Learn coding ... does it matter?

Continuing the journalists/developers train of thought ...

This blogger thinks all new journalists should learn how to code. And if you can, you'll be able to code a nice, functional and pretty map like this one on The Guardian.

If I had one piece of advice to a journalist starting out now, it would be: learn to code

Yes, it would. Seriously, if you’re doing one of those courses where they’re making you learn shorthand and so on, take some time to learn to code. MORE

The future: journalists-slash-developers?

A good piece on interactives ventures at the nytimes.com website. The way of the future for newspapers, methinks.

The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady

What are these renegade cybergeeks doing at the New York Times? Maybe saving it.
By Emily Nussbaum Published Jan 11, 2009

On the day Barack Obama was elected, a strange new feature appeared on the website of the New York Times. Called the Word Train, it asked a simple question: What one word describes your current state of mind? Readers could enter an adjective or select from a menu of options. They could specify whether they supported McCain or Obama. Below, the results appeared in six rows of adjectives, scrolling left to right, coded red or blue, descending in size of font. The larger the word, the more people felt that way. 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

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."

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

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 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

'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

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.

Possibly the best slideshow so far ...

Photographer Lucas Oleniuk and columnist Jennifer Wells reflect on the Conrad Black trial.

Know any other good ones?