NICK Jones, former BBC political correspondent, joined panellists Iain Dale and Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes) at the Foregin Press Association yesterday, where the impact of new media on newsgathering and reporting was discussed.
Further to Dale’s comments on blogging and political journalism, Jones added that audio and video material appearing on newspaper websites is ’stretching journalism in the way it should be stretched’.
“Newspapers are making money out of video and audio. They are buying up exclusive material obtained in dubious circumstances - but it is getting good ratings,” said Jones.
Thanks to video evidence The Guardian, for example, was first with exclusives about police involvement in the death of G20 protestor Ian Tomlinson, he said.
“The Guardian was prepared to take risks the BBC would not have contemplated,” said Jones, who claimed the BBC would have had to apply a ‘whole host’ of tests to the video evidence.
The code for newspapers is much simpler, he suggested: “They just need to ask, is it in the public interest?”
Source: journalism.co.uk
Showing posts with label Journalists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Journalists. Show all posts
Friday, May 1, 2009
Journalists: Where do you add value?
EVERY day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing?
Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story. It did the opposite for me. I was disturbed at the waste.
The correspondent - I won’t pick on him; it was just his turn to play show monkey - stood in front of the new Mets’ stadium to tell us that there’s controversy about naming it after a sponsor. It was just a stand-up. There was no evidence of reporting as he was standing alone in a parking lot. The knowledge was a commodity. Anybody could have read it. But they wanted to scene and invested a correspondent and crew to get it. Then he dashed to the UN because there was a vote happening. But he didn’t run to report. He ran to the bureau to do another stand-up with another background. Again, what happened in the vote was commodity knowledge. Anybody could have read it.
So there is a reporter not reporting. But, of course, that is hardly unique to CNN. How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have - on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines - goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?
Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?
Look at a service such as PaidContent. They have a small (though growing) staff and they choose carefully what they do, whether it’s worth it to send someone to a conference, whether they can add reporting to a story that’s already known, how they can curate links to the best of coverage that already exists. They fire their bullets carefully, economically, to contribute maximum unique value. PaidContent doesn’t - and can’t afford to - record stand-ups or rewrite others’ reporting for the sake of rewriting it or waste money on production and design niceties.
That’s the way that journalism will have to be executed in the future: efficiently.
I’ve been wanting to get funding to perform an audit of the journalistic output and value of the entire legacy structure of news in a market. It’s not that the current state of news should be the model for the future but it is where the discussion begins: ‘How do we make sure we’ll maintain this level of reporting?’
Once journalism becomes efficient, I think it can do much better than maintain what we have now. When we cut out all the incredible waste - those standups and rewrites and frills and blather - and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting.
Bloggers have had to learn that, too. Just linking to and commenting on others’ reporting won’t get you much attention. Every blogger who does original reporting and tells the world something it doesn’t know but wants to know learns that this is how to get links and audience. Arianna Huffington told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London months ago that she was hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic; it’s enlightened economic self-interest. This is a lesson we teach our journalism students at CUNY, when we have them add reporting to the conversations that are going on online.
Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.
In the link economy, the value given to original reporting will rise. The ability to waste money on old practices of egotistical journalism will plummet. And what is left standing, I think, is more efficient and valuable reporting.
Source: buzzmachine.com
Sitting in a hotel room, cruising by CNN the other day, I caught a behind-the-scenes segment that wanted to show us just how cool it is to be a reporter dashing from story to story. It did the opposite for me. I was disturbed at the waste.
The correspondent - I won’t pick on him; it was just his turn to play show monkey - stood in front of the new Mets’ stadium to tell us that there’s controversy about naming it after a sponsor. It was just a stand-up. There was no evidence of reporting as he was standing alone in a parking lot. The knowledge was a commodity. Anybody could have read it. But they wanted to scene and invested a correspondent and crew to get it. Then he dashed to the UN because there was a vote happening. But he didn’t run to report. He ran to the bureau to do another stand-up with another background. Again, what happened in the vote was commodity knowledge. Anybody could have read it.
So there is a reporter not reporting. But, of course, that is hardly unique to CNN. How much of the dwindling, precious journalism resource we have - on national and local TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines - goes to original reporting, to real journalism? How much goes to repetition and production?
Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?
Look at a service such as PaidContent. They have a small (though growing) staff and they choose carefully what they do, whether it’s worth it to send someone to a conference, whether they can add reporting to a story that’s already known, how they can curate links to the best of coverage that already exists. They fire their bullets carefully, economically, to contribute maximum unique value. PaidContent doesn’t - and can’t afford to - record stand-ups or rewrite others’ reporting for the sake of rewriting it or waste money on production and design niceties.
That’s the way that journalism will have to be executed in the future: efficiently.
I’ve been wanting to get funding to perform an audit of the journalistic output and value of the entire legacy structure of news in a market. It’s not that the current state of news should be the model for the future but it is where the discussion begins: ‘How do we make sure we’ll maintain this level of reporting?’
Once journalism becomes efficient, I think it can do much better than maintain what we have now. When we cut out all the incredible waste - those standups and rewrites and frills and blather - and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting.
Bloggers have had to learn that, too. Just linking to and commenting on others’ reporting won’t get you much attention. Every blogger who does original reporting and tells the world something it doesn’t know but wants to know learns that this is how to get links and audience. Arianna Huffington told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London months ago that she was hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic; it’s enlightened economic self-interest. This is a lesson we teach our journalism students at CUNY, when we have them add reporting to the conversations that are going on online.
Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.
In the link economy, the value given to original reporting will rise. The ability to waste money on old practices of egotistical journalism will plummet. And what is left standing, I think, is more efficient and valuable reporting.
Source: buzzmachine.com
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners
PUBLIC SERVICE: Alexandra Berzon & staff (The Las Vegas Sun)
Berzon was cited for "courageous reporting" that exposed a high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas strip and how lax safety rules and the rush to build quickly contributed to the injury and death rate.
The newspaper reported that 12 workers had died within 18 months on the Strip in the middle of a $32 billion building boom, including the largest private commercial development in U.S. history.
Ten weeks after the first stories appeared in March 2008, the newspaper wrote in its entry letter, workers walked out at MGM Mirage's $9.2 billion CityCenter project. The paper said that no workers died after the industry made safety improvements three months after the stories were published.
"To see things change as a result, that is really a satisfying thing as a reporter," said Berzon, a 29-year-old writer who joined the paper 18 months ago.
BREAKING NEWS REPORTING: The New York Times staff
The New York Times was honored for "swift and sweeping coverage" of the sex scandal that ruined Gov. Eliot Spitzer's political career.
The newspaper's metropolitan staff broke the story on its Web site that Spitzer had been snared in a federal investigation as a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring. Just over an hour later, Spitzer issued a public apology. He resigned two days later.
The newspaper was also first to identify the prostitute that Spitzer met with in a Washington, D.C., hotel in February, recounted in an indictment listing the governor as "Client 9."
The newspaper wrote in its entry letter that it began pursuing a tip three days before its first story that a public official had been implicated in the indictment.
Over the weekend, the newspaper wrote in its entry letter, reporters began visiting Washington hotels, went to the homes of people charged with leading the prostitution ring and tracked down Spitzer's regular driver in Washington.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: David Barstow (The New York Times)
Barstow won his second Pulitzer for reporting on military analysts who acted as television war commentators and their conflicts with the Pentagon and their own businesses, which benefited form U.S. military policy.
Barstow's piece, "Message Machine," showed how the Pentagon recruited the analysts to make the case for the war in Iraq, sometimes rewarding favorable commentary with access to U.S. contracting officials. The Pentagon suspended its program, which offered trips and briefing for favored analysts after Barstow's piece appeared in April 2008.
"David Barstow's work is inspired by a keen sense of impropriety among the highest and mightiest, and by the courage and persistence to expose it," the newspaper wrote in its entry letter.
EXPLANATORY REPORTING: Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart (The Los Angeles Times)
Boxall and Cart were honored for a four-part series exploring that wildfire seasons last longer and are three times as expensive to fight in the U.S. West than elsewhere. The reporters pored through cartons of U.S. Forest Service records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and traveled to Australia to compare firefighting efforts there.
The Pulitzer board called the series a "fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires."
LOCAL REPORTING: Jim Schaefer, M.L. Elrick and the staff of the Detroit Free Press, and Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz.
The Detroit newspaper helped expose a steamy extramarital affair between Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff by obtaining a trove of sexually explicit text messages sent by the mayor. Kilpatrick pleaded guilty, lost his office and served 99 days in jail for lying under oath about the affair during a whistle-blower lawsuit.
Gabrielson and Giblin were honored for "their adroit use of limited resources" for a five-part series on a county sheriff's efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, and how the focus affected the cash-strapped county's crimefighting efforts. The suburban Phoenix newspaper has a circulation of 100,000 but publishes in print only four days a week, and will go to three days next month.
NATIONAL REPORTING: St. Petersburg Times staff
The staff won in national reporting and was also named a finalist in the public service category for "PolitiFact," an online database that fact-checked political claims of the 2008 presidential candidates.
The Pulitzer board praised the initiative for "using probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."
The newspaper used a "Truth-O-Meter" graphic that was carried by other national newspapers and on cable networks CNN and MSNBC.
INTERNATIONAL REPORTING: The New York Times staff
The newspaper won for its "masterful, groundbreaking coverage" of America's military presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, citing work often done under dangerous conditions. It was the fourth win by the Times in the international reporting category over the past decade.
The entries included disclosures from Pakistani officials that the nation had lost control of some militant groups they had nurtured since Sept. 11, 2001, and that the Bush administration had been late to realize the growing influence of al-Qaeda in both countries.
The newspaper praised reporters Carlotta Gall, David Rohde and C.J. Chivers for working "at great risk" to cover a story in regions where many newspapers had closed bureaus years before.
FEATURE WRITING: Lane DeGregory (St. Petersburg Times)
DeGregory was honored for what the Pulitzer board called her "moving, richly detailed story" about a neglected young girl, discovered in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family.
DeGregory spent six months watching the girl and her new family. She tracked down the girl's birth mother, the officer who rescued the girl, the doctors who examined her, the foster care worked who found her a home. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
The St. Petersburg Times said more than 1 million people read "The Girl in the Window" online. It generated e-mails from 1,200 people worldwide.
"The story touched people," Executive Editor Neil Brown wrote in the newspaper's nominating letter. "It made them angry and hopeful, grateful and more aware."
COMMENTARY: Eugene Robinson (The Washington Post)
Robinson won for his columns on the 2008 presidential campaign focusing on the election of the first black president, which the judges said displayed "graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture."
The Post, in its nominating letter, noted that Robinson chronicled, analyzed and at times anticipated the story of the election like no one else. It cited his trip to Iowa, where Sen. Barack Obama stunned the political world by winning the Iowa caucuses, and Robinson's column that predicted Obama might just win.
Later columns placed Obama's campaign in the larger context of the black struggle for freedom, just and equal opportunity. And on the morning after Obama's win, Robinson tried to explain how a man who grew up in the segregated South felt at seeing a black man elected president.
"In retrospect, it seems as though Gene Robinson the columnist was made for this moment," Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt wrote in his nominating letter. "He is at the top of his game: a vivid, funny, moving writer with an understanding of the big picture and a knack for the telling detail. He was an amazing chronicler of an amazing year."
CRITICISM: Holland Cotter (The New York Times)
Cotter was honored for his art reviews spanning from Manhattan to China, marked by "acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling," the Pulitzer board said.
He traveled to China in summer 2008 to explore art museums, galleries and archaeological sites. His criticisms also explored the bust of the art-market boom.
"As memorable as it was, Holland Cotter's fresh take on China was simply the pinnacle of another year of acute observation and instructive writing. The entire body of work, extraordinary in its range, affirmed his place among the finest art critics working in America today," The Times said in its entry form. "He can be funny, ethereal or brisk — he mixes it up, which is part of the fun — but the journey is always a trip."
Cotter has been a staff art critic at The Times since 1998. Between 1992 and 1997, he was a regular freelance writer for the paper.
EDITORIAL WRITING: Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y.
Mahoney won for what the judges said were his "relentless, down-to-earth editorials on the perils of local government secrecy, effectively admonishing citizens to uphold their right to know."
Mahoney's editorials urge residents of this largely rural area on the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains to demand accountability from government. One editorial ran beside a sample Freedom of Information Law request, while another compared a closed-door meeting of representatives of a local town board and the state comptroller's office to a "clandestine affair at a sleazy roadside motel."
Mahoney said he was especially happy to win for his writing about open government.
"If I'm going to win, I'm glad it's for that," he said. "I think this indicates that we really are making a difference."
EDITORIAL CARTOONING: Steve Breen (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Breen was awarded the Pulitzer for his "agile use of a classic style to produce wide-ranging cartoons that engage readers with power, clarity and humor," the Pulitzer board said.
Breen's editorial cartoons are nationally syndicated by Copley News Service and regularly appear in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek and US News & World Report. His comic strip "Grand Avenue" appears in more than 150 newspapers nationwide.
Breen was about to become a high school history teacher when the Asbury Park Press offered him a job in the art department in July 1994. He became the full-time editorial cartoonist there in 1996. In April 1998, Breen won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
In July 2001, he returned to his home state to join the staff of the Union-Tribune.
BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY: Patrick Farrell (The Miami Herald)
Farrell was honored for what the judges called "provocative, impeccably composed images of despair" after Hurricane Ike and other storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.
His entries included powerful images of a father cradling the body of his 5-year-old son killed by floodwaters.
Farrell said he was "humbled" by the award. Of Haiti, he said, "That's a country that everywhere you turn there's just an image that needs to be seen."
Farrell was part of the Miami Herald staff that won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the coverage of Hurricane Andrew's devastation in South Florida.
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY: Damon Winter (The New York Times)
Winter won for his "memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets" of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, according to the Pulitzer board.
Winter also has worked for the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Newsweek, Magnum Photos, The Ventura County Star and The Indianapolis Star.
His photo essay on sexual abuse victims in western Alaska was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography and was part of a portfolio that earned the National Journalism Award for Photojournalism that year.
The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music:
FICTION: "Olive Kitteridge," by Elizabeth Strout.
Strout won for her collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine. The Pulitzer judges commended her for work that "packs a cumulative emotional wallop" held together by the "blunt, flawed and fascinating" character of title character Olive.
Strout's book was a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.
DRAMA: "Ruined," by Lynn Nottage.
The setting for "Ruined" is a bar and brothel in war-torn Congo run by a shrewd businesswoman whose stable of prostitutes include many already "ruined" by rape and torture.
Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage crafted a drama that confronts audiences with the horrors of war but manages, according to the judges, to find "affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness."
HISTORY: "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," by Annette Gordon-Reed.
Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York Law School, published her first book, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," in 1997. That book focused on how Jefferson's numerous biographers dealt with the issue of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings and whether she bore him children.
Her latest book explores several generations of the Hemings clan and, according to the judges, "casts provocative new light" on the relationship between the nation's third president and his slave.
The Pulitzer board said she was the first African-American to win the history prize.
BIOGRAPHY: "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," by Jon Meacham.
Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the best-selling author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship" and "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation."
His latest work looks at how Jackson's pivotal years in the White House as the nation's seventh chief executive helped shape the modern presidency. The book was described by the judges as an "unflinching portrait" of Jackson, written in "agile" prose that brings Jackson's story to life.
POETRY: "The Shadow of Sirius," by W. S. Merwin.
This is the second Pulitzer for Merwin, whose writing career can be traced to the hymns he wrote as a child and who won in 1971 for "The Carrier of Ladders." The Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin has published more than 20 books of poetry and nearly as many works in translation from Latin, Spanish and French.
In 1976 he moved to Hawaii to study with a Zen Buddhist master. Since then, his work has been marked by his passionate commitment to Buddhism and environmentalism. The judges described the book as "a collection of luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory."
GENERAL NONFICTION: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," by Douglas A. Blackmon.
Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has written extensively about the use of African-Americans as forced laborers in the nation's coal mines, lumber camps, railroads and plantations in the early 20th century.
"Slavery by Another Name," his first book, grew out of an article in the Journal about U.S. Steel Corp.'s use of forced black labor in the Alabama coal mines. The judges called the book a "precise and elegant" work that "rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity."
MUSIC: "Double Sextet," by Steve Reich.
Reich's work received its premiere on a U.S. tour that kicked off in March 2008 in Richmond, Va., with concerts in San Francisco, New York's Carnegie Hall, Washington and Chicago.
The 22-minute work can be performed as a live sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano playing against a pre-recorded sextet on tape, or as an ensemble of 12 instrumentalists. The Pulitzer board called it a "major" work "consistently intriguing to the ear."
Source: AP
Berzon was cited for "courageous reporting" that exposed a high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas strip and how lax safety rules and the rush to build quickly contributed to the injury and death rate.
The newspaper reported that 12 workers had died within 18 months on the Strip in the middle of a $32 billion building boom, including the largest private commercial development in U.S. history.
Ten weeks after the first stories appeared in March 2008, the newspaper wrote in its entry letter, workers walked out at MGM Mirage's $9.2 billion CityCenter project. The paper said that no workers died after the industry made safety improvements three months after the stories were published.
"To see things change as a result, that is really a satisfying thing as a reporter," said Berzon, a 29-year-old writer who joined the paper 18 months ago.
BREAKING NEWS REPORTING: The New York Times staff
The New York Times was honored for "swift and sweeping coverage" of the sex scandal that ruined Gov. Eliot Spitzer's political career.
The newspaper's metropolitan staff broke the story on its Web site that Spitzer had been snared in a federal investigation as a customer of a high-priced prostitution ring. Just over an hour later, Spitzer issued a public apology. He resigned two days later.
The newspaper was also first to identify the prostitute that Spitzer met with in a Washington, D.C., hotel in February, recounted in an indictment listing the governor as "Client 9."
The newspaper wrote in its entry letter that it began pursuing a tip three days before its first story that a public official had been implicated in the indictment.
Over the weekend, the newspaper wrote in its entry letter, reporters began visiting Washington hotels, went to the homes of people charged with leading the prostitution ring and tracked down Spitzer's regular driver in Washington.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: David Barstow (The New York Times)
Barstow won his second Pulitzer for reporting on military analysts who acted as television war commentators and their conflicts with the Pentagon and their own businesses, which benefited form U.S. military policy.
Barstow's piece, "Message Machine," showed how the Pentagon recruited the analysts to make the case for the war in Iraq, sometimes rewarding favorable commentary with access to U.S. contracting officials. The Pentagon suspended its program, which offered trips and briefing for favored analysts after Barstow's piece appeared in April 2008.
"David Barstow's work is inspired by a keen sense of impropriety among the highest and mightiest, and by the courage and persistence to expose it," the newspaper wrote in its entry letter.
EXPLANATORY REPORTING: Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart (The Los Angeles Times)
Boxall and Cart were honored for a four-part series exploring that wildfire seasons last longer and are three times as expensive to fight in the U.S. West than elsewhere. The reporters pored through cartons of U.S. Forest Service records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and traveled to Australia to compare firefighting efforts there.
The Pulitzer board called the series a "fresh and painstaking exploration into the cost and effectiveness of attempts to combat the growing menace of wildfires."
LOCAL REPORTING: Jim Schaefer, M.L. Elrick and the staff of the Detroit Free Press, and Ryan Gabrielson and Paul Giblin of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz.
The Detroit newspaper helped expose a steamy extramarital affair between Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and his chief of staff by obtaining a trove of sexually explicit text messages sent by the mayor. Kilpatrick pleaded guilty, lost his office and served 99 days in jail for lying under oath about the affair during a whistle-blower lawsuit.
Gabrielson and Giblin were honored for "their adroit use of limited resources" for a five-part series on a county sheriff's efforts to arrest and deport illegal immigrants, and how the focus affected the cash-strapped county's crimefighting efforts. The suburban Phoenix newspaper has a circulation of 100,000 but publishes in print only four days a week, and will go to three days next month.
NATIONAL REPORTING: St. Petersburg Times staff
The staff won in national reporting and was also named a finalist in the public service category for "PolitiFact," an online database that fact-checked political claims of the 2008 presidential candidates.
The Pulitzer board praised the initiative for "using probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."
The newspaper used a "Truth-O-Meter" graphic that was carried by other national newspapers and on cable networks CNN and MSNBC.
INTERNATIONAL REPORTING: The New York Times staff
The newspaper won for its "masterful, groundbreaking coverage" of America's military presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, citing work often done under dangerous conditions. It was the fourth win by the Times in the international reporting category over the past decade.
The entries included disclosures from Pakistani officials that the nation had lost control of some militant groups they had nurtured since Sept. 11, 2001, and that the Bush administration had been late to realize the growing influence of al-Qaeda in both countries.
The newspaper praised reporters Carlotta Gall, David Rohde and C.J. Chivers for working "at great risk" to cover a story in regions where many newspapers had closed bureaus years before.
FEATURE WRITING: Lane DeGregory (St. Petersburg Times)
DeGregory was honored for what the Pulitzer board called her "moving, richly detailed story" about a neglected young girl, discovered in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family.
DeGregory spent six months watching the girl and her new family. She tracked down the girl's birth mother, the officer who rescued the girl, the doctors who examined her, the foster care worked who found her a home. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.
The St. Petersburg Times said more than 1 million people read "The Girl in the Window" online. It generated e-mails from 1,200 people worldwide.
"The story touched people," Executive Editor Neil Brown wrote in the newspaper's nominating letter. "It made them angry and hopeful, grateful and more aware."
COMMENTARY: Eugene Robinson (The Washington Post)
Robinson won for his columns on the 2008 presidential campaign focusing on the election of the first black president, which the judges said displayed "graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture."
The Post, in its nominating letter, noted that Robinson chronicled, analyzed and at times anticipated the story of the election like no one else. It cited his trip to Iowa, where Sen. Barack Obama stunned the political world by winning the Iowa caucuses, and Robinson's column that predicted Obama might just win.
Later columns placed Obama's campaign in the larger context of the black struggle for freedom, just and equal opportunity. And on the morning after Obama's win, Robinson tried to explain how a man who grew up in the segregated South felt at seeing a black man elected president.
"In retrospect, it seems as though Gene Robinson the columnist was made for this moment," Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt wrote in his nominating letter. "He is at the top of his game: a vivid, funny, moving writer with an understanding of the big picture and a knack for the telling detail. He was an amazing chronicler of an amazing year."
CRITICISM: Holland Cotter (The New York Times)
Cotter was honored for his art reviews spanning from Manhattan to China, marked by "acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling," the Pulitzer board said.
He traveled to China in summer 2008 to explore art museums, galleries and archaeological sites. His criticisms also explored the bust of the art-market boom.
"As memorable as it was, Holland Cotter's fresh take on China was simply the pinnacle of another year of acute observation and instructive writing. The entire body of work, extraordinary in its range, affirmed his place among the finest art critics working in America today," The Times said in its entry form. "He can be funny, ethereal or brisk — he mixes it up, which is part of the fun — but the journey is always a trip."
Cotter has been a staff art critic at The Times since 1998. Between 1992 and 1997, he was a regular freelance writer for the paper.
EDITORIAL WRITING: Mark Mahoney of The Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y.
Mahoney won for what the judges said were his "relentless, down-to-earth editorials on the perils of local government secrecy, effectively admonishing citizens to uphold their right to know."
Mahoney's editorials urge residents of this largely rural area on the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains to demand accountability from government. One editorial ran beside a sample Freedom of Information Law request, while another compared a closed-door meeting of representatives of a local town board and the state comptroller's office to a "clandestine affair at a sleazy roadside motel."
Mahoney said he was especially happy to win for his writing about open government.
"If I'm going to win, I'm glad it's for that," he said. "I think this indicates that we really are making a difference."
EDITORIAL CARTOONING: Steve Breen (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Breen was awarded the Pulitzer for his "agile use of a classic style to produce wide-ranging cartoons that engage readers with power, clarity and humor," the Pulitzer board said.
Breen's editorial cartoons are nationally syndicated by Copley News Service and regularly appear in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsweek and US News & World Report. His comic strip "Grand Avenue" appears in more than 150 newspapers nationwide.
Breen was about to become a high school history teacher when the Asbury Park Press offered him a job in the art department in July 1994. He became the full-time editorial cartoonist there in 1996. In April 1998, Breen won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
In July 2001, he returned to his home state to join the staff of the Union-Tribune.
BREAKING NEWS PHOTOGRAPHY: Patrick Farrell (The Miami Herald)
Farrell was honored for what the judges called "provocative, impeccably composed images of despair" after Hurricane Ike and other storms caused a humanitarian disaster in Haiti.
His entries included powerful images of a father cradling the body of his 5-year-old son killed by floodwaters.
Farrell said he was "humbled" by the award. Of Haiti, he said, "That's a country that everywhere you turn there's just an image that needs to be seen."
Farrell was part of the Miami Herald staff that won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the coverage of Hurricane Andrew's devastation in South Florida.
FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY: Damon Winter (The New York Times)
Winter won for his "memorable array of pictures deftly capturing multiple facets" of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, according to the Pulitzer board.
Winter also has worked for the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, Newsweek, Magnum Photos, The Ventura County Star and The Indianapolis Star.
His photo essay on sexual abuse victims in western Alaska was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography and was part of a portfolio that earned the National Journalism Award for Photojournalism that year.
The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music:
FICTION: "Olive Kitteridge," by Elizabeth Strout.
Strout won for her collection of 13 short stories set in small-town Maine. The Pulitzer judges commended her for work that "packs a cumulative emotional wallop" held together by the "blunt, flawed and fascinating" character of title character Olive.
Strout's book was a finalist for this year's National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.
DRAMA: "Ruined," by Lynn Nottage.
The setting for "Ruined" is a bar and brothel in war-torn Congo run by a shrewd businesswoman whose stable of prostitutes include many already "ruined" by rape and torture.
Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage crafted a drama that confronts audiences with the horrors of war but manages, according to the judges, to find "affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness."
HISTORY: "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," by Annette Gordon-Reed.
Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York Law School, published her first book, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," in 1997. That book focused on how Jefferson's numerous biographers dealt with the issue of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings and whether she bore him children.
Her latest book explores several generations of the Hemings clan and, according to the judges, "casts provocative new light" on the relationship between the nation's third president and his slave.
The Pulitzer board said she was the first African-American to win the history prize.
BIOGRAPHY: "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House," by Jon Meacham.
Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the best-selling author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship" and "American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation."
His latest work looks at how Jackson's pivotal years in the White House as the nation's seventh chief executive helped shape the modern presidency. The book was described by the judges as an "unflinching portrait" of Jackson, written in "agile" prose that brings Jackson's story to life.
POETRY: "The Shadow of Sirius," by W. S. Merwin.
This is the second Pulitzer for Merwin, whose writing career can be traced to the hymns he wrote as a child and who won in 1971 for "The Carrier of Ladders." The Princeton-educated son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin has published more than 20 books of poetry and nearly as many works in translation from Latin, Spanish and French.
In 1976 he moved to Hawaii to study with a Zen Buddhist master. Since then, his work has been marked by his passionate commitment to Buddhism and environmentalism. The judges described the book as "a collection of luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory."
GENERAL NONFICTION: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II," by Douglas A. Blackmon.
Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has written extensively about the use of African-Americans as forced laborers in the nation's coal mines, lumber camps, railroads and plantations in the early 20th century.
"Slavery by Another Name," his first book, grew out of an article in the Journal about U.S. Steel Corp.'s use of forced black labor in the Alabama coal mines. The judges called the book a "precise and elegant" work that "rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity."
MUSIC: "Double Sextet," by Steve Reich.
Reich's work received its premiere on a U.S. tour that kicked off in March 2008 in Richmond, Va., with concerts in San Francisco, New York's Carnegie Hall, Washington and Chicago.
The 22-minute work can be performed as a live sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano playing against a pre-recorded sextet on tape, or as an ensemble of 12 instrumentalists. The Pulitzer board called it a "major" work "consistently intriguing to the ear."
Source: AP
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
News businesses must think about content, not just products, to ensure their survival
I work for a 126-year-old start-up company.
Since our founding in 1883, Gazette Communications has revolved around the newspaper that gave the company its name. As time went on, the company added a television station and various other products, but our focus was always on the products, especially that venerable core print product.
We developed a pretty good staff to provide content for the products, but their work always revolved around the products. Editors would meet daily in a conference room and talk about the stories that would be in the next day’s paper, writing slugs and story lengths on a whiteboard. The story lengths were not based on the amount of relevant content a reporter might develop. They were based on the interests and attention span of a mythical average newspaper reader and on the price of newsprint.
After two newspapers that were older than ours, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, folded within the past month, it’s clearer than ever that a proud past doesn’t ensure a prosperous future. We are feeling the same pressures as all newspaper companies. In fact, beyond the national economic problems and the industry turmoil, our community is reeling from a historic disaster. Our company is cutting its staff from about 600 before the flood to about 500. I had to tell 14 journalists last month that their jobs were eliminated. But whatever turmoil our products face, the demand for content is stronger than ever.
So Gazette Communications is unhitching our content generation from product management.
If you just thought, “Huh?” you’re not alone. Our staff and some of our leaders are still working on understanding this concept. Content and product are so closely entwined in newsroom organizations and in the minds and hearts of journalists that “untangling” would probably be a more accurate verb for the paragraph above than “unhitching.”
A Mark Briggs blog entry in January quoted Tom Peters, summarizing the mental and cultural challenge we face: “Visa founder Dee Hock said it best: ‘The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.’ … Every enterprise (and every individual) needs a formal … Forgetting Strategy. We must be as forceful and systematic about identifying and then dumping yesterday’s baggage as we are about acquiring new baggage.”
So I spelled out the forgetting strategy for our staff, listing some time-honored terms and concepts in any newsroom (starting with the word “newsroom”): reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, deadlines, story lengths, space, gatekeeper, story selection …
This had to start with me forgetting and forgoing my title of editor, which, of course, I had been thrilled to accept last May. Gazette CEO Chuck Peters had suggested Information Content Creator or Moderator in his blog, but I didn’t like either of those. I countered by suggesting conductor. I liked three different meanings of the word: musical (orchestrating creative people), railroad (helping people get where they want to go) and electrical (carrying energy). Most important, it says we’re doing something different, forgetting something precious.
As conductor, I lead a start-up organization, which we are calling Content Creation & Collaboration. We will have about 30 entrepreneurial journalists whose sole job is creating content, some in topical areas, some providing enterprise or covering breaking news. Other staff members will lead the group or provide training and support. We will publish unedited content digitally in a multitude of forms: stories, yes, but also bulletins, updates, tweets, liveblogs, photographs, videos, multimedia, graphics, source documents, databases, links and whatever other form is appropriate.
We will sell our content to The Gazette and other products our company owns and they will edit the content to meet the needs of the packaged products. We also will sell content to external customers such as other media outlets and will seek ways to sell enhanced content (such as photo reprints or customized products) directly to the public.
Our start-up will collect revenue for advertising sold to accompany these streams of unedited content, though the journalists producing the content won’t handle the advertising sales ourselves. Gazette Communications’ sales staff will sell advertising, but we also can use Google or other third-party ad sales. We also hope to develop some direct-sales opportunities for business customers, though that responsibility will rest with our colleagues responsible for transforming our approach to commercial content.
We’re in the transition right now, making staff assignments, working out the details of workflow and communication and deciding which functions rest with the content staff and which are product-focused. We answer many questions by saying, “We don’t know yet.”
But here’s an example of how it will work: In the print-only days, a reporter covering a trial spent all day in the courtroom, then wrote a story for the morning newspaper that summarized the day’s action and presented a few highlights. That story might be 12-15 inches, more than many readers cared about but not nearly enough for people with strong interest in the case. Now that reporter will liveblog from the courtroom, writing perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 words and interacting with the audience. In a throwback to the days of “Sweetheart, get me rewrite,” a product editor will cut, paste and edit a story for the morning Gazette from the liveblog (probably not the 12-15 inches of days gone by, because our newshole is tighter). If the judge makes a key ruling, the reporter would file a bulletin to our breaking news blog, informing people who aren’t watching the case as closely and linking to the liveblog.
Because building audience will be part of our journalists’ responsibility, the journalist would also tweet news developments in a Twitter feed, linking to the liveblog. And the journalist would link to relevant external contact as well as to archived stories about the case that would provide context.
The basics of journalism remain unchanged, even strengthened: We’ll answer who, what, when, where, why and how in greater depth, free from the limits of products.
Source: KnightDigitalMedia
Since our founding in 1883, Gazette Communications has revolved around the newspaper that gave the company its name. As time went on, the company added a television station and various other products, but our focus was always on the products, especially that venerable core print product.
We developed a pretty good staff to provide content for the products, but their work always revolved around the products. Editors would meet daily in a conference room and talk about the stories that would be in the next day’s paper, writing slugs and story lengths on a whiteboard. The story lengths were not based on the amount of relevant content a reporter might develop. They were based on the interests and attention span of a mythical average newspaper reader and on the price of newsprint.
After two newspapers that were older than ours, the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, folded within the past month, it’s clearer than ever that a proud past doesn’t ensure a prosperous future. We are feeling the same pressures as all newspaper companies. In fact, beyond the national economic problems and the industry turmoil, our community is reeling from a historic disaster. Our company is cutting its staff from about 600 before the flood to about 500. I had to tell 14 journalists last month that their jobs were eliminated. But whatever turmoil our products face, the demand for content is stronger than ever.
So Gazette Communications is unhitching our content generation from product management.
If you just thought, “Huh?” you’re not alone. Our staff and some of our leaders are still working on understanding this concept. Content and product are so closely entwined in newsroom organizations and in the minds and hearts of journalists that “untangling” would probably be a more accurate verb for the paragraph above than “unhitching.”
A Mark Briggs blog entry in January quoted Tom Peters, summarizing the mental and cultural challenge we face: “Visa founder Dee Hock said it best: ‘The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.’ … Every enterprise (and every individual) needs a formal … Forgetting Strategy. We must be as forceful and systematic about identifying and then dumping yesterday’s baggage as we are about acquiring new baggage.”
So I spelled out the forgetting strategy for our staff, listing some time-honored terms and concepts in any newsroom (starting with the word “newsroom”): reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, deadlines, story lengths, space, gatekeeper, story selection …
This had to start with me forgetting and forgoing my title of editor, which, of course, I had been thrilled to accept last May. Gazette CEO Chuck Peters had suggested Information Content Creator or Moderator in his blog, but I didn’t like either of those. I countered by suggesting conductor. I liked three different meanings of the word: musical (orchestrating creative people), railroad (helping people get where they want to go) and electrical (carrying energy). Most important, it says we’re doing something different, forgetting something precious.
As conductor, I lead a start-up organization, which we are calling Content Creation & Collaboration. We will have about 30 entrepreneurial journalists whose sole job is creating content, some in topical areas, some providing enterprise or covering breaking news. Other staff members will lead the group or provide training and support. We will publish unedited content digitally in a multitude of forms: stories, yes, but also bulletins, updates, tweets, liveblogs, photographs, videos, multimedia, graphics, source documents, databases, links and whatever other form is appropriate.
We will sell our content to The Gazette and other products our company owns and they will edit the content to meet the needs of the packaged products. We also will sell content to external customers such as other media outlets and will seek ways to sell enhanced content (such as photo reprints or customized products) directly to the public.
Our start-up will collect revenue for advertising sold to accompany these streams of unedited content, though the journalists producing the content won’t handle the advertising sales ourselves. Gazette Communications’ sales staff will sell advertising, but we also can use Google or other third-party ad sales. We also hope to develop some direct-sales opportunities for business customers, though that responsibility will rest with our colleagues responsible for transforming our approach to commercial content.
We’re in the transition right now, making staff assignments, working out the details of workflow and communication and deciding which functions rest with the content staff and which are product-focused. We answer many questions by saying, “We don’t know yet.”
But here’s an example of how it will work: In the print-only days, a reporter covering a trial spent all day in the courtroom, then wrote a story for the morning newspaper that summarized the day’s action and presented a few highlights. That story might be 12-15 inches, more than many readers cared about but not nearly enough for people with strong interest in the case. Now that reporter will liveblog from the courtroom, writing perhaps 4,000 to 5,000 words and interacting with the audience. In a throwback to the days of “Sweetheart, get me rewrite,” a product editor will cut, paste and edit a story for the morning Gazette from the liveblog (probably not the 12-15 inches of days gone by, because our newshole is tighter). If the judge makes a key ruling, the reporter would file a bulletin to our breaking news blog, informing people who aren’t watching the case as closely and linking to the liveblog.
Because building audience will be part of our journalists’ responsibility, the journalist would also tweet news developments in a Twitter feed, linking to the liveblog. And the journalist would link to relevant external contact as well as to archived stories about the case that would provide context.
The basics of journalism remain unchanged, even strengthened: We’ll answer who, what, when, where, why and how in greater depth, free from the limits of products.
Source: KnightDigitalMedia
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
When newspapers fold
THE death of a modern newspaper is a real-time, multimedia event. When journalists on the Rocky Mountain News were summoned to their Denver newsroom on February 26 to be told they were working on their final edition, they relayed the announcement through live blogs, online videos, slide shows of tearful colleagues and a minute-by-minute stream of updates on Twitter. “It’s odd to cover your own funeral,” read one tweet.
Bad news about America’s newspapers is tumbling out too fast for their presses to keep up. The closure of “the Rocky” after 150 years capped a week in which the Journal Register Company and the 180-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer joined the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy proceedings.
Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle – and on Monday said it would make the Seattle Post-Intelligencer an online-only publication. Gannett, owner of USA Today, has followed The New York Times in slashing its dividend to preserve cash. Titles from the venerable Cincinnati Post to the six-year-old New York Sun have folded.
Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print’s role as intermediary between advertisers and customers. The crisis is affecting not just newsprint: most news magazines, broadcast news outlets and newswires are also suffering.
Nowhere, however, has the impact been greater than in the US newspaper industry, where civic identity and an often monopolistic grip over local classified advertising had sustained an array of titles with journalistic resources envied by many national newspapers in other countries. Dwindling circulation and advertising are nothing new – but until recently the hope was that newspapers might be saved by private ownership or cost-saving roll-ups of titles under fewer, stronger corporate umbrellas.
The bankruptcies and closures prompted by a near one-third decline in advertising revenues since their 2005 peak have shattered those theories, leaving owners looking for new ideas. But what prospect is there of a solution when Barclays Capital predicts a further 21 per cent fall in newspaper advertising revenues this year alone?
A debate playing out in the pages of the properties it most concerns has focused on two new hopes: that charitable endowments may replace commercial business models and that readers who have grown accustomed to finding news for free online can be made to pay. “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance,” David Swensen and Michael Schmidt from Yale University’s endowment argued in The New York Times this year. The more than $200m (£143m, €155m) annual cost of its newsroom could be covered, they estimated, by a $5bn endowment that would guarantee its independence. Extrapolating from Yale’s calculations, the Nieman Journalism Lab estimated that it might cost $114bn to subsidise every US paper.
Charitable models exist already: ProPublica, producing “investigative journalism in the public interest”, is supported by the Sandler Foundation and other trusts. MinnPost.com was set up in Minneapolis-St Paul with funding from local families and foundations.
Outside the US, the state is at times stepping in. France is injecting €600m ($776m, £554m) over three years by doubling government advertising in newspapers and offering tax breaks for publishers’ digital investments. UK local publishers are lobbying for looser competition rules to allow consolidation.
The idea of charitable or state assistance makes many uneasy. Subsidies could create unfair competition for commercial rivals. In any event, many endowments are already suffering market-driven declines. “The idea of charitable endowments is a bit of a red herring,” says Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor who writes the influential Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
Two prominent US newspapers are supposedly sheltered by not-for-profit parents, he says, but The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned its print edition and the Poynter Institute is selling the Congressional Quarterly to support its St Petersburg Times flagship: “There’s nothing about that form of ownership that insulates you.”
Instead, the notion of charging for news online is gathering momentum after a cover story by a self-confessed “old print junkie” in Time magazine. Walter Isaacson returned to the title where he was once managing editor to argue that news should no longer be free online.
Until now, only specialised news organisations such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and trade publications have succeeded in generating meaningful online subscription revenues. With online advertising growth stalling, Mr Isaacson wrote, general news outlets needed to create “an iTunes-easy method of micropayment”, offering their product for a nickel an article or a dime a day in the same way as Apple’s music store sells tracks and albums. Past attempts to charge for individual stories have gone nowhere, but his call came as many owners were concluding that their decision to chase online advertising rather than subscription revenues was not paying off.
Cablevision, the owner of Newsday, and Hearst, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, have both said they will start charging readers of their websites. Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times, hinted last week that it would revive attempts to charge for content, 18 months after ending such an initiative. “We have renewed our analysis of how paid content can augment our core advertising business,” he told a university audience.
With the typical item on the Google News home page linking to hundreds of similar – free – stories about the same subject, charging for most news will be difficult “unless the product dramatically changes”, says Anthea Stratigos of Outsell, a publishing research firm. To succeed, papers will therefore have to provide content that readers find more valuable than the mass of commoditised information.
“We must put staff resources behind building those channels of interest that have the greatest potential: those built around pro sports teams, moms and high school sports, to name a few,” Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, told staff. Bluffton Today, launched by Morris Communications after it shut the Carolina Morning News, is seen as one way forward: it is hyper-local, with reader-written blogs on its website. But as one of a handful of online initiatives to have spawned a successful print iteration, it represents a model that could have new followers.
Collaboration between publishers on an iTunes for news may, however, be one of several remedies impossible under antitrust restrictions designed in an era where policymakers were more worried about over-mighty media owners colluding than the fragility of the fourth estate. Mergers of neighbouring newspapers, or between print and broadcast owners in the same market, have been blocked for decades.
Media owners express little hope that this will change under President Barack Obama, who campaigned on diversifying media ownership. “It is as if regulators went to sleep during the Eisenhower administration and woke up staring blankly at an iPhone,” John Chachas, co-head of the media practice at Lazard, which is advising on several newspaper restructurings, told the Dallas Morning News last month. Newspapers should be exempted from antitrust restrictions for long enough to establish “an industry-wide system to track and charge for the reuse of their content” by online aggregators, he argued.
Charging for news online could help publishers’ top lines but that would address only one of their problems. The spate of dire news shows the industry’s challenges fall into three broad categories: the mismatch between costs and revenues; inappropriate capital structures; and oversupply. Any hope of a durable news business rests on tackling all three.
"One inescapable conclusion of our study is that our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today,” Mr Swartz told his staff: “It is equally inescapable that during good times our industry developed business practices that were at best inefficient.”
...
Jonathan Knee, director of the media programme at Columbia Business School, likens newspapers’ “antiquated” cost structures to those in the airline industry. Labour unions, the inefficient use of printing plants and distribution networks and journalists’ frequent reluctance to ask whether what they want to cover serves the interests of readers have all kept costs high, he argues.
The industry is having to rethink its assumptions, outsourcing printing and distribution and carrying advertising on front pages that long resisted it. The cuts to costs have been sweeping. McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald, has announced three restructuring plans since June, involving more than 4,000 job cuts in all. A concern voiced by union leaders and investors alike is that indiscriminate cuts will only make it harder to produce content valued by consumers, in print or online.
Several publishers are cutting national or foreign coverage to focus on local areas, relying on newswires for the rest. Five papers in New York and New Jersey plan to share articles and pictures. Again, competition law may complicate further collaboration.
But it is servicing debt that represents one of the largest costs for many publishers. A Moody’s analysis of six large operators in November found all but Gannett had debts above four times their earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. In Tribune’s case, the multiple was 12.3. “A number of these newspaper companies are still reasonably good businesses but the problem is they took on too much debt,” says Mr Mutter.
Others estimate that industry profitability is even higher. Mr Knee says newspapers enjoy margins well above those of film studios or music labels – providing a cushion against falling revenues. But to reduce debt multiples to a more sustainable 2-3 times ebitda, tough restructuring will be required. “In some cases bankruptcy may be a good option,” Ms Stratigos says, because it allows publishers to deal with union contracts, pension liabilities and other operational costs.
For some publishers, closing more titles will be the only viable option. The disappearance of some competitors from an oversupplied and shrinking market may help the industry, however. Dean Singleton, owner of Denver’s other paper, said when the Rocky closed: “This dramatically improves the finances of the Denver Post.”
The prospect of fewer, more narrowly focused titles facing less competition, employing fewer journalists and charging readers who once enjoyed their content for free is an unpalatable one for many. It may also be a troubled industry’s best hope.
Source: FT.com
Bad news about America’s newspapers is tumbling out too fast for their presses to keep up. The closure of “the Rocky” after 150 years capped a week in which the Journal Register Company and the 180-year-old Philadelphia Inquirer joined the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy proceedings.
Hearst is threatening to close the San Francisco Chronicle – and on Monday said it would make the Seattle Post-Intelligencer an online-only publication. Gannett, owner of USA Today, has followed The New York Times in slashing its dividend to preserve cash. Titles from the venerable Cincinnati Post to the six-year-old New York Sun have folded.
Obituaries for the news business are being written in newsrooms around the world as advertising revenues that long subsidised the cost of newsgathering shrink, just as digital media usurp print’s role as intermediary between advertisers and customers. The crisis is affecting not just newsprint: most news magazines, broadcast news outlets and newswires are also suffering.
Nowhere, however, has the impact been greater than in the US newspaper industry, where civic identity and an often monopolistic grip over local classified advertising had sustained an array of titles with journalistic resources envied by many national newspapers in other countries. Dwindling circulation and advertising are nothing new – but until recently the hope was that newspapers might be saved by private ownership or cost-saving roll-ups of titles under fewer, stronger corporate umbrellas.
The bankruptcies and closures prompted by a near one-third decline in advertising revenues since their 2005 peak have shattered those theories, leaving owners looking for new ideas. But what prospect is there of a solution when Barclays Capital predicts a further 21 per cent fall in newspaper advertising revenues this year alone?
A debate playing out in the pages of the properties it most concerns has focused on two new hopes: that charitable endowments may replace commercial business models and that readers who have grown accustomed to finding news for free online can be made to pay. “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance,” David Swensen and Michael Schmidt from Yale University’s endowment argued in The New York Times this year. The more than $200m (£143m, €155m) annual cost of its newsroom could be covered, they estimated, by a $5bn endowment that would guarantee its independence. Extrapolating from Yale’s calculations, the Nieman Journalism Lab estimated that it might cost $114bn to subsidise every US paper.
Charitable models exist already: ProPublica, producing “investigative journalism in the public interest”, is supported by the Sandler Foundation and other trusts. MinnPost.com was set up in Minneapolis-St Paul with funding from local families and foundations.
Outside the US, the state is at times stepping in. France is injecting €600m ($776m, £554m) over three years by doubling government advertising in newspapers and offering tax breaks for publishers’ digital investments. UK local publishers are lobbying for looser competition rules to allow consolidation.
The idea of charitable or state assistance makes many uneasy. Subsidies could create unfair competition for commercial rivals. In any event, many endowments are already suffering market-driven declines. “The idea of charitable endowments is a bit of a red herring,” says Alan Mutter, a veteran newspaper editor who writes the influential Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.
Two prominent US newspapers are supposedly sheltered by not-for-profit parents, he says, but The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned its print edition and the Poynter Institute is selling the Congressional Quarterly to support its St Petersburg Times flagship: “There’s nothing about that form of ownership that insulates you.”
Instead, the notion of charging for news online is gathering momentum after a cover story by a self-confessed “old print junkie” in Time magazine. Walter Isaacson returned to the title where he was once managing editor to argue that news should no longer be free online.
Until now, only specialised news organisations such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and trade publications have succeeded in generating meaningful online subscription revenues. With online advertising growth stalling, Mr Isaacson wrote, general news outlets needed to create “an iTunes-easy method of micropayment”, offering their product for a nickel an article or a dime a day in the same way as Apple’s music store sells tracks and albums. Past attempts to charge for individual stories have gone nowhere, but his call came as many owners were concluding that their decision to chase online advertising rather than subscription revenues was not paying off.
Cablevision, the owner of Newsday, and Hearst, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, have both said they will start charging readers of their websites. Arthur Sulzberger, chairman of The New York Times, hinted last week that it would revive attempts to charge for content, 18 months after ending such an initiative. “We have renewed our analysis of how paid content can augment our core advertising business,” he told a university audience.
With the typical item on the Google News home page linking to hundreds of similar – free – stories about the same subject, charging for most news will be difficult “unless the product dramatically changes”, says Anthea Stratigos of Outsell, a publishing research firm. To succeed, papers will therefore have to provide content that readers find more valuable than the mass of commoditised information.
“We must put staff resources behind building those channels of interest that have the greatest potential: those built around pro sports teams, moms and high school sports, to name a few,” Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, told staff. Bluffton Today, launched by Morris Communications after it shut the Carolina Morning News, is seen as one way forward: it is hyper-local, with reader-written blogs on its website. But as one of a handful of online initiatives to have spawned a successful print iteration, it represents a model that could have new followers.
Collaboration between publishers on an iTunes for news may, however, be one of several remedies impossible under antitrust restrictions designed in an era where policymakers were more worried about over-mighty media owners colluding than the fragility of the fourth estate. Mergers of neighbouring newspapers, or between print and broadcast owners in the same market, have been blocked for decades.
Media owners express little hope that this will change under President Barack Obama, who campaigned on diversifying media ownership. “It is as if regulators went to sleep during the Eisenhower administration and woke up staring blankly at an iPhone,” John Chachas, co-head of the media practice at Lazard, which is advising on several newspaper restructurings, told the Dallas Morning News last month. Newspapers should be exempted from antitrust restrictions for long enough to establish “an industry-wide system to track and charge for the reuse of their content” by online aggregators, he argued.
Charging for news online could help publishers’ top lines but that would address only one of their problems. The spate of dire news shows the industry’s challenges fall into three broad categories: the mismatch between costs and revenues; inappropriate capital structures; and oversupply. Any hope of a durable news business rests on tackling all three.
"One inescapable conclusion of our study is that our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today,” Mr Swartz told his staff: “It is equally inescapable that during good times our industry developed business practices that were at best inefficient.”
...
Jonathan Knee, director of the media programme at Columbia Business School, likens newspapers’ “antiquated” cost structures to those in the airline industry. Labour unions, the inefficient use of printing plants and distribution networks and journalists’ frequent reluctance to ask whether what they want to cover serves the interests of readers have all kept costs high, he argues.
The industry is having to rethink its assumptions, outsourcing printing and distribution and carrying advertising on front pages that long resisted it. The cuts to costs have been sweeping. McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald, has announced three restructuring plans since June, involving more than 4,000 job cuts in all. A concern voiced by union leaders and investors alike is that indiscriminate cuts will only make it harder to produce content valued by consumers, in print or online.
Several publishers are cutting national or foreign coverage to focus on local areas, relying on newswires for the rest. Five papers in New York and New Jersey plan to share articles and pictures. Again, competition law may complicate further collaboration.
But it is servicing debt that represents one of the largest costs for many publishers. A Moody’s analysis of six large operators in November found all but Gannett had debts above four times their earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. In Tribune’s case, the multiple was 12.3. “A number of these newspaper companies are still reasonably good businesses but the problem is they took on too much debt,” says Mr Mutter.
Others estimate that industry profitability is even higher. Mr Knee says newspapers enjoy margins well above those of film studios or music labels – providing a cushion against falling revenues. But to reduce debt multiples to a more sustainable 2-3 times ebitda, tough restructuring will be required. “In some cases bankruptcy may be a good option,” Ms Stratigos says, because it allows publishers to deal with union contracts, pension liabilities and other operational costs.
For some publishers, closing more titles will be the only viable option. The disappearance of some competitors from an oversupplied and shrinking market may help the industry, however. Dean Singleton, owner of Denver’s other paper, said when the Rocky closed: “This dramatically improves the finances of the Denver Post.”
The prospect of fewer, more narrowly focused titles facing less competition, employing fewer journalists and charging readers who once enjoyed their content for free is an unpalatable one for many. It may also be a troubled industry’s best hope.
Source: FT.com
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Rescuing print journalism: Does Cable TV have the right idea?
TOWARD the end of the three-hour Chicago Journalism Town Hall meeting Sunday afternoon at the Hotel Allegro, the battle lines became clear.
On one side were those who believe journalists will do just fine in the future if they continue to give away their work product on the Internet. All they need to do is be more creative when it comes to content, advertising and funding.
These tended to be the younger, more entrepreneurial members of the overflow crowd of nearly 400 and the 14-person panel of current and former reporters.
On the other side were those who believe the free ride has got to end. All the innovation in the world isn't going to keep news organizations—particularly print-based outlets such as the Tribune—in the black as more and more customers migrate to the Web.
These tended to be the older, more established folks—the ones either stuck in the past or blessed with the wisdom of experience, depending on how you see the argument.
Normally, despite my age, I'd be with the young—the visionaries who embrace change, even with its attendant turmoil. They're the ones who refuse to cling to tradition for its own sake. They're the ones who are most comfortable with the inevitability that progress must destroy even as it rebuilds.
And, in fact, I was on the side of the young until a few months ago. Until then, I believed that large news organizations could thrive online by using the TV/radio broadcast model—by making it difficult to enjoy content without being confronted with advertising messages.
But for a variety of reasons, this model doesn't seem to work for online news, particularly in this economy. Newspapers can and do make money with Web advertising, just not enough to make up for the declines in print advertising.
I'm now a believer in the cable TV model. News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives and other offerings.
For, say, $10 a month, a subscriber would have a choice of, say, 50 participating local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Another $5 might buy an additional 50 outlets, and so on.
Why the bundling? Because the online subscription model doesn't work for most individual media companies. Readers just browse over to similar, free sites to avoid the hassle and the expense, however minor.
Why not try a pay-per-click model instead? Same reason.
I floated an even more vague version of the cable-TV idea from my seat on the panel Sunday, and while no one shouted me down, no one seconded my motion and the chippy conversation continued.
You can join me (free!) online to point out all the likely drawbacks and pitfalls of this model for distribution of online journalism, including the potentially knotty hurdle of antitrust laws.
I've probably thought of all of the objections already. I've certainly read a lot of naysaying about paid content via the links posted at the event's Web site.
There's no going back, skeptics say. News and commentary want to be free.
Maybe so. But unless someone's bold and unlikely experiment works, those on both sides of the battle lines will be losers.
Source: Chicagotribune.com
On one side were those who believe journalists will do just fine in the future if they continue to give away their work product on the Internet. All they need to do is be more creative when it comes to content, advertising and funding.
These tended to be the younger, more entrepreneurial members of the overflow crowd of nearly 400 and the 14-person panel of current and former reporters.
On the other side were those who believe the free ride has got to end. All the innovation in the world isn't going to keep news organizations—particularly print-based outlets such as the Tribune—in the black as more and more customers migrate to the Web.
These tended to be the older, more established folks—the ones either stuck in the past or blessed with the wisdom of experience, depending on how you see the argument.
Normally, despite my age, I'd be with the young—the visionaries who embrace change, even with its attendant turmoil. They're the ones who refuse to cling to tradition for its own sake. They're the ones who are most comfortable with the inevitability that progress must destroy even as it rebuilds.
And, in fact, I was on the side of the young until a few months ago. Until then, I believed that large news organizations could thrive online by using the TV/radio broadcast model—by making it difficult to enjoy content without being confronted with advertising messages.
But for a variety of reasons, this model doesn't seem to work for online news, particularly in this economy. Newspapers can and do make money with Web advertising, just not enough to make up for the declines in print advertising.
I'm now a believer in the cable TV model. News organizations that generate significant original content should band together for their own survival and sell group subscription packages for unlimited access to their stories, photos, videos, archives and other offerings.
For, say, $10 a month, a subscriber would have a choice of, say, 50 participating local, regional and national newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations. Another $5 might buy an additional 50 outlets, and so on.
Why the bundling? Because the online subscription model doesn't work for most individual media companies. Readers just browse over to similar, free sites to avoid the hassle and the expense, however minor.
Why not try a pay-per-click model instead? Same reason.
I floated an even more vague version of the cable-TV idea from my seat on the panel Sunday, and while no one shouted me down, no one seconded my motion and the chippy conversation continued.
You can join me (free!) online to point out all the likely drawbacks and pitfalls of this model for distribution of online journalism, including the potentially knotty hurdle of antitrust laws.
I've probably thought of all of the objections already. I've certainly read a lot of naysaying about paid content via the links posted at the event's Web site.
There's no going back, skeptics say. News and commentary want to be free.
Maybe so. But unless someone's bold and unlikely experiment works, those on both sides of the battle lines will be losers.
Source: Chicagotribune.com
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