Undercurrent

A good idea from Michael Massing:

I propose that Google set up a Journalism Innovators’l Fund with an initial annual budget of $100 million-less than 0.5 percent of the more than $20 billion it takes in annually. The fund would seek not to subsidize existing news operations but to support creative ideas and new programs aimed at reinventing the news as Schmidt suggests. It would support start-ups and fledgling enterprises engaged in investigation, international reporting, policy analysis, blogging, and other forms of probing and provocative reporting and commentary undertaken by the independent journalists who, given the severe retrenchment taking place at traditional organizations, are making up an ever-larger part of the field. More and more journalists are becoming entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs need start-up capital, and who better to provide it than Google, itself a product of, and tribute to, the entrepreneurial spirit?

Found via The Media Revolution and Mohamed Nanabhay.

The latest idea to emerge from Google’s labs is Fast Flip, a new way of speed-browsing through news and current affairs websites. You should try it, it’s fun and easy to see the potential. I’ve already discovered many good stories and had a new look at forgotten sites. Serendipity, like browsing a good magazine rack in a kiosk, but much faster.

Some media observers see a significant shift in that Google will share revenue from the ads shown with the content, but this must be an exaggeration. How could Google not share revenue when they are displaying whole pages from other publishers’ websites? This surely goes beyond the usual search engine indexing. Google not sharing revenue here would make publishers call their lawyers — and this time rightly so.

Good weekend flipping!

Good information about how much quality journalism really costs is strangely difficult to come by. So thanks to Zachary Seward for sharing a few examples with us, prompted by the ProPublica/New York Times 13,000 word Katrina magazine story:

In this case, Fink was paid $33,000 plus $10,000 in expenses for her Kaiser fellowship, according to Steve Engelberg, her editor at ProPublica, where she’s been for 14 months. Engelberg, who was kind enough to go through these figures with me, said, “Fourteen months of salary plus benefits for us easily gets you north of 100 plus, 100, 150 or something.” He threw in another $20,000 to $30,000 for travel expenses, in addition to three months of editing and lawyering at ProPublica and the Times, which also spent $25,000 to $30,000 on photographs, he said.

UPDATE: A more detailed breakdown in Mother Jones. 10.000 for fact-checking? Wow.

Probably most news organizations prefer to keep such numbers for themselves, or maybe they don’t even break them down in much detail. A good thing about a crisis in journalism: It would probably expose the real costs.

And now I have to read the Katrina story — and wonder if any Norwegian newspaper will foot the translation bill and re-publish it, which they can after Sept. 29.

Finally the media industry has come up with the ultimate plan that will reset the world again and save democracy: Make people pay $ 12.50 for quoting 5-25 of your precious words!:

Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

A 15 year old intern at Morgan Stanley in London wrote a report about how young people use the media — and the company thought it so excellent that it was published. (pdf). Matthew Robson’s report “generated five or six times more feedback than the team’s usual reports”, Morgan Stanley says. So is it any good? I don’t think people following media trends will find stunning new insights, though there might be important details there. The response should alert analysts to the merits of qualitative methodology. Above all, the report is written in clear language without all the meaningless buzzwords that usually are thrown around in such publications. If only consultants could learn that lesson, Matthew really deserves a prize!

US newspaper leaders are holding a more or less secret emergency summit where they discuss (again!) fun topics such as how to charge for news online and demand money from Google. James Warren chooses historical summit analogies carefully:

One hopes it displays the same sense of purpose as, say, troubled world leaders did at Yalta in 1945 or, in a rather less respectable sector of the economy, beleaguered mob bosses did at a legendary Apalachin, New York, confab in 1957.