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.
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.
After the French come the Brits: Three strikes or internet cut-off as punishment for illegal filesharing was not included in the Digital Britain report, but now the government wants it after all:
…Today the government will take the unusual step of proposing much stricter rules midway through the Digital Britain consultation process. Illegal filesharers will still get warning letters but if they continue to swap copyrighted material they could have their internet connection temporarily severed, although it may be possible to retain basic access to online public services. A similar law in France under which filesharers could be cut off for up to a year was recently kicked out by the country’s highest court as unconstitutional. In the UK, privacy groups are likely to challenge any similar legislation as contrary to human rights law.
PST har lagt ut fotoalbumet fra Treholt-saken ikke bare på lukkede Facebook, men heldigvis også på åpne Flickr. Sikkerhetstjenesten har til og med spionert seg fram til en Creative Commons-lisens på bildene — navngivelse, ingen bearbeidelse (står egentlig noe i veien for å velge den aller frieste lisensen, med kun navngivelse? De ivrigste vil nok remikse Treholt-bildene uansett).
Jeg håper virkelig at mange offentlige institusjoner vil følge PST og gjøre historiske fotografier tilgjengelig. Treholt-bildene er en påminnelse om at det ikke bare er arkiver, biblioteker, museer eller NRK som sitter på viktig historisk materiale.
Digitaliseringen av fotografier, både av offentlige hendelser og private minner, har potensial til å påvirke vår historieforståelse. Både profesjonelle aktører og amatører vil bidra. Min personlige favoritt for tiden er Bergensavisens Fotomuseum på Origo. Ved siden av bilder fra avisens eget arkiv er det nå begynt å dukke opp mange spennende bilder fra private samlinger. Se for eksempel bilder tatt av Franz Blaha. Fascinerende. En utfordring for Origo blir å legge til rette for at publikum kan føre på stikkord (tags) som på Flickr, og å innarbeide Creative Commons-lisenser. Burde være mulig å få til, folkens?
Se min temaside med flere relevante saker om historisk fotografi.
…it means that we’ll have resources to expand EveryBlock profoundly. MSNBC.com is the most-visited news Web site in the U.S. and is in solid financial shape in a time when news organizations around the world are struggling. We’re excited about the possibilities of pointing a massive audience at EveryBlock and having the resources to beef up our technological infrastructure and staff. Our site is very young — it’s only been live for about a year and a half — and we have a lot of ideas and expansion plans. I often tell friends and industry colleagues that EveryBlock in is current incarnation is only about 5 percent of what we want to do with it. We’re now in a position to make this happen.
Evgeny Morozov delivers a good analysis, as usual, of the Twitter hype. Beware:
Twitter use in authoritarian countries comes with major drawbacks. Twitter creates an extensive online paper trail that can be easily used against dissidents. In fact, as Twitter use becomes more common, authoritarian governments are likely to exploit Twitter to gather open-source intelligence on the opposition — not a difficult task for anyone with an Internet hook-up. So Twitter could help authorities identify dissent at very early stages, tracking not just individual activists, but entire activist networks. An online friend list could enable a serious crack-down.
New concepts for voluntary user payment — or more effective donations — keep turning up. The latest is Sprinklepenny (via Steve Outing). I’m intrigued by the possibilities, and I like this approach much better than the current “force the user to pay“-approach of the mainstream media. But will it work? Will there ever be enough users, so publishers will make more than, ah, pennies?
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.
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.
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:
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?
A few years ago Creative Commons licensing of photos (and other works) was mostly for geeks, but I believe use of the licenses are gaining in popularity, and slowly but surely, users will also credit photographers in the correct way. At least now that, finally, Google has launched Creative Commons filtering in their image search.
Still, so far I much prefer Peter Shanks’ flickrCC search site, which manages to combine usability with beauty — no small accomplishment. I can live with the limitation that here you “only” search through Flickr images.
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!
Reuters has made its journalism handbook available online, free for everyone. Surely a very valuable resource for journalists, students, bloggers, writers all over the world. Dean Wright explains the reasoning behind the move in the following quote:
“Transparency: At a time when trust is an endangered commodity in the financial and media worlds, it’s important that news consumers see the guidelines our journalists follow.
Service: As we’ve seen over the past decade, the barriers to publishing have dropped so that anyone with an idea and a computer can be a publisher. But it’s also become clear that publishers have a varying standard of truth, fairness and style. Our handbook is a good place for budding journalists to begin.
Geography: Reuters serves a global audience and the handbook recognises the cultural and political differences that our journalists face in reporting for the world. This is a handbook not just for English-language journalists in the United Kingdom or the United States, but for wherever English is used.”
I found the news at the excellent journalism.co.uk. site, which also tips about one of the good Delicious features: The lists of popular bookmarks, here for the tag “journalism”, where the Reuters handbook currently is no. 1. A good tool.
There’s plenty of misinformation out there, like rumors that Ahmadinejad is going to stage an assassination attempt, so we need to be careful about how we judge the information. If we’re a savvy analyst, we need to be careful about the weight we attach to photographs and video accounts. They’re the most immediate and emotionally powerful, but they can distort our understanding of the situation, particularly of about the importance of specific developments.
Every major news story these days has its own user-driven information logic, Iran is no exception. The realtime criticism of CNN’s coverage is a good example. Now we debate the news judgement of the media as it happens, and this opinion exchange again influences the news coverage and maybe even events. Some news media have been good at reflecting this shift via their news blogs, a format that turns out to be very useful:
Extraordinary: The four photographers who captured the “Tank Man” on Tiananmen Square 20 years ago tell their individual stories of the event. An afterthought from Charlie Cole about the man with the bags — who remains unidentified, his destiny unknown:
I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers. And I felt honored to be there.
Cole reflects further:
In my opinion, it is regretful that this image alone has become the iconic “mother” of the Tiananmen tragedy. This tends to overshadow all the other tremendous work that other photographers did up to and during the crackdown. Some journalists were killed during this coverage and almost all risked being shot at one time or another. (…) and we should not be lured into a simplistic, one-shot view of this amazingly complex event.
The photojournalist’s dilemma?
The event was also recorded on video; the moving pictures provide context and answers to some questions remaining after seeing the still images.
When your exclusive story can be quoted by all other media online seconds after you have published it, it no longer pays to invest in good journalism. Some say. Even government ministers. I have never understood that argument. If you consistently can produce good, exclusive, intriguing, appealing journalism, the audience will recognize it and reward you. A piece of evidence from Britain:
One of the most interesting aspects of the scandal is the revelation that old-fashioned scoops can still sell papers. Many publishers have assumed that in the Internet era, “exclusives” stay that way for about three seconds, so they are not worth pursuing. Instead, they have shifted the emphasis of their papers toward analysis or opinion. But The Telegraph’s exclusives, serialized like popular 19th century novels, have made a big difference at the newsstand. According to unaudited industry figures, The Daily Telegraph sold a cumulative total of about 900,000 additional copies in the first two weeks of its reports. On some days, its circulation jumped more than 10 percent from the official April level of about 818,000.
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.
