Category Archives: Media industry

Newspaper economy and innovation

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Collected links from recent days:

Roy Greenslade: Some newspaper people more optimistic based on recent results. But if print revenue is improving, resources must be channeled into (online) innovation, not automatically hiring more reporters again, Greenslade and Earl Wilkinson say.

Guardian Media Group is losing money and reportedly considering to shut down The Observer.

New York Times CEO still thinking about models for charging readers.

Umair Haque follows up on his nichepaper manifesto. I’m still struggling with figuring out the basis for his niche optimism.

Future of Journalism: E-book and interviews published at OurBlook.

See my recent op-ed piece (in Norwegian) about journalism and innovation.

Niches and worried journalists

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Strange: Everywhere I look there are stories, interviews and analyses about the future of journalism, crisis in the media etc, but I’m not getting fed up with it! A selection of the latest:

Michael Massing is upbeat about the news-producing potential of blogs in New York Review of Books.

Chris Anderson does some good fencing with Spiegel Online.

Umair Haque presents a “nichepaper manifesto”:

Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are “real” enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content – while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.

Afterthought: Are their economics really superior? How good are their numbers? What about examples from other countries?

Another good idea: The Investigations Fund

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Better than whining about Google: Experiment with new models for funding journalism. In the UK, an impressive line-up of people now launch The Investigations Fund. Roy Greenslade reports:

Its aim is to foster independent public interest journalistic inquiry while encouraging a new generation of reporters.

Related posts:

Pro Publica launched

What Google (and others) can do

Teenybopper media analyst

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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!

Yalta?

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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.

The revolution itself

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Clay Shirky on media technology revolutions, especially the current one:

Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case. Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead. When we shift our attention from ‘save newspapers’ to ‘save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

Google’s blind spot

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Virginia Heffernan points to Google’s blind spot as a media company: they lack essential competence in the craft of editing. Her example is the disappointing presentation of the fantastic Life photo archive collection:

When Google first announced on its blog that the Life archive was up, it seemed like another Google good deed: rescuing the name of Life magazine and the glorious 20th-century tradition of still photojournalism. But Google has failed to recognize that it can’t publish content under its imprint without also creating content of some kind: smart, reported captions; new and good-looking slide-show software; interstitial material that connects disparate photos; robust thematic and topical organization. All this stuff is content, and it requires writers, reporters, designers and curators. Instead, the company’s curatorial imperative, as usual, is merely “make it available.”

“Save the New York Times” round-up

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In Norway newspapers call on the state to save them (again), in the US it’s the “enlightened philanthropists” that must come to the rescue? In an op-ed in the Times, two Yale executives propose a US university-style endowment of 5 Billion dollars (!). That should be enough to fund the around 200 Million dollars that the newsgathering costs per year.

PJNet’s Leonard Witt thinks it’s a better idea to make the newsroom into a a “cooperative trust owned by its readers as it eases into the online world”.

Everyone seems to have ideas for the NYT, suddenly. When Murdoch bought the WSJ, it was thought that he would make the subscriber based website free. But it hasn’t happened. Now Henry Blodget thinks that the NYT should consider copying the WSJ’s current model, what he calls a “hybrid subscription-free” business:

” * Many news stories are available for free at WSJ.com every day. So much so that the site’s direct, non-subscriber traffic is meaningful and impressive.

* ALL of the WSJ’s content is indexed by, and available through, Google and other search engines. Most people don’t understand this, but it is critically important. The WSJ’s paid content is NOT hidden behind a firewall. It is available for free, all over the web, on a story by story basis.

* Many sites have deals with the WSJ where they can link to WSJ’s content and have their readers read it for free. This encourages bloggers and other publications to include the WSJ in the conversation economy.

* The only WSJ content that web searchers and readers CANNOT access are the full navigation pages of WSJ.com. Put differently, only subscribers can read The Wall Street Journal. Non-subscribers have to settle for reading the occasional Wall Street Journal story when they happen to encounter it.”

Blodget plays around with the numbers: if the NYT could get “only” 750.000 subscribers paying 80 dollars, that would be 60 Million in revenue.

What Google (and others) can do for journalism

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The ever-increasing newspaper crisis and Google chief Schmidt’s claims that there’s nothing the search giant can do that would really help, inspires Dan Froomkin to propose seven ways Google can help journalism (I would add: other actors could contribute also). I like no. 2 and 4 especially:

“* “Adopt” a handful of newspapers, and help them build technologically-sophisticated Web sites, with an emphasis on micro-local and business-to-consumer relationships. For instance, local papers need ways to database local advertising, local content, and information on local readers — then serve up ads based on psycho-graphic and geographic information. Newspapers can’t seem to figure this out by themselves. Then make the technology available to others.

* Create and endow an independent nonprofit; put esteemed journalists on its board; let them buy newspapers from owners who are wringing them dry and run them as nonprofits.

* Create an open-source journalism wire service, hiring excellent laid-off reporters to do great narrative and investigative work that’s free for the picking.

* Fund a short-term project to hire laid-off journalists from across the country, connect them virtually with hot programmers, and see what they come up with.

* Create a journalist-mediated repository of citizen journalism. Hire professional journalists to “accredit” excellent citizen journalism and train citizen journalists.

* Create “endowed chairs” for bloggers who can then quit their day-jobs and do actual reporting as well as blogging.

* Contribute to nonprofit journalistic ventures and foundations, i.e. ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity – and NiemanWatchdog.org (where I am deputy editor and where this post first appeared.)”