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."

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?

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

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??

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 ...