Apiculture

The Death of Newspapers, Part 97 ...

David Carr of The New York Times writes a nuanced, sensitive piece on what will become of newspapers and the people who make them in an age where their major reason for being is the same as McDonald's and Wal-Mart's reason for being: to make investors happy. Carr's piece focuses on The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper Knight Ridder built into one of the great institutions of U.S. journalism and just as quickly pulled down with its drive to extract a return from its property. But profit-hungry owners are not the only players in the great American newspaper crisis

Carr reports a conversation with a young Inquirer reporter, Michael Currie Schaffer, on the future of the newspaper business. Schaffer observes at one point:

"Something happened to our generation where we were not raised to do something that our parents did every day. I have friends here who are smart people, who are very well informed, but they don't feel the need to get a paper."

Yes, something has changed. But instead of probing further into that "something," which is really a galaxy of things, Carr backs off the subject with only Schaffer's vague statement that "I'm interested in what comes next, and some of those versions of the future are pretty unappealing to me."

Maybe a discussion of where journalism is going ought to be reserved for the pages of academic journals or for professional journalism savants who live and breathe the topic and blog it, too. But I think the papers that have a stake in the future ought to be raising the volume of the conversation in their own pages, and doing it in explicit terms that explains what's at stake not only for committed reporters and editors but to all readers and to our society as a whole. To do less -- to do what Carr does in his well-crafted column is to settle for atmospherics and pass on the substance. That's not good enough if some remnant of the public-service-oriented news business is to survive.

Technorati Tags: journalism, newspapers

Can Bloggers Make Money?

From the Wall Street Journal: Can Bloggers Make Money?

I guess you can't call it an age-old debate, but it's certainly the hottest debate of the Web 2.0 era: Will the economic shift in the media/journalism world support talented single practitioners who need to make a buck to support their individual enterprises  (as opposed, say, to a shift that transfers money and publishing clout from the old-line media companies to a bunch of new-agey ones). The Journal's piece yesterday pits traditional publisher Alan Meckler ("few people if any will ever make money from writing a blog") against Weblogs Inc. founder Jason Calcanis ("many bloggers are already making money").

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.: CNN Interview

Richard Edelman - 6 A.M.: CNN Interview on Wal-Mart and Bloggers.

A good followup to last week's story from The New York Times on how Wal-Mart has begun to focus on friendly bloggers to get its story out. Richard Edelman, head of the firm that's doing the outreach, and Jeff Jarvis, late of the MSM and now a champion of all things beyond MSM it seems, appeared with CNN's Howard Kurtz. Jarvis's strident anti-established-media rhetoric aside -- gee, Jeff, where would you be without the Chicago Tribune and People in your resume? -- he's right that the Times's piece was just a little too pious. But for my money, Edelman had the more penetrating analysis of the importance of blogs and other new distribution forms vis a vis the traditional media:

Jarvis: ... We're seeing the death of the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers used to be those in power, then it was those in the press, and then -- yes, now it's P.R., who are gatekeepers to the powerful and the rich and the famous.

But now the people have the press. And I harp on this obnoxiously, I'll admit, but what it really means is that there's no scarcity anymore, and that we can push those in power to be transparent. And to not hold back information, which is what gatekeepers really do. So for reporters acting as a gatekeeper, they're doing the wrong thing.

Kurtz: If gatekeepers don't have this kind of influence anymore, Richard Edelman, does that benefit public relations companies like yours?

Edelman: We believe that there's incredible dispersion of authority in the world, and we think that in order to achieve belief today, you have to have a story communicated multiple times. It is very important that traditional media cover a story to get trust, but also, the echo chamber that is, in fact, the blogosphere is urgent for companies and government and others to recognize and participate in.

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in P.R. Campaign.

The Times today runs a piece on how Wal-Mart over the last few months has become pro-active in seeking out friendly bloggers through whom they hope they can disseminate the company's good news about itself. The Times's big revelation is that some bloggers take the tips they get from a Wal-Mart PR account executive and run them nearly verbatim without disclosing where they're from. Thus, they turn themselves into unpaid corporate shills for the company.

Yeah, it's an issue. Everybody wants authoritative information. Objectivity is less important than knowing a story's provenance and being aware of a source's spin proclivities. But it's a little ironic that the Times is going out of its way to wring its hands over Wal-Mart's blogger campaign and the bloggers who swallow it without recognizing that all the same issues, which might together be grouped under the rubric of trust, are immediate and relevant for the traditional media, too. In fact, moreso: To the extent organizations like the Times hold themselves up as the standard bearers of journalistic correctness, they need to hold themselves to a higher standard.

Garbage In ...

Today's reading: Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal does a sort of Barbara Ehrenreich Lite turn and lives life as a lowly Web "content creator." Gomes solicited work writing content for online sites. He discovers that the work is laughably poorly paid and that the sites soliciting material are really only interested in reworked boilerplate:

"Understanding what's happening requires a lesson in modern Web economics. If there is a topic in the news, people will be searching on it. If you can get those searchers to land on a seemingly authoritative page you've set up, you can make money from their arrival. Via ads, for instance.

"Then, to get your site ranked high in search engines, it's best to have "original content" about whatever the subject of your site happens to be. The content needs to include all the keywords that people might search for. But it can't be just an outright copy of what's on some other site; you get penalized for that by search engines.

"Hence, there has been an explosion of demand for 'original content.' ... You'd think this would be a godsend for writers. Hah.

"Curious to learn more about the process, I bid on some writing jobs on the Web sites where these transactions occur. (I described myself quite honestly: as a Journal reporter interested in freelance work who might also write a Journal story about writing for Web sites.)

"I managed to get underbid on numerous jobs before snaring one from a Web entrepreneur I would come to know as 'Whirlywinds.' I would have to write 50 articles, each 500 words long. Topics to be assigned. Pay: $100. For everything."

Yeah, 25,000 words for $100; that's .25 cents a word. Not surprisingly, Gomes approaches the job as an experienced, highly paid journalist would. The first article he turns in is the product of some actual research and reporting (even if the reporting consisted only of "interviewing" colleagues at the Journal). But spending a couple of working days on that reduces his pay to just 15 cents an hour, though, and reality sets in. The real "original content" game involves touching up material copied and pasted from other websites. Gomes begs off when he's asked to commit what amounts to plagiarism.

Gomes correctly points out that what lies at the bottom of this junk-content phenomenon is the widespread effort to game Google and the other search engines, which despite their relative sophistication are not smart enough by and large to distinguish between sites producing authoritative information and those that are merely ripping them off.

My colleague Ted says he thinks the proliferation of bad content is the search engines' fault: In essence, they've created a market for crummy content that imitates good content. Maybe so -- but no matter how smart search engines get, people will try to exploit them if they believe they can make a few bucks in the process. In the short run, anyway, this points up the importance of human intelligence as an extra filter in the content-analysis process.

Technorati Tags: journalism

A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It - New York Times

Link: A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It - New York Times.

Somewhere way, way back in the early days of the digital revolution, someone said "information wants to be free." Today, long after the revolution has turned into something that looks like Wal-Mart, where things can be cheap but never free, "content" substitutes for "information" in this formulation. Content as in: news and entertainment tidbits and financial data and music and videos and everything else you can think of.

Does content really want to be free? How do creators survive if the masses don't have to shell out for the privilege of listening to a song or watching a video clip? No, I don't have the definitive answers. But the Times piece above, on how NBC reacted to the wild popularity of a free clip from "Saturday Night Live," is a great example of the wrong way to react to the new realities, and possibilities, of the changing media environment.

Faced with a situation in which a clip from the show had escaped its control and become a major hit on the Web -- all by word of mouth, without the company spending a penny on promotion -- NBC jumped in to limit access to the clip, impose a fee on it, and threaten the service that had made it popular in the first place. That was a lousy PR move, but it was more than that.

No one's suggesting copyright issues aren't serious -- they are and must be one of the core considerations for every publisher and creator. But in this case, NBC let its long-term concern over how it's going to pay the bills destroy an opportunity to learn from and exploit a new mode of distribution.

Dreaming the Possible Dream

Ted is too busy right now playing with PHP -- though playing might not be the right word, given the look on his face -- to blog this, so I will:

John Battelle's Federated Media Publishing is off to the races -- it's even hiring. The operation obviously deserves more than this cursory nod, but:

When I was still at The San Francisco Examiner -- pre-1996 -- I was invited to speak at a science writers' conference at Stanford. The subject, as I remember it, was on how the World Wide Web might change things for writers and publications. A question arose as to whether the Web might provide new self-publishing opportunities for writers. My private experience with the Web at that point consisted of posting a few pages I created in primitive HTML on several topics of interest (the Web hardly ever forgets: the site is still up). I had already happened upon some neat resources from avid individuals out there, but the notion of a simple personal website having any commercial life seemed remote. My take on the future, as it looked then, was, "The world's never been short of opportunities to become poor doing something you love." The line got a gratifyingly big laugh. But I meant what I said; that's the way the Web looked to me then.

Federated Media looks like a step toward achieving the impossible dream -- the ability of lone-wolf Web publishers to make a living, or maybe even a little more, doing something they love. Battelle's effort isn't the first to try to get into the business of serving as business agent for content creators on one side and as ad rep on the other (admittedly, that's a rough take on what they're about). But it's coming forward at a time when the self-publishing sphere has matured; independent online publishers now command an audience that advertisers are looking for ways to reach.

All that having been said, Federated doesn't appear to be working with just anyone, to start. Its first cluster of publishers is a who's who of the most successful and influential blogging/independent publishing operations out there, including BoingBoing, Metafilter, TechCrunch, Om Malik's Broadband Blog, and Battelle's own Searchblog. OK -- that's just smart business. The reality is that if you want to be your own boss in this new publishing world -- if you hope to pay the bills by the sweat of your blog -- you'll need to respond to the market. Neither Federated nor anyone else is going to help you make a killing on your inspired navel-gazing or tip on how to spin cathair into yarn.

One more thing I like about Federated: Its statement on editorial values: "In addition to establishing a devoted following, each blog in the FM fold subscribes to a core set of values: Strong point of view, factual accuracy, engagement with the community, responsibility, integrity and transparency."

That's actually something old media could learn from.

Where the News Comes From

By way of Tom Foremski (who hat tips Romanesko):

David Carr, The New York Times media critic/reporter/blogger, is in Rochester, New York, today to talk about, well, the future of media. In an interview with the Rochester City Paper published last week, Carr touched on a subject I (and probably most newsroom vets) think is much overlooked in the discussion of the role bloggers and citizen journalists will play in the evolving media environment:

"I think people assume that, "Oh, we'll be able to use the web to assemble a portrait of the world beyond our town," and the fact is that Google News or whatever RSS feeder you've got, most of it is just annotating coverage. Somebody has to make phone calls somewhere in order for news to function.

"Where are the data inputs coming from? Where is the information coming from? In other words, who is making the phone calls? Who is sending the emails? You cannot have a robust discourse without a database of current information. And if the information that's being culled through is just government-issued data without a critical eye or editing, then you're going to end up with a fairly dumb republic.

"There's a conceit that young people get their news from the Jon Stewart show or get their news from the web, but there was a study not long ago at Ball State, and if you're talking, say, 18 to 24, young people just don't get their news. That's all there is to it. They don't have a strong interest in it. So there you have a very attractive advertising demographic where there's no upside in serving them with that kind of information, because they have no interest or need. There's not much news on a Playstation, man."

Articles of Faith

An article of faith often invoked by established media practitioners in dismissing grassroots/citizen/new media is that the people inside the newspapers, magazines and TV and radio stations have a corner on expertise. Those other people -- the bloggers, podcasters, self-appointed pundits, analysts, editors and reporters -- don't have a clue what real journalism is.

The media veterans might have a point when it comes to training, access to resources, and institutional tradition. Established media companies possess a huge advantage in their knowledge about craft, practice and business. As Walter Cronkite used to say in his signoff, that's the way it is. I'll add: Today.

Just as important as owning a media franchise -- and that's another advantage the established entities enjoy: monopoly positions in many markets -- is what an organization does to sustain and promote excellence. The same could be said of any business, I suppose. But in an age where newspapers, especially, find themselves besieged by electronic media on one side and the insistent, aggressive voice of self-publishers on the other, nothing but the best reporting, editing, photography, art, and business practices will do. Another essential ingredient: the ability and willingness to adapt to new circumstances. The rude voices outside the newsroom door won't go away.

All this is on my mind because of a little drama (detailed on my personal blog) playing out in the San Francisco Chronicle this week. On Sunday, the paper launched an exhaustively reported investigative series on the persistent, largely unpunished use of excessive force by some members of the city's police force. Along with the Sunday mainbar, the paper ran a long sidebar on one of the most violent cops on the force. The story was accompanied by a photo of the officer, displayed over the full width of an inside page. It turns out, though, that the picture actually depicts a private citizen -- a cabdriver and part-time security guard.

The police chief instantly seized on the mistake and suggested that because of that mistake, none of the paper's reporting could be trusted. That's disingenuous at best on the chief's part. But still, it leaves the Chronicle's editor's with a dilemma: Do we handle this the old-fashioned way, issue a brief admission we were wrong and try to move on? Or should we examine, in print, how the mistake happened.

You can tell what side I come down on. The paper ought to go for full public disclosure of the processes and steps that led to splashing the wrong picture all over the Sunday paper. And here's why: First, readers deserve that level of accountability. Second, thanks to bloggers and the rest of the unwashed, it's no longer possible to keep the door shut on issues like this. The news media's new reality -- as The New York Times and Dan Rather discovered -- is transparent. So the Chronicle's choice real choice is to disclose and maybe salvage a bit of its editorial credibility or to try to bar the door and see the news leak out some other way.

The End of Newspapers

By way of Stowe Boyd:

Slate's Jack Shafer -- ever the gentle-spoken, soft-around-the-edges observer of media trends -- produces an excellent capsule history of the evolution of the modern newspaper business (based, in part, on a less capsular version of that history), combines it with some smart off-the-cuff analysis of how Web 2.0 is changing media distribution, and synthesizes a clear, if not overly detailed, argument on what newspapers must do to avoid extinction:

"... This much I know: [Newspapers] can't compete by adding a few blogs here, blogging up coverage over there, and setting up 'comment' sections. If newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters don't produce spectacular news coverage no blogger can match, they have no right to survive."

In a way, what Shafer wants from newspapers sounds modest: Quit nickel-and-diming readers by cutting the features that distinguish newspapers from their upstart online competitors. Do great journalism. Provide great features. Offer it all in an attractive package.

He's right about all of that. But he doesn't confront the biggest driving force behind the erosion of newspaper quality: The fact modern newspapers are being run like they're turning out screws or garbage bags or blank DVDs, products from commodity industries where the thinking is cheaper is better (and consumers confirm that by packing the aisles in Wal-Mart).

In the newspaper world, getting a return means cutting costs, and cutting costs means getting rid of people and eliminating features that readers might like. In fact, virtually all of the complaints Shafer voices about today's papers--that they're ugly, that they've lost distinctive and distinguished editorial voices, that they simply don't give enough value for the change you shell out--all come back to cost-cutting instituted to please shareholders or at least keep them at bay.

Papers need some visionary thinking about their product, about how they will find a niche in the evolving media world. But they also need some courage about committing to the investment it will take to implement the vision. Without both, what Shafer calls "the newspaper guild" simply won't survive.