Category Archives: Journalism

I began writing this as a comment on Steve Buttry’s blog, which today has two posts about a Lancaster, Pa., newspaper’s new paywall on its online obituaries for out-of-town viewers. I was reacting to the editor’s response to Steve’s initial post criticizing the move, but I figured I have a little more to say about it than just a comment.

What newspapers are doing failing to do with their obituary business model should be frighteningly familiar to them by now.

Newspapers: I think it’s very predictable that someone is going to come in and “craigslist” your obit business. Hell, we could even put the obits on Craigslist itself today if Craig gave us a new category. (more…)

After a long time telling everyone the name of our new DC news site was to be determined, we announced today that the site will in fact be called “TBD.”

Now I’ve always felt that a brand name itself is not that important. All brands start at reputation zero. (Think back to how meaningless the brand “Google,” or the word “googol,” was to you in 1997.) It’s nice to have a catchy name. But the brand is defined over time by the value and experiences it provides. I’m happy to now have that brand we can start building. (more…)

CJR is putting on a play about the Pentagon Papers saga this month as a fundraiser. I received this e-mail, and since I don’t see details online anywhere I’m posting it here so others can see and share:

mike hoyt <mh151@columbia.edu>     Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:37 PM
To: XXXXXX

Dear reader,

If you will be in the New York area on March 16, we hope you can join us for this fundraiser—an excellent play and a stellar panel about a seminal journalism event:

TOP SECRET: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

Please join the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) for this benefit performance of a riveting historical play that recalls one of journalism’s most important chapters. A talkback will follow with:

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, and set the stage for a historic showdown between the press and the Nixon administration over First Amendment rights.

Leslie Gelb, who was director of the Defense Department project that produced the Pentagon Papers, and who later served in a variety of posts in government and at The New York Times.

James Goodale, who as Vice President and General Counsel for The New York Times disagreed with outside counsel and defended the paper’s right to publish the papers.

Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, formerly Washington correspondent for The New Yorker.

Moderated by Victor Navasky, Chairman, CJR, and Delacorte Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

The play is co-authored by the late Leroy Aarons, a former editor and national correspondent for The Washington Post and the founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and Geoffrey Cowan, Dean Emeritus and University Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC, and Honorary Vice Chair of CJR’s Circle of supporters.

A fascinating evening—and a great way to support CJR, the country’s leading media monitor.

TUESDAY, MARCH 16, 2010 – 7pm

New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4th Street

TIckets: $65 ($30 tax-deductible); students: $20 (no tax-deductible portion)

Tickets are limited. Please email Sara Germano at sg2827@columbia.edu with “Top Secret” in the subject line to reserve your seat. Please indicate the number of tickets you are requesting, and we will follow up with you. Tickets must be paid to confirm your reservation; no ticket sales on the evening on the performance. Sorry, no refunds. Please call 212-854-1881 with questions.

Image by Flickr user retuta

In almost any article examining the changing news media business, either the author or some pundit will throw out a comment like this: “Eventually, you’re going to pay for good online content.”

Here’s a new and particularly blatant example from Andrew Zolli, writing for Newsweek:

“The theory was that companies were supposed to make back the money by, uh, “monetizing the attention economy,” or some other similarly vaporous concept, that meant either charging customers later on, or selling advertisements, or both.” …

“In the long run, the (free content of the) first decade of the Web could come to be seen as a momentary aberration—an echo of ’60s free culture”

The assertion is that free was clearly a mistake, an aberration, is usually not explained or backed up with any facts, it’s just out there.

But any fair assessment of the facts shows that forcing payments for news is barely possible, and certainly not inevitable.

Begin with the fact that for the past two decades people largely have not paid for online news content. That’s not an accident, as Zolli suggests. That’s the status quo of a functioning online economic system. If someone says it’s going to change, it’s their burden to explain why. And so far, I don’t hear any good reasons. The most common is that because the news industry is in financial trouble, consumers must bail them out by paying — an insular, backwards view of the consumer relationship.

Along with the lack of evidence for “inevitability,” there is significant evidence against it.

The spark of the whole paid-content discussion was the realization that display ads online aren’t nearly as profitable as in print. The theory arose, if ads don’t work we have to charge the user directly. Here’s the problem: The same reason that the display ad model is failing is the reason paid content doesn’t work — there’s no scarcity online. There are infinite other places to buy ads, consume content or even watch kitten videos, for free.

Meanwhile, the web has completely unbundled and fractured content consumption. So paying in bulk each month to access one site’s bundle does not make sense to most users.

And you can read any of a half-dozen recent surveys that find a very small fraction of users willing to even consider paying for news content, and even those people hedge with demands that it be unique and special — not just your everyday stuff.

I don’t doubt that for some types of content and some consumers, there will be paid-content relationships that work. It’s certainly possible. But at this point it’s not probable, and certainly not inevitable. Anyone who says otherwise has a difficult case to make. And it seems they often don’t even try to make it.

Spend some quality time with this: A five-part video of NYU professors Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky interviewing each other about what’s happening to news.

Total runtime is about 52 minutes, broken into five segments. It’s well worth the time. (more…)

There are frequent panel discussions these days to discuss the future of news. But too often they stick to tired questions: Will paywalls work? Will e-readers save print media?

For a possibly more revealing discussion, here are five questions that should be asked of panelists:

1) What role can everyday citizens play in directing and participating in the news process? How do we build authority and reputation systems to make those contributions credible and useful?

2) What role can amateur bloggers play in an ecosystem of local news, and what roles must still be done by professionals?

3) How can new revenue streams (sponsorships, memberships, donations, product-discount marketing, premium information services) move beyond the limitations of display ads?

4) How is the emerging mobile news market different from the desktop web, and how do news companies take advantage of it? Are the new “tablet” computers something different as well?

5) Social networks are connecting everyone in real time, allowing people to spread basic news and observations among themselves. How does that change the function of professionally produced news?

What are the answers to these questions? What other key questions need to be discussed more? Leave your ideas in the comments below.

The discussion about the value and role of reader comments on news and blogs can be as divided as the commenters themselves.

Join a discussion in the comments below: Where do you stand?

Are reader comments a useful tool for building engagement, soliciting feedback and generating traffic and revenue? Or are they a wasteland of anonymous slander dominated by trolls? What can a site owner/moderator do to help or hurt the quality?

Please leave your own views and examples in the comments below. (Click the little orange RSS button above the comments to subscribe, so you can follow the discussion).

I’m engaged in (what I thought was an old) discussion at work about the value of reader comments on news stories. Others’ concerns are the nastiness of some commenters, and the (flawed) logic that we wouldn’t print it in the newspaper, so why let people say it on our website?

In my research to explain this, I’ve looked at a lot of essays and blog posts. I think Jeff Jarvis says it best in this post from 2008:

So are comments destroying civilization? The reason this argument is so damned tired is that we all know who the assholes are and where they hang out and we know how to step around them and their smelly shopping carts. I don’t need … newspaper editors to protect me from them. The nannies’ obsession comes, I think, from the media and news worldview that led them to believe that they were able to package the world neatly every day in a beautiful box with a bow on top. Now that we can suddenly hear more voices, it upsets them as schmutz does Felix Ungar. The world isn’t just out of their control now but it’s messy.

But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.

The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published. It’s even more wrong because the internet is not media — no matter how much media people insist on seeing the web in their image. Instead it is, as Doc Searls points out, a place where we talk. Walk by any streetcorner on the way to the theater and there’s a good chance you will hear stupid, illiterate, nasty things before you hear smart, well-written things. Time for a neutron bomb? No, you keep walking.

There is a subtle but deeply wrong bias woven into much of the newspaper reports and columns about budding efforts to charge users for access to online news.

More often than not, the writers state as historical fact that newspapers made a “fatal miscalculation” in not charging for news long ago — and thus it’s difficult now because readers are “accustomed” to free news. (Those phrases are from this LA Times story by Joe Flint but you’ll find them in many newspaper reports. This new one from the New York Times’ Richard Perez-Pena and TIm Arango says “consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news” and the “free ride” might end.)

Flint states: “There is a general consensus that putting content on the Internet for free — d’oh! — may not have been the brightest idea.”

Such views are certainly questionable. Many DID try to charge early and failed, as Steve Yelvington among many has noted, and many including me and Wired’s Chris Anderson will tell you there’s no economic sense to charging for general online news in its present form.

In addition to being inaccurate, these unsupported assumptions reveal the writers’ contemptuous view of their audience as a bunch of lazy, unappreciative freeloaders who don’t know how lucky they are to have us. If news publishers want to survive, they need the opposite approach — respect and listen to your users’ sense of content value, and get past your sense of entitlement.

Your reaction to the Washington Post’s announced closure of three bureaus (in New York, Chicago and L.A.) probably depends on whether you see news as a print person or online person.

Print-oriented people see a withdrawal, a loss. In his story today on , Howard Kurtz notes:

What is lost, however, is the knowledge and experience of reporters who come to understand the local issues, personalities and culture of other regions by living there.

Online people know they can get the “local issues, personalities and culture of other regions” from the many news outlets and the 46 million people who actually ARE in Chicago, New York or L.A.

That’s my take as well. I see the Post making a smart reorganization of resources to improve the Post’s core mission.

Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchliis exactly right when he said: “We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.” He is right to say the Post’s strength is to report on Washington, and on national issues through a “Washington prism.”

Cover what you do best, and link to the rest.