Time to stop printing the newspaper? It would be tough
After the third set of layoffs at my employer, a colleague and I started musing about where the business model for the newspaper industry might be headed. I’m not smart enough to figure it out. But I wondered whether we really need to print a newspaper anymore. Why not sell the presses, close the circulation department and just report the news — distributing it electronically?
I was curious enough to do a back-of-the-napkin experiment to see if it would work. This exercise, by the way, has nothing to do with my employer. I have no idea what any news organization plans for its print strategy. This is simply spit-balling. My experiment says it would be tough to make it work — not without making more newsroom cuts. I couldn’t make it work. Read more
Interesting stuff I saw online from Sep. 20 to Sep. 28
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Sep. 20 through Sep. 28:
- Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog » Blog Archive » Was the Scotsman right to sack Nick Clayton for blogging? - "Journalism.co.uk tried contacting the Scotsman…but received no response to the following: does the Scotsman have a set policy on staff writing for external websites? and are journalists aware of this?" The Post-Dispatch has a policy about blogging outside the newsroom by staffers.
- Buttry: Finding our way in social media | GazetteOnline.com - Cedar Rapids, Iowa City - Good strategies and ideas for how to engage audiences from the newspaper newsroom in social media.
- Digg aims to raise its profile - San Jose Mercury News - "Digg's traffic is showing signs of plateauing," Malik wrote this week. "What's troubling is that a mere 1 percent of its users (who can be labeled addicts) are generating 32 percent of the visits."
- Are We Ready for Citizen Journateerism? | PBS - "Basically that means ordinary folks leveraging social media tools to help people in need. I'm not talking about political or community-relevant reporting and opinioning, which is certainly a kind of volunteer community service, but about the re-purposing of citizen journalism tools in response to life and death issues on the ground."
- Interview with Ron Sylvester about using Twitter as a reporting tool | BeatBlogging.Org - Yes! “For traditional print, it kind of puts us back in the game,” he said. “It allows us to cover the courts live.”
- Citing abuse, Maui News kills online story comments - Pacific Business News (Honolulu): - How 19th century! "Instead, publisher Joe Bradley said readers would be directed to submit letters to the editor that could be printed in the newspaper or online. Submitting a letter requires readers to leave their names and contact numbers."
- ThePort helps clients, users interact on Web | ajc.com - Yeah. OK. Whatever.
Interesting stuff I saw online from Sep. 15 to Sep. 19
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Sep. 15 through Sep. 19:
- Comments on a religion blog - Michael Paulson's Articles of Faith Blog - I was most amused by the first comment, paraphrasing Jesus: "Trolls will always be with us." "A colleague of mine suggests that the web is self-correcting; one person posts a nasty comment about the Catholic Church, and another posts a comment rebutting the criticism. And there's an element of truth to that. But the tenor of that exchange is often ugly."
- Columbia Students Cover Presidential Forum via Twitter - Editors of the blog agreed that Twitter enhanced coverage of the forum. "Leading up to the events, our best up-to-the-minute coverage came from people seeing things online or on TV and texting them to their Twitter accounts, which is much faster than us going to our computers and blogging," said Heather Grossmann, one of the editors of the blog.
- LA Observed: Ex-Times reporters sue Zell - "The plaintiffs include several familiar bylines and at least one current Times star. A team has been looking into Zell's leveraged takeover of Tribune almost since he used employee money to get the company."
- Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey - I Want Media - From the St. Louis native and creator of Twitter. He's asked, "Some reports have valued Twitter at nearly $3 billion. Does that sound right?" What does he answer?
Interesting stuff I saw online from Sep. 12 to Sep. 14
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Sep. 12 through Sep. 14:
- Ideas and Trends - I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy - NYTimes.com - Yes, skeptics of msm, editors are still valuable: "Eliminating the human touch from the process seems to be what wiped out all that value in United’s stock — because any person who follows the company or owns the stock likely would have known to dismiss the bankruptcy report as old news."
- Journalism.co.uk :: Mixed business: should publishers charge for online content? - "Could pay walls drive up journalism quality? Grimshaw seemed to think so, as did fellow conference speaker Hugo Dixon, editor-in-chief of BreakingViews.com – another advocate of driving up non-subscribers with the hope of later converting them with 'quality' content."
- Pew: Nearly 70 pct of online Americans use services such as webmail and Google Docs - Holy cowabunga! I guess I wouldn't have guessed the number of webmail and Google Docs (etc) users was this high. "Some 69% of online Americans use webmail services, store data online, or use software programs such as word processing applications whose functionality is located on the web."
- 21 Easy Hacks to Simplify Your Life | Zen Habits - Funny. I read this on delicious…but one of the tips is: "Go media free. If your life is filled with information overload, and you find little time to do the things you love to do, consider eliminating media from your life, at least temporarily."
- Fact Checking Resources from ONA 2008 - From the Online News Association 2008 conference, stuff assembled by Chrys Wu for the "fact-checking" panel. A good collection of helpful links for getting data out of the web.
ONA award says STLtoday’s come a long way baby
If you’ll indulge me…
More than six years ago when I arrived at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reporters and editors were still asking why we were giving all that content away for free on the Internet. I’d get enormous push-back from colleagues in the newsroom about giving up stories for the web, steeped in fear that we’d tip off the competition (the television stations). Readers, they reasoned, wouldn’t have a reason to buy the paper.
We’ve come a long way, baby. Last night, the Online News Assocation awarded STLtoday.com two Online Journalism Awards, for breaking news and multimedia feature. I was pleased and proud to be there to accept the awards with my colleague Will Sullivan. I only hope I adequately conveyed how broad the newsroom’s contributions were to those awards. I couldn’t begin to name all the people who contributed to both awards.
The breaking news award was for our coverage of the Kirkwood City Hall shootings, where four were killed and others injured. Will noted in his remarks that an award for tragedy is hard to take. We all recognize the importance of that work to our community on such a difficult day.
Our second award was for best multimedia feature for our “Reporting for Duty” series, which documented Army recruits’ progress in basic training during a time of war. The competition in both categories was incredible. UPDATE: Here’s the link to all the winning entries for the Online Journalism Awards. And here’s a link to all the nominees. I think you’ll agree that they were all incredibly worthy.
Congrats to my colleagues in the Post-Dispatch newsroom.
We’re doomed if we can’t hire more programmers
Cover from the Las Vegas Sun history project.
If it is possible for a conference session to be inspiring, awakening and frustrating in the same moment, this one was the one: The “Las Vegas Site Redesign” session at the Online News Association conference on Friday.
After the somewhat uninspiring keynote address by magazine guru Tina Brown, I went to the Las Vegas Sun session to hear the wunderkinds of the new Rob Curley empire in the desert talk about the race to market with new site. The session, predictably, was standing room only.
It confirmed for me something I have been saying for some time in my own shop and to anyone else who would listen: The newspaper industry can’t move fast enough unless it hires more programmers/software engineers. We. Have. The. Content. But without people to help us display it, manipulate it, update it and publish it more effectively, we’re doomed. Read more
News games: Do journalists want to lose that, too?
Ian Bogost
Today was the first day for the Online News Association conference — the “pre-day,” actually, with a series of preconference programs. I attended the daylong “Playing the News” session hosted by J-Lab. The best part for me: The quote from Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
When asked why spend substantial money on building online games instead of paying for another reporter, freelance help or a web server: “I see (news gaming) as an opportunity as big as the web,” he replied. “You really want to give that up again?”
The room roared with appreciation for the candor.
I was impressed through the day with the willingness of the group to experiment and revise the work they’d done on news games — and the careful thought they gave to designing, structuring, researching and revising the games they developed. Example: Gail Robinson, editor-in-chief of the Gotham Gazette talked about a New York City budget game that roughly caricatured city officials. But the caricatures were rough so the game wouldn’t lose its shelf-live as the officials left office.
Here more of the highlights from the sessions. Read more
Interesting stuff I saw online from Sep. 8 to Sep. 9
Here’s some of the stuff I thought was interesting while stomping through the Internet from Sep. 8 through Sep. 9:
- SpinSpotter: unspinning online news? - "Looks like the Spinoculars are only available for Firefox at the minute. Once downloaded and turned on they’ll identify if elements of a news story have previously been identified by another SpinSpotter user."
- South Korean government looks to rein in the Net - International Herald Tribune - Yes, some comments are coarse and crude, words we'd rather not see. But at least we can see them, out in the open, and respond to them. We're not faced with a paternalistic or oppressive government deciding what's appropriate.
- Official Google Blog: Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time - "Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it's our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily. The problem is that most of these newspapers are not available online. We want to change that." Once again, doing what newspapers can't do themselves.
- iWidgets to Bring CBS Fall Season to a Social Network Near You - The tools "will enable audiences to watch full episodes of television programming directly within popular social networks. They will also be able to socially engage viewers with features such as sharing, polls, ratings, and contests."