Useful reading - Picard: Shift in modes of news production

Robert Picard is one of the world's leading scholars on media economics, and as a blogger he's definitely quality over quantity.

So when he does a piece like this that nicely and clearly explains the shifts in news production into a forked model, I highly recommend it.

Kroll on how to break the print mindset

You really need to read this post by John Kroll on breaking the print mindset.

It is by far one of the best I have read in many a year, and the graphic is fantastic.

CSJ Column: Why journalists need to pay attention to 3-D printing

I've resumed my Common Sense Journalism monthly column with some thoughts on why 3-D printing will be one of the long-term business disruptors for journalism and other advertiser-supported media.

Why you should pay attention to 3-D printing

By Doug Fisher

No. 118 for July 2013

The curiosity factor of 3-D printing has soared lately with videos of a working gun made using one of the printers. The curiosity will fade – for a while, at least – but smart media managers will keep tracking the technology's progress because it could be one of your next big business disruptors.

It's not as likely to be a direct disruptor as many other digital technologies of the past 15 years have been. But it will disrupt the business of some of your major advertisers.

The idea of "printing" three-dimensional objects is no longer a dream or even an expensive prototype. It is likely to be an accepted consumer technology within a decade.
Doctors already use 3-D printing to make replacement body parts. Formula One racing teams use it to make car parts. The federal government is putting $30 million into creating a manufacturing hub in Youngstown, Ohio.

For $99, a South Carolina company is putting kiosks at malls where you can turn your or your children's drawings into a 3-D model. Keychains and charms are also in the works, according to The State newspaper. The Center for Digital Education says the University of California-Berkeley now has a 3-D print vending machine. And a consumer-level printer can be had for about $1,300 (see cubify.com/cube for an example).

The digital age is ruthless in cutting out middlemen, as media companies are learning. And many of your advertisers are retailers, the epitome of middlemen. Read more ...

Good for newspapers, maybe, but for journalism?

Thanks to Lou Phelps of the Savannah Daily News in a column this week for making brutally clear that newspapering is a business - a cutthroat one - that's not necessarily good for journalism.

 Phelps, a media consultant whose company also publishes the Daily News, seeks to make the point that, when looked at from a cash-flow perspective, newspapering is still a pretty decent business and that "we are far from dead," especially smaller community papers:

For smaller publishers still operating their own presses who need to spend $150,000 for computer-to-plate equipment, or $250,000 on press improvements, these incentives will help them cut their payrolls and newsprint waste, helping to make their companies even stronger in future years.

I agree with Phelps, who also looks at Lee, McClatchy and Gannett and finds that they would be in decent shape if it weren't for their crushing debt and depreciation payments. Traditional media companies are going to have to move earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization (EBITDA) closer to bottom-line earnings.

This month's Common Sense Journalism column is going to use an example out of Iowa to argue that if trad media companies want to thrive among the nimblest of new-media companies, they are going to have to write down and throw off more of the real estate, "big iron" and "big silicon" they find themselves writing down and tied to. They have become storefronts on the information highway, and, frankly, they probably ought to be operating out of storefronts, or close to it.

Phelps, however, takes it a step further, nicely drawing the distinction between newspapering as a business and journalism:

Unlike many business sectors, our expenses are tied very tightly to revenue. And, our industry, generally, is not burdened with significant research and development costs or patent attorneys, such as those in the drug or manufacturing sectors.

Take a restaurant, for example. It has to have employees standing there to cook and serve, and has to purchase the food items listed on the menu whether customers come in the door on Friday night or not.

Not so with the newspaper business. If our ad revenues decline, we cut newsprint/ink usage, we buy fewer stories and photographs, and we don't pay sales commissions (particularly optimum if sales reps are on straight commission.) Well-run newspaper companies have controlled all of their overhead and operating expenses, and changed their staffing strategies to be able to adjust to these vagaries.

Granted, some companies were late to that party and paid dearly in 2008 and 2009 as they struggled to believe that advertising revenues would not rebound - and took too long to cut.

But by 2010, most newspaper companies came to grips with the future, and began to admit to each other ... "It's amazing how few people it actually takes to run a newspaper company, isn't it?" as one distinguished newspaper owner in Georgia said to me last year.

And, we all began to cut like crazy.

 Exactly. Newspapering doesn't take (relatively) a lot of resources. Journalism does.


To keep things in perspective, The Savannah Daily News is not the traditionally dominant paper (the Savannah Morning News, daily circulation about 35,000, is). It's a free, low-staff operation (perhaps it's significant that the paper's "about us" page is blank, though this is on the subscription form: Welcome to readership of Savannah Daily News, locally owned and edited by professional journals. Be sure to sign up your family members...and we how you will consider recommending us to your friend and associates. ---Founded in 2004, Savannah Daily News is the region's FREE daily news source. SDN is locally owned, with news stories written daily by respected journalists who live in and love the Savannah, Coastal Georgia and the Lowcountry.)

I couldn't readily find any circulation figures, but it doesn't matter, because I think the sentiments Phelps expresses are shared by many others in the industry looking for low-cost, turn key solutions to what ails them (which Phelps will happily supply through her Community Daily News LLC).

As Phelps notes, newspaper companies are "not burdened with significant research and development costs." Which goes a long way to explaining why newspaper companies are finding it so hard to merge onto the new information - and journalism - highway.

2 important reads into the state of things and how we got here

Dean Starkman has two important pieces to read in the Columbia Journalism Review - important because the first one should get you thinking, at least, about the sometimes squishy base on which so many future of news predictions - including a few made here - are based and the second should get you thinking hard about whether newspapers (and to some extent mainstream news organizations, including broadcast) were ever structurally, organizationally and psychologically capable of avoiding what has befallen them.

In his first piece, "Confidence Game," Starkman takes aim at Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis - the thinkers and proouncers - and Journal-Register head John Paton, who is trying to translate many of those thoughts into practice.

Shirky, Rosen and Jarvis are (or, more correctly, at times can be) important voices in the discussion. My thinking has certainly been influenced by them (one of the most important being Shirky's observation that we may well be in an interregnum similar to that following the invention of the printing press where the only certainty is uncertainty until some new kind of form, process and equilibrium are found (and that probably should be forms and processes, since one size is rarely likely to fit all going forward).

But they tend to be, how to delicately put it, at times full of themselves. That's to be expected - one does not venture out on such limbs without a certain hubris and certainty of one's position. On the other hand, Starkman does put a pin to some of the over-inflation of the future-of-news (FON) crowd:

Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load (see Pulitzer.org for a laundry list of exposés—on tobacco-industry conspiracies; worker-safety atrocities; Lyndon Johnson’s wife’s dicey broadcasting empire; group-home abuses in New York; redlining in Atlanta; corruption in the St. Paul, Minnesota, fire department, the Rhode Island courts, the Chicago City Council, the University of Kentucky men’s basketball program, and on and on). But their vision for replacing it with a networked alternative, or something else, is hazy at best.


Meanwhile, FON’s practical prescriptions—what it calls engagement with readers—have in practice devolved into another excuse for news managers to ramp up productivity burdens, draining reporters of their most precious resource, the thing that makes them potent: time. ...

FON thinkers, who emerged only in the last few years, represent a new kind of public intellectual: journalism academics known for neither their journalism nor their scholarship. Yet, the fact is they are filling a void left by an intellectually exhausted journalism establishment, and filling it with crisp, readable—and voluminous—prose that offers to connect journalism to the technocratic vanguard.

Starkman spends many words decrying the idea that news is a commodity, if for no other reason than that much of it is local:

Framing the news as a commodity and ultra-abundant makes it easier to give away. It also suggests a lack of understanding of what it takes to produce great beat reporting, let alone accountability journalism. ...

Seeing news as a commodity, and a near valueless one (Paton above says its value is “about zero”), is a fundamental conceptual error, and a revealing one. A commodity is the same in Anniston, Alabama, as it is in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Whatever local news is, it’s not that.

But in doing so, Starkman falls into the same tar pit that traps many journalists - assuming - without testing - that geography remains a definer of value. There are beginning to be some signals that may not be the case. (Yes, especially as to the last, I know there are flaws in the methodology; that, to me, is not a reason to reject outright the possibility but to find ways to test it more effectively).

So he asserts value without really effectively answering the question: If it is not a commodity, then why are newspapers and broadcasters needed anyhow? If every story produced has intrinsic value that can be effectively captured, why do the journalists doing the work need or want a third party to intercede with the audience, and by implication siphon away some or all of the value, for them?

One can imagine Starkman answering that if the institutions did not exist, they would have to be invented to provide the aggregate fire power (journalistically, legally and financially) needed to stand up to the other "big three" - government, business and, until rather recently, labor.  (As he writes: "I’ll go further and posit as axiomatic that journalism needs its own institutions for the simple reason that it reports on institutions much larger than itself.") While the Fourth Estate has been atomizing, government and business have been consolidating, centralizing and amassing more power and resources.

The FONers have never effectively answered that challenge, in my reading of them. But Starkman doesn't really, either. 

Now that we’re done panicking, it’s time for journalism thinkers to turn to the real task: how to re-empower reporters, the backbone of journalism, whoever they are, wherever they may work, in whatever medium, within institutions that can move the needle. (That sound like the same kind of squishiness he accuses the FONers of.)

 He talks about journalism that is "institution-centered, network-powered" using an example from The Guardian's coverage of the News Corp. scandal.

"In that case, traditional investigative reporting broke the story, while social media propelled it to the stratosphere—heights the paper never could have achieved on its own," he writes. (An idea, I would add, that is not new at all but is embodied in Paul Bradshaw's "news diamond" idea of 2007.)

All well and good, but Starkman does a bit of the same that he accuses the troika of - throwing out some idea with a certain hope but no real sense of how to get there.

Starkman, in a response to a comment from Paton, says: "And while I appreciate your credentials, candidly, I don't see how they are relevant here. My piece is about ideas. I expect people to feel free to disagree with mine without feeling the need to interview me."

Which is why, on that level, I recommend reading it. It is a piece about ideas and their clashing. These are important ideas, and sometimes it is important to consider them on a philosophical level divorced from practical reality. Starkman's piece, if you approach it that way, is a valuable stimulant.

His second work, on the rise and fall of the San Jose Mercury News, can be seen in a way to contradict at least some of the underpinning of his first. At least part of his take-away seems to be that while audiences for the Merc's online operations saw little value in the general local news report (how's that not make it a commodity?), they were more than willing to pay for, essentially, utility - access to the archives and to News Hound, an early aggregator of other sources as well:

The Merc dropped the fees in the hope of generating more traffic, and with it, more advertising, even though the revenues from those online ads were a seventh of their print counterparts. The decision not to charge for content reflected an electronic version of the business model built on amassing the largest possible audience, not on cultivating niches


And yet, the niches were there for all to see. By the late 1990s, Chris Jennewein told me, the Mercury News was finding audiences well beyond its circulation area—online readers as far away as India eager for the Merc’s tech news. And while Knight Ridder began trying to build audiences for its NASCAR coverage in Charlotte and the auto industry in Detroit, it was reluctant to dedicate the people necessary to create the content for those niche markets. “Our newspaper roots,” he wrote to me, “held us back.” 

 That last sentence is what makes this an important read. As much as anything, the Merc (and Knight Ridder in which it operated) is the embodiment of institutional news orgs', and especially newspapers', past 25 years. From mediocre to soaring on monopoly and booming-economy profits invested in the best way in make-a-difference, award-winning journalism to watching its economic core - classifieds - be eaten away in a decade, the Merc's story is that of Newspaper Agonistes writ larger.

Starkman ends with this observation:

Disruptive technology is only half the story of what happened to newspapers. There is also the response. The disruption opened the path to change, and not just for small companies unburdened by legacies of success. The change could also come for those older newspaper companies willing to accept that what was happening was not so much an existential crisis in journalism as it was a catastrophic assault on the most prosaic aspect of the newspaper business: the classifieds. Tough to do in any circumstances. Even tougher at a time when things feel as if they are going better than ever.

There was no better time to produce journalism and make a profit for newspapers than in the period journalists like to think of as the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, and which their colleagues on the business side might prefer thinking of as the Era of the One-Newspaper Town.

Mary Jean Connors of Knight Ridder, reflecting the sensibilities of so many people who insisted that, in the end, they were newspaper people, had told me, “You cannot change who you are.”

It is a noble sentiment, reflecting the diminished glory of a noble enterprise.

But it is not written. 

I'd like to agree, but I can't. More like a flawed Shakespearean character, the newspaper industry was a prisoner of its own traditions, history, mindset and people, a potentially lethal psychological and economic cocktail. It continues today in many ways and in many newsrooms I visit or work with and among many journalists I talk with. Yet, given their sociology, I can't bring myself to lay all the blame on them.

The industry's one-time strength, it's localness, quirkiness and fierce independence (which too often operationalize as resistance to change or even to recognize it outside the organization), can be harnessed for good (cut across the bureaucratic crap) or deadly at a time of fast-moving external change. Starkman details the internal publisher-led struggles against Merc initiatives that K-R wanted to roll out chainwide and resistance of other papers to standardization online at a time when advertisers were scaling up to digital and increasingly saw audiences as national or at least regional (there's a reason all those big-box chains emerged at about the same time).

He also leaves behind a bit of a warning tale about "big iron" and "big vendor" (my terms), noting that in many ways K-R's Real Cities initiative was strangled partly by being ahead of the systems commonly used in newsrooms. Coding changes, things that in online publishing systems today can take just a few minutes, required extensive time, for instance. (On today's content management systems, for instance, some of that inter-paper quirkiness and power prerogative might have been accommodated with a few keystrokes while still being within an overall structure.)

And his portrayal of Tony Ridder, the man who sold Knight Ridder to McClatchy and who has been largely vilified, suggests that Jim Batten, Ridder's predecessor who was revered as the journalist's journalist might have gotten it a little less right and Ridder a little more so (what kept him awake at night? "Electronic classified.") than the popular meme would have us believe. (Follow that earlier link and you'll find Jon Fine making a similar point in 2006, though the vilification continued in the comments.)

This all makes this an important story, one that should be required reading in journalism schools and newsrooms. It is at once both a hopeful and cautionary tale. It makes us think about the role that both personal and institutional foibles play, what it might take to overcome them and whether they actually can be effectively overcome short of the major upheavals we have seen in this and other industries. Approached that way, without the usual finger-pointing, we may well learn something from it.

RIP Gannett's 'Moms Like Me'

At one time not too long ago, niche sites like Gannett's "Mom's Like Me" were being touted as one of the ways to pump needed life, and revenue, into traditional newsrooms' flagging online efforts.

Such sites, not branded to the paper or TV station, were a core part of the Newspaper Next initiative from the American Press Institute. Now, word that Moms Like Me is being shuttered shows the strong headwinds both inside the industry and outside that continue to make such initiatives difficult.

Steve Buttry, one of the people tasked by API with trying to spread the "N2" gospel (and one of those I respect for trying to effect real change), put it this way in a recent blog post:

As someone who spent most of two years trying spread the N2 message and issuing the N2 call for transformation, it pains me to look back five years later and say that we didn’t bring about any significant lasting change.

N2 was a worthy effort that delivered what the newspaper business needed. We presented tools and concepts for newspaper companies to focus more clearly on meeting the needs of their communities with multiple products doing valuable jobs for businesses and communities. We spurred development of some niche products, some of them still in operation. We guided some innovative projects. But the default settings of the newspaper industry were too strong for anyone to embrace the thorough organizational transformation that N2 championed.

It wasn't just the industry, of course. Social media, like Facebook, has moved in on at least part of the space these sites hoped to occupy.

It highlights, for me, trad news orgs' continuing struggle with the "community" part of the three-legged stool necessary for success online (content, utility and community) Many of these sites were put up more in an "if you build it, they will come" mode without significant input from the hosting newsrooms.

It's not all Facebook. It's also a lesson that it's tough to pick niches that can work on the scale that a lot of chains feel is needed to generate acceptable ROI. (And if you think about it, there's a bit of an oxymoron there - a "scalable niche"?)

High school sports appears to be viable, and for now at least Gannett is keeping its HighSchoolSports.net.

But is this best done on the national scale Gannett is trying? Or more on a local scale as the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News has done admirably with its Pigskin Review? We'll see ...

Media Culture, part deux - Filloux's take

It must be media culture day on the blogging calendar, and I missed it.

Earlier, I noted with some minor skepticism INMA's discovery that news/media organization culture is probably more important than trying to bolt on a strategy or, worse, trying to dictate a culture from the top.

In another aspect of this multifaceted gem of an issue, Frederic Filloux, in his Monday Note, does a good job of laying out why media and tech have such trouble just getting along. 

(I'm a little snarkier than he - I think a lot of it is the studied disdain, or at least suspicion, that media - and especially journalists - have projected for anyone who seems "smart." It's the old street wise, fedora-wearing idealized image of the "Journalist" outsmarting the more schooled - if not necessarily erudite - business and political classes.)

Filloux (whose post grows out of his presentation at the INMA World Congress - so not so coincidental after all) has some observations to chew on from those on both sides of the aisle:

“You guys, are geared to compete rather than collaborate. You’re not getting that collaboration is the new name for the game”. “Even among yourselves, you are unable to cooperate on key industrial issues, shooting yourselves in the foot as a result”. “Your internal organizations are still plagued by a culture of silos. The winners will be the ones  who break silos”.

Tech executives also underline they see media companies as co-managed with unions – the consequence being a wage system that discourages rewarding valuable individuals. Media companies are also viewed as having a tech-averse culture. “Media don’t understand that their business has become engineering-intensive. Their investment in technology is grossly insufficient”.

Symmetrically, I collected adjectives summing up media people’s perception of the tech world. “Arrogant, condescending”: true, old media people always have the feeling of being looked down upon by the guys in chinos. “Nerdy, left-brained”: well, it goes along with the flip-flops and the hoodie… “Wealthy”, (I’ll come to that later). “Alien to the notion of value for content”: also true; and that might be the most difficult obstacle to a reconciliation. ...

The only identical critic, evenly spread on both sides, concerns bureaucracy: medias point at intricate technostructures staffed with legions of people working on the same subject; tech people mock news media needing six weeks to sign the innocuous non-disclosure agreement covering a routine project.

That sounds like a prescription for Kumbaya, eh?

Yet, as Filloux notes, tech companies need media. Despite all the predictions that a big tech company could buy a media company or two and be done with it, it largely has not happened - because the cultures are different, and producing software and hardware is not the same vein of creativity as producing a hit publication or show.

Likewise, as he observes: Medias have a lot to learn from tech companies. The way they conduct projects, their relentless drive for innovation, their bold imagination, coupled with a systematic and agile “Test & Learn” approach…  For the news industry, drawing inspiration from such a culture is a matter o[f] survival.

Filloux argues for "rapprochement" between the two. Perhaps we should look for detente first. After all, the first, hesitant cross-cultural exchanges eventually became the things that helped thaw the Cold War.

INMA's Wilkinson: Culture trumps strategy

Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia (formerly Newspaper) Marketing Association, professes surprise at the theme coming out of the INMA World Congresss - that changing newsroom culture trumps strategy.

Or, to put it another way, all the paywalls in the world and all the gimmicks and marketing strategies don't mean scratch if your organization continues to project the kind of thinking about deadlines, story forms, priorities, incentives, etc., that had become standard in newsrooms for about 45 years (I say 45 because, really, it was from the 1960s on that we began having that strange confluence of factors that produced halcyon days for newsrooms until the bottom fell out in this decade).

I like Wilkinson. I've chatted him up at j-prof conventions, and he was the main force behind trying to get AEJMC to produce more research relevant to newsrooms (though whether news managers ever read what was there already and was pretty damning was always open to question).

But forgive me if I suggest that INMA and its members are coming a little late to the party. Research on newsroom sociology and culture has for decades, and certainly in the past decade, pointed out the corrosive effect of existing culture and the tremendous challenges - but also urgency - needed to change it.

Here are Wilkinson's take-aways:

1. Separate the business model from culture in print vs. digital discussions. Or, as he puts it: The emerging consensus from New York was that a digital business model can't replace a print business model. Instead, the digital model must be additive to the print model — if for no other reason than the inclusion of print is part of a publisher's USP vs. media competitors. I suspect he'll get his share of blowback on that - that it still elevates the declining print model to the detriment of digital. But in the context he puts it - that it is a way to differentiate a full-service media organization - it can make some sense.
2. Encourage speed, place small bets, be willing to fail (fast). How long have those watching the evolution of digital been saying this? At least since 2006 and API's "Newspaper Next" project. So far the results have been, shall we say, less than stunning. I'll believe it when I really see a newsroom culture that allows failure. In fact, if there is one defining point for me, it is that. But that raises all sorts of questions. For instance, can there be journalism fail as part of that? If so, to what extent will it be tolerated? It seems to me that's the tough nut. Is it desirable or even possible to have a split organizational personality: Well, yes, you can fail on the "business" side in the name of taking chances. But on the journalism side, nope. It's that fear of failure that makes news organizations still even reluctant to handle corrections with the comprehensiveness and alacrity that digital allows. It still pervades many newsrooms, and, like a poison gas, it seeps through all layers of the organization.
3. Transparency will change your mindset. Let's just say Wilkinson's concern with transparency is not quite the same as others writing in the same space.  His seems to be a marketing perspective. The [Financial Times] paywall allowed for a transparency in viewing its audience and segmenting its readers based on their engagement — in turn, driving its audience and advertising strategy in ways once thought unimaginable. INMA is hearing this repeatedly from publishers who are implementing paywalls. While the user data is overwhelming, there are mind-bending lessons that are emerging from people willing to pay for digital content — distinctly different lessons than from people only willing to view your content if it's free. Let me put it this way: people willing to pay for digital content are not reading what you are producing. Your differentiators online are different from your differentiators in print which are different from your differentiators on the mobile.
4. Relentlessly focus on differentiators. Changing the corporate culture to focus on strategic differentiators and cut away non-differentiators was another recurring conference theme. Actually, as coldly marketing as that sounds, I rather think it's something important journalists need to think about - how is what I am doing different from the others and how does it bring utility to users/readers? It's utility that sells in digital, rarely content alone.

All in all, if this means executives are coming around to the idea that you can't a) dictate culture (or strategy, for that matter) from the top down and b) you can't just bolt new ideas onto existing newsroom cultures, then progress is being made.

Burkeman sets us thinking about virtual-physical merger

There's a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of dreck, that comes out of South by Southwest - it has to be so when the program is 300+ pages.

There's some good stuff, too. And then there are those few pieces that make you go, "Wow, that really pulls this all together." Such is The Virtual and the Physical Worlds are no Longer Separate By Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian and featured on Paid Content.

Aside from being a very good piece of writing with just that touch of British disdain or snark (my students, please note), it's one of those rare pieces that really sets my brain racing and going, yeah, yeah.

The ah ha moment came about a third of the way in:

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.

 I recommend you take it for a spin and see what you get out of it.

James Fallows throws in the towel?

It might seem so at first glance at Fallows' piece in The Atlantic: Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media

But read on and you'll find a very nuanced and intensely thoughtful piece on where this all may be going. Useful for reminding us that the gold old days were often not the good old days, and perhaps a bit too hopeful that something, something good has to come out of all this. But a worthy read overall.

A couple of my favorite passages:

Indeed, the relative stability of big media in the golden-age decades after World War II left a misleading impression of how tumultuous the news business had been through most of America’s past. The mid-1940s to the late 1970s was a time when newspapers were fat, national magazines were widely read, and TV news reports were sober and “responsible.” Like the idealized sitcoms of the same era—Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Happy Days—they presented as normal and traditional what was in fact an exceptional moment in American existence....

If we accept that the media will probably become more and more market-minded, and that an imposed conscience in the form of legal requirements or traditional publishing norms will probably have less and less effect, what are the results we most fear? I think there are four:
• that this will become an age of lies, idiocy, and a complete Babel of “truthiness,” in which no trusted arbiter can establish reality or facts;
• that the media will fail to cover too much of what really matters, as they are drawn toward the sparkle of entertainment and away from the depressing realities of the statehouse, the African capital, the urban school system, the corporate office when corners are being cut;
• that the forces already pulverizing American society into component granules will grow all the stronger, as people withdraw into their own separate information spheres;
• and that our very ability to think, concentrate, and decide will deteriorate, as a media system optimized for attracting quick hits turns into a continual-distraction machine for society as a whole, making every individual and collective problem harder to assess and respond to.

Worth Reading - Kramer's take on the future shape of media

At Seeking Alpha, former Marketwatch and CBS Digital head Larry Kramer has what I think is a pretty well-measured, solid take on where media is heading. To sum: Lots of different pay models, focused content.

Nothing tremendously new, but it's very well laid out.

Worth reading: Why NewsTilt failed

Paul Biggar's lengthy dissection of why his NewsTilt failed is worth reading for journalists to become familiar with some of the issues of online news-tech startups. (If you need some background, here is the original Tech Cruunch story on NT's launch.)

Certainly, NewsTilt had its own problems unique to its idea, but Biggar points out larger issues too:

• Tech must be rolled out and updated quickly
• You have to know your audience, both externally and internally (The fact that we didn’t know anything about our readers’ demographics underscores another problem: I don’t understand news readers. I certainly wasn’t one, and I didn’t know many people who really were. My customer development had largely consisted of talking to journalists and figuring out what they wanted. I never really–despite good intentions on lots of occasions–talked to people who loved news about why they loved it. So I was unable to say what was going wrong and why people weren’t sticking around.)
• Spend lots of time thinking about your staff and contributors. (He says NT hired journalists that were too good and not motivated enough to continue supplying content: All the problems the journalists faced, not writing enough, their distrust of Facebook, their unwillingness to socially promote their work, were really problems of motivation. If they had been the sort of people who gave up everything to succeed at their dreams, these could have been blown past. But as established successes in their field, expecting them to make large changes like that is unreasonable.)
• Be brutally honest about the challenges (We never made it clear how hard it was going to be to create an online presence, and so when articles went nowhere, there was little motivation to continue. Building a brand online is akin to doing a startup – it’ll take five years.)
•  Design is important - one of the things I've been trying to get across to an MSM partner on one of the original J-lab funded sites we run that still limps along after a crash wiped out the original design. (Journalists felt that they were writing for us, instead of writing for themselves, for their own brands. How could they feel anything else, since that’s the impression we gave them by the design of newstilt.com),

Come to think of it, those are the same problems many startups and experiments in the mainstream media have suffered from over the years. As I said, well worth reading and thinking about.

ACES2010: Are editors necessary?

It was a provocative title put forth by outgoing ACES President Chris Weinandt for one of Thursday's ACES sessions, and it apparently stemmed from a blog post I made last summer from the journalism profs breakfast at AEJMC. At the time I wrote about remarks by Josh Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab:

The question arose from the audience, of course, "Does quality no longer matter?" Benton's response (after noting he was once a reporter who "had copy editors as friends") is that it is no longer valid to say there is just one metric for quality - what copy desks do to stories. If a copy desk is focused on filtering out a voice and creating a corporate style, no, he said.

Benton said many reporters write differently when they know it will be read by editors than when they know it's going direct to readers. "I learned more from blogging because I had to pay attention to readers," he said.

At the time, I remarked after talking with some folks afterward, that some had left upset.

This time it was Benton engaging with Charles Knittle, chief copy editor for world and national news at the New York Times. By the end, it seemed to me that there was more closing in on some consensus than division.

You can read more detailed reports from the ACES blog and here, so I'm not going blow by blow. But a couple of things stood out:

• Benton's basically arguing that newspeople need some unedited channels - think Twitter and blogging (but maybe not the latter in all cases, depending on the amount of mischief that can be done) - to reach audiences directly. He says his writing improved because as a blogger for the Dallas Morning News he had to think a lot more about his audience.
• Knittle said copy editors "have got to get in and fight for our place." That place is much more in the middle of the process, not just at the end. Copy editors should realize one of their purposes is "to help civilized discourse." And later: "I don't think there's any writing that gets better without an editor."

 Benton sees the job changing substantially. He notes that many online startups actually have more editors than reporters. But the jobs are far different. They are more like the skills of a wire editor, sifting through large quantities of information and finding important connections. They also are like the skills of editors at smaller papers, working as mentors, working with people not especially strong in journalism as user-contributed content grows. They are "engagement editors" like the ones Albritton's new D.C. startup is hiring editors before reporters. In short, the "multipurposed editor."

Benton also noted that the traditional role of a unified voice for a paper goes away online.

There were two key points of insight I took away, the sorts of things I will think a lot about:

• Knittle: Copy editors were unnecessarily smug when pagination rolled into newsrooms in the 1990s. Hundreds of printers and backshop makeup people were laid off. A few copy editors were hired. But what the editors actually were learning was a "machine skill," the same kind of skill those printers and makeup people had, the same kind of skill that is easily displaced.**
• Benton: It used to be there was a financial penalty for having an error - especially a mechanical one like having too much copy, because it could displace advertising in the limited pages of a newspaper. In that environment, copy editors played a vital role in policing the production process, which in a sense includes style (often put in to save space) and brevity. It could cost seriously to break up a page if errors were not caught early in the process. But, "for better or worse, we are at a time when the cost of an error ... is coming down in terms of correcting it." Now, having people in the production end instead of the content creation end has the greater financial penalty.

That latter observation, I think, is especially important and thought-provoking.

** In an earlier session on the future of editing, Susan Keith, a professor at Rutgers, outlined a rather dismal outlook based on depth interviews looking, among other things, at editing consolidation in Australia and Canada. She sees some reflection of Braverman's "de-skilling" theory and routinization of editing. One thing she concluded, in talking about the continued separation (philosophically and operationally, if not physically) of online operations from main editing desks, was that audience demand for well-edited Web content -- at least in a way to attract online ads -- has not been great enough to influence the predominance of the "get the paper out" mentality she still found among most of those she interviewed.

ASNE10 - Back to the future

I've been peeking in on the unofficial ASNE10 event blog, and I just can't help feeling, well, feeling like it's sooooooo back to the future.

Here's an example post: Editors Stress Convergence at ASNE10

• One panelist urged editors to consider: "What can we do to reinvent how we package?"
• With circulation and readership on a general decline, editors must take into account how they will get and hold their readers' attention, which includes taking marketing into mind.
• On the future of journalism, [Jane] Hirt [ME/news and features, Chi Trib] said that what we today consider newspapers will change into news organizations, dispersing information for multiple platforms.
• The panel was generally optimistic about the future of the industry as long as editors make the effort to adapt to the needs and wants of their readers.

Now there are some revolutionary thoughts -- in 2005.

(The other interesting thing - try to post a comment. I couldn't get it to work. If the comments are turned off, it's sort of emblematic, isn't it? I was going to share the link to my Amy Webb post on their Amy Webb post, but not to be. So you'll just have to get the one-say here.

J-lab/New Voices: Peering into the future

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked at a state press association meeting to peer into the future and try to give the assembled publishers and editors a sense of where things might be going.

I talked about HTML5, which will be multimedia oriented (here's the summary from Wikipedia and the gory details from W3C, if you really want to wonk out). I also talked about augmented reality through apps such as Layar, geocoding and the idea of a Web without Web sites. (Think about it - the last time you whipped out the smartphone and punched the button on that app, did you go to a Web site? Chances not, yet you certainly had an online experience.)

I also stressed that every news operation, even the smallest community one that hasn't been hit that hard by the recession, needs a mobile strategy. Why? Because even in the backroads and hamlets, that thing people are carrying around in their purses and on their belts ain't a newspaper, Bubba. Cell phone/smartphone technology is following Moore's law of doubling in power, etc., about every 18 months.

But Amy Webb of Webb Media Group can do it a lot better than I can, and she was at the J-lab confab today, so I'm just going to run out the notes I took and let you follow whatever links your hearts desire.

But you've got to sit through the 10-second commercial first: What contact I've had with Webb and through those I know in the industry, she's been about as accurate as anyone about all this. Do yourself a favor; visit Knowledgewebb, her company's training site, and sign up for her free newsletter. You might find something else you like (that costs extra, however).

Now the show:

Tools that can work for you:

What's important and what can wait? How nimble must you be? Do consumers really want everything out there.

Ask yourself:
- Who are you really developing for?
- Will it stick?
- Is it comprehensive enough?
- Will it generate engagement that is habit forming?
- Do you need all the features?

Six spheres, social media is a part of all of them that ties it together:
Traditional media
Web ("just stuff you get going online")
Mobile
E-readers
Tablets (iPad gets all the publicity, but her firm is tracking 18 from 18 manufacturers, some yet to be released)
Connected TV (plug your TV into the Internet/ AT&T's FIOS fiber-to-house broadband vastly expanding options).

Computers in cars: "Pretty soon you're going to be driving a computer down the road."

Do not assume that people are only engaging in traditional or web spheres because of social or economic status. (Doug's comment: Mobile, for instance, is becoming so cheap that for many people it is leapfrogging the traditional computer and is the way they are accessing online.)

Trend 1: User engagement 2.0
It's being offered in unusual places, it's not just tweeting the latest thing, new media organizations have found a "sweet spot" of producing content and getting content contributed. You have to be part of the community to really understand.

Social media being incorporated in unexpected places. Land's End, Netflix, for example, have incorporated social networks.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the audience?
- Are they where you think they are?
- What are the expectations of the audience (tell others? contribute? you listen?)?
- Are you willing to participate?

Keep the sharing options on your site to a minimum - the ones your audience is using.
She does not like AddThis or Shareomatic and similar services. Says they produce too confusing a list, most of which people seldom use. Points, for instance, to Mashable, which has just Twitter, Facebook, Digg, RSS and e-mail. But for this to work you have to know where your audience is sharing. (See Quarkbase below.)

Tools:
Quarkbase – get site metrics, most popular social media referrals
Facebook Connect –Problem is that with Facebook you can lose lots of data.
Disqus – aggregate comments (My note: I've had mixed results on various sites that have it installed; sometimes it seems to get into weird loops.)
KnowEm – plug in your username and it will go through all the social networks and see who has your name already.

In discussing content management systems, Webb's one recommendation was to get off Expression Engine (the CMS Media General is using for Hartsville Today, the local site I am involved with). She sees it as less extensible and flexible than most of the others.

Trend 2: Geolocal engagement
Why the hyperlocal model does not work. Things like LoudonExtra (the Washington Post's defunct site) and Everyblock just can't be hyperlocal enough or don't deliver the information the way people want it. Webb says Everyblock, for instance, gets fewer than 200,000 visits/month and that AOL-Patch metrics are "awful."

Consumers want to know what is happening, but they want more sophistication. Content has to be niche. Otherwise there is too much competition, too many platforms. She used this example of a smart phone app, Offender Locator, that takes data like Everyblock's but lets the user query it wherever he or she is -- it is location aware -- and pull down a list of sex offenders nearby.

For the consumer local is where I am right now, not necessarily physical; just as likely topical. Less about ZIP code and more about what I am doing right now. Real-time! Not just about maps and citizen-journalism. Action must be associated with content and conversation – context must be social.

Twitter, for instance, now has location info and the accompanying privacy concerns.
She calls this the check-in culture accompanied by a rapid change in user expectations.
- Your consumers want hyperlocal, but the way they define it.
- Tied to local.
- Socially interactive.
- Wrapped in opportunity (points, games)
- Not repurposed or stale.

Some other tools:
- Micello – maps for the inside of buildings. She showed some shopping malls. Someone raised the idea, however, that this will last "until homeland security shuts it down."
- Foursquare – "Twitter with location" as you "check in" to places. However, there also is a gaming aspect – get badges based on how many check-ins.
- Gowalla – she doesn't like it as much as Foursquare, but it's an alternative.
- Miso (gomiso.com) – connect with others while watching movies, videos, etc.
- Apple's iGroup allows you to set up a local social network where you are.
- Create your own iPhone check-in app through Double Dutch, $499 setup fee and $40 a month.
- Fourwhere: See what Foursquare users who have checked in from a location say about it.

Trend 3: Augmented reality
Two aspects to this: Show a coded marker to a webcam and cause an action to happen (think Esquire's recent augmented reality edition) or use the camera on your mobile phone, linked to geocoding or image recognition.

Some examples:
- Wikitude: An app available for all phones – install it, point your phone camera at something, like a monument, and get information about it.
- Post office: Hold item you want to ship up to camera and virtual box simulator will tell you size box, etc.
- Rayban: Virtual mirror allows you to "try on" glasses.
- Acrossair: Among other things, makes apps that allow you to hold up yout iPhone and see nearest subway stations in the direction you are holding it.
- Toozla: Voice activated augmented reality
- Layar: Maybe the most widely known, out of Holland, put the app in your phone and you can look at several "layers" of information such as shopping, real estate, etc. Or you can create your own.
- StreetSpark: Augmented reality dating application. Use your phone to see if any fellow sparkers are near you; strike up a conversation (or … whatever).
- Recognizr – Point a phone at a person's face and find out what social networks they are on (not public, but available business to business).
- Face.com: Tool being used by Google's Picasa photo site. From the Picasa site: Picasa scans all the photos in your collection, identifies the ones with faces, and groups photos with similar faces together. It's easy to add name tags to dozens of photos at once by clicking "Add a name" below a photo and typing the person's name. Once you've tagged some pictures, you can make a face collage with one click, easily find all your pictures with the same two people in them, or upload your name tags to Picasa Web Albums.
- Google Goggles: Scan logos, books, text, etc., and get info returned.

Bottom line:
- People are uploading content
- They are tagging content
- They are geocaching that content
- It's creating wide databases of info that can link people to locations and history of actions
- Consumers are starting to search and discover via social networks and mobile instead of the traditional search engine.

(Follow up: Webb's remarks Monday at ASNE.)

Quick hits, good reads

The BBC's Kevin Marsh has an excellent and lengthy post of his notes from the UK's news:rewired conference. Among other things, Marsh makes the sensible, if sometimes forgotten point, that the pan-skilled journalist is probably not going to be the future model, just because everyone can't be that good at everything.

An excerpt:

I think I detect a hint of ‘return to the cottage industry’ in a lot of what is written about new media’s potential for journalists.
Don’t make the mistake, for example, of thinking that journalism’s future will be populated mainly by ‘news entrepreneurs’ – it won’t, as even that particular idea’s uberzealots will tell you.
Don’t make the mistake, either, of thinking that in future journalism will be entirely or even mainly about the kind of skills we’re talking about today.
Like it or not, much journalism is about process and organisation – and seems likely to remain that way.
Demand for people who can organise an outside broadcast or coverage of a court case for live and continuous news remains and will remain high.
Demand for people who can elbow their way to the front of a scrum – ditto. Or for people who can field produce, problem solve or persuade players to appear on screen or on the web.
And so one of the challenges of learning multimedia and social media skills is to understand them not just for what they are and what they can do, but how they fit with the other essential - arguably more endurable - skills of journalism.

While you are at it, spend a few moments with David Sullivan's latest on the High Church of Journalism and professionalism, and how it eventually promoted a fatal disconnect from readers.

Geek Squad guy looks into future of tech and news

Discovered this today. Worth watching. Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad, prognosticates on technology's near future.

It's from the Future of News conference in Minnesota this past November.

"It feels like the last 40 years are all coming to a head where normal people will have high speed in their pocket."

"There's really only four screens that we are planning on as the plumbers of the future to support" the mobile phone ("the main event, it is the computer; everything else is just a piece of glass that connects to a network"), the anticipated tablet computers, flat screen TVs that really are "large iPod Touches" and in-vehicle systems.

Worth reading over at "That's the Press, Baby"

David Sullivan, a longtime journalist and fine thinker on matters of the press who doesn't get enough recognition, has picked up the digital pen lately and is on a roll on his blog.

• His Nov. 3 A death in the desert about the announced closing of Arizona's East Valley Tribune is an insightful look into newspaper "mashups," which were all the rage in the 1990s and why they likely fall apart in an age when we can be so much more worldly because of the Internet but also can drill down to the hyper-local level.
• Two days later, in What if ... again, he introduced me to a blogger I have already bookmarked - Judy Sims, who used to be in charge of the digital space for the Toronto Star. I had not seen her Top 10 lies newspaper execs are telling themselves. But it's one of those pieces every editor and newsroom exec should have to read numerous times. Her thoughts about whether existing ad staffs can sell online touch on one of the underdiscussed but most imporant topics.
• And in How many axes can be made, his trenchant commentary to the comments on another blog's post asking whether the N.Y. Times should ditch its sports section highlight the difficulties of a mass market vehicle in this digital age. As Sullivan writes, "The question isn't that interesting, but the range of responses is, and really shows why our friend the newspaper is in such straits."

All are worth taking a spin. David writes sporadically these days, but I'd bookmark his feed because when he does write, it is very good stuff.

Convergence Conference: Slide shows

Jonathan Lillie, Loyola-Maryland: Newspaper journalists as multimediators

Exploratory study of audio slide show producers – ended up with 30 papers

• Most doing it are photojournalists (27). Others: multimedia specialists (16)
• Most self-trained
• Almost all use Soundslides
• On average create one or two a month

Slideshows were seen as an alternative to video, which management pushed but photojournalists resisted.

Almost all said it improved their reporting – more involved in the process. More competition with reporters to get good assignments.

Most see themselves using an "NPR" style more than a local broadcast style.

Other observations
• It does require extra work, and that cuts into the time for better photojournalism.
• But most do believe they are worth the extra effort
• There is pressure to "get it up" without necessarily an emphasis on quality.
• Pressure from management still to do video. Management believes video gets the most hits and that pressure is on for "hits."

Convergence Conference: News orgs still don't get it

I'm at the "Convergence and Society" conference in Reno the next couple of days and will be trying to do regular updates (as long as the battery holds out).

The first session today is "The changing media landscape," but what we are finding is that not all that much is changing. I'm just going to post my notes here; no great attempt to make them into a narrative.

Tim Bajkiewicz and Marcus Messner: Engaging the future

Interviews with managers of nine news orgs. 30 minutes each. Use "convergence continuum" to return to integration of theory. Grounded theory: our findings are about their perceptions.

Major themes:
• Convergence not really right word. Just about engaging audience among platforms
• Business not ink on paper but bringing information to the community. But print is still the major driver.
• Not only depending on print, but everything it brings to the table.
• Cool Tools: They were aware of new, cool tools, but a disconnect. Managers seem to know what is going on, but it has not made its way into the business plan.
• Mobile is going to be the thing, but no one sure how to monetize
• Social media communities – trying to engage, but not necessarily the driving force

Conclusions
• No real new media strategies
• Disconnect with ground-level journalists
• Know what need to do but not doing it
• Cost hurdle, bunker mentality
• Conundrum: while trying to assimilate tech, more native-to-the-Web operations may eat their lunch.
• New media is still an experiment