How social networks can inspire investigative reporting

Head of Media24's investigative unit, Andrew Trench, writes about how social networks can inspire in-depth reporting, citing a recent four-week long City Press investigation of Tony Yengeni as an example.

About a month ago a Facebook friend posted an interesting status update which directly led to four weeks of investigative reporting by the Media24 Investigation team and which culminated in front page leads carried in this past weekend's editions of Rapport and City Press about how ANC NEC member and convicted fraudster, Tony Yengeni, had broken the law.

It all started when my Facebook friend Herman Lategan (he gave me permission to use his name) posted an indignant observation. He had spotted Yengeni driving in his R1.7m Maserati and swanning about a luxury Greenpoint apartment complex.

The update got me thinking: How does Yengeni afford such a car? After all, he is a convicted fraudster after being sent to jail for getting a dodgy discount on a Merc, and can no longer serve as an MP.

As far as I knew his only salary was from the ANC as head of its soon-to-be-established political school.

And that's how a lot of investigative journalism starts.... with a simple question, a bit of curiousity and then some old-fashioned digging. But we would never have asked that first question had it not been for that Facebook update.

So, Media24 investigations reporter Julian Rademeyer started sniffing around and before long we had established that Yengeni had more than one luxury car and was a director of six companies in contravention of the Companies Act in terms of which it is a criminal offense to be a company director if you have a conviction for a crime of dishonesty. Using online social networks we were even able to source a picture of the Yengeni Maserati.

I think this is a good example of how online social networks can extend a journalist's contact base in ways that we could never imagine before. This is the potential power of crowdsourcing when you have tens of thousands of citizens out there, keeping the powerful on their toes.

In another story we are working on we have been able to develop a source providing useful information on a company which is up to no good using nothing but Twitter. One tweet and a couple of RTs later we had located someone which would otherwise have taken us many days, if not weeks, to locate.

This is another reason why I think it is not a good idea for media owners to deny journalists access to social networks on company networks - imagine the scoops which are passing you by?

Source: journalism.co.za

In Demand

A week inside the future of journalism

By Nicholas Spangler

I spent eight years at The Miami Herald, mainly writing features, and when the paper laid me off in 2009, I was humiliated and sad. But people told me getting laid off could be a good thing and I listened to them. “Invent” and “take charge” and “define” are some of the words I remember from those conversations, which left me, in hindsight, manically deluded about my prospects.

I moved to New York, where I’d always wanted to live. I thought I would polish off a few story ideas and a friend’s idea for a screenplay I’d been toying with (it featured, unwisely, a terminally blocked romance novelist); then, after a suitable period, reinvented and redefined and fully in charge, I would find another job as a reporter.

But the screenplay foundered. The story ideas turned out to be not very good and I could not think of new ones. The well was dry. So I started looking for a job, at first confining my search to New York and Washington. There were reporting jobs of a peculiar sort in these cities, and my cover letters included lines like, “My knowledge of the nuclear power industry is admittedly scant” and “Although I speak no Japanese, I know New York City intimately.”

For a long time I did not come close to any job, and then I found Demand Media, which ran help-wanted ads on JournalismJobs.com and Mediabistro.com. Demand’s own site featured a picture of a laptop on a table in front of a beachfront tiki bar. Sometimes instead there was a picture of a good-looking woman sitting with her laptop in a comfortable chair. She looked happy. She was beaming. I wanted to look like that.

Demand, which launched in 2006, doesn’t do news, which is expensive to produce and perishable. It does “commercial content.” If you’ve watched a how-to video on YouTube or read an instructional article on the web, you’ve probably consumed Demand content. More than 2 million pieces were online by mid-summer, with more than 5,000 new ones appearing every day. In September, Demand attracted nearly 59 million unique visitors, according to comScore, the Internet marketing research firm (Nytimes.com, by comparison, the nation’s top newspaper site, had 33 million), to its company-owned websites like eHow and Livestrong, and more to its 350 client sites, which incorporate some of Demand’s content. Among Demand’s clients are websites operated by USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Houston Chronicle.

Demand and its competitors—there are several, including AOL’s Seed and Yahoo’s Associated Content—rely on algorithms and search data to determine what content consumers are seeking, what content advertisers are willing to pay for, and what content can be profitably produced. There are no news meetings. There are no newsrooms. The editorial workforce is freelance, compensated by the piece, at a rate that varies but is never far from skimpy.

Demand and the specter it represents—what Clay Shirky calls the radical “commodification” of content, without regard to civic value or subjective judgments about quality or any of the other sentimental trappings of the Murrow century—have inspired loathing and awe, but mostly loathing, in the class of people that pays attention to such things. Which is to say, mainly journalists and those who love them. “We’ve got former members writing this stuff,” says Bernie Lunzer, of The Newspaper Guild. “Some are just glad to have work. They’re becoming just a raw commodity bought at the cheapest price and that, essentially, is what Demand stands for. It spells the end of what we consider journalism.”

Or take Ken Doctor, former newspaperman turned news futurist and author of the book Newsonomics: “This is the logical extension of a long-time strategy to eke out profits by squeezing labor and overhead costs.”

Most news organizations already use search-engine-optimization strategies to push their content on the web. Within five years, says Doctor, SEO and advanced metrics will play a prominent role in decisions about what to cover and how heavily to cover it, with reporters and stories graded by the number and value of the consumers they attract. “It’s a box that, once you look inside, you can’t not look,” Doctor says.

One possible consequence of looking in the box is that news organizations will increasingly turn to companies like Demand for their evergreen content. Quality may suffer, at least initially, but the money news organizations save could be redirected to actual newsgathering, benefiting not just readers but the commonweal. If, in the future, consumers demand higher-quality content from the evergreen material, wages may stabilize for the para-professional workforce producing it, as Demand and others compete for a limited number of skilled content producers.

Or not. Doctor envisions not so much a race to the bottom as a race to mediocrity, the “good-enough” that is all consumers may really want, which would mean the end of most quality journalism and the end of journalism as a middle-class profession.

In August, Demand filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public stock offering that could value the company at $1.5 billion. Forty-five percent of the company’s $198.5 million in revenue in 2009 came from a domain-registry service that is the world’s second-largest, with more than 10 million names. Besides the cash it throws off, the registry is a valuable source of information on people’s search habits, and a list of potential outlets for Demand content. The other part of that $198.5 million, the part everyone talks about, came mostly in pennies and fractions of pennies earned on video and search advertising.

For most of its brief existence, Demand has been a money-loser, and it finished 2009 with a $22 million loss. But its sec filing contains numbers that would make newspaper executives salivate: every dollar spent on written content in 2008’s third quarter, for instance, is projected to return $1.58.

Source: cjr.org

Digital journalism: More work, more pressure but more opportunity

Longer hours, more pressure, decreasing quality and less enjoyable work. Old media is a dark, dark place for journalism - at least that's the mood of many of the journalists who were interviewed for the annual Oriella digital journalism study.
There are some reasons to be cheerful, which include journalists not being quite as pessimistic as the previous year. Are things really that bad?

The Ugly

• Oriella PR interviewed 770 journalists in 15 countries including the US, Brazil and several in Europe. More than half the journalists working on traditional newspaper, TV and radio formats said they thought the channel would fold, and one in six say this has already happened. The trend is exaggerated in Sweden where a third of traditional channels have closed and one in six has completely transferred online.
• Forty-four percent said print media will shrink dramatically – pessimistic, but down from 60% in the 2009 survey. Around 43% said lack of profitability online will impact resources and therefore the quality of journalism.
• Advertising will fall a further 10% this year, journalists expect, though they anticipate a smaller drop than 2009.
• Around 46% of journalists said they were expected to produce more work, 30% said they are working longer hours and 28% have less time to research stories. Welcome to our world.

The Bad

• Journalists are producing less video, largely due to cuts in budget and increased time pressures. Last year, the number of news sites offering video reached 50%, but this fell to 39% this year. Blogs and discussion boards were also less used, according to the journalists surveyed this year.
• Journalists are less interested in receiving multimedia content from PRs; 75% want emailed releases and half want photographs. Does this mean less imaginative and experimental editorial?

The Good

• Journalists are slightly more positive about the future; only 14% think the total number of media outlets will shrink (by this, they mean established media rather than blog houses) and 40% think the web provides new opportunities. The most optimistic webbists were in the UK, US, Spain and Brazil.
• Twitter is even more widely used this year with 41% of publications running a feed. But that only increased 6% from the previous year – not much considering the rapid growth of Twitter. It was most popular in the UK, US and Brazil.
• Smartphones are increasingly important to publishers, particularly as they look to apps to provide a new income stream. One in five publications now has a mobile app, but apps are particularly popular in Germany, Italy and the US where one in three publishers offer them.
• One quarter of publishers are looking at paid-access models, with 30% exploring paid-for websites and 22% mulling charges for smartphone apps. Sunday Times executive editor Tristan Davies said there is a broader move to paid-for digital content in the industry: "The arrival of iPad and the explosion of mobile media means we will be able to give people the Sunday Times however they want it, wherever they are and whenever they want it. We think that's worth paying for. The Times and Sunday Times may be the first British newspaper to introduce subscriptions for their websites but it's clear from this survey that other media groups are actively working on ways of making their digital content pay."
• But despite the added workload and that extra pressure, 79% of journalists think the quality of their work has remained high and 84% still enjoy their jobs. The most optimistic journalists regard technology as an aid, rather than a threat. Quite right too.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

The Rise and Fall of Traditional Journalism,

By Kurt Cagle
TechNewsWorld

The centuries-old profession of journalism is undergoing change so cataclysmic that it may soon be unrecognizable. The journalist as hero -- Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Bob Woodward -- has become displaced by the pundit. Advertising moved to the Internet, and the ground began crumbling as a disaster waiting to happen began.

The term "journalism" conjures up powerful memories for many people. For some, it's the epic confrontation between Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joe McCarthy, which ultimately led to the senator's downfall and the end of the Red Scare. For others, it's Walter Cronkite, whose stentorian tones and skill in telling the story served to chronicle the 1960s, earning him the sobriquet of the "Most Trusted Man in America." Still others can point to Bob Woodward's coverage of Watergate during the 1970s, which ultimately forced President Richard Nixon to resign in disgrace. Indeed, Woodward's role may have spawned a number of TV shows and movies over the years in which reporters and journalists are featured heavily.
Indeed, these have, in turn, created an image of the journalist as hero -- investigating mysterious deaths, corrupt politicians and battle-torn war scenes -- and contributed a fair share of hoary tropes, from the spinning newspaper used to showcase some public "scoop" to the hoards of microphone-laden reporters converging on the villain as he's perp-walked into the courtroom.
For all that, the vast bulk of journalism was far more mundane: hours upon hours of research; even more hours of waiting for or arranging interviews; sitting in on public meetings and taking notes; long hours on the road traveling; and, of course, spending a great deal of time writing. With a few exceptions, journalism tended to be a career with comparatively little personal recognition or pay at all but the highest levels, especially as newscasters -- talking heads -- increasingly become the ones to speak the words the journalists wrote.
Despite all of that, many journalists have been happy with their jobs -- even with the stress, the long hours and the comparatively low pay. However, several factors are now pushing the journalism profession, as it exists today, into extinction.

Rise of Big Journalism

Modern journalism exists due to a curious convergence of factors that trace their origins back to the beginning of the last century. Newspapers have been around for a long time. When The Boston News-Letter, the first regular North American publication, went to press in 1704, Europeans had already had newspapers for nearly a century.
Benjamin Franklin got an early start in journalism as a regular contributor to his brother's newspaper, The New England Courant; later, he purchased the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1728 and proceeded to make it one of the most successful newspaper of the 18th century, changing its name to the Philadelphia Evening Post in the 1780s (to become one of the first daily papers) and then, after a change of ownership, to the Saturday Evening Post in 1821, which survived, aside for a few short interruptions, to the present day.
Until the late 1800s, most newspapers were paid for by subscription, donations, and the occasional support of local governments. Stories were typically gathered by reporters who would either cover local events or wait by ports or near gatehouse taverns in order to get stories from incoming travelers, sea captains, or other "reliable witnesses."
They would write up these stories in their "journals" (from the French word for "daily") and then sell them to local printers, who would produce broadsides. As papers began to develop more prestige, it became increasingly common for world adventurers to keep regular journals of their wanderings and then sell the stories to news-magazines when they returned home to help recoup costs.
With the invention of considerably more sophisticated printing technology (photogravure) in the 1870s, it became possible to create photographic images for reproduction in newspapers and magazines. This period also, not coincidentally, marked the rise of the advertising industry -- as such a process made possible the easy reproduction of advertising graphics -- and the rise of photojournalism. The additional income from advertising made it possible for formal news organizations to arise, both for local coverage and, increasingly, for foreign coverage.
Printing presses are expensive pieces of equipment and, as such, represent a significant barrier to entry, particularly for a newspaper. Magazines can be printed in runs with other jobs, but newspaper presses are highly specialized machines that can't really be suborned to other tasks, even if there should be time to run them. This has kept the number of newspapers down to a few for all but the largest cities, with many of the secondary papers serving a specific language demographic. This meant that as newspapers grew, so did their advertising sales departments, which often developed in tandem with one or two specific agencies that frequently were themselves acquired by the newspapers.
Papers survived the arrival of the radio -- and later, television -- because they offered a medium that complemented rather than competed with the other media. Specifically, with newspapers, a reader wasn't constrained by the schedule of the broadcaster. Moreover, newspapers could provide a low-cost alternative for many small-scale advertisements -- job listings, real estate and automobile listings, want ads and personal ads -- and they could also distribute coupons and other tangibles that could be shipped with the papers, something neither radio nor TV could do.
This meant that journalism itself became "Big Journalism," with journalists deployed throughout the country and the world. Syndication also helped, as it helped the largest papers establish brand name columnists with various specialities, while giving smaller papers the appearance of being far more heavily staffed than they actually were.

Rise of the Pundit

It can be argued that newspaper journalism reached its apex in the 1970s, and that it has, in fact, been in decline ever since. One factor was the diminishing costs of video production, which, when combined with the growth of cable TV, made the creation of specialized news, analysis and entertainment channels feasible. This not only siphoned off advertising dollars, but also proved a powerful allure to young reporters who saw TV news as being more visible, lucrative and satisfying than print. A similar phenomenon occurred with radio in the 1930s and '40s.
The second factor was an increasingly fractured and factionalized market, which made it harder to sustain the illusion of objective journalism -- an illusion that was only really made possible by the presumption of a monolithic culture that held sway in the 1950s and '60s. A newly politicized journalism had an overall corrosive effect upon the perceived authority of the journalist, and good investigative journalism gave way to the rise of the pundit, an opinion maker who did little to report news and everything to shape it.
The mania for mergers in the 1990s and early 2000s was the third factor responsible for the demise of big journalism. During that period, many previously independent newspapers, radio and TV stations were purchased by large news consortia such as Gannett, McClatchy, and Knight-Ridder (itself purchased by McClatchy in 2006). Newspapers have traditionally been extraordinarily profitable, and a common strategy has been to use the papers themselves as collateral for purchasing the papers -- a process facilitated by the use of low-grade (i.e., junk) bonds. Once purchased, editorial operations were often evaluated, and editorial departments downsized in order to get the maximum possible profit.
Advertising had been undergoing its own large-scale consolidation that mirrored the newspaper publishing industry. Large advertising concerns bought up smaller, newer ad agencies, which, in general, pushed them to supporting large clients such as automotive manufacturers, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and so on -- typically pushing the cost of advertising out of the reach of smaller producers, who increasingly moved to the Internet. This dependency upon high dollar accounts was a disaster waiting to happen.

In a world where everyone can be a reporter and everyone can sell advertising, and where search-engine powered aggregators can gather fat bundles of related news content from sources scattered across the globe, is it possible for a branded news organization to survive?

The economy came crashing down in September 2008 as the credit markets seized up, a massive dislocation which is now, tsunami-like, causing huge damage to the economy. This has significantly reduced the amount of credit available for businesses, and has put publishers, consortia and advertisers -- many highly leveraged -- into a situation that forces them to liquidate parts of their businesses and lay off large numbers of workers just to make the ballooning payments on their bonds.
Many news organizations -- made vulnerable by media competition, the rapid drying-up of advertising dollars, fragmenting markets and the Internet -- are being forced to close their doors, and it is very likely that many cities' alternate papers, and in some cases their primary papers, will cease production this year.
The advertising market has collapsed. Automobile manufacturers are now either in or near bankruptcy. Financial services are, of course, in disarray. Real estate is facing its worst markets since the mid-1930s, and luxury goods advertising is disappearing as conspicuous displays of wealth make people targets.
With 5 million jobs lost in the last year and countless others facing reduction in hours or pay, consumer spending has given way to consumer saving. Advertising hasn't completely disappeared, but its place as the engine driving journalism most certainly has been significantly diminished. In many places, advertising itself is being rethought as the Web continues to become more pervasive in our lives.

The Web's Devastating Effect

During the 1930s, a number of newspapers that had survived for decades finally succumbed to the ravages of the Great Depression, but once the economy started to recover in the late 1930s and early 1940s -- and especially as World War II created an insatiable demand for news -- the newspapers in general came back, and many new ones were started, incorporating new technologies in order to be far more competitive.
Eventually, the current crisis will end as well, but it's likely this time around that newspapers will not recover with the rest of the economy. A big part of the reason for this is the Web -- more specifically, the rise of search engines, social media and semantics, known as the "Triple S Threat." Taken together, these technologies give a significant competitive edge to the newest generation of publishers: everybody.
During the 1990s, as the World Wide Web first began taking shape, designers were torn about which medium the Web was most like. Was it more like a magazine, a newspaper, radio or television? In fact, it was like all of them ... and none of them. The Web could mimic the characteristics of other media, from the telegraph and telephone to 3-D worlds. Moreover, it could make it possible to combine these media in ways that no one could have imagined when the first Web browsers appeared. This fluidity of media became the first, most obvious, threat to existing media organizations.
However, the Web proved to be devastating in more subtle and insidious ways. Most Web pages can be thought of as content liberally sprinkled with hyperlinks to other content. These hyperlinks create alternative pathways to content that often bypasses branding (and the corresponding gates), and what's more, they make the content searchable.
Search engines like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) have changed the dynamics of the Web completely. Instead of locating content on the basis of a brand -- in this case, embodied in the server address -- they make it possible to find content by using keywords, in ways that frequently render useless the carefully designed front-page portals that companies often spend millions to develop.
Further, search results generally are sorted by relevancy, and freshness plays a big part. Because they search across news sites, the search engines themselves are very quickly fulfilling the timeliness aspect of contemporary journalism.

Everyone's an Advertiser

This aspect of the collision of journalism and search engines flared recently when the Associated Press threatened to sue aggregators of its news content. Google has a formal aggregation agreement with AP, but Google CEO Eric Schmidt nevertheless warned it -- and related organizations -- that they risked angering users of news aggregation services at their peril.
The Google chief executive called on the newspaper bosses to engage with readers more thoroughly.
"These are consumer businesses, and if you piss off enough of them you will not have them anymore," he said. He also condemned many of the newspaper publishers' Web sites for the poor quality of their technology. "I think the sites are slow, they are slower than reading the paper. That can be worked on, on a technological basis."
In this context, it's also worth nothing that Google has very quickly usurped the role of the advertising broker from Madison Avenue. Indeed, in many ways it is better to think of companies such as Google or Yahoo less as search engines and more as advertisers.
Because they control such a critical part of the Web browsing pipeline, they are able to pull together semantic information about users based upon internal profiles, and thus are much better able to target these users at a level that most ad agencies a couple of decades ago would have found impossible to achieve. Not surprisingly, those seeking to advertise are attracted to this -- even more so given the comparatively low cost of such advertisements.
Yet there's another thing tearing away at the advertising firmament. Programs such as AdSense make Web site owners into ad space sellers, even if the Web site in question is a single-person shop operating a blog.
This approach takes advantage of the distributed nature of the Web to make the "long tail" profitable, and it serves to further weaken one of they key benefits that traditional media have had: the ability to sell advertising space in a broadcast fashion.

Social media arose in a scattershot fashion as experiments in online collaboration. In the beginning, they were all fun and games. As blogs, podcasts, social networks and Twitter feeds developed, however, amazing possibilities began to unfold. For one, anyone could be a reporter -- and, in some ways, tech-savvy bloggers could arguably be better reporters than traditional journalists.

The shift from highly centralized corporations to distributed, networked "clouds" of micro-businesses is a hallmark of the Internet age, and it finds its expression most clearly in the rise of social media.
Social media services can best be thought of as ad hoc organizations of contributors providing media content of some sort over the Web. The variety of such services is stunning: blogging, for editorial content; Flickr, for photographic postings; YouTube and similar services for video; Blip.fm for sharing of musical tracks; Twitter (more about the Twitter phenomenon below); DeviantArt for sharing graphical art; eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) for buying and selling; Craigslist for advertising just about anything, including job listings; LinkedIn for business profiles; MySpace for music profiles; Facebook for general profiles; Wikipedia for encyclopedia entries; and so on.
This short list doesn't even begin to consider the universe of related applications that provide value-add to a primary social media service.

The T-Blogger as the New Journalist

Blogging represents one of the most immediate threats to traditional journalism, to the extent of likely supplanting it completely within the next decade. A blog consists of a do-it-yourself article published on the Web by means of easy-to-use content management tools. What makes a blog so devastating, however, is that once it's posted, that blog content is syndicated through specialized news feeds, which means that anyone who has subscribed to it will be notified (in one way or another) of every new post.
That solved one of the major problems of the Web: knowing when new material was posted to a given site. However, it also had an unintended side effect. The first large news sites on the Web were not that radically different from newspapers or magazines, in that competing effectively required a significant investment in infrastructure: servers, content management systems, customized programming and so forth. The investment in printing presses served as a barrier to entry against anyone becoming a publisher in the 1930s, and that looked to be holding increasingly true for the Web in the early 1990s, as large media corporations set up their "Web presence" with multimillion dollar Web site roll-outs.
Blogging, however, changed the dynamics of publishing on the Web completely. Anyone could set up a blog within perhaps an hour tops and at little to no cost; could post content to it as often as desired; and lay out that content in a way that appeared visually identical to what was being published by the large news organizations (or could go the other direction and make the output unique).
Early on, most blogs were, ironically, journals that recorded day to day personal experiences. Yet over time, different styles of writing emerged as people with different talents, interests and needs-to-communicate started writing.
Some bloggers began to treat their entries like news articles, reporting on local events or even on global events as their means permitted. Some began to concentrate on analysis writing -- particularly those people in areas such as financial services, who could provide their own opinions about trends in the markets; or political analysts, who performed the same service in the halls of power. Some became reviewers and critics of everything from consumer electronics to food to film and theater, and some concentrated on writing tutorials or technical articles.
The upshot of all this has been that a second area of journalism -- the creation of "news" content -- is increasingly shifting from the domain of the "professional journalist" to the "dedicated amateur." For a relatively short period of time, this arguably reduced the overall quality of news content. Certainly, that is the opinion of many dedicated professional journalists, and there's some merit in it.

Student Becomes Teacher

However, the same thing is happening now as happened back in the 1990s, when amateur designers found themselves establishing a new visual feel for Web sites. The professionals approached Web design with a certain disdain, applying the same rules that had worked so well in print ... but they didn't work terribly well on the Web.
The amateurs, starting with fewer preconceived rules, were able to establish themselves more quickly in the new media, and in many cases became the next generation of professionals, while established design firms either made the transition or faded into obsolescence.
Bloggers have been diligently producing articles -- in some cases, several articles a day -- since 2003, which means they have had six years of exploration in a completely new medium, finding out what works and what doesn't, all the while studying the works of established journalists to compare and contrast. In many cases, what it means is that these dedicated amateurs know their medium -- and know its writing styles and limitations -- far better than the supposed professionals.
Not surprisingly, many of the more forward-thinking professional journalists started blogging on the side. As a consequence, they are now far better placed than many news organizations, particularly those that are undergoing upheavals as they make the transition to "online" or "virtual" publishing.
As a side note, there's some question about how effective these "real-to-virtual" transitions really are. In general, if an organization had already established a fairly broad online presence in the earlier part of the decade (or even earlier), the issues of Web presence, infrastructure investment and the like have generally been solved.
The likelihood that a purely offline publication will survive the jump in the current environment is pretty close to zero, as a dedicated offline subscription base generally does not, in fact, translate into a dedicated online readership.

The Online Conversation

A second phenomenon that has been taking place is what might best be termed the "Online Conversation." While there have been a number of different instances of this, one of the most recent (and most popular) is Twitter. Twitter began as yet another "social nightclub" conceit, letting users post (very) short messages describing what they were doing at that moment, and letting them subscribe to their friends' feeds to see what they were doing. Like a lot of significant social media, however, Twitter evolved.
At some point, the Twitter staff decided to add the ability to embed shortened (tiny) URLS into the status messages if longer site URLs were supplied. That meant people could start pointing to articles they'd just read and pass that information to all of their "followers." This setup became the equivalent of "headline news" -- short teasers that could function as succinct reports of breaking news events in real-time, often delivered via an Internet-connected handset. They could also be linked to longer news stories, images, videos, or analyses.
The coming-out moment for such real-time journalism occurred when an observer in New York, Janis Krums, who was videotaping flights coming out of the airport, watched in disbelief as a jet took off, then emergency-landed in the Hudson River. He caught the plane's aborted flight with his cellphone camera and uploaded the shots to Flickr , sent out a running "tweet" stream as events unfolded, and was even there to cover the orderly evacuation of the plane.
Krums, an amateur blogger/twitterer, managed to report the critical breaking news in its entirety before the first "professional" journalist could even arrive.
What's significant here is not Twitter in and of itself, but the integration of the various social media, first in an ad hoc way, but increasingly in formalized ways. Someone can Twitter a given online blog posting or event, which, if its interesting, will get picked up and spread around so that others can also determine its import. Among them, someone will follow up on the story (possibly via Skype or a similar electronic phone system), check it out, post a video to YouTube and photos to Flickr; then either write up another article or do a podcast, linking it back to Twitter or Facebook. The posted article, once published, will then appear on a news feed that can get pulled in by subscribers, and possibly get posted as part of an electronic newsletter sent via email.
Notice that despite the fact that the information involved may be newsworthy, there's no mention of publishers, editors, printers, graphic designers, or even newsboys delivering the paper from a basket on their bicycle. The whole process, from the actual event to a notice landing in your email in-box, might take place within the space of an hour. Where the event happens is not really a factor. The blogosphere and twittersphere were essentially tracking a recent Obama/G20 meeting in real-time, with aides on the scene capturing events as they were taking place at a locale that, for many "observers," was half a world away at a level of access that was very exclusive.
Facebook has recently made it possible to embed tweets into the Facebook stream, while Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) indicated that it was in discussions to acquire Twitter and integrate it into its own increasingly sophisticated news system. Whether or not the latter will happen, the reality is that new media are already talking to one another, and will likely serve only to accelerate the demise of the traditional media institutions.

The Web has changed the concept of community. "Community" no longer only means the people in your geographical vicinity. It also means the people who share your interests, regardless of where they are. As Web users in any given community are able to more actively create and self-select the news that interests them the most, traditional channels of journalism are swept aside.

Ask someone about the future of journalism, and it's likely that most people will point to something like E-Ink or perhaps the Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) Kindle -- high-fidelity readers that use millions of embedded, magnetically sensitive spheres which can show a black, white or in-between state to create dynamically refreshing text content. Such readers no doubt have a great deal of potential (along with a number of other display technologies), but while it's entirely possible that future newspapers will be displayed on such readers, they will also be displayed on laptops and netbooks, on cellphones, on car heads-up displays, the refrigerator, specialized glasses, and ultimately even our shirt-sleeves.
This highlights the real future of journalism -- it is increasingly ubiquitous, increasingly participatory, and increasingly germane. Ubiquity is a function of search; participatory is a function of social media; while increasingly germane has to do with a relatively new concept that's been of largely academic interest in the last few years, but is increasingly entering into common usage -- the semantic Web.

What Is Community?

Semantics is one of the more obscure (and philosophical) branches of linguistics, and in the acaddemic sense, semantics is largely preoccupied with the concepts of meaningfulness and relevancy. As such, it tends to be seen as too technical or abstract to be of use to most people. However, in point of fact, semantics (and especially computational semantics) is going to become increasingly central to the way that people work with information systems of all sorts, and most especially news.
One of the most profound changes that the Internet has introduced is the idea that we are transitioning from communities of place to communities of interest. A community of place is geographical -- your house, your neighborhood, your city, your region, your state or province, your country, your continent, your hemisphere, your world. For most of recorded history, the degree of relevance of any given thing was inversely proportional to the distance away that thing was. Not surprisingly, your allegiances likewise followed the same relationship. The king may have had more overall power, but in most cases the local lord had far more power over you, and in a struggle between your lord and your king, there was seldom any question of where your true loyalty lay.
Newspapers are very much artifacts of this idea of community of place. A paper is typically associated with a city, or in many cases, with a specific community within that city. A newspaper's National section may contain news about the country, but in most cases even that news is cherry picked for those pieces of information that may affect the newspaper's region. The Sports, Business and Lifestyle sections focused on the most proximate sports teams, the doings of the businesses that had a presence in the region, and human interest stories that dealt primarily with the local culture or environment. There are a few exceptions (USA Today comes to mind) but even here its notable that most of their content is still segmented by geography -- the USA Today that you pick up in Seattle will have very different news beyond the front page content than the same issue in Atlanta.
In communities of interest, on the other hand, the basis for the community is a particular theme, topic or cause -- such as the community surrounding a given computer language, sports team or political ideology. Such communities of interest have, of course, been around for some time, but the difficulty in coordinating communication between members of a given community has typically kept the size of such organizations small and its influence limited. With the rise of the Internet, this is changing.

Shaping Yourself

An interesting case in point is an organization such as Major League Baseball's Seattle Mariners. As the name would imply, the Mariners are located in Seattle, and as such its fan base tends to be drawn largely from the Puget Sound -- with one notable exception. Because the team features two very popular Japanese ball players (Ichiro Suzuki and Kenji Johjima) and the first Asian American coach (Don Wakamatsu), the Mariners have a large and vibrant fan base in Japan, despite appearing only once a year for exhibition games. This latter community is one of interest.
The Web has accelerated a shift that has been underway for a while: As it has become easier for people to communicate with one another across different social media, it has also made it easier for people to find others who have similar interests, coordinate activities, share information, and often to buy and sell within interest-based markets, regardless of where on Earth these people may actually live.
Most social media sites are built around the concept of community interest. Facebook , MySpace , LinkedIn and countless others provide a centralized place for a person to project a particular representation of themselves (an avatar) to the rest of the world, while at the same time acting as windows into interest groups of one form or another. Over time, the more a person becomes involved in a particular media space, the more they invest of themselves in that space, and the more that they shape their particular information sphere.
This filtering process was formerly one of the functions that a news editor performed, determining which particular content would be passed to the readers or viewers within that particular community. The editor as generalist is disappearing; instead, they are being replaced by moderators who act primarily to insure that the inbound content from contributors does not stray too radically from the role of the interest group.
It can be argued that even that function is disappearing, as users of many media services are increasingly able to enable or disable particular channels or news providers. This is the filtering mechanism that is core to Twitter , for instance. You can choose to follow people who other people in your interest circle recommend, and you can also choose to "unfollow" people who provide comparatively little value of interest to you personally. The effect of this over time is the development of a filter "envelope" that provides references to content that is most interesting to you, with comparatively little noise (i.e., the signal-to-noise ratio goes up dramatically). While this may have been an unintended side effect of the original architecture, it is surprisingly effectively.
Put another way, such services let you create your own "newspaper" incrementally, without necessarily choosing to explicitly choose given interest groups or categorizations. This process of increasingly transparent categorization is one of the hallmarks of the current age of journalism; the categorization becomes a function of the likes and dislikes of the reader rather than the editor. Add into this the fact that the reader also is able to effectively "vote" on their favorite news provider (where this information is increasingly at the level of a given writer rather than of an entire news organization), and what emerges is a powerful medium for shaping the news in ways appropriate to the user.

Wearing Blinders?

One argument that's been raised about this particular filtering and categorization mechanism is that over time, it tends to lock a person into a narrow view of the world, one where alternate ideas are not presented as often and majority viewpoints become self-reinforcing. There's some validity in that criticism, though it can also be argued that having a human editor in the question provides no guarantee that the content involved will be any more free of bias toward a particular mindset or viewpoint.
Yet consider the counterpoint to this: As such self-filtering becomes the norm, the reader needs to take on more responsibility in seeking out alternate viewpoints. Indeed, this raises the concept of the "responsible information consumer," in which the information profiles that a person sets up (either directly or indirectly) reflect a more thoughtful approach to understanding the world.
The amount of information on the Internet is reaching a point of inconceivability -- the information space is growing faster than any one person, even a voracious reader of this information, could ever take in. It is this fact as much as any that is causing the profession of journalism to collapse -- once you remove the requirement that only "formally recognized" journalists can produce content and only "formally recognized" editors can determine what constitutes news, then the amount of content can grow without limit. Through social media tools like Twitter, through blogs, through other similar media, the editorial function becomes a preferential one -- "this link is interesting to me ... if you have a similar profile to mine, you will likely find the content at the other end of this link interesting too."

Enter Semantics

Most of these filters act at the document level, but current developments in Semantic Web technology are likely to start performing a fair amount of the analysis at the sub-document level. Document enrichment, encoding terms, people, events, places and things within documents through the use of specialized markup, makes it possible to analyze a document and determine what it's "about" even if the document doesn't necessarily use specific terms in that topic.
At a minimum, such semantic analysis makes it easier to create compelling abstracts of articles without human intervention -- a remarkably difficult task for humans to accomplish, let alone computers. Yet in conjunction with specific Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, RDFa, OWL, Sparql and other sometimes cryptic acronyms, this also makes it possible for systems to read through collections of blogs, articles and other Web content and make inferences that may not necessarily be obvious to people.
Such an inference engine opens up both possibilities and raises some disturbing issues. One benefit of such a tool is that it makes it possible to perform better prognostications and forecasts (financial and resource allocation, especially), and be able to better determine when there is questionable activity taking place in business, government or elsewhere. The danger here is in failing to recognize that user-generated content does not necessarily just represent true facts, but also contains opinions, distortions, analyses and biased content.

With the current upheaval in the news, publishing and print industries, journalists are struggling against slim opportunities and poor wages. What is changing most, however, is the vehicle for expression of journalism -- not the very real need for news, analysis, investigative reporting, deep technical knowledge and entertainment. Skilled professionals are destined to make a big comeback.

When questions about the future of journalism come up, there are generally two driving concerns: what happens to the notion of "news" in an era of ubiquitous communications; and how you, as a writer, get paid.
One of the great paradoxes of the information age is that as channels of distribution have proliferated, rates of pay for producing content for those channels have continued to fall. Part of this can be attributed to the collapse of the basic business model for many news publishers that were reliant upon advertising in order to fund their operations. Part of it can be attributed to the growing number of bloggers, who are, at least on the surface, generally publishing their content for free. Part of it can be attributed to the shift from local to global economies, which translates to a larger number of people producing content.
The bad news is that the immediate future is not likely to improve significantly. We're in a transitional era, and in such periods, the specific value of anything -- especially something as intangible as writing -- is extremely ambiguous. The good news is that when things do stabilize, they will definitely stabilize in the writer's favor.

Writing Is a Skill - Blogging Is a Tool

Writing, regardless of whether you're writing a novel, a textbook or a blog, is a skill. It takes a great deal of time to become proficient in that skill, to build up a base of fans, and to reach a stage where you are capable of producing high quality content on a regular sustained basis. It requires gaining an understanding of your audience and a time to find your own voice, and time to establish a network of publishers.
Most people have the basic tools to become writers. In this day and age, all that's required is having a computer and Internet access. However, generally speaking, few are willing to make the investment of time necessary to become proficient as a writer, regardless of the domain. It's worth noting that of the huge number of blogs that are written every month, the vast majority of them are updated perhaps once every two to three months, and most blog sites will be abandoned after no more than five posts.
The reason for this is simple. Writing is a business, like any other -- but unlike most others, it requires that you are constantly inventing, constantly creating new content. This content has to be informative, provocative, or entertaining -- and hitting all three of these is better than getting one or another.
Blogging, whether as news content or something else, is the sizzle -- it is what gets readers interested in your work. It's your calling card. It is, in essence, your own advertising. The more you blog -- and the better the quality of that blog -- the larger the following you develop, but it's highly unlikely that you will get people choosing to pay for your blog.
What that means is that writers should look upon such content as being part of their overall offerings. Many financial analysts use blogs as a way to establish their authority as an expert in the field, then make their money by taking on clients for whom they provide much more customized services. Technical writers regularly publish technical blogs that prove their authority, then translate that advantage into selling their services, or selling books that outline their take on technology in a more cohesive fashion. Fiction writers may develop themes, even publish short stories within their blogs, especially if the short stories are in support of book-length storylines.
Indeed, one of the key points about "do-it-yourself" Web publishing is that ultimately, what you are selling is your expertise in some area -- your worlds, if you are a fiction writer, or your skills in being able to fashion larger, more complex bodies of work. In a lot of cases, you can package that expertise as other products -- webinars, customization of code, training, private newsletters and so forth -- that are sent to your "patrons," your actual customer base.

Five Paths to Cash

One of the keys in all of this is to recognize that you have at least five avenues of monetization as a writer in this day and age:
* Customers. Those people (or organizations) who wish for you to customize your services and offerings for their specific needs;
* Patrons. Those people (or organizations) who want to support your efforts as a way of enhancing their personal reputation;
* Employers. Those people (or organizations) who hire you long term for your skills, including your communication skills;
* Agencies. Those people who wish to sell your works through their imprint or under their banner; and
* Advertisers. Those people who wish to use your reputation to sell their own goods.

You target customers with books, digital videos, software, training materials and so forth. Typically monetization here involves content that you create once then sell repeatedly, though it may involve some customization. As a writer, you should always be looking for potential things to see in what you produce.
Patrons, in general, are people who -- for some reason or another -- are willing to support you financially in your writing efforts, either because they believe in the message that you're trying to articulate or because they want to be seen as being a supporter of your career. This mode of monetization went out of style, in great part because the mechanics of patronage made it something that only the very wealthy could do (and only at a very large scale), but the Internet may change that by letting people become "micro-patrons" (via PayPal donations to sites, for instance, as well as a number of social networks that are coming online soon).
Note also that patrons may be organizations that are interested in some particular cause or focus, and are seeking writers who can clearly articulate their purpose without necessarily hiring them as employees.
Employers often represent the most-desired path to monetization: a guaranteed paycheck, benefits, potential for career growth and so on. Perhaps one of the biggest concerns for writers who have been formal journalists is that, without an employer, their careers are dead. However, it's likely that -- at least for a while -- formal employment may prove increasingly elusive for writers. Many organizations are looking for ways to cut costs; with the exception of dedicated news organizations -- most of which are disintegrating fast -- bringing on full-time writers who do nothing but content development is very low on most organizations' priorities.
This trend is exacerbated by the fact that in a buyers market (which it is, for most companies) one of the major expectations is that anyone who is hired will, in fact, take on any writing and communication responsibilities associated with the position. In the short term, this means that although full-time employment should be viewed as a potential source for monetization, it is not necessarily the most viable.
Longer term, that will change. Recesssions should be seen as periods of adaptation, as people go from one set of expectations to another. Once that equilibrium state is reached, however, you also tend to get a huge amount of innovation and entrepreneurship that tries to take advantage of the new rules. At that point, original content creators will likely be in very high demand as organizations become their own publishers, as new news organizations that have found successful funding models emerge, and as the number of available writers declines. Expect this to be the situation by 2012.
Agencies fall into a somewhat different category from other employers. They aggregate writers (or similar experts) and package them together under the agency's label or banner. In essence, each writer is a consultant or partner within the agency, producing cohesive analysis about the state of an industry, technology, financial sector, government policy or politics.
Obviously, this applies most to writers who specialize in analysis, but that encompasses a broad swath of columnists and journalists working at news organizations today. Note that this concept also covers studios in which writers (in this case fiction writers) work together to produce entertainment content in a given genre or medium.
Finally, advertisers may end up helping to fund a given writer in order to promote their own products. This will likely prove to be a somewhat contentious area, primarily because advertisers may have gone overboard with their efforts in the last couple of decades, to the extent that as a creative individual, you have to determine the balancing point between promoting your own brand and promoting the brand of some other company.
Note that there's nothing preventing these from overlapping -- this is the era of the mashup, after all -- and there may be other venues that may emerge over time. Nor should you think that the existing modes will completely disappear; people will be buying paper-based books, magazines and newspapers for the next century, in all likelihood.
However, expect for those texts to be increasingly printed in micro-lots by all-in-one presses that can go from a PDF proof manuscript to final hardbound and paperback book without ever being touched by human hands. Expect for magazines and newspapers to become anachronisms, used for "historical color," backups or archives, but far less important as vehicles for providing news content.

Embrace the Unknown

In the end, what is changing most is the vehicle for expression of journalism, not the very real need that we still have day to day for news, analysis, investigative reporting, deep technical knowledge and entertainment. The rise of interest communities, replacing geographic ones, places an upper limit on the number of people who can effectively write to the concerns of those communities, and the means for individual writers to increasingly become their own publishers, marketers and promoters gives them considerable more leverage as the economy recovers.
It is likely that as the economy shakes out, the ethics for a new form of journalism will arise, one consistent with the media and ways of thinking of a distributed, networked society. That it doesn't bear that much resemblance to the journalism of yesterday should not be surprising. We're undergoing one of the most radical transformations to society in the last half millennium, and the rules are changing as a consequence.
With change comes opportunities, if you're brave enough to take them.

Source: technewsworld.com

Saving journalism, a farthing at a time

Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet online. The answer is not to give content away but to sell it – for peanuts

Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

Saving journalism, a farthing at a time

Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet online. The answer is not to give content away but to sell it – for peanuts

Ever since Rupert Murdoch announced plans to put his digital titles behind a paywall, claiming the "free" web was dead, the rest of the media have either pooh-poohed his proposals, or nervously wondered if they should do likewise.
A great deal of online content is profitably charged for – notably music and porn – but news struggles. With the exception of some high-value material from publications like the Wall Street Journal, news doesn't seem able to turn a buck. Experiments in charging have largely failed – and the advertising-subsidised model has reigned supreme.
However, with recession, advertising revenues, always marginal at best, have dried up. Publishers are in a nightmarish situation; they know the print side of their business is struggling, they know punters want their news online, but they can't see how to make it pay. In desperation others may follow Murdoch's retreat behind the paywall. Not good news for news addicts. It isn't so much the money, it's the usernames, passwords, subscriptions ... Actually, it is the money. But publishers need a profit. Information might want to be free – but food and housing isn't. So is there another way? Some model that brings in more than advertising, but doesn't exclude casual visitors, either by cost or inconvenience? Well yes – an idea that won't go away: micropayments.
The basic concept of micropayments is that you charge at a price that doesn't deter consumers at all, but will aggregate enough profit, via mass sales, to sustain a business. Classical micropayment theory (yes, there is a classical and neo theory – probably a superstring version too) states that payments should be of the order of 1/1000 of a US cent. A cent would be the minimum now. Fans claim this is beneath the mental threshold at which resistance to a purchase sets in. Critics divide into two camps – those who feel it's a dumb idea, and those who feel it's evil. Dumb because similar schemes have failed in the past. Evil because it swipes your money under the radar, and an effective scheme could easily expand to diminish the entire web by fencing off vast quantities of content. The dumb argument can be countered – we can implement a scheme today that beats previous implementations hands down – I'll explain how in a moment. I pretty much accept the evil argument, but it's the lesser of several evils – the main one being that journalism goes down the pan unless we find a way to fund mainstream media online.
So, how could it work? Step forward Google. Many of you will be familiar with Google Ads – perhaps not with how the system works. Basically, you sign up, create a bundle of code using their site tools, wrap it into your own pages and presto, ads appear, and when your visitors click on those ads, you get paid. Not immediately. Payments – tiny payments – are tracked and added up. To reduce payment transaction costs, you're paid one sum, once a month. The code has unique identifiers, the code is smart enough to tell Google to look at your pages, providing content-targeted ads. The database in the background keeps track. You just watch the money roll in. The transfer potential of this technology to a micropayments scenario is clear: individuals would sign up with Google, deposit funds. They'd have a unique ID attached to them at that point – an encrypted cookie stored on whichever PC they happen to log in with. When they visit a site with GoogleDosh embedded they're allowed in, a fraction of a penny is switched to the content provider's account for every item they read – if visitors aren't GoogleDosh members, they're re-routed, perhaps, to a précis, or a sign-up form, or even to a limited trial. The key difference from other micropayment schemes is scale – and that's what beats individual site subscriptions too – sign up with one scheme, and you get access to thousands of sites. That's my theory, at least. It's technically simple – an easy step if publishers accept a single standard, and the success of Google Ads suggests they will. Publishers win, consumers win long-term by supporting content providers, and in the short term, if good sense among sellers prevails, they get a bargain: spending pennies a day for all the content they need. Not just news of course – anything could be paid for in the same way.
Googlephobics will no doubt hold their hands up in horror. Tough. This needs a big player – there are two: Google and Microsoft. Of the two, Google already has the infrastructure and the reputation for managing situations like this. Not only that, but they're touted as news content's No 1 enemy, via GoogleNews. They "owe" the press one. Yes, there are issues. Privacy. Exclusion, perhaps. And further entrenching a near-monopoly position. But these can be countered, technically and economically – and nothing stops parallel schemes running, once the concept is established. The fact is that in the boom years micropayments looked like a lot of fuss, and a leap into the unknown. I get the impression publishers' pride got in the way of being asked to sell for pennies. But now the boom is over, micropayments aren't an option – they may be the only way forward.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Commercial Appeal's E-Edition Leads to 40 Percent Circulation Increase

AS newspapers struggle to stay ahead of the transition from print to digital news distribution, many are turning to e-editions and watching their circulation figures jump as a result.
Sounds promising, right? Yes and no. While e-editions bring in new subscribers, they don't necessarily bring in revenue. At least one paper, however, has found that its e-edition is attracting new audiences, especially younger readers and schools, and serving as an experimental investment in the future of newspapers.
Case in point is The Commercial Appeal's e-edition, called "e-appeal," which accounts for nearly 40 percent of the paper's overall circulation. Recent Audit Bureau of Circulation figures that cover a six-month period ending in March show that the paper's circulation climbed 31 percent as circulation industry-wide dropped 7 percent.
The increase, said Karl Wurzbach, vice president of sales and marketing at The Commercial Appeal, is directly related to its e-edition subscriptions, all but 2,000 of which are electronically delivered to classrooms.
"We made a decision to bite the bullet and tell the schools that effective the beginning of the 2008-09 school year, the only way they could get NIE [Newspapers in Education] copies was digitally, but that the price was going to be reduced significantly," said Wurzbach. "We created a new rate structure, and basically the acceptance was such that we've registered 70,000 and 80,000 [users] across local middle schools and high schools."
Wurzbach would not share the specifics of the new rate structure, but said it was a good enough deal to increase the number of digital edition copies by 60,000 to 70,000. The e-edition is a PDF version of the printed paper that lets users print and e-mail articles. In this sense, it trains younger readers to grow accustomed to reading a digital replica of the newspaper as opposed to just reading the paper's stories online.
The Commercial Appeal's NIE e-edition includes several interactive features, such as the ability to translate stories into 12 different languages and an audio option that reads to you and lets you archive content. It's one step, Wurzbach and the paper's publisher say, toward attracting younger newspaper readers and promoting literacy.
"The schools love the program," said Joe Pepe, publisher of The Commercial Appeal. "They use white boards to instruct classrooms and make the e-editions available on individual PCs in addition to applauding us for being 'green.'"
So far, the increased e-subscriptions have not led to increased revenue. The paper has, however, profited from no longer having to pay for the 10,000 print editions it delivered to schools before requiring them to order the NIE e-edition.
The Commercial Appeal is still considering how to best gain ad revenue from its e-edition. "Right now," Wurzbach said, "we have not sought advertisers to sponsor the NIE edition, and we haven't done anything on the home delivery side. Our intent is to find a big advertiser sponsor for the NIE edition."
To attract more home delivery subscribers, the paper is planning to launch a "Go-Green" section, which will be teased in the print edition but will be available only to e-subscribers.
Wurzbach, who talks regularly with other circulation directors at Scripps-owned newspapers, said he isn't aware of any other Scripps papers that are using the NIE e-edition the way The Commercial Appeal is. But, he said, "I think they're all aware of what we've done, and I think they're all looking to do something else or they're already working toward it."
While The Commercial Appeal has benefited mostly from its NIE e-subscriptions, papers such as the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News have had noticeable success with their home delivery e-editions.
Both papers, which earlier this year cut home delivery to just Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, are generating about three million page views a week and attracting an estimated 30,000 people a day -- a significant increase from the 5,000 to 6,000 readers who subscribed to it before the papers' home delivery changes, Poynter's Bill Mitchell reported.
Recent Audit Bureau Circulation figures show that e-subscriptions account for 18.4 percent of The Wall Street Journal's circulation, 6.9 percent of The Dallas Morning News', 4.2 percent of The New York Times' and 4.1 percent of The Washington Post's. The St. Paul Pioneer Press' e-edition accounts for about 21 percent of its overall circulation.
"We continue to do a limited amount of print third-party, but growth of the e-edition makes it easier to be selective about print distribution of non-individually paid categories such as hotels and third-party," said Guy Gilmore, publisher of the Pioneer Press, noting that "selective" is the operative word. "We have tried to move into digital where it makes sense. But that is not to say that we could not reverse course and add back print copies."
NIE, he said, is an obvious example of where the print/digital hybrid makes sense. "A category such as newspapers in education is especially well suited to appear in an electronic version, and we have consciously moved school copies out of print and into digital," Gilmore said. "We now have over 6,000 digital-only [home delivery] paid subscriptions, which I consider to be a promising development given the newness of the program."
At The Commercial Appeal, getting people accustomed to the e-edition is as much about shaping reader behavior as it is about building revenue. "The purpose is to get people to go to the e-edition -- to use it, touch it, feel it," Wurzbach said. "Our intent is not to cut distribution but to move content from print over to digital as people become tolerant of that."

Source: poynter.org

Newspapers' evolutionary print

FEW practitioners of a profession or craft get paid for publicly speculating on the future, even the possible demise, of the trade that sustains their mortgages or rents.

But journalism is a singular craft, and its future, not least of the print variety, has insinuated itself at the forefront of international discussion. Time magazine gave the future of newspapers thousands of words a few editions back. The BBC World Service consistently digs up journalists or media entrepreneurs for interviews on the subject. So does PBS's The News Hour (seen here on SBS at 4.30pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays). And Radio National's Saturday Extra last week brought a well-credentialled panel together to discuss the fate, or future, of Australian newspapers.
To be truthful, journalists have always been willing to discuss their trade. Many (probably most) journalists are obsessed with journalism. It invades their social, as well as working, time. Who can't recall some long and labyrinthine pub tales of tremendous stories that somehow got away, of fantastic yarns that somehow got published not on page one but on page 19, of terrific features some ignorant editor declined to publish? It's endemic to the craft.
But today's torrent of discussion takes on a markedly different hue. At its core is whether there's going to be a front-page spot to argue about. It's about whether anyone gives a fig whether you have a great story or not. It's about if, or for how long, your newspaper will exist. It's a more sober conversation. It doesn't lend itself to beer-fuelled hilarity or casual insults. It calls for realism, even courage. It calls, as do so many dilemmas, for Will Shakespeare: "Raze out the written troubles of the brain/And with some sweet oblivious antidote/Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart."
Some sweet oblivious antidote is proving as elusive for sectors of print journalism as it was for Macbeth. The US newspaper industry is estimated to have shed 22,000 jobs last year.
Such revered mastheads as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune are financially embarrassed. Lesser-known papers have ceased to publish. Two-newspaper towns are getting rarer. Thus we must deem the current round of journalistic discussion about journalism to be of more practical use than all those pub stories about stories. Maybe it'll trigger, perhaps inadvertently, a sweet oblivious antidote. Or the seeds of one.
The RN discussion mentioned earlier, sensibly presided over by Saturday Extra's experienced presenter Geraldine Doogue, produced a disparate array of observations from such media-wise folk as Campbell Reid, John Hewson, Alan Kohler, Eric Beecher and Wendy Bacon. There isn't, unfortunately, enough space here to sum it all up. Very briefly, it did seem Beecher (a former newspaper editor more latterly associated with the founding of Crikey.com) and Reid (once the editor of this journal, now News Limited's group editorial director) found themselves -- more or less -- at opposite ends of the debate.
Beecher believes that what he calls "public trust" journalism is as important to democracy as the judiciary or parliament. He says the diminution in classified advertising revenues puts such journalism at risk, and that what we might call the journalism of scrutiny could end up at the mercy of public funding or philanthropy. On the other hand, this was Reid: "I walked over here to the ABC (headquarters in inner Sydney) from News Limited. On the way I had the opportunity to buy 30 newspapers, from the militant Green Left Weekly to News Limited's (free) MX ... Newspapers in this country remain an extremely vibrant business, and we make a mistake if we think the canary in the tunnel is the US newspaper business."
You wouldn't expect the humble scribe to have the definitive answers, and nor does he. He began pondering the future of newspapers at least a decade ago, at a juncture when you could somehow sense stormy times ahead. It's a strange thing, but he went through a phase when just about every front page he saw would infuriate him. He became convinced newspapers wasted too much space and journalistic endeavour on effectively repeating what had already become public knowledge via the electronic media. If asked to do a comment/analysis piece to accompany some news story he might have written, he probably put more care and energy into the analysis. You began with the premise that readers already knew the bald facts about what had happened. But they probably didn't know why it had happened, and what the likely consequences would be. The scribe came to believe the entire newspaper should adopt that format: a brief news item as a reminder of what had occurred, accompanied by longer analysis and comment.
It was just a phase, obviously not destined to be that sweet oblivious antidote. And in truth, most of the proposed models seem flawed. Some suggest newspapers should simply skip the paper product and publish online. But it's a more complicated decision than it sounds. Would advertisers approve? Would traditional readers follow you on to the net? Should there be a subscription fee? Should the content be freely available to search engines such as Google? If so, why? What about a paper version at, say, the weekend? Hard questions.
There's this US idea, outlined on RN's Future Tense (8.30am, Thursdays) last week, where citizens club together to commission and pay a journalist to do a specific story. Perhaps they should simply hire a private detective? These things can, in any case, lead to nothing. Newspaper proprietors pay the salaries of numerous journalists who daily hit brick walls as they try to snare particular stories. The list of stories the scribe would love to have got, but couldn't, is formidable. The thing is that someone was prepared to pay him to try. Which is precisely what Beecher was talking about: journalism costs money. Less money could enfeeble journalism.
Contrarily, Reid could yet be right. This is one of those times when you can actually watch evolution evolving.

Source: theaustralian.news.com.au

Online News Organizations Compete For Pulitzers

IT used to be that online news organizations were out of the running when it came to the Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. In 2007, Josh Marshall, the editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo, an online news and opinion site, was the first person to identify and reveal the full scope of the politicization of the Justice Department under former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
Though Marshall won a George Polk Award for his work on the story, some people said he should have won a Pulitzer — perhaps the highest honor in American print journalism. But back then, because of where he works and because of the medium in which he works, Marshall wasn't eligible.
But Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says times have changed.
"We expanded the online aspect of the competition and made it open to online-only news organizations, provided they were primarily dedicated to original news reporting and the coverage of ongoing events," explains Gissler.
Those are important stipulations. To be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize, a site must show that original news reporting outweighs aggregated content from other news sites — and Gissler says the onus is on the news organization to make the case that it meets the standard.
Joan Walsh, the editor-in-chief of Salon, applauds the Pulitzer Board for recognizing the contributions of online news organizations, but she adds that she doesn't think the guidelines were clear enough.
"I felt like somebody had a formula some place that they weren't entirely sharing with me, and it just felt like more trouble than it was worth at that point," says Walsh.
Ultimately, Salon didn't apply for a Pulitzer. Neither did Slate — the chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group wasn't sure it qualified. And Marshall says Talking Points Memo didn't submit anything either.
But at least two nonprofit sites — the St. Louis Beacon and MinnPost — did submit stories.
Susan Albright, an editor of the Minnesota-based MinnPost who has served as a Pulitzer juror twice, says that her site covers national and international stories, usually from a Minnesota angle.
"We sent, for example, John Camp to Iraq last January, along with a photographer and videographer, and they spent a good bit of time there, writing news about Minnesotans who are there," says Albright. "So we do news, but we do it in a different way."
Albright submitted that series for a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She says the prize would mean a lot to her small staff of reporters and freelancers: "I think it would be terrific. I mean for an online news site to win something like that would be great."
Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, says that the Pulitzer Board will continue to "monitor the impact of the Internet. ... The Pulitzer Prizes are a living organism, and we take into account what's happening in the world of journalism, in the world of the news media, and we'll, I'm sure, continue to do that."
Walsh says she spoke with Gissler two weeks ago, and he addressed some of her questions. She says Salon will "absolutely" apply next year.

Source: npr.org

Is The Legacy Of 'The New York Times' In Trouble?

THE New York Times is the most important newspaper in the country and, maybe, the world. It is, writes Mark Bowden in this month's Vanity Fair, the flagship of serious journalism.
No newspaper has won so many prizes or produces such consistently outstanding work. No other journalism Web site comes near its excellence — or its readership. And yet, many of its writers, readers and staunchest supporters wonder if it can survive.
Protecting the Times legacy is a legacy himself — Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. — the fifth in his family to preside as publisher, and the man who, Bowden says, has steered his inheritance into a ditch.

Source: npr.org

The Future of Journalism Is Not in the Past

Reframing the Debate Over how to "Save" Journalism

The question of "How to save Journalism?" is a front-burner issue, as major metropolitan dailies, like the Rocky Mountain News and the Philadelphia Inquirer, implode. Calls for bailouts in the tens of billions of dollars have gone up, even from critics of the industry, and some are calling for further relaxation of limits on media ownership so newspapers and television stations can merge, presumably to improve the financial prospects of both.
After excoriating the commercial mass media for decades, should we spend huge sums of public money to prop it up or abandon our concern about large mass media outlets and chains dominating local markets?
We need to step back and ask some tough questions. What do we mean by "good" journalism and why should we "save" it? What is the problem with the newspaper business? Will saving newspapers save journalism? Will allowing mergers solve the economic problem or improve the quality of content? What alternatives are available?

Why Does Journalism Need to Be Saved?

The premise of the effort to save newspapers is that journalism provides a public function that needs to be preserved. "Good" journalism is a public good because it creates value far beyond the revenue stream it generates. The benefit to society is supposed to be its function as a watchdog on both the public and private sectors -- disciplining waste, fraud and abuse -- and as a source of information for the public about important issues of public policy. Because it is a public good, commercial markets tend to under-produce it, so it needs non-market support. In the United States the mass media has long been subsidized, starting with low postal rates to support print media in the 19th century and running through free exclusive licenses to use the public airwaves to broadcast radio and TV in the 20th century.

What Is the Underlying Problem?

To deal with the crisis of journalism, we have to recognize key characteristics of the future journalism space. The majority of newspaper revenues come from local advertising. Newspaper advertising revenues are driven by readership, which has been declining. However, advertising revenues have been declining more rapidly than readership; classified advertising has been declining more rapidly than general advertising; and local newspaper advertising has been declining more rapidly than national activity. Thus, there is a migration of revenue to other media -- the Internet, local cable TV and direct mail -- that deliver more targeted or more compelling advertising. In 2000, the revenues of these three advertising media were just 12 percent larger than newspaper advertising; by 2007 they were 82 percent larger.
The future is digital: text, not print; viral, not one-to-many; and, in critical ways, more global and less local. For newspapers that means that geography does not matter as much as it once did. Functional specialization replaces geographic specialization.
Much of the journalism we lament losing is statewide, regional, national and international. If an issue is not inherently local, such as a school board election, it will have difficulty commanding resources in the local media because "outsiders" can now use digital distribution to aggregate a larger audience. Local papers will simply not be able to compete in reporting on global, national or statewide issues and they have begun to outsource that function.
Newspapers in medium to large cities that historically covered local, statewide, regional, national and some global news are in the worst shape because the new environment impacts their business model most. In the digital age, they cannot maintain adequate advertising revenue -- losing ground to cable and web-based alternatives to classified ads -- to sustain adequate investment in such broad-based reporting. They lose competitively in the national and global markets to the big national newspapers and wire services.
Small town papers may fare better because they face less competition in small local markets, but those local markets will not support the journalism that covers statewide, regional, and global issues. Large national and international papers and services may fare better, since they can aggregate demand. It is the hole in the middle where the impact is greatest.

Would the Proposals to "Save" Journalism by Saving Newspapers Work?

The assumption that subsidies or mergers will save journalism economically in the face of the powerful underlying economic forces or ensure the delivery of journalism's public good is dubious at best.
The commercial mass media newspaper model was failing to properly fulfill its public function long before its economic model collapsed. Any subsidy might push the economic day of reckoning off, but it will not solve the long-term economic problem. The most successful commercial papers are not necessarily the best. We could get more of the same journalism we have had, maybe even lower quality, as newspapers compete for more scarce advertising dollars.
Concentrating large media voices to shore up commercial media has not been an economic panacea. The large multimedia chains and cross-owned properties are having just as much trouble as stand-alone entities, and mergers have tended to reduce the quality of journalism in the past. The efficiencies that merging parties project will be gained by shrinking the production of news. The amount of news produced declines, but the number of journalists declines even more, squeezing the remaining journalists. If advertising dollars continue to shrink and attention continues to migrate to other media, cutting costs will not replace lost revenue and the burden will be born by shrinking the worst performing line of business, which is likely to be print journalism. One thing is certain, with shrinking markets and overstretched reporters, the quality of journalism (i.e. good reporting), and the types of journalism that best represent the public goods -- investigative journalism -- will decline. Thus, mergers between newspapers and TV are not a solution for the crisis of newspapers or the problems of journalism.
The dilemma from the public good's point of view is the fact that the political importance of the commercial mass media has always exceeded their economic significance and economic resources are shifting more rapidly than political influence. Newspaper and television are still the mass market media and carry substantial political clout. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on national advertising during the recent presidential election and the role that newspaper endorsements play, especially in early primaries, are reminders of the clout of the commercial mass media. The counterbalance to the commercial mass media has not fully developed, either economically, to sustain "good" journalism," or politically, to blunt the power of traditional commercial outlets.
At this key moment, we should not prop up the incumbent media, or give in to its demands to concentrate, which will extend a model that is irretrievably broken, economically and politically. We should focus public policy and citizen action on building the alternatives.

Are New Models Emerging for a Changed Information Environment?

The commercial newspaper market in the 21st century media environment leaves substantial gaps in coverage that need to be filled. The digital age has witnessed an explosion of alternative media and citizen expression that did not exist in the age of 20th century mass media.
The cacophony of the blogosphere is dizzying and overwhelmingly opinion, but it is a vast improvement over a public sphere dominated by corporate media. Traditional media have begun to utilize this communications mechanism, with reporters blogging and bloggers reporting on traditional media web sites, but it is the independent, citizen and community media that provide the seeds of an alternative journalism.
These alternatives tend to be structured viral communications, in which a light touch of hierarchy can go a long way. The examples are well known, beyond blogging, which tends to be the least organized form of expression. We find things like Wikis, online posts, collaborative production and distribution in peer-to-peer networks, opens source software, crowd sourcing, and new forms of copyright, like the Creative Commons, etc.
The critical challenge for these outlets is to become trusted intermediaries. The critical challenge for society is to figure out how to tap into the immense energy of the public sphere in cyberspace while preserving key journalistic attributes someplace within a much-expanded public sphere. To build trust the new journalism will have to produce a steady stream of output that readers find authoritative, correct and useful. To ensure the quality of output, they will need to routinize the roles of reporter and editor and find ways to ensure that the reporters and editors have resources to do their jobs. If we equate good journalism with careful reporting, editing and opportunity for response, how do we map those basic characteristics of journalism into the new media space?
We can debate whether those attributes are the key to "good" journalism, but even if we take that as a given, it is the journalistic functions that matter, not the form. We must be willing to recognize other ways of performing traditional functions. How can contributed and paid labor, professional and citizen mix? How much editorial control could be applied without destroying the wiki essence? What models of editorial oversight best balance the goal of quality content and democratic input (lieutenants, councils, member rankings, member voting)? What decision-making management structures and group processes can promote progress toward completion of tasks, determine critical tasks and screen acceptable solutions, not unlike the functions of editorial boards and editors.
Some parts of the 20th century landscape can be mobilized in support of the new journalism. Consumer Reports, a well-known nonprofit journalistic enterprise, fearing a declining revenue stream from print publishing, has transformed itself into a hugely successful mass online subscription business. It has a trusted brand to build on, but there is no reason that other nonprofit brands cannot be built in cyberspace to support subscription models. Among the existing one-to-many media distribution models, those that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low power FM on the radio side, have never been properly funded, but they have grown on the basis of a direct connection to the local community.
In other words, the participatory base of citizen and community media, a tradition that existed in America before the industrialization of the media and journalism in the past century, is a superior starting point for building a new journalism.

Can Public Subsidies Speed the Transition to a Good Journalism Model?

Just as federal Recovery Act stimulus funds will support computer centers and communications networks, a media stimulus package could support new local news centers and news services. Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space. Public subsidies can be directed to alternative forms of media and journalism with the objective of establishing financially viable new forms of production and distribution of journalistic content.
No one can predict which models will succeed, but in the rapidly changing environment, solutions that preserve the past are more likely to fail or make matters worse. The outcome will be much better if we confront the right and hard questions from the get-go in order to arrive at a sustainable journalism that serves its function in society. If we intend to build an institution of journalism as the four estate in the 21st century, we need to build it from the fresh clay of alternative media in cyberspace and the moment of the collapse of 20th century journalism is the ideal time to start.

Source: huffingtonpost.com