Undercurrent

More philanthropic financing of journalism:

Last week, “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” received a Gates Foundation grant of $3.5 million to help its correspondents produce 40 to 50 reports over three years on malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis, measles, neglected diseases and other global health issues.

Except the Norwegians. So it seems, anyway, as Aftenposten closes its news service in English. At the same time, there seems to be a momentum for local/national news and commentary in English from different European countries. Examples:

• Germany: Spiegel and The Local.
• Sweden: The Local.
• Denmark: Politiken
• Netherlands: NRC Handelsblad — in partnership with Spiegel.
• Serbia: B92
• Slovakia/Central Europe: Salon

And more stories from different countries can be found in euro|topics.

The list can probably be made longer. Any tips?

UPDATE: Denmark is on the list, thanks to Søren.

The title is of course borrowed from signandsight.

Philip Meyer thinks the endgame for newspapers is in sight and that the papers will vanish even faster than he has concluded before. Some newspapers might survive by publishing less frequently and concentrating on “evidence-based journalism”. The key is community influence:

I still believe that a newspaper’s most important product, the product least vulnerable to substitution, is community influence. It gains this influence by being the trusted source for locally produced news, analysis and investigative reporting about public affairs. This influence makes it more attractive to advertisers. By news, I don’t mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts. The old hunter-gatherer model of journalism is no longer sufficient. Now that information is so plentiful, we don’t need new information so much as help in processing what’s already available. Just as the development of modern agriculture led to a demand for varieties of processed food, the information age has created a demand for processed information. We need someone to put it into context, give it theoretical framing and suggest ways to act on it.

In some respects, what Meyer is describing is concepts like The Economist, and in Scandinavia Mandag Morgen in Denmark and Norway (disclosure: I used to work at the Norwegian edition and still write for them). Community influence among its small, but influential readership is certainly one of the cornerstones of the MM concept.

A quite original point from Meyer is that there’s no reason to worry about the consequences of democracy of a future where newspapers are more elitist than today. No problem, he says:

As far back as 1940, the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that voters get their information from one another as much as from direct consumption of the media. He called this the “two-step flow” from opinion leaders to the general public. The Internet is enhancing that two-step flow, converting it to a many-step flow. The problem is not distributing the information. The problem is maintaining a strong and trusted agency to originate it. Newspapers have that position of trust in the minds of the public.

(tip: Bookforum.com).

The question mark is out of place in this story’s headline. Definitely Google is a media company. Knol is just a new example of that. All these forays into every possible area which might be “monetized” one way or the other is what makes Google somewhat unheimlich. David B. Yoffie has it right:

If I am a content provider and I depend upon Google as a mechanism to drive traffic to me, should I fear that they may compete with me in the future? The answer is absolutely, positively yes.

(tip: John Battelle).

I’m an amateur photographer (with a big A), but photography is fun and I would like to learn more. So it was a nice encouragement that the online travel guide Schmap wanted to include this photo of a detail of the building on top of St. Hanshaugen in Oslo in a guide to Scandinavian parks:

Schmappers apparently do a lot of Flickr browsing…!

UK newspapers could get much more ad revenue out of their websites, Ernst &Young claims in a new report. The consultants say that if newspapers got as much revenue out of their users as Google, they would have earned 120 to 250 million pounds each in 2007, instead of around one-fifth of that. Google had revenues of 1,26 billion pounds in the UK in 2007.

E&Y say that the newspapers should start offering advertisers cost per click (CPC) based ad models alongside the usual cost per thousand page impressions (CPM). But can ads in newspapers ever become as relevant to the user as Google’s search-based ads? Maybe on the newspapers’ own search pages? Some news websites have fought advertisers who wanted CPC before, because they feared too few would click (they know their own click-through rates, of course).

Other recommendations: acquire online classified ad services (a well-known strategy in Norway) and improve behavioural targeting of users. It would be interesting to know how much of this is done already, and what regulations exist — probably privacy rules are tougher in for example Germany and Norway than in the UK and US. (tip: journalism.co.uk).

UPDATE: A prediction for the US online ad market says growth will continue and the shares of the different types of advertising will be very stable in the five years ahead.