. I only wrote that sodding paragraph to make that joke. And you've fucking stripped it out like a pissed Irish plasterer restoring a renaissance fresco and thinking jesus looks shit with a bear so plastering over it. You might as well have removed the whole paragraph. I mean, fucking christ, don't you read the copy?
3) And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
I am sorry if this looks petty (last time i mailed a Times sub about the change of a single word i got in all sorts of trouble) but i care deeply about my work and i hate to have it fucked up by shit subbing. I have been away, you've been subbing joe and hugo and maybe they just file and fuck off and think "hey ho, it's tomorrow's fish and chips" - well, not me. I woke up at three in the morning on sunday and fucking lay there, furious, for two hours. weird, maybe. but that's how it is.
It strips me of all confidence in writing for the magazine. No exaggeration. i've got a review to write this morning and i really don't feel like doing it, for fear that some nuance is going to be removed from the final line, the pay-off, and i'm going to have another weekend ruined for me.
I've been writing for The Times for 15 years and i have never asked this before - i have never asked it of anyone i have written for - but I must insist, from now on, that i am sent a proof of every review i do, in pdf format, so i can check it for fuck-ups. and i must be sent it in good time in case changes are needed. It is the only way i can carry on in the job.
And, just out of interest, I'd like whoever made that change to email me and tell me why. Tell me the exact reasoning which led you to remove that word from my copy.
Right,
Sorry to go on. Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.
All the best
Giles
Monday, July 21, 2008
'Things are happening at the speed of light'
An uncertain future? What's going to happen next? Is the uncertainty of not knowing if your industry, job, etc is gonna be around good cos it promotes inventiveness, or is it just waaaay too depressing? Like this bit at the end of the article:
Many said, though, that they were uncertain improved editorial content would ensure a bright future — especially since most organizations failed to anticipate the changes that have wracked newsrooms in recent years.
Only 5 percent of the editors surveyed said they were confident they could predict what the newsroom would look like in five years.
"I feel I'm being catapulted into another world, a world I don't really understand," Virginian-Pilot editor Dennis Finley told PEJ. "Things are happening at the speed of light."
Study: shrinking newsrooms hurting papers' quality
NEW YORK (AP) — The many and deepening cuts at newspapers across the country are starting to take a toll on their content, according to a study being released Monday.
The challenge newspapers must meet immediately is to find more revenue on the Internet, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study, called "The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers."
Newspaper managers need to "find a way to monetize the rapid growth of Web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears."
Stories are shorter overall, the study found, and staff coverage tends to focus on local and community news.
"America's newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads," the study said.
Even when foreign and national news makes it into the papers, it is being relegated to less prominent pages.
"To make the front page, it has to be a significant development or a story that we can see through Florida eyes," said Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the Fort Lauderdale-based South Florida Sun-Sentinel and a longtime newspaper executive.
The reasons for the newsroom cutbacks are well known: Newsprint costs have jumped, and advertising and circulation revenue have quickened their descent this year as advertisers follow readers online. Newspaper Web sites capture only a small fraction of the revenue lost as they sell fewer print ads, which fetch more money. MORE
Many said, though, that they were uncertain improved editorial content would ensure a bright future — especially since most organizations failed to anticipate the changes that have wracked newsrooms in recent years.
Only 5 percent of the editors surveyed said they were confident they could predict what the newsroom would look like in five years.
"I feel I'm being catapulted into another world, a world I don't really understand," Virginian-Pilot editor Dennis Finley told PEJ. "Things are happening at the speed of light."
Study: shrinking newsrooms hurting papers' quality
NEW YORK (AP) — The many and deepening cuts at newspapers across the country are starting to take a toll on their content, according to a study being released Monday.
The challenge newspapers must meet immediately is to find more revenue on the Internet, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's study, called "The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America's Daily Newspapers."
Newspaper managers need to "find a way to monetize the rapid growth of Web readership before newsroom staff cuts so weaken newspapers that their competitive advantage disappears."
Stories are shorter overall, the study found, and staff coverage tends to focus on local and community news.
"America's newspapers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads," the study said.
Even when foreign and national news makes it into the papers, it is being relegated to less prominent pages.
"To make the front page, it has to be a significant development or a story that we can see through Florida eyes," said Sharon Rosenhause, managing editor of the Fort Lauderdale-based South Florida Sun-Sentinel and a longtime newspaper executive.
The reasons for the newsroom cutbacks are well known: Newsprint costs have jumped, and advertising and circulation revenue have quickened their descent this year as advertisers follow readers online. Newspaper Web sites capture only a small fraction of the revenue lost as they sell fewer print ads, which fetch more money. MORE
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Business v the press
This has long been discussed and lamented by journos - the erosion of journalism standards by business and shareholder demands, but it's worth highlighting again.
Profit margins have to be redefined for sure, but can we really expect our new business leaders to care about journalism? Or will they dump their stock and look for a more profitable company when the financial crunch hits too hard?
And the truth is, even if we stop whining and try and work to preserve the future of our industry, will we be able to save it?
Profit and the press: Reporting only what sells
By DAVID DIZON
abs-cbnNEWS.com
How does mass media, known also as the Fourth Estate, balance the need to make a profit while providing correct, important and relevant information to their readers?
Journalism professors and media practitioners had a crash course on the subject during the first day of the 17th Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) Annual Conference held at the Manila Hotel on Monday.
Prof. Ian Richards of the University of South Australia said the press remains as important as ever as consumers continue to look for news on radio, TV, print or online.
He added, however, that some newsrooms and journalism schools are being handled by managers with business backgrounds; people who have no deep appreciation of the role of the press in society.
"Their first and last priority is the bottomline: Is the newsroom making a profit? This focus on business ethics can have a significant impact in newsrooms as well as journalism schools," Richards said. MORE
Profit margins have to be redefined for sure, but can we really expect our new business leaders to care about journalism? Or will they dump their stock and look for a more profitable company when the financial crunch hits too hard?
And the truth is, even if we stop whining and try and work to preserve the future of our industry, will we be able to save it?
Profit and the press: Reporting only what sells
By DAVID DIZON
abs-cbnNEWS.com
How does mass media, known also as the Fourth Estate, balance the need to make a profit while providing correct, important and relevant information to their readers?
Journalism professors and media practitioners had a crash course on the subject during the first day of the 17th Asian Media Information and Communication Center (AMIC) Annual Conference held at the Manila Hotel on Monday.
Prof. Ian Richards of the University of South Australia said the press remains as important as ever as consumers continue to look for news on radio, TV, print or online.
He added, however, that some newsrooms and journalism schools are being handled by managers with business backgrounds; people who have no deep appreciation of the role of the press in society.
"Their first and last priority is the bottomline: Is the newsroom making a profit? This focus on business ethics can have a significant impact in newsrooms as well as journalism schools," Richards said. MORE
Old school journo defends the internet
Surprise surprise. Here's an opinion article by a journalist who started in the industry in the days when pages were laid out by hand. What I do wonder sometimes though is whether people who are starting out in journalism, or in the middle of their careers rather than at the end are just as positive about the future of their industry ...
Opinion: Journalism is changing for the better
By Bobby Mathews (Contact) | Demopolis Times
Published Sunday, July 13, 2008
One of the best parts of being a journalist is learning about things before (almost) anyone else.
I’ll give you a perfect example: Several weeks ago, Demopolis Police Sgt. Tim Williams was promoted to interim chief. It took a span of three meetings — two of which were held at 8 a.m.
For those final two meetings, I was the only one in Rooster Hall who was not a member of the city government. Minutes after that meeting ended, we broke the news before anyone else on our Web site.
Then I was invited into a private meeting for the police force, where Demopolis Mayor Cecil P. Williamson announced Williamson’s promotion. Again, I was the only person there who was not a city employee.
And there’s the paradox for many journalists. Robert Duvall, in the excellent movie “The Paper” said it this way: “We move in their world, but it is their world — not ours.”
The world of journalists is changing, though. In the old days, we would have held that news for publication in the next day’s newspaper. MORE
Opinion: Journalism is changing for the better
By Bobby Mathews (Contact) | Demopolis Times
Published Sunday, July 13, 2008
One of the best parts of being a journalist is learning about things before (almost) anyone else.
I’ll give you a perfect example: Several weeks ago, Demopolis Police Sgt. Tim Williams was promoted to interim chief. It took a span of three meetings — two of which were held at 8 a.m.
For those final two meetings, I was the only one in Rooster Hall who was not a member of the city government. Minutes after that meeting ended, we broke the news before anyone else on our Web site.
Then I was invited into a private meeting for the police force, where Demopolis Mayor Cecil P. Williamson announced Williamson’s promotion. Again, I was the only person there who was not a city employee.
And there’s the paradox for many journalists. Robert Duvall, in the excellent movie “The Paper” said it this way: “We move in their world, but it is their world — not ours.”
The world of journalists is changing, though. In the old days, we would have held that news for publication in the next day’s newspaper. MORE
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Outsourcing subbing? Where else but India
Remember this company folks - Mindworks. It's one of the first Indian companies to do copyediting for US newspapers from India, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.
Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India
Not far from New Delhi, Mindworks now has eight overseas clients, and it's mounting a big effort to go after more U.S. publications
by Nandini Lakshman
In a squat, gray building in Noida, a leading outsourcing destination 15 miles from New Delhi, is the headquarters of Mindworks Global Media. Here, 90 young men and women peer into their computers, editing copy, designing and laying out pages, and even reporting over the phone. Mindworks isn't a new publication. It's a company to which media groups in Asia, Europe, and the U.S.—including the Miami Herald and South China Morning Post—outsource work that journalists and copyeditors usually do. The Mindworks staff works two to three shifts a day, seven days a week. Tony Joseph, 46, an editor-turned-entrepreneur, is Mindworks' founder and chief executive. He sometimes drops by at 6 a.m. to see his employees, just when U.S. clients are putting their papers to bed.
Mindworks has been handling outsourcing assignments from non-Indian publishers for four years. It expects plenty more business as the cost-cutting in U.S. and European print media grinds on. Some Western publishers do their outsourcing in-house—Thomson Reuters (TRI), for instance, has moved basic Wall Street reporting on U.S., European, and Gulf equities to a new bureau in Bangalore. But other media companies prefer to outsource to the Indians directly. On June 24, Mindworks made global headlines when the Associated Press reported that the company had taken on copyediting and layout work for a couple of publications owned by the California media publishing group Orange County Register Communications. MORE
Copyediting? Ship the Work Out to India
Not far from New Delhi, Mindworks now has eight overseas clients, and it's mounting a big effort to go after more U.S. publications
by Nandini Lakshman
In a squat, gray building in Noida, a leading outsourcing destination 15 miles from New Delhi, is the headquarters of Mindworks Global Media. Here, 90 young men and women peer into their computers, editing copy, designing and laying out pages, and even reporting over the phone. Mindworks isn't a new publication. It's a company to which media groups in Asia, Europe, and the U.S.—including the Miami Herald and South China Morning Post—outsource work that journalists and copyeditors usually do. The Mindworks staff works two to three shifts a day, seven days a week. Tony Joseph, 46, an editor-turned-entrepreneur, is Mindworks' founder and chief executive. He sometimes drops by at 6 a.m. to see his employees, just when U.S. clients are putting their papers to bed.
Mindworks has been handling outsourcing assignments from non-Indian publishers for four years. It expects plenty more business as the cost-cutting in U.S. and European print media grinds on. Some Western publishers do their outsourcing in-house—Thomson Reuters (TRI), for instance, has moved basic Wall Street reporting on U.S., European, and Gulf equities to a new bureau in Bangalore. But other media companies prefer to outsource to the Indians directly. On June 24, Mindworks made global headlines when the Associated Press reported that the company had taken on copyediting and layout work for a couple of publications owned by the California media publishing group Orange County Register Communications. MORE
Sunday, July 6, 2008
... but Greenslade says don't lose hope
Memo to journalists: don't be depressed by falling paper profits, the future is ours
I have attended four newspaper conferences in the past couple of months - in Italy, Australia, Sweden and Serbia - all of which have been dominated, in varying degrees, by concern about the immediate future. Some owners, managers and editors have been in denial, arguing that things are better than they appear.
In their view, newsprint is here to stay, though all have grasped that it cannot stand alone. Most have signed up to multi-platform journalism, though they generally see online as complementary rather than a viable replacement.
Others have been more rational, claiming that newsprint is on its way out. For them, it is only a matter of time before the online alternative replaces paper altogether. But they, like their less radical colleagues, tend to view the problem through the prism of commerce.
What exercises almost everyone connected to the newspaper industry - and industry is the key word here - is the belief that websites cannot generate anything like the revenue enjoyed by media companies throughout the last century (more properly, the last 60 years). They are cast down by their inability to "monetise the net".
Why the worry? Profits, of course. Online news sites will never generate the kind of money that has made newspaper ownership so lucrative. Corporate owners in Britain and the US - along with their investors - have revelled in achieving 30% plus profit margins in the past and cannot conceive of lower returns. The investors, ruthless and logical, are looking elsewhere for higher dividends. The owners are left with companies facing declining revenue amid a technological revolution they do not want and cannot control.
Meanwhile, many journalists who have grown used to the idea that their work is inextricably linked to profitable enterprises are scratching their heads. They cannot conceive of a journalism that is gradually freeing itself from the yoke of commerce. Without business, without profits, who will pay their wages? Who will fund the foreign assignments? Who will provide the resources for long-form investigative journalism?
ADVERTISING SLUMP HITS REGIONALS
Such journalistic anxiety is understandable, but it is no good wailing about it. We have to envisage a future with an entirely new business model based on smaller returns that will fund a small, high quality staff, probably serving niche markets. (The days of mass media may well be over). But we have to admit to ourselves first that things will never be as they were in the last millennium. MORE
What do you think?
I have attended four newspaper conferences in the past couple of months - in Italy, Australia, Sweden and Serbia - all of which have been dominated, in varying degrees, by concern about the immediate future. Some owners, managers and editors have been in denial, arguing that things are better than they appear.
In their view, newsprint is here to stay, though all have grasped that it cannot stand alone. Most have signed up to multi-platform journalism, though they generally see online as complementary rather than a viable replacement.
Others have been more rational, claiming that newsprint is on its way out. For them, it is only a matter of time before the online alternative replaces paper altogether. But they, like their less radical colleagues, tend to view the problem through the prism of commerce.
What exercises almost everyone connected to the newspaper industry - and industry is the key word here - is the belief that websites cannot generate anything like the revenue enjoyed by media companies throughout the last century (more properly, the last 60 years). They are cast down by their inability to "monetise the net".
Why the worry? Profits, of course. Online news sites will never generate the kind of money that has made newspaper ownership so lucrative. Corporate owners in Britain and the US - along with their investors - have revelled in achieving 30% plus profit margins in the past and cannot conceive of lower returns. The investors, ruthless and logical, are looking elsewhere for higher dividends. The owners are left with companies facing declining revenue amid a technological revolution they do not want and cannot control.
Meanwhile, many journalists who have grown used to the idea that their work is inextricably linked to profitable enterprises are scratching their heads. They cannot conceive of a journalism that is gradually freeing itself from the yoke of commerce. Without business, without profits, who will pay their wages? Who will fund the foreign assignments? Who will provide the resources for long-form investigative journalism?
ADVERTISING SLUMP HITS REGIONALS
Such journalistic anxiety is understandable, but it is no good wailing about it. We have to envisage a future with an entirely new business model based on smaller returns that will fund a small, high quality staff, probably serving niche markets. (The days of mass media may well be over). But we have to admit to ourselves first that things will never be as they were in the last millennium. MORE
What do you think?
'The sub-editing function is obsolete'
Comforting isn't it?
In deleting subs, CityAM is in good company: a 'paper in Peterborough or somewhere'
Is London's financial freesheet undermining journalism with crude cost cutting, or just becoming more efficient? Simon Evans meets its owners
'Managers need to take care of stressed staff, especially now," proclaimed an article in CityAM, the London freesheet, last week. Just days earlier, the company's management had served notice on all of its sub-editing workforce, its web editor, a reporter and two members of the sales team.
Hardly the stuff to boost morale but a necessary move in the current climate, Jens Torpe, the paper's co-founder, said on Wednesday. "I don't understand why people are so surprised," he says in a rather exasperated way. "A number of newspapers in the UK have been doing without subs for a long while."
Unfortunately, he scratches around to name any, save for a "paper in Peterborough or somewhere".
He rebuts the suggestion that the move, coming after nearly three years of a subbed and generally well-regarded CityAM, has been forced on the company because of a lack of cash in the credit crunch.
"I don't know how many hundreds of people have been made redundant at the Telegraph, but nobody says they are going under. It's absolutely ridiculous. When we launched, we gave the editor the authority to build his editorial staff. He did it, and within budget, in a very short space of time.
"In the last couple of months, we've looked at potential ways to make the company more efficient, and feedback from editorial was that we should put more resources into front-line writing journalists," he adds. "There is a limit to the resources we have. That was how the new model came about. We have done three days under the new regime now, so it can be done. I have every confidence and trust in our journalists."
Co-founder Lawson Mun-caster is rather brusquer: "The sub-editing function is obsolete. I believe writers can take responsibility for filing copy that is readable and correct with a headline." MORE
In deleting subs, CityAM is in good company: a 'paper in Peterborough or somewhere'
Is London's financial freesheet undermining journalism with crude cost cutting, or just becoming more efficient? Simon Evans meets its owners
'Managers need to take care of stressed staff, especially now," proclaimed an article in CityAM, the London freesheet, last week. Just days earlier, the company's management had served notice on all of its sub-editing workforce, its web editor, a reporter and two members of the sales team.
Hardly the stuff to boost morale but a necessary move in the current climate, Jens Torpe, the paper's co-founder, said on Wednesday. "I don't understand why people are so surprised," he says in a rather exasperated way. "A number of newspapers in the UK have been doing without subs for a long while."
Unfortunately, he scratches around to name any, save for a "paper in Peterborough or somewhere".
He rebuts the suggestion that the move, coming after nearly three years of a subbed and generally well-regarded CityAM, has been forced on the company because of a lack of cash in the credit crunch.
"I don't know how many hundreds of people have been made redundant at the Telegraph, but nobody says they are going under. It's absolutely ridiculous. When we launched, we gave the editor the authority to build his editorial staff. He did it, and within budget, in a very short space of time.
"In the last couple of months, we've looked at potential ways to make the company more efficient, and feedback from editorial was that we should put more resources into front-line writing journalists," he adds. "There is a limit to the resources we have. That was how the new model came about. We have done three days under the new regime now, so it can be done. I have every confidence and trust in our journalists."
Co-founder Lawson Mun-caster is rather brusquer: "The sub-editing function is obsolete. I believe writers can take responsibility for filing copy that is readable and correct with a headline." MORE
More job cuts ... but also from online
Have highlighted the interesting bits in bold ...
LA Times Cuts 250 Jobs; 150 Cuts in Editorial Include Online
Rafat Ali
The most troubled big newspaper in U.S. is cutting off 250 jobs, including an unprecedented 150 positions in editorial, to bring its expenses down in line with declining revenues.
The Los Angeles Times newspaper will also reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%, it announced on a slow Wednesday prior to July 4th holiday week.
These cuts will be across all departments of The Times, including circulation, marketing and advertising; the company will have about 3,000 employees after the reductions.
This is among the biggest such cuts announced by any major market U.S. newspaper in recent history. The editorial cuts amount to roughly 17% of the 876 the company employs now, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ online operations and are to be completed by Labor Day.
Times Editor Russ Stanton explained the paradox in a staff memo: “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
Also thanks to the Internet, the luxury of monopoly is gone too…
The cuts on the online side are a bit surprising, considering LATimes.com has been trying to build up its online operations with blogs, special vertical sections, search, video and other services. The Times will be combining its print and Web staffs into a single operation with a unified budget, and that perhaps explains some of the online cuts, to do away with the redundancies.
Recently the company said that LATimes.com expects to generate $25 million in display ad revenue this year, more than tripling the $6 million that area attracted three years ago.
From publisher David Hiller’s memo to staff, some plans for the future:
-- A re-designed flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper to debut in the fall, reflecting the work of the Reinvent team, the Spring Street Project, and related efforts underway for quite some time
-- A re-designed latimes.com website
-- A combined multimedia newsroom to produce excellent content for both
-- More targeted products for new audience segments
-- A re-organized sales team fired up to turn our revenue picture around
-- Increased utilization of our operating strengths so we can print and distribute newspapers and other products all across SoCal
The Tribune-owned paper has seen a lot of management turmoil over the last few years, and even since Sam Zell took over the company.
Announcements of hundreds of reductions were issued only last week by dailies other Tribune papers, Boston, San Jose, Detroit and elsewhere.
LA Times Cuts 250 Jobs; 150 Cuts in Editorial Include Online
Rafat Ali
The most troubled big newspaper in U.S. is cutting off 250 jobs, including an unprecedented 150 positions in editorial, to bring its expenses down in line with declining revenues.
The Los Angeles Times newspaper will also reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%, it announced on a slow Wednesday prior to July 4th holiday week.
These cuts will be across all departments of The Times, including circulation, marketing and advertising; the company will have about 3,000 employees after the reductions.
This is among the biggest such cuts announced by any major market U.S. newspaper in recent history. The editorial cuts amount to roughly 17% of the 876 the company employs now, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ online operations and are to be completed by Labor Day.
Times Editor Russ Stanton explained the paradox in a staff memo: “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
Also thanks to the Internet, the luxury of monopoly is gone too…
The cuts on the online side are a bit surprising, considering LATimes.com has been trying to build up its online operations with blogs, special vertical sections, search, video and other services. The Times will be combining its print and Web staffs into a single operation with a unified budget, and that perhaps explains some of the online cuts, to do away with the redundancies.
Recently the company said that LATimes.com expects to generate $25 million in display ad revenue this year, more than tripling the $6 million that area attracted three years ago.
From publisher David Hiller’s memo to staff, some plans for the future:
-- A re-designed flagship Los Angeles Times newspaper to debut in the fall, reflecting the work of the Reinvent team, the Spring Street Project, and related efforts underway for quite some time
-- A re-designed latimes.com website
-- A combined multimedia newsroom to produce excellent content for both
-- More targeted products for new audience segments
-- A re-organized sales team fired up to turn our revenue picture around
-- Increased utilization of our operating strengths so we can print and distribute newspapers and other products all across SoCal
The Tribune-owned paper has seen a lot of management turmoil over the last few years, and even since Sam Zell took over the company.
Announcements of hundreds of reductions were issued only last week by dailies other Tribune papers, Boston, San Jose, Detroit and elsewhere.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Who needs those bloody subs anyway?!?!
About 40 editing jobs expected to go at Fairfax
NZPA
Fairfax Media, which owns The Dominion Post and The Press among other publications, today flagged lay-offs of about 40 sub-editors.
The company said it had 190 sub-editors across the group and although initial indications suggested about 40 redundancies, no firm numbers could be given until after a consultation period.
The move is another blow to the news media industry. This month the New Zealand Press Association announced it was cutting seven jobs and last year TVNZ cut nearly 60 news and current affairs jobs while The New Zealand Herald's publisher, APN New Zealand, cut 70 sub-editors in an out-sourcing move.
APN said at the time it w anted to centralise the sub-editing of all its print titles with Pagemasters, which hired up to 50 people.
Fairfax Media said today that the move was part of its plan to have "national centres of expertise" for world, features and business pages on its nine daily newspapers. More generic pages such as the weather and tv pages could follow. MORE
So ... does this represent a slow and steady erosion of the standards of journalism???
NZPA
Fairfax Media, which owns The Dominion Post and The Press among other publications, today flagged lay-offs of about 40 sub-editors.
The company said it had 190 sub-editors across the group and although initial indications suggested about 40 redundancies, no firm numbers could be given until after a consultation period.
The move is another blow to the news media industry. This month the New Zealand Press Association announced it was cutting seven jobs and last year TVNZ cut nearly 60 news and current affairs jobs while The New Zealand Herald's publisher, APN New Zealand, cut 70 sub-editors in an out-sourcing move.
APN said at the time it w anted to centralise the sub-editing of all its print titles with Pagemasters, which hired up to 50 people.
Fairfax Media said today that the move was part of its plan to have "national centres of expertise" for world, features and business pages on its nine daily newspapers. More generic pages such as the weather and tv pages could follow. MORE
So ... does this represent a slow and steady erosion of the standards of journalism???
Us v Them, or rather, new v old media
Yup, the "fight", if you want to call it that, is still going on strong, as seen in the furore over the Associated Press taking issue with The Drudge Report. Good or bad move? What does it represent?
Here's some takes on it:
Associated Press takedown notice sets the net abuzz
Bloggers to AP: I got your feed right here
I don't understand why it has to be an Us V Them type scenario to be honest. In the end, news wires like AP are still, I believe the lifeblood of the news industry. Without them, news would be one unregulated mess. Maybe that's how the bloggers like it, I don't know. But I can't see how sifting through millions of blogs to get just a decent bit of information would be feasible as a newsgathering activity. Or, I could be wrong ...
But yes, AP is cutting back, and so is Reuters. So maybe one day it'll just be blogs eh?
Here's some takes on it:
Associated Press takedown notice sets the net abuzz
Bloggers to AP: I got your feed right here
I don't understand why it has to be an Us V Them type scenario to be honest. In the end, news wires like AP are still, I believe the lifeblood of the news industry. Without them, news would be one unregulated mess. Maybe that's how the bloggers like it, I don't know. But I can't see how sifting through millions of blogs to get just a decent bit of information would be feasible as a newsgathering activity. Or, I could be wrong ...
But yes, AP is cutting back, and so is Reuters. So maybe one day it'll just be blogs eh?
What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia
By Clay Shirky
Nick Carr is right. Now what?
As new capabilities go, effortless distribution of unlimited perfect copies is a lulu. (Throw in low cost, accessibility to amateurs, and global reach, just for good measure.) Defending businesses based on scarce production is simply special pleading in the face of a change this epochal.
That’s not to say that the beneficiaries of the old system are above a bit of special pleading; indeed, there is a whole literature of newspaper publishers equating their falling revenues with social calamity.
To hear publishers tell it, they are deeply concerned about losing their audience, but the facts don’t bear this out. They’ve been losing their audience since 1984, the year readership first began shrinking (and ten years before the launch of the commercial web.) When their audience was shrinking but their ad revenues were growing, they were mum about social value. Now that the web means their audience is growing again but their ad revenues are falling, they’ve suddenly discovered their civic function. (Next stop: publishers lobbying for federal support on national security grounds. This will happen within two years.) MORE
Nick Carr is right. Now what?
As new capabilities go, effortless distribution of unlimited perfect copies is a lulu. (Throw in low cost, accessibility to amateurs, and global reach, just for good measure.) Defending businesses based on scarce production is simply special pleading in the face of a change this epochal.
That’s not to say that the beneficiaries of the old system are above a bit of special pleading; indeed, there is a whole literature of newspaper publishers equating their falling revenues with social calamity.
To hear publishers tell it, they are deeply concerned about losing their audience, but the facts don’t bear this out. They’ve been losing their audience since 1984, the year readership first began shrinking (and ten years before the launch of the commercial web.) When their audience was shrinking but their ad revenues were growing, they were mum about social value. Now that the web means their audience is growing again but their ad revenues are falling, they’ve suddenly discovered their civic function. (Next stop: publishers lobbying for federal support on national security grounds. This will happen within two years.) MORE
Monday, June 9, 2008
Shoot the messenger
I've been away travelling for a while, but I'm back, and will try and post as often as I can.
In this news this weekend was the death of two BBC journalists - one in Somalia and another in Afghanistan. Both were murdered.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the number of journalists killed rose 244 per cent in five years (ending 2007).
"At least 86 journalists were killed around the world in 2007. The figure has risen steadily since 2002 - from 25 to 86 (+ 244%) - and is the highest since 1994, when 103 journalists were killed, nearly half of them in the Rwanda genocide, about 20 in Algeria’s civil war and a dozen in the former Yugoslavia.
More than half those killed in 2007 died in Iraq."
Grim stats indeed...
Image from Reporters Without Borders
In this news this weekend was the death of two BBC journalists - one in Somalia and another in Afghanistan. Both were murdered.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the number of journalists killed rose 244 per cent in five years (ending 2007).
"At least 86 journalists were killed around the world in 2007. The figure has risen steadily since 2002 - from 25 to 86 (+ 244%) - and is the highest since 1994, when 103 journalists were killed, nearly half of them in the Rwanda genocide, about 20 in Algeria’s civil war and a dozen in the former Yugoslavia.
More than half those killed in 2007 died in Iraq."
Grim stats indeed...
Image from Reporters Without Borders
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Kill the Cliche
A cool site, still in its infancy stages I reckon, since it only has 164 news media cliches so far ... so do add some!! (another site highlighted by the AFP blog)
Monday, April 21, 2008
Replacing professional filters with social ones
Gleaned this from the AFP Mediawatch blog - it's an article in The New York Times analysing the way in which American youths are processing information. Seems forward emails, blogs, facebook groups etc are the way to go to share information. I believe the term is "viral", though strangely enough, the reporter here doesn't use the term ...
March 27, 2008
Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On
By BRIAN STELTER
Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.
But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.
It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show. But that is only the beginning of how they process information.
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. READ MORE
March 27, 2008
Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On
By BRIAN STELTER
Senator Barack Obama’s videotaped response to President Bush’s final State of the Union address — almost five minutes of Mr. Obama’s talking directly to the camera — elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January.
But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.
It is not news that young politically minded viewers are turning to alternative sources like YouTube, Facebook and late-night comedy shows like The Daily Show. But that is only the beginning of how they process information.
According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. READ MORE
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Live blogging
One of the ways that traditional media have been trying to contact with their online audiences is through live blogging. The most recent one, sort of anyway, is that of Annabel Crabb's blogging of the 2020 summit in Canberra. I'm not sure if it's that successful - I think maybe the initial blog could have been updated with timestamps instead of just Crabb responding to comments, but that could be more because of the limitations of the blogging system that the Herald uses rather than anything else.
That said, one of the comments cited the Twitter site as one way for summit attendees to mobile blog. Interestingly, it hasn't been used at all. Maybe Twitter has't really taken off in popularity in Australia? Or are people at the summit not really tech-savvy?
I think one of the most successful live blogging ventures is that of sports blogging. It's a bit like live football commentary on the radio - you can't see it, so you've gotta go your updates somewhere else. I think it's telling that when the Guardian Unlimited has minute-by-minute commentary on Premier League matches in England, the page is one of the most read on the site. Of course, online readers have to refresh the site to read the latest updates, but assuming that the Guardian's stats of the Top 5 (as shown on the site) are that of unique visitors and not page impressions, then that's a pretty mean feat. That's also credit to some very very witty commentary by the Guardian's footy scribes.
The BBC also has good live "reporter's diary" style blogs that allow readers to follow say the US elections, or a summit etc. The current "diary" is the Pope's US tour.
I'm sorry if my examples are very anglo-centric. They are just the initial sites I can think of. Are there other good ones that you can suggest??
That said, one of the comments cited the Twitter site as one way for summit attendees to mobile blog. Interestingly, it hasn't been used at all. Maybe Twitter has't really taken off in popularity in Australia? Or are people at the summit not really tech-savvy?
I think one of the most successful live blogging ventures is that of sports blogging. It's a bit like live football commentary on the radio - you can't see it, so you've gotta go your updates somewhere else. I think it's telling that when the Guardian Unlimited has minute-by-minute commentary on Premier League matches in England, the page is one of the most read on the site. Of course, online readers have to refresh the site to read the latest updates, but assuming that the Guardian's stats of the Top 5 (as shown on the site) are that of unique visitors and not page impressions, then that's a pretty mean feat. That's also credit to some very very witty commentary by the Guardian's footy scribes.
The BBC also has good live "reporter's diary" style blogs that allow readers to follow say the US elections, or a summit etc. The current "diary" is the Pope's US tour.
I'm sorry if my examples are very anglo-centric. They are just the initial sites I can think of. Are there other good ones that you can suggest??
Illustrators ... to broadcasters
One of my favourite illustrators that's now doing animations is Peter Nicholson of The Australian. You can check out his recent animations at The Australian's website or a full archive of all his work at his personal site.
The Sydney Morning Herald's illustrator Rocco Fazzari has ventured into claymation. I believe his first offering last year was one about Labor's Peter Garrett. I'm hunting around for his latest production ...
The Sydney Morning Herald's illustrator Rocco Fazzari has ventured into claymation. I believe his first offering last year was one about Labor's Peter Garrett. I'm hunting around for his latest production ...
So you want to shoot something ...
Here's a link to some multimedia sites that introduces one to capturing video for an online or broadcast audience:
DIY Film School
Bakersfield.com photography
Make Internet TV
BBC's Good Shooting Guide
8 ways to shoot video like a pro
Izzyvideo: video podcasts on how to shoot video
WebVideoShow
DIY Film School
Bakersfield.com photography
Make Internet TV
BBC's Good Shooting Guide
8 ways to shoot video like a pro
Izzyvideo: video podcasts on how to shoot video
WebVideoShow
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Coverage of world news on US media
Saw this video on the "From the Frontline" blog. Worth a watch. What I wonder after watching it is - if there is interest in international news coverage, as the video suggests, why aren't the news networks covering it? Is it that it's just become too expensive and it's better to use the wire agencies? Is it because news organisations have been bought up by other companies who think foreign coverage is a luxury not worth having? What are the sources of the problems??
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Another media blog to visit
This one's from Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media at the AlJazeera Network.
The End Of Hunter-Gatherer Journalism
Got this in an email from a journo colleague in India.
==
Phil Meyer, raising the ante again
SHOWCASE | March 28, 2008
Following is the text of Meyer's talk on the occasion of a two-day symposium celebrating his retirement as holder of the Knight chair at the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu
Perhaps the most quoted line in Precision Journalism, is this: "They are raising the ante on what it takes to become a journalist."
I used it to open the third edition, published in 1991. And now I have a confession to make. At the time I wrote it, I could not be certain that it was true.
It was time to raise the ante, sure enough. But the mainstream media were being painfully slow to keep up with the need for better and more skillful journalism. I guess I thought that if I announced that standards were rising, perhaps that might nudge the process along a
bit.
An "ante," of course is what you pay to buy into each hand of a poker game. It ensures that you have a stake, some commitment, before you see your cards. Putting time and money on the table for journalism education is the way that most people in newspapers and broadcasting
make their commitment. And now, 17 years after I made that rash claim, the ante really is being raised. This time, I am certain. And technology is the cause. While we were worrying about other things, learning to do journalism got harder.
And it's going to get harder still. The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.
This is why we still need newspapers – or something like them. Ronald Coase, the British economist, once asked why we need business firms. Why can't all their activities be coordinated by individuals contracting with one another instead of working in a bureaucratic, command-and-control environment? The answer, he said, is transaction costs. If a manager had to negotiate with a free-lancer for every task, the cost in time would be unbearably high.
Searching for information on the Internet involves something like transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate. We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the task of the new journalism.
So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting, gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism education will spend so much time on the new tools that we'll short-change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added part. Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn't enough. We need to supply the interpretive framework, too.
Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.) Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won't do that.
The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern.
In academe, we have a parallel concern. Patterns and structures are what lead us to theory. The social sciences have been chronically short on theory. When I was a first-semester graduate student at this University, I took Alexander Heard's seminar in the scope and methods of political science. In our conversations, sparked by an amazing list of guest speakers, including Angus Campbell and David Truman, the scarcity of theory was a recurring theme. Without theory, research isn't cumulative. It just stacks up loosely related facts.
That was in 1956, the same year that Robert A. Dahl published his modestly titled A Preface to Democratic Theory. Dahl argued that social checks and balances were far more important for the protection of our liberties than the checks and balances in the Constitution. Society protects the Constitution as much as the Constitution protects society. Dahl's model makes our role all the more important. There won't be an enlightened public to keep democratic values alive if we
don't do our job.
I began practicing journalism in the waning days of the Industrial Revolution. Mass media were a product of the Industrial Age. Its starting point was 1776, which I am sure you will recognize as the year that James Watt invented the reciprocating steam engine. Industrial power enabled mass production, which yielded standardized products, which needed mass media to sell them. You see the parallel: standardized products, standardized information.
Newspapers were the main mass medium for most of the 20th century, and they evolved toward natural monopolies, only in part because of their high capital costs. The other factor was that buyers and sellers in that standardized world needed the efficiency of a single marketplace
to minimize their transaction costs.
I've been reading about a nice example in a new history of the Kansas City Star by Harry Haskell, the grandson of an early Star editor. (Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star) William Rockhill Nelson started the paper with a hand-fed flatbed press in 1880, a time when Kansas City already had four English-language newspapers. Nelson gained dominance in that market by becoming an influential voice in the development of the young city, helping to
plan its wide boulevards and green parks. Advertisers want influence, and they find it easier to get if they can piggyback on a medium with influence of its own.
When journalism schools arrived, their mission was a simple one: provide cheap labor for the newspaper industry.
That emphasis left us a little bit short on the other functions of a university, research and service – present company excepted, of course. And that might be why so many of the main theories in mass communication evolved elsewhere. Paul Lazarsfeld got his two-step flow through sociology. He had chosen political communication to study because its output, voting behavior, was easy to quantify. Gate-keeping theory originated in social psychology. And a promising recent development, the idea of the public's attention as a scarce economic good, came from a political scientist, Herbert Simon.
Journalism schools were closely tied to an industry that was so successful that it didn't see any need for theory. The owners of the dominant newspapers could make money whether their products were good or bad. And so the research they wanted looked for trivial, low-risk
ways of optimizing content and minimizing cost.
We now live in a different world. After World War II, specialized media began prospering at the expense of more general media. As Alvin Toffler put it well before the Internet, instead of a few messages going to many people, we began having a system that generates many messages, each going to relatively few people. Newspapers used to bring us together. The media that are replacing them may drive us apart.
How can this system yield enlightened understanding by the public? What happens if we all gravitate to narrowly-directed messages from senders who would rather reinforce our prejudices? They are motivated to do it, of course, because that's an easier way to get our
attention.
The other way to get attention is to provide entertainment, and that takes more of the scarce supply away from public issues. Remember Neal Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he recalled the two dystopian novels that I read in college, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell saw totalitarian government arising through perpetual war and high-tech surveillance of the citizens. Huxley envisioned government control exercised with
voluntarily ingested drugs and rigid social stratification. Postman claimed that Huxley had it right except that our drug is entertainment. This was 1985! Just look around, and you can see how the ways of being entertained have multiplied since then. When I see students who know everything about popular culture and next to nothing about public affairs, I tend to agree with Postman. On the other hand, the events of the past five years have lent some support to the
Orwellian model as well.
The world is changing very fast, and we need to understand what is happening and its implications for democracy. As faculty, we have the responsibility to discover, as well as impart, the truth. And we have the privilege of investigating whatever interests us. There is plenty to choose from. But without theory, our efforts cannot be cumulative.
Ronald Coase, the economist who figured out the importance of transaction costs, noticed this problem in business schools. For years, he said, they concentrated all their research efforts on
institutional studies.
"Without a theory," he said, "they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory or a fire." What makes this meeting important is that we are looking for ways to pass on the work that we do.
Last week, a newspaper reporter asked me why, at the age of 77, I care so much about the future of journalism. "I have grandchildren," I explained. But there is more to it than that. I want the work of journalism and journalism education to advance, to be cumulative. I want the conversation to continue.
Two decades ago, when the late James A. Carey and I were the guests of Ev Dennis at the Media Studies Center, Jim guided me to the work of Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form) who suggested that life is a conversation. When we enter the room, we find this conversation already under way. It is heated at times. We try to get the drift of it, and then maybe add a few ideas of our own. Our little contribution is attacked by some and defended by others. Then the hour grows late, we have to go, and the conversation continues without us. If we are lucky, what we have said might affect that conversation long after we have left the room.
We need to turn our conversation toward an economic theory of journalism. We need to apply existing theory to understanding the processes and effects of the new media. We need to learn how to sell enlightened understanding to the public so that it can preserve its democratic values. The synergy of mass media and mass production is gone, probably forever. Something strange – and possibly dangerous -- is taking its place.
We need to understand it. The ante has been raised. I hope you're ready.
==
Phil Meyer, raising the ante again
SHOWCASE | March 28, 2008
Following is the text of Meyer's talk on the occasion of a two-day symposium celebrating his retirement as holder of the Knight chair at the University of North Carolina's School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
By Philip Meyer
pmeyer@email.unc.edu
Perhaps the most quoted line in Precision Journalism, is this: "They are raising the ante on what it takes to become a journalist."
I used it to open the third edition, published in 1991. And now I have a confession to make. At the time I wrote it, I could not be certain that it was true.
It was time to raise the ante, sure enough. But the mainstream media were being painfully slow to keep up with the need for better and more skillful journalism. I guess I thought that if I announced that standards were rising, perhaps that might nudge the process along a
bit.
An "ante," of course is what you pay to buy into each hand of a poker game. It ensures that you have a stake, some commitment, before you see your cards. Putting time and money on the table for journalism education is the way that most people in newspapers and broadcasting
make their commitment. And now, 17 years after I made that rash claim, the ante really is being raised. This time, I am certain. And technology is the cause. While we were worrying about other things, learning to do journalism got harder.
And it's going to get harder still. The hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Citizens can do their own hunting and gathering on the Internet. What they need is somebody to add value to that information by processing it – digesting it, organizing it, making it usable.
This is why we still need newspapers – or something like them. Ronald Coase, the British economist, once asked why we need business firms. Why can't all their activities be coordinated by individuals contracting with one another instead of working in a bureaucratic, command-and-control environment? The answer, he said, is transaction costs. If a manager had to negotiate with a free-lancer for every task, the cost in time would be unbearably high.
Searching for information on the Internet involves something like transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate. We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the task of the new journalism.
So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting, gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism education will spend so much time on the new tools that we'll short-change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added part. Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn't enough. We need to supply the interpretive framework, too.
Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.) Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won't do that.
The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern.
In academe, we have a parallel concern. Patterns and structures are what lead us to theory. The social sciences have been chronically short on theory. When I was a first-semester graduate student at this University, I took Alexander Heard's seminar in the scope and methods of political science. In our conversations, sparked by an amazing list of guest speakers, including Angus Campbell and David Truman, the scarcity of theory was a recurring theme. Without theory, research isn't cumulative. It just stacks up loosely related facts.
That was in 1956, the same year that Robert A. Dahl published his modestly titled A Preface to Democratic Theory. Dahl argued that social checks and balances were far more important for the protection of our liberties than the checks and balances in the Constitution. Society protects the Constitution as much as the Constitution protects society. Dahl's model makes our role all the more important. There won't be an enlightened public to keep democratic values alive if we
don't do our job.
I began practicing journalism in the waning days of the Industrial Revolution. Mass media were a product of the Industrial Age. Its starting point was 1776, which I am sure you will recognize as the year that James Watt invented the reciprocating steam engine. Industrial power enabled mass production, which yielded standardized products, which needed mass media to sell them. You see the parallel: standardized products, standardized information.
Newspapers were the main mass medium for most of the 20th century, and they evolved toward natural monopolies, only in part because of their high capital costs. The other factor was that buyers and sellers in that standardized world needed the efficiency of a single marketplace
to minimize their transaction costs.
I've been reading about a nice example in a new history of the Kansas City Star by Harry Haskell, the grandson of an early Star editor. (Boss-Busters and Sin Hounds: Kansas City and Its Star) William Rockhill Nelson started the paper with a hand-fed flatbed press in 1880, a time when Kansas City already had four English-language newspapers. Nelson gained dominance in that market by becoming an influential voice in the development of the young city, helping to
plan its wide boulevards and green parks. Advertisers want influence, and they find it easier to get if they can piggyback on a medium with influence of its own.
When journalism schools arrived, their mission was a simple one: provide cheap labor for the newspaper industry.
That emphasis left us a little bit short on the other functions of a university, research and service – present company excepted, of course. And that might be why so many of the main theories in mass communication evolved elsewhere. Paul Lazarsfeld got his two-step flow through sociology. He had chosen political communication to study because its output, voting behavior, was easy to quantify. Gate-keeping theory originated in social psychology. And a promising recent development, the idea of the public's attention as a scarce economic good, came from a political scientist, Herbert Simon.
Journalism schools were closely tied to an industry that was so successful that it didn't see any need for theory. The owners of the dominant newspapers could make money whether their products were good or bad. And so the research they wanted looked for trivial, low-risk
ways of optimizing content and minimizing cost.
We now live in a different world. After World War II, specialized media began prospering at the expense of more general media. As Alvin Toffler put it well before the Internet, instead of a few messages going to many people, we began having a system that generates many messages, each going to relatively few people. Newspapers used to bring us together. The media that are replacing them may drive us apart.
How can this system yield enlightened understanding by the public? What happens if we all gravitate to narrowly-directed messages from senders who would rather reinforce our prejudices? They are motivated to do it, of course, because that's an easier way to get our
attention.
The other way to get attention is to provide entertainment, and that takes more of the scarce supply away from public issues. Remember Neal Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he recalled the two dystopian novels that I read in college, George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Orwell saw totalitarian government arising through perpetual war and high-tech surveillance of the citizens. Huxley envisioned government control exercised with
voluntarily ingested drugs and rigid social stratification. Postman claimed that Huxley had it right except that our drug is entertainment. This was 1985! Just look around, and you can see how the ways of being entertained have multiplied since then. When I see students who know everything about popular culture and next to nothing about public affairs, I tend to agree with Postman. On the other hand, the events of the past five years have lent some support to the
Orwellian model as well.
The world is changing very fast, and we need to understand what is happening and its implications for democracy. As faculty, we have the responsibility to discover, as well as impart, the truth. And we have the privilege of investigating whatever interests us. There is plenty to choose from. But without theory, our efforts cannot be cumulative.
Ronald Coase, the economist who figured out the importance of transaction costs, noticed this problem in business schools. For years, he said, they concentrated all their research efforts on
institutional studies.
"Without a theory," he said, "they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory or a fire." What makes this meeting important is that we are looking for ways to pass on the work that we do.
Last week, a newspaper reporter asked me why, at the age of 77, I care so much about the future of journalism. "I have grandchildren," I explained. But there is more to it than that. I want the work of journalism and journalism education to advance, to be cumulative. I want the conversation to continue.
Two decades ago, when the late James A. Carey and I were the guests of Ev Dennis at the Media Studies Center, Jim guided me to the work of Kenneth Burke (The Philosophy of Literary Form) who suggested that life is a conversation. When we enter the room, we find this conversation already under way. It is heated at times. We try to get the drift of it, and then maybe add a few ideas of our own. Our little contribution is attacked by some and defended by others. Then the hour grows late, we have to go, and the conversation continues without us. If we are lucky, what we have said might affect that conversation long after we have left the room.
We need to turn our conversation toward an economic theory of journalism. We need to apply existing theory to understanding the processes and effects of the new media. We need to learn how to sell enlightened understanding to the public so that it can preserve its democratic values. The synergy of mass media and mass production is gone, probably forever. Something strange – and possibly dangerous -- is taking its place.
We need to understand it. The ante has been raised. I hope you're ready.
Sacred Facts blog
One of my favourite blogs on news media and its evolution is Richard Sambrook's blog "Sacred Facts".
Richard Sambrook the Director of the BBC's Global News division.
Richard Sambrook the Director of the BBC's Global News division.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Robin Williams at BBC's World Debate at TED conference
Ok, just had to post this. A short clip of Robin Williams entertaining the crowd at the TED conference at BBC's The World Debate when the cameras failed:
And you can also read Matt Frei's blog on this.
And you can also read Matt Frei's blog on this.
Britannica Blog: Newspapers & the Net Forum
So here's the first link ...
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/category/newspapers-the-net-forum/
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/category/newspapers-the-net-forum/
So is it all doom and gloom?
I've been collecting bits and pieces here and there about online news media and traditional print and broadcast media, and how the integration between the two is or is not happening.
It's all secondhand stuff really, but I thought I'll collect them all together in one blog ...
So why "brave new world"? It has a negative connotation I suppose, because of Adolf Huxley's book. But does the advent of the internet necessarily mean the demise of journalism? Are we all focusing on the wrong issues? Does an online news website have to be "Kylie's Bum" journalism (as one newspaper colleague said) to be finanically viable (let alone successful)??
It's all secondhand stuff really, but I thought I'll collect them all together in one blog ...
So why "brave new world"? It has a negative connotation I suppose, because of Adolf Huxley's book. But does the advent of the internet necessarily mean the demise of journalism? Are we all focusing on the wrong issues? Does an online news website have to be "Kylie's Bum" journalism (as one newspaper colleague said) to be finanically viable (let alone successful)??
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