future-of-journalism

The unanswered question posed by this essay: What if newspapers had insisted in charging for their content in 1995 or so, instead of responding to the threat of Microsoft's Sidewalk by making everything free? Is it too late now for the industry to coalesce around a line in the sand that content isn't free when it's produced by professionals, and that professional efforts are worth funding?

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802874.html

By David Simon
Sunday, January 20, 2008; B01

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David Simon, a Baltimore Sun reporter from 1983-95, is executive producer of
HBO's "The Wire." The final season of the drama depicts the struggles of a
present-day newspaper.
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Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?

Bright and shiny we were in the late 1970s, packed into our bursting journalism schools, dog-eared paperback copies of "All the President's Men" and "The Powers That Be" atop our Associated Press stylebooks. No business school called to us, no engineering lab, no information-age computer degree -- we had seen a future of substance in bylines and column inches. Immortality lay in a five-part series with sidebars in the Tribune, the Sun, the Register, the Post, the Express.

What the hell happened?

I mean, I understand the economic pressures on newspapers. At this point, along with the rest of the wood-pulp Luddites, I've grasped that what was on the Internet wasn't merely advertising for journalism, but the journalism itself. And though I fled the profession a decade ago for the fleshpots of television, I've heard tell of the horrors of department-store consolidation and the decline in advertising, of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I understand the vagaries of Wall Street, the fealty to the media-chain stockholders, the primacy of the price-per-share.

What I don't understand is this:

Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? It's hard to say that, even harder to think it. By that premise, what all of us pretended to regard as a viable commodity -- indeed, as the source of all that was purposeful and heroic -- was, in fact, an intellectual vanity.

Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When they might have -- as one, industry-wide -- declared that their online advertising would be profitable, that their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service?

And which, exactly, is the proper epitaph for the generation that entered newspapering at the very moment when the big-city dailies -- the fat morning papers, those that survived the shakeout of afternoon tabloids and other weak sisters -- seemed impervious, essential and ascendant? Were we the last craftsmen prepared for a horse-and-buggy world soon to prostrate itself before the god of internal combustion? Or were we assembly-line victims of the inert monopolists of early 1970s Detroit, who thought that Pacers and Gremlins and Chevy Vegas were response enough to Japanese and European automaking superiority?

My own experience is anecdotal, I admit. I was hired out of college by the Baltimore Sun in 1983 and worked there until the third round of newsroom buyouts 12 years later. When I came to Baltimore, the Sun was a dour gray lady, but one of unquestioned substance, and there were two competing evening papers. When I left in 1995, we were the last game in town, and the newsbeat-by-newsbeat attrition of veteran talent was well underway. City to city, paper to paper, your mileage may vary. But I'm willing to trust in the Baltimore story enough to offer it up as an argument for the Detroit analogy.

Here's Baltimore in the mid-1980s:

The family-run A.S. Abell Co. owns the Sun and its sister publication, the Evening Sun -- an afternoon edition that is in direct competition with the dying Hearst paper, the News-American. In terms of circulation and advertising, the morning Sun is ascendant, as all morning papers seem to be, and it's clear that the publishers are holding on to the evening edition just long enough to drive the last nails into the Hearst coffin. Sure enough, once the News-American folds, the Sun undertakes to lure as much circulation as possible to its evening edition before combining the two news staffs and making the Evening Sun merely a late edition of the morning paper.

Similarly, the Sun spends the 1980s publishing, in every surrounding county, a "zoned" tabloid -- a locally oriented insert largely devoid of hard news or sophisticated storytelling, but filled with the hope that more people will subscribe to a newspaper that manages now and then to run a photo of someone's kid at the county fair.The "tab" inserts are the last piece of the monopoly puzzle -- an effort to mitigate against the growth of smaller county papers, and ultimately, when they don't achieve all they should, the Sun simply sets about buying up smaller papers in Baltimore, Howard and Harford counties.

At the apogee of its power and influence, the Baltimore Sun, with the Evening Sun and the tabloid Suns, employs close to 500 newsroom personnel. It is a massive operation, and as the monopoly is consolidated, it is profitable.

So there we sat.

Then came the key moment in the early 1990s, when the Sun junked its tabloids and merged the evening and morning staffs, and the prevailing wisdom became that the newsroom of the remaining morning edition was now too large, that attrition was the order of the day. And so it began -- a buyout of newsroom veterans, then a second buyout of older editors, then a third buyout of more veterans.

It was, I will argue, the precise moment when the post-Watergate future of newspapers -- the one that so many of us had sold ourselves -- was made a lie. When I was in J-school, the argument was that the siren-chasing would be ceded to television, but newspapers, to thrive, would become magazines -- thoughtful, stylish, comprehensive. And magazines? To compete with newspapers they were going to be recruiting literary and investigative giants.

Better was the watchword. Chevrolets would become Buicks, and Buicks were soon to be Cadillacs. And all of them were going to be well-built, well-tuned automobiles, offering readers more each day. In order to provide something more than the simple immediacy of television, newspapers would become organs of sophisticated, unique storytelling. They would need to deliver a complex world, to explain that world, challenge and contend with it. That's what they told us in the Introduction to Journalism lectures, anyway.

Yet here were the veterans -- the labor reporter, the courthouse maven, the poverty-beat specialist, the second medical beat guy and the prisons and corrections aficionado -- damned if they weren't walking out the door forever. There would be fresh hires, and some serious players would remain, of course. But no longer would it be practical to argue that newspapers were going to become more comprehensive, and better written -- the product of experienced and committed people for whom print journalism was a life's calling.

At the moment when the Internet was about to arrive, most big-city newspapers -- having survived the arrival of television and confident in their advertising base -- were neither hungry, nor worried, nor ambitious. They were merely assets to their newspaper chains. Profits were taken, and coverage did not expand in scope and complexity.

In my newsroom, I lived through the trend of zoning (give the people what's happening in their neighborhood), the trend of brevity (never mind the details, people don't read past the jump) and ultimately, the trend of organized, clinical prize-groveling (we don't know what people want, but if we can win something, that's validation enough), not to mention several graphic redesigns of the newspaper.

I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout.

So in a city where half the adult black males are unemployed, where the unions have been busted, and crime and poverty have overwhelmed one neighborhood after the next, the daily newspaper no longer maintains a poverty beat or a labor beat. The city courthouse went uncovered for almost a year at one point. The last time a reporter was assigned to monitor a burgeoning prison system, I was a kid working the night desk.

Soon enough, when technology arrived to test the loyalty of longtime readers and the interest of new ones, the newspaper would be offering to cover not more of the world and its issues, but less of both -- and to do so with younger, cheaper employees, many of them newspaper-chain transplants with no organic sense of the city's history. In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation -- the very currency of the Internet itself.

Charge for that kind of product? Who would dare?

Is there still high-end journalism? Of course. A lot of fine journalists are still laboring in the vineyard, some of them in Baltimore. But at even the more serious newspapers in most markets, high-end journalism doesn't take the form of consistent and sophisticated coverage of issues, but of special projects and five-part series on selected topics -- a distraction designed not to convince readers that a newspaper aggressively brings the world to them each day, but to convince a prize committee that someone, somewhere, deserves a plaque.

And so here we are.

In Baltimore, the newspaper now has 300 newsroom staffers, and it is run by some fellows in Chicago who think that number sufficient to the task. And the locally run company that was once willing to pay for a 500-reporter newsroom, to moderate its own profits in some basic regard and put money back into the product? Turns out it wasn't willing to do so to build a great newspaper, but merely to clear the field of rivals, to make Baltimore safe for Gremlins and Pacers. And at no point in the transition from one to the other did anyone seriously consider the true cost of building something comprehensive, essential and great.

And now, no profits. No advertising. No new readers. Now, the great gray ladies are reduced to throwing what's left of their best stuff out there on the Web, unable to charge enough for online advertising, or anything at all for the journalism itself.

Perhaps it was all inevitable. Perhaps the Internet is so profound a change in the delivery model that every newspaper -- even the best of the best -- is destined to face retrenchment and loss. Perhaps all of this was written in stone long before I was ever wandering around a student newspaper office with a pica ruler sticking out my back pocket. Perhaps everything written above is merely Talmudic commentary.

Well, what do I know? I have a general studies degree, I didn't even meet the J-school requirements, and this HBO gig I've got now doesn't exactly qualify me for a grad program at the Wharton School of Business.

But one thing I do know:

A great newspaper is a great newspaper. And a good newspaper isn't great. And a Chevy Vega by any other name is, well, a Chevy Vega.

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ORIGINAL URL:
http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/11/23/newspapers_can_break_news_again.php
(GO TO ORIGINAL URL FOR EMBEDDED LINKS TO USEFUL RESOURCES)

November 23, 2007

ORIGINAL HEADLINE: Newspapers can break news again

Posted by Kevin Anderson (mini-bio below)

Steve Outing highlighted on Poynter's E-Media Tidbits how useful Twitter can be during breaking news. Sending out short burst updates during a breaking news event can keep journalists in the field and close to the story while quickly filing updates that can easily be pulled via RSS into your site. He wrote: In the not-so-distant past, I would have urged you to create a breaking-news blog for your news site if any big story like those hit in your backyard. ...That's so 2004! You can still do it, and probably should. But the breaking-news blog is about to be supplanted (or perhaps supplemented is a better word) by the Twitter breaking-news feed.

I don't think it's an either/or proposition. Twitter can be a good resource to reach your audience via SMS and even desktop alerts if you encourage your subscribers to follow breaking news 'tweets' via applications like Twitterific. But you can easily pull that into a blog via an RSS feed, and really, in the age of networked journalism, it's about your site being a hub in the network to disseminate news. Journalists back at base can tap into the network for leads, pictures and first person reports.

I'll give you an example from last week when we looked out our window here on the fifth floor of the Guardian and saw black smoke billowing from somewhere in east London. Journalism.co.uk noted the pace of updates across several different sites and services, including Twitter, Flickr and the Guardian's Newsblog: The first tweet Journalism.co.uk saw on the fire came from the Guardians head of blogging Kevin Anderson shortly before 12:30pm. Anderson has also posted pictures to Flickr and at 12:45pm posted an entry on the events to his Guardian blog.

I also did a quick post here on Strange Attractor. A commenter from Washington DC found the post and said: Greetings from Washington D.C. Getting reports here that it is an industrial site. Stock futures markets moving up after intial shock. Looks ugly but, industrial chemical fires usually are. Yours was the first blog I came across that had the story. Who needs cables news? Will be watching to see how story develops. Thanks for posting BCP -- http://beercanpolitics.blogspot..com

I was able to post faster and with more pictures and information than Sky and the BBC, which we were watching in the office. Flickr users noted that they were seeing more pictures on the site than on traditional news sites and TV channels. I also used Technorati to find video posted to YouTube before Sky had its helicopter on the scene. People were also posting links in the comments on the Guardian Newsblog.

Since the advent of radio and television, newspapers have been pushed out of the breaking news business. News is frozen at the time you have to go to press. Web-first has only slowly been embraced by newspapers and newspaper journalists. I do sometimes find that newspaper journalists suddenly pushed into the 24/7 news cycle can feel that quality suffers as one daily deadline becomes a rolling deadline. But the internet does both immediacy as well as depth as Paul Bradshaw recently highlighted in the first of his 21st Century Journalism series of posts. The strengths of the online medium are essentially twofold, and contradictory: speed, and depth. And Paul's 'News Diamond' shows how a story passes from speed to user control. It's a great series of posts, and Paul's thinking has brought together some brilliant ideas. Ideas that I'll use the next time I'm blogging breaking news.

I was sitting in the office, which is a role for a networked journalist to play pulling together a news organisation's own coverage while also aggregating the best of crowdsourced content. But I think there is also a role for field journalists to use Twitter, blogging software or other forms of flexible field filing to break news. Blogging was liberating for me as a journalist if for no other reason as a field journalist, it gave me a much easier way to file than using traditional content management systems that are made to work in the office but are unusable in the field. Until traditional CMSes provide that kind of flexibility, they will have significant drawbacks when compared to blogging platforms. But that's another post for later.

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Kevin Anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. In 1998, he joined the BBC and became their first online journalist based outside of the UK, covering the US for its award winning news website. After coming to the UK in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for BBC news, helped launch a programme on the BBC's 5Live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme World Have Your Say on the BBC World Service. Kevin is now the Blogs Editor for The Guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for Guardian Unlimited blogs.
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

ORIGINAL URL:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003646835
Published: September 26, 2007 1:45 PM ET

Klurfeld of 'Newsday' to Head News Literacy Center

By Joe Strupp
Editor & Publisher Online

NEW YORK -- Editorial Page Editor Jim Klurfeld of Newsday in Melville, N.Y., will serve as interim director of what is being touted as the nation's first News Literacy Center at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N,Y.

In a release Wednesday, the university announced the formation of the new center "designed to educate current and future news consumers on how to judge the credibility and reliability of news." The project is being funded in part from a $200,000 grant of the Ford Foundation.

"The Center will act as a resource center for universities across the U.S., develop curriculum for high school instruction and secondary teacher training programs, and design conferences, seminars, lectures, and workshops that will bring together scholars and journalists to explore issues related to the reliability of news from print, broadcast, and the web," the release added. "Last year, with a $1.7 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Stony Brook created one of the nation's first courses in News Literacy that the University expects to teach to 10,000 students over the next four years."

Klurfeld, who is joining the School of Journalism as a visiting professor, has been named interim director, said Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny. "Jim Klurfeld is just the right person to lead this new Center," Kenny said. "His commitment to truth and accuracy was the hallmark of his outstanding career in journalism. Under his leadership, this unique effort will have a lasting impact on students, teachers, and the public."

Adds Howard Schneider, Dean of the School of Journalism, who will serve as Executive Director of the new center: "The goal is to equip the next generation of news consumers with the ability to judge for themselves what information they can trust and what information is suspect," said. "We want to create more informed citizens and sustain quality journalism at the same time."

The center will "develop a pilot program for the public, act as a clearinghouse for 'best practices,' design and develop a center web site, and extend the News Literacy program to high school students," the release stated. "We are going through a media revolution and it's critical that students are equipped to deal with that revolution," Klurfeld said in a statement. "I'm excited about the challenge of starting Stony Brook.s Center for News Literacy and believe we can make it into a resource for educators not just on Long Island but throughout the country."

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Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

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ORIGINAL URL:

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-newsblogs9oct09,1,3678198.story
POSTED: October 9, 2007
From the Los Angeles Times

HEADLINE: Newspapers, bloggers now on same page
Journalistic websites see amateur scribes as partners, not rivals. They
increase coverage and may share revenue.

By Alana Semuels (alana.semuels@latimes.com)
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Once upon a time, newspapers wanted nothing to do with bloggers, those amateurs who opined on anything that caught their fancy, whether it was interesting, or accurate, or not.

That was then. Now newspaper websites, desperate for readers and revenue, are increasingly in cahoots with bloggers, posting and plugging them and even sharing advertising revenue. Purists may sniff at these online liaisons but, as the print newspaper industry shrinks, they may be inevitable.

"Any new information source is a potential competitor to a local newspaper. Smart newspapers are figuring out they don't have to fight with those competitors -- they can make alliances with them," said Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, which is published by the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

This year, the Washington Post added a sponsored blog roll to its website, a directory of links to blogs that specialize in travel, technology, health and more. If the Post sells an ad on the blog roll's main page, the bloggers split the money with the newspaper. So far, about 100 bloggers have signed up.

To Caroline Little, the chief executive of Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive, the ad network is good business. Most ad buyers don't want to take the time to buy space on dozens of different blogs, she said, and the staff-driven side of the website often doesn't have enough stories about technology, business or health for advertisers looking to place ads near that content. With the blog roll, the Post can grab ad revenue that might have gone elsewhere. "It's about figuring out how to monetize other people's content," Little said.

The partnership has boosted ad revenue, she said, although the money made from selling blog roll ads isn't a significant part of online income, at least not yet. A spokeswoman for Adify, a San Bruno, Calif., company that supplies ad network technology to the Post, said the blog roll had increased the site's audience by more than 50%. Little couldn't confirm that.

Britain's Guardian newspaper and Hoy, a Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles (owned by Times parent Tribune Co.), have also set up networks that sell ads on smaller sites and share ad income with blogs.

Other papers are expanding coverage -- and, they hope, drawing traffic -- by posting the work of local bloggers. The Houston Chronicle, for one, has recruited 50 reader-bloggers whose commentary appears its website. A note at the top of the readers' blog page reads: "Our members are responsible for this content, which is not edited by the Chronicle." Among the recent blog headlines: "Breastfeeding is obscene?"

Scott Clark, vice president and editor of Chron.com, said readers' blogs had expanded coverage. "Many of our readers have specialized knowledge and passions," he said. "By adding them to our site, we tremendously expand the scope of information that we're able to provide."

The blurred lines make many uneasy. "There's a lot of uninformed opinion on the Internet and not a lot of solid reporting," said Fred Brown, vice chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee and a columnist at the Denver Post. A professional journalist "respects the truth and lives up to standards of ethics. Certainly that isn't the case in the blogosphere."

Newspapers should make a clear distinction between staff-written and blogger-generated material as a service to their readers, said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. But what if a blogger gets a fact wrong or makes a defamatory comment about someone?

Newspapers have to be careful, but federal law generally protects a website owner from postings by its users. As long as employees of a newspaper site have nothing to do with a blogger's work, Ardia said, the newspaper is probably protected, because it is simply posting content produced by an outsider.

At the same time, the law allows newspapers to act as good Samaritans to protect their readers, and Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said his paper had been doing just that. It removes from its website "anything brought to our attention that violates our terms of use, including personal attacks, hate speech, obscenities, plagiarism, as well as potentially libelous or defamatory material," Wilson wrote in an e-mail.

The USA Today site has run excerpts from such blogs as College Football Resource and A Socialite's Life, the latter a gossip site that discusses and mocks fashion, celebrities and the media. Wilson said in an interview that the industry wasn't adopting blogs in place of traditional reporting but in addition to it. In any event, he said, newspapers can't afford to think about distributing information the way they used to. "The walled garden is dead. We're living in an era of distributed content," he said. One important role of a newspaper nowadays is to sift through rafts of information online, he said, and help readers use it.

Some popular blogs have been "absorbed," to use the New York Times' term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue. Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world "with all the readership and support that comes along with it." The blog gets more traffic on the Times site than it did when it was accessible only at Freakonomics.com, he said. Unlike before, now it can make money. With the funds, the Freakonomics authors are sprucing up the blog, adding a full-time editor and filmmaker.

Most bloggers are paid little, if anything, for the thousands of words they type. Teaming up with a newspaper is a way to establish credibility, said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, which distributes blog content to a handful of newspaper sites, including USA Today's, through a service called BlogBurst. "Being picked up by the mainstream media," he said, "is the highest form of flattery."

Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times
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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailfeatures.asp?fileid=20070930.E10&irec=10

OPINION: Oh my! The future of news -- by a WSJ Asia reporter
SOURCE: The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today (fwd)
DATE: Sunday, Sept. 30, 2007 -- Features Section

By Jeremy Wagstaff

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Jeremy Wagstaff writes a weekly technology column for The Wall Street Journal Asia. His guide to technology, Loose Wire, is available in bookshops or on Amazon. He can be found online at www.loosewireblog.com or via e-mail at jeremy@loose-wire.com.
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I was asked the other day to address a room full of media types about
changes in consumer behavior; where, they wanted to know, are people looking for news in this new digital world?

It's always a bad idea to get me to talk in public, especially on this subject, since I think it's the wrong one. Or at least, the wrong way of looking at the subject. I gave them two reasons:

First, there are no consumers of news anymore. In fact, you've probably heard this said a lot, here and elsewhere that, in the era of MySpace, Wikipedia, OhmyNews and citizen journalism, everyone is a journalist, and therefore a producer, of news. No one is just a consumer. Second, there is no news. Or at least there is no longer a traditional, established and establishment definition of what is news. Instead we have information. Some of it moving very fast, so it looks like news. But still information.

A commuter taking a photo of a policeman extracting bribes from drivers and then posting the picture on his blog? It's not news, but it's not just information either. It could be news to the policeman, and if he's busted because of it could be good news to drivers in that town.

We journalists have been schooled in a kind of journalism that goes back to the days when a German called Paul Julius Reuter was delivering it by pigeon. His problem was a simple one: getting new information quickly from A to B. It could be stock prices; it could be the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

That definition of news has remained with us until today. A lot of the time it remains a good one. When terrorists hit, we'd rather know sooner than later. If stocks in our portfolio are losing their value in a crash, we'd prefer to get that information now. When Buddhist monks hit the streets of towns in Myanmar we look to AFP, Reuters and AP to get the news out.

But the Internet has changed a lot of this. First off, everyone is connected. By connected I mean they can look up anything they like so long as they're near an Internet-connected computer. Which for a lot of people now means a 3G phone. Even if you don't have one, the chances are you'll be in spitting range of a computer that is connected to the Internet. Or you could get you information by SMS -- from news sites, from colleagues, from family members. It's not that we're not far from a gadget. We're not far from information. This has a critical impact on the idea of news.

Because we're informed, news doesn't hit us in the same way it used to when we didn't. True, if someone hits a tall building with an airliner, that's news to all of us. The U.S. invades or leaves Iraq; that's news. But the rest of the time, news is a slippery beast that means different things to different people. That's because there's another kind of news we're all interested in.

It's hyperlocal news. It's what is around us. In our neighborhood. Since moving house I'm much less interested in gubernatorial elections and much more in anything that anybody says about en bloc sales and house prices. That is hyperlocal news, and it's where most people spend their day. No nuclear weapons being fired? No terrorist attacks? No meltdown in the financial markets? OK, so tell me more about en bloc sales. Actually, this is just part of hyperlocal news.

If you've used Facebook, you'll know there's another kind of addictive local news: your friends' status updates. A status update, for those of you who haven't tried Facebook, is basically a short message that accompanies your profile indicating what you're up to at that point. I think of it a wire feed by real people. Of course it's not news as we'd think of it, but news as in an answer to the questions "What's up?" "What's new?""What's happening?" "What's new with you?" In that sense it's news. I call it hyper-hyperlocal news. Even though those people are spread all over the world, they're all part of my friends network, and that means for me they're local.

So news isn't always what we think of as news. News has always meant something slightly different to the nonmedia person; our obsession with prioritizing stories in a summary, the most important item first (How many dead? What color was their skin? Any Americans involved?) has been exposed as something only we tend to obsess over. Don't believe me? Look at the BBC website. While the editors were putting up stories about Musharraf, North Korea and Japan, the users were swapping stories about Britney Spears splitting with her manager, the dangers of spotty face, and the admittedly important news that the Sex Pistols might be getting back together.

Of course, I'm not saying journalists are from Mars and readers are from Venus. It just looks that way. What we're really seeing is that now that people have access to information, they are showing us what they're interested in. Unsurprisingly, they're interested in different stuff. What we call audience fragmentation -- niche audiences for specialized interests -- is actually what things have always been about.

If we're a geek we go for our news to Slashdot. We want gossip? We go to Gawker. We want to change the world? We go to WorldChangingOnline.org The Internet makes the Long Tail of all those niche audiences and interests possible, and possibly profitable. What we're seeing with the Internet is not a revolution against the values of old media; a revolution against the notion that it's only us who can dictate what is news.

What we're seeing is that people get their news from whoever can help them answer the question they're asking. We want the headlines, we go to CNN. But the rest of the time, "news" is for us just part of a much bigger search for information, to stay informed.

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The article above is copyrighted material, the use of which may not have specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of political, economic, democracy, First Amendment, technology, journalism, community and justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Chapter 1, Section 107, the material above is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this blog for purposes beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

ORIGINAL URL:
http://www.followthemedia.com/fittoprint/eros21092007.htm

followthemedia.com - a knowledge base for media professionals
POSTED: September 21, 2007

The Cashless Society Finally Hits Paid-For Newspaper Newsstands -- And What A
Great Idea It Is!

By Philip M. Stone

LONDON -- Associated Newspapers has hit upon a gem of an idea for its faltering Evening Standard newspaper that competes against two free newspapers in London. Prepay your newspaper via the Internet and just tap a card on an electronic pad at the newsstand and not only do you get a cut-price paper but also reward points, and even free I-Tunes.

The Standard is taking a page from the very successful Transport for London campaign in which most Londoners now prepay their public transport via what are called .Oyster. cards by tapping them on a pad located in every bus and at every Underground (subway, Metro) station. The system charges cut-rate prices for trips and puts a cap on the daily travel expense. Not only has it speeded up bus boarding procedures, the system actually works. It was surely just a matter of time before the private sector tried it, so why not a newspaper?

An added beauty to the system is that users .top-up. their cards via the Internet, paying by credit or debit cards. But to do this one has to register and will need to provide such information as name and address, post code etc. Now to a newspaper that is almost entirely sold on the newsstand what a goldmine of information that is going to be gained to attract advertisers.

The Standard knows it now has a daily circulation of some 270,000, including about one-third bulk sales, but if an advertiser were to ask management exactly who the readers were there is no answer. except to say it is people on their way home from work.

ftm background

When The British Have A Real Newspaper War It.s a Beaut . A Former Scotland Yard Detective Poking Into Trash All Over London, Embarrassing Video Released on YouTube, Ads Aimed at Damning The Other In The Eyes of Advertisers, And Oh So Much Money Bled By Murdoch And RothermereEven though London has 10 daily national AM newspapers all are basically at peace with one another. Staff poaching goes on all the time, once in a while one will cut its newsstand price forcing others to follow, a lot of money is thrown around looking for the elusive exclusive, but basically it.s civilized peace. How boring! But now a battle royal has broken out between the two new PM Free papers and it looks like no holds barred. Now we.re talking!

Here.s A Lesson From The UK.s Sunday Times . Raise Your Cover Price To A New Industry High And Even The Most Loyal Readers Will Depart -- A 20p Increase in September Has So Far Cost It More Than 100,000 In CirculationSticker shock can apply to a newspaper.s cover price as the UK.s Sunday Times has learned. The term got its start in the US when buyers looking at a new car.s price sticker in the auto showroom were shocked to see figures far higher than expected. Well, the Sunday Times raised its price in September to £2 ($3.90, .3), the highest in the UK, and the sticker shock has so far cost it more than 100,000 circulation.

Fighting Two New Free Newspapers London.s Evening Standard Raised Its Price 25%. How Many Print Marketing Gurus Out There Believe That Strategy Was Right? Hint: The Combined Free Newspaper Circulation Is Already 8% Up

In announcing the scheme this week the Standard did not say how much of a discount the card would be worth on each day.s newspaper. A year ago the newspaper raised its price from 40 pence to 50 pence as part of a two-fisted campaign to fight the introduction of Rupert Murdoch.s new free PM newspaper, thelondonpaper. The other fist in Associated.s stable was to bring out its own free newspaper, London Lite. Both started with a circulation of 400,000 each weekday and after a few months thelondonpaper increased its daily run to 500,000.

And the Evening Standard has not fared well in the year, although the spin from Associated is that it has done remarkably well to be doing what it is doing. The official August audit numbers showed its circulation down 11.38% from last August to 277,555 copies but dig into those numbers and the results are really much worse. A year ago the circulation was 317,511 of which 12% (some 38,000 copies) were bulk sales to hotels, airlines and the like at greatly discounted prices. Today.s 277,555 figure includes 34% bulk sales (95,111 copies). Do a like-on-like of full price sales and it is 182,444 today compares to 279,433 of a year ago, down almost 100,000 copies (34%).

So by using the card it can implement a climb-down of that year-ago price hike.

Andrew Mullins, the Standard.s managing director, explained, .We are very excited to be the first newspaper to introduce this cashless and reward based payment system. Over the next two years in London (the central area) will increasingly become a cashless payment zone and the Evening Standard will be helping drive and leads this trend. The Evening Standard Eros card is a genuine innovation. It not only provides greater convenience for our loyal readers but also appropriate added value benefit rewards..

And Mullins emphasized the marketing goldmine the system should provide. .For the first time we will have in-depth knowledge of how many people are buying the paper, and on what day and at what time..

As an incentive for the cards that are being given out for the first time next week, when users top up those cards on the Internet they will be eligible for five free downloads from I-Tunes. In a statement the Standard said, .Users of the card will discover that it saves money over paying directly by cash. And because of the loyalty rewards package, cardholders will benefit from additional privileges as well as exclusive added value and discount offers provided by card partners.

And the Standard is not the only London paper getting into the card game. Earlier in the month Rupert Murdoch.s tabloid Sun announced it was teaming up with a third party to offer a pre-paid, pay-as-you-go MasterCard with chip and PIN code.

But why call the card Eros, the Greek mythical God of love? Take a look at the illustration at the top of this story and you should be able to make out that the logo for the card is superimposed over a statue of Eros, and that statue has been a part of the Standard.s logo for many years (anyone out there know how that came to be and why?) The original aluminum statue was sculpted by Alfred Gilbert and finished in 1893 and it has stood for most years since then Piccadilly Circus . London.s Time Square. Associated Newspapers has tried to trademark the statue, but is opposed by the Westminster City Council on the basis that such a well known symbol of London should not be monopolized for private reasons.

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believe this constitutes a 'fair use' as provided by Section 107 of U.S.
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An analysis by a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle of social-news networking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit -- based upon a just-release Project for Excellence in Journalism study.

LINK TO THE PEJ STUDY WRITEUP:
http://www.journalism.org/node/7493

EXCERT:

"Indeed, these user-driven sites have entered the news business, or perhaps more accurately, they have entered the news dissemination business. Reporting is not a part of their charge. Instead, they turn to others for content and then they bestow users with the task of deciding what makes it on the page."

URL OF ARTICLE BELOW:
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/12/MNPDS3RE6.DTL

User-news sites offer diverse stories, some questionable sources

By Joe Garofoli
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

During a week this summer when the mainstream press focused on the immigration debate in Congress and a failed terrorism plot in the United Kingdom, the most popular stories on news sites where the users rank their favorites, like San Francisco's Digg, was - aside from chatter about Apple's new iPhone - not dominated by any one news story. And that's part of their allure. The 24-hour news cycle doesn't exist on rapidly growing user-news sites like Digg, Del.icio.us or San Francisco-based Reddit. Neither do the small cabal of editors who decide what news readers and viewers should see on traditional print and broadcast outlets.

Instead, the readers of these user-news sites collectively and continuously contribute to the creation of a digital "front page" of their favorite stories - pushing to prominence news that may get scant airing on traditional print, broadcast or cable outlets, where space and airtime is finite and, they say, risk-taking is more rare.

This changing approach to news consumption is highlighted in a study released today by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington, D.C., think tank. It compared the stories on the above three leading user-news sites, along with Yahoo News' Most Recommended, Most Viewed and Most E-mailed stories, with the project's daily content audit of 48 print, cable, online, network TV and radio news outlets. The study, a snapshot of a week's worth of news consumption, shows the growing interdependence between traditional news outlets and online user-news sites. It also illustrates how the news looks a lot different when audience members pick what story they want to read or recommend, as opposed to a professional journalist.

"The traditional news outlet wants to put a lot of gravitas on their front page. They want the readers to eat their spinach," said Kourosh Karimkhany, general manager of Wired Digital, which owns Reddit. Technology allows users to create their own news "agenda" from multiple online sources, rendering a traditional front page increasingly "irrelevant," he said. Instead, on these growing sites - Digg welcomed 19.5 million unique visitors last month - consumers rely on the "wisdom of crowds" (other readers) to figure out what are the top stories of the day.

The study found that the news items on these sites are "more diverse, more transitory and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources." It found that 40 percent of the stories on user-news sites originated on blogs and 24 percent came from mainstream sites like BBC News. Only 5 percent came from wire services.

So the immigration debate never was a top-10 story on Digg or Del.icio.us during the week of June 24, the study's focus period. It appeared just once that week among the top stories on Reddit.

"The best way to get a sense of trend among these sites is not to look at specific news events, but at broad topic areas such as politics, crime and foreign affairs," the study found. And the focus on user-news sites is a lot different than editor-chosen news sites. The study found roughly 40 percent of the stories on Digg and Del.icio.us were devoted to technology and science. Lifestyle stories were the second most popular on user-news sites. While the war in Iraq accounted for 10 percent of the stories from the nation's top mainstream news outlets, it was only 1 percent of the stories on the three user-news sites.

At traditional outlets, the top-10 list of stories that week - topics like Iraq, the Supreme Court decisions and a major fire near Lake Tahoe - accounted for 51 percent of all the stories. "What it hints at is that the range of topics are broader and more varied (on user-news sites)," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. However, Rosenstiel said, it also shows that "more sources may or may not be completely dependable." On these user-news sites, items may be posted from a blog or other online source that doesn't come with the "assurance of a professional journalist saying, 'I made seven calls on this, and it's legitimate.' Or, 'It's a scam.' "

And while traditional journalists often concentrate on ongoing coverage of the same issue, the variety of stories turning up on user-news sites may show that "maybe a lot of readers aren't as interested in those turn-of-the-screw type of stories," Rosenstiel said. But the study doesn't portend the end to traditional journalism, said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. On his site, its 2 million registered users submit and vote on content, "digging" the stories they prefer and "burying" those they don't. Stories with the most "diggs" go to the top of the page, creating a constantly evolving news source. "In the current form, it is a very symbiotic relationship" between user-news sites and traditional media, he said. "What
this study shows is that the online news consumer consumes news differently." Instead of cuddling up to one newspaper or checking out the evening news, today's consumer is checking out 15 to 20 sources - from the New York Times and The Chronicle to ABC to a blog, said Reddit's Karimkhany.

Indeed, many traditional news outlets mark their stories with one or more user-news icons, inviting their readers to "Digg" that story. "It's not so much that people are shunning news. I think people are reading more," said Karimkhany, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and a former reporter for mainstream outlets like Reuters and Bloomberg News. "What Reddit does is much what a traditional newsroom does. Except that instead of having four or five men in their 40s and 50s decide what goes on the front page, thousands of people do."

But while this changing environment has brought many more news outlets into the picture, it has also cut into revenues for traditional outlets - which traditionally have been the home of most investigative reporting, because they had the resources to do so. Said Adelson: "What I wonder about is what is going to happen to investigative journalism."

User-news sites in the survey

Digg.com

Begun in December 2004, Digg's audience is more male (57 percent) than female. It is also had the youngest audience of
the three user-news sites in the study, with just under half (47 percent) of all users between ages 18 and 34.

The content is entirely user-driven. Registered users submit and vote on content, "digging" those they like and "burying"
those they don't. The stories with the most "diggs" move to the top of the page, with the order changing almost every
minute.

Del.icio.us

Founded in late 2003, Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005. It has more female (55 percent) users than male
(45 percent) users. It also skews the oldest, with the lowest percentage (35) of users under 35. Del.icio.us is also 100
percent user-driven, but works a little differently than Digg. Del.icio.us is a social "bookmarking" Web site, which lets
users "tag" content they find most interesting. So when users find a piece of content (or an entire Web site) that they
want to share - whether they find it on Del.icio.us or on an outside news outlet - they "tag" it and add a list of
keywords to describe the story.

Reddit.com

Founded in 2005 and later acquired by Conde Nast Publications last October, it is the newest of the three user-news
sites. It had the highest percentage (64) of men and almost as many users (45 percent) 18 to 34 as Digg did during the
week the study conducted its research.

Its content selection is based on user submissions followed by "up" or "down" votes. Next to each of the 25 stories on
Reddit's home page there is an up and a down arrow for users to vote for or against the content. Stories with the most
"up" votes rise to the top.

Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism
E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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