Category: Media

And not just in their own words.

Clay Shirky defends the Internet (6.21.07)

The internet is impurifying our precious bodily fluids, Mandrake (7.6.07)

Shirky explains why Keen is a Luddite (7.9.07)

The last link discusses Clay Shirky’s essay “Andrew Keen: Rescuing ‘Luddite’ from the Luddites” which takes Cult author Andrew Keen and Michael Gorman (who I linked to here) to task for saying they’re pro technology, anti its current application.

I’m still reading the book so I can’t say but so much about the arguments quite yet. I’m still bothered by Keen’s insistence on the internet’s negative impact on the music industry but most of his take on blogging and its impact on mainstream media sounds right on to me.

The Economist writes about media’s analogue holdouts and how they may be missing out on some awesome digital benefits:

They have some good reasons. Online advertising is worth much less than television or print advertising. It is hard to persuade people to pay much (if anything) for digital content. Technology firms such as Amazon and Apple can often set retail prices. Digital products can be less beautiful than physical ones.

But such gripes are widespread in the media industry. They must be set against the fact that digital distribution is a low-cost way of reaching huge audiences. What is more, refusing to go online is a sure way to alienate many potential customers. So why do the analogue holdouts hold out?

It comes down to different strokes for different folks.

While an online presence may be “low-cost” in the overall scheme of things, cheaper than print, cheaper than smoke signals, etc, it still is a cost. You have to pay for the site and someone to maintain it, not just posting new content but policing any interactive areas. When ad revenue from websites is so much less than print, a firm has to decide if it can at the very least pay for itself but that comes after an initial investment that may not be worth the effort.

Beyond that, if you’re providing a product that is dependent upon sales in order to remain in operation, why are you doing to give it away online? This mainly applies to specialty products, niche targeted items that don’t provide services easily found elsewhere. Washington Post can’t afford to fall behind New York Times online in regards to its national coverage, but a women’s weekly magazine with a solid subscriber base can keep itself merely focused on print as long as it provides quality content unavailable elsewhere. Giving it away online in the hopes that someone will then decide to subscribe to the print (as the article suggests) is a frightening prospect when most companies would fear losing a number of already existing subscriptions to their now free online service.

Beyond news, the article suggests the Beatles could really benefit from a digital catalog and that whoever convinces them to do it will make a boatload of money. While true, the Beatles aren’t hurting for money or sales of the physical copies of their music. Here you’re talking about a brand that is so hugely popular that it has no need to go digital in order to reach masses it might not otherwise. Every music store carries the Beatles catalog and any number of “best of” compilations to saturate the market. If someone wakes up at 2 a.m. in a cold sweat because they just HAVE to hear Come Together or they’ll never sleep again, Walmart is right around the corner with three different CDs to choose from.

The internet is hardly one size fits all and not all people absolutely have to be in a rush to get online and digitize their content that they’d otherwise charge for. There’s a reason newspapers are flipping out over how to make money. In their rush to be ahead of the digital curve they completely removed their at one time profit base and helped breed a society now used to getting the news for free. To suggest others need to rush to do the same is drinking the digital Kool Aid without first having it pass the sniff test.

Interesting column from Gene Weingarten about how the new newsroom is different than the old and, in particular, the impact it has on headlines:

The only really creative opportunity copy editors had was writing headlines, and they took it seriously. This gave the American press some brilliant and memorable moments, including this one, when the Senate failed to convict President Clinton: CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR; and this one, when a meteor missed Earth: KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE. There were also memorably wonderful flops, like the famous one on a food story about home canning: YOU CAN PUT PICKLES UP YOURSELF.

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.

Headlines now have to not only boost SEO but summarize the article well enough to capture the reader. Creative titles that don’t practically tell the whole story are passed over. For some this is a challenge to get even more creative with headlines (see Skywalkers In Korea Cross Han Solo), but 9 times out of 10 it just leads to laziness. (via Kottke)

Wesley Donehue over at TechRepublican wonders what if newspapers explored the Hulu advertising model?

Let’s look at South Carolina as an example. The State’s John O’Connor and Gina Smith pumped out “must read” material for the nation during the Mark Sanford scandal. Unfortunately the only money they got from the increased readership was a hopeful increased click-through rate on the banner ads that polluted the page.

What if those banner ads weren’t there? What if, instead, a 30 second commercial popped up and you couldn’t move on to the story until you sat through the video? Sure, it’s a little annoying, just like on Hulu. But people will sit through 30 seconds of a commercial to get to solid content

Some news sites already do this, a splash coming up showing an advertisement with a small “click here to go to the article” link in the corner. It’d be interesting to see how that has impacted ad revenue compared to readership rates and whether this model works. But to date most of these ads have been standard flash advertisements and the opt through link at the top has made them not so mandatory.

The problem with forcing a 30 second or even 15 second commitment from a reader is a difference in how the medium is consumed. We are already used to commercials when watching television or video so three 30 second ads during a 30 minute Hulu broadcast doesn’t bother us.. Websites based on text content fall into a newspaper style of advertising in that it’s a matter of placement around the content, not interrupting the flow of it with something on a completely different level of interaction.

Could this use a change? Sure. But text is usually skimmed more than read and articles of 1200 words may only keep eyes on the site for an average of around 75 seconds. Tacking a 15 second hurdle on top of something before they’ve committed to it risks losing that reader. Interrupting their skimming after a few paragraphs with the same style of ad risks the same.

Brick/Brick Reloaded, a big media attempt at local alt-weekly-ness, will run it’s last issue next week.

People don’t pick up newspapers to read syndicated material. You will not last long doing that. And people don’t go to flimsy, finger-staining newspapers to read reviews of movies, books or music. The national stuff is all available everywhere on the Internet. You really need big local coverage from local writers who can infuriate and delight readers, sometimes at the same time.

Media General tried to enter a market that already is served by Style Weekly and RVA Magazine on the cheap and offered nothing to distinguish itself from either.

Geoff Livingston over at The Buzz Bin makes a great analogy – Newspapers Are Like Department Stores:

For department stores, many chains found their death in a trojan horse — the mall. With the rise of the mall, department stores were asked to anchor these megaplexes. But inside the smaller stores were more nimble, better competitors who specialized in deeper lines of products. Electronics, women’s shoes, hardware, whatever it was, from big box to pretzels chains took shoppers away from many department stores.

Ironically, like the mall, the Internet was supposed to be the future of newspapers. But for some reason the 90s passed and the opportunity was never realized. Perhaps that crack known as print advertising was just too good to give up. Or maybe, change was really that hard.

And he’s right.  Department stores for decades was the jack of all trades families turned to for one-stop-shopping.  But then malls came along, inviting specialist stores who then competed within feet of one another for foot traffic and business.  Department stores couldn’t compete – sure J.C. Penney’s has a shoe department, but it’s no Foot Locker when it comes to selection, brands and sometimes price (well, maybe not price, but still).

Specialization and one-stop-shopping met at the mall.

For over ten years now that’s been happening with the news on the internet: newspapers have come to anchor media coverage online but other operations have set up that specialize and do some things better than those aiming to do all things.  Sure the New York Times has a sports section, but ESPN is just a dot-com away.

So it’s adapt or die.  But how to do that?

“Cover what you do best. Link to the rest. “

This changes the dynamic of editorial decisions. Instead of saying, “we should have that” (and replicating what is already out there) you say, “what do we do best?” That is, “what is our unique value?” It means that when you sit down to see a story that others have worked on, you should ask, “can we do it better?” If not, then link. And devote your time to what you can do better.

As I linked to in March (Newspapers: Adapt Or Die), Newsweek is already doing this

Newsweek is about to begin a major change in its identity, with a new design, a much smaller and, it hopes, more affluent readership, and some shifts in content. The venerable newsweekly’s ingrained role of obligatory coverage of the week’s big events will be abandoned once and for all, executives say.

“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

If you can’t make it your own, focus on what you can make your own and hat tip others for the rest of it.

For some that may not be enough.  Sarah Lacy has advice at TechCrunch that’s a bit more aggressive but sounds like a perfect business model for succeeding online and off:

There’s an obvious option for these magazines, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it: Ruthlessly collapse the print and online staffs, run everything online as soon as they write it, except one or two cover-length, long-form glossy pieces. Those will anchor the print issue, rounded out by the best stories from online. Then cut the money spent on trying to court new subscribers, shifting the entire marketing budget to promote the Web or real-life conferences and branded events. You could even use reader comments to flesh the online pieces out more for the print edition, driving more engagement in both the print and online versions. Voila! One publication, not two pretending to be one. And guess what? One publication is a hell of a lot cheaper, even if it’s printed on dead trees.

Give them something online many times a day, save the meat for the print and utilize your audience for filler when the magazine/paper comes out.  Now a reader can participate and have a vested interest in the success and invest in the media accordingly.

Not only does this allow media to remain relevant but also supports newspapers and magazines doing what they can do better than most any other blogger out there: WRITE ACTUAL ARTICLES.  Real meat, investigative pieces that take up 5-10 pages and really involves some journalism the reporting that they are better trained, equipped and financed to do.  Get a handful of kids fresh outta college to do your online content for $25-30k a year a starting, pay a couple veterans the bigger bucks to deliver the meat, groom the kids to eventually be able to do the same, and suddenly you have yourself a working paper on the relatively cheap.

This isn’t the way newspapers have worked, nor is it how they’re adapting.  Instead they’re cutting the bigger bucks veterans, stocking up on prospects on the cheap, and leaving them with no one to learn the real ins and outs of journalism from.  At some point its unsustainable, the kids don’t know how to provide any real meat and the hemorrhaging of money continues without anyone with the know how to stick their thumb in the dike.

Papers are going to keep failing.  Even if some make the harsh adjustments, it may be too little too late.  Just as many department store chains are now long and gone, so will many papers.  Others will survive, linger on as a shell of their former selves, or maybe convert and become something different, something better.

1:00pm UPDATE:

David Simon, creator of The Wire, gets it wrong:

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don’t go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can’t be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a Newark Star-Ledger columnist to this effect:

Don’t expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings… a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

…

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

The whole Gawker piece by Ryan Tate is good and has some fine examples of citizen journalism.

Jeff Jarvis challenges Journalists to ask themselves a tough question:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.
Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.
The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

It’s a hard thing for a journalist or a media outlet to face.  In this age of infotainment presentation has become everything while the actual meat of the story takes a backstage for the sake of flash and bang and ratings.  But if you’re not adding anything of merit to the conversation it won’t spread, it won’t go very far and it’s hardly news.

This comes back to the continuing argument I make about newspapers as they continue to hemmorage subscriptions: specialization is key.  Do what you do well, leave the rest to the experts.  If you are able to cover something better than everyone else, if you’re really able to add value to the conversation, people will pay and reward you for it.
As Jarvis points out:

Bloggers have had to learn that, too. Just linking to and commenting on others’ reporting won’t get you much attention. Every blogger who does original reporting and tells the world something it doesn’t know but wants to know learns that this is how to get links and audience. Arianna Huffington told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London months ago that she was hiring reporters because their stories get more traffic; it’s enlightened economic self-interest. This is a lesson we teach our journalism students at CUNY, when we have them add reporting to the conversations that are going on online.
Whether you’re a blogger or a new form of news organization, you’re going to have to ask with every move whether it will add value to the news ecosystem. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t do it.

Metablogging (feeding links left and right) will only get you so far.  If you can bring something to the table, a take, some information, something that adds to the story, you’re in.  If you’re just passing folks along you’re nothing but a tollbooth on the way to something worthwhile.

Also see Jarvis’s “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.“

Sen. Chap Petersen chimes in on yesterday’s Washington Post coverage on the lack of journalists:

Should anyone care if news reporting dies out?

That’s a great question.  Not everyone is obsessed by the state legislature.  However, on a day-to-day basis, it has more impact on the lives of Virginians than any other political body.  We write  the criminal laws,  the health laws, the divorce laws.  We shape and fund public education.  We plan and build highways.

While press coverage dwindles in Richmond, the content inevitably “dumbs down.”

One could argue that the dumbing down came first.

What the Post and other media outlets seem to be trying to do is set the tone. You NEED these reporters, you NEED this coverage, so you NEED to either subscribe to us or bail us out.

The problem is, these reporters and this coverage isn’t cutting it these days. The current structure of newspapers is a failed business model that has failed to adapt over the last ten years as the Internet has exploded into their turf.  Newspapers need to prove themselves to the public if they can even hope to woo back the dollars they need to survive.  That involves a reevaluation of the way they do business, whether it’s changing how they measure the quality of their product (based on actual quality of content as opposed to sales) or whether it’s changing direction.

Newsweek is trying this.  In a NYTimes article, Newsweek editor Jon Meachum noted:

“There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on,’ ” said Newsweek’s editor, Jon Meacham. “That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

Newsweek loses money, and the consensus within its parent, the Washington Post Company, and among industry analysts, is that it has to try something big. The magazine is betting that the answer lies in changing both itself and its audience, and getting the audience to pay more.

Newsweek is hoping that it’s more opinionated and stylized take will create a fresh product that people may be willing to pay more.  While this isn’t entirely new – new for weeklies, old for journals like Foreign Affairs and such – it’s different enough that it might work.

But it’s change, it’s adaptation, and it’s an attempt to do something other than business as usual given that business has failed.

Specialization may be the key.  In a time when print is supposedly dying, Politco has not only expanded its news operations but increased it’s print circulation from 27,000 to 32,000.  What Politico brings to the table isn’t just fresh ideas and content but a targeted market that appreciates the quality of their product.  Politico knows what it does well – inside the beltway political coverage – and capitalizes on it, not just in circulation but in advertising revenue as well.  It’s easier to woo a potential advertiser when you can easily help them target a specific market.

Newspapers on the other hand casts a wide net but generates no real bang in any one market enough to really capitalize.  The jack-of-all-trades mentality of newspapers of old isn’t working.  A newspaper is not an expert at all things and does not have the staff to pretend to be so.  The newspaper can no longer be a Swiss Army Knife of news in an era of specialized websites delivering better information from experts in a more timely manner.

Newspapers need to find their niche, their market, what they do well, and tweak accordingly.  Is sure isn’t going to be easy and it might not make as much money as papers once did, but evolution need to happen.

If newspapers don’t adapt, they’re going to die and they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

While that’s not the full question in play in Waldo Jaquith’s recent legal troubles it certainly is a large one as Thomas Garrett and his lawyers try to get information from Waldo about his commenters and their private information.  From the Motion To Compel:

[W]hile Virginia recognizes a qualified repotter’s privilege, see Brown v. Com., 214 Ya. 755,757 (1974), Mr. Jaquith has not introduced any evidence to prove that he is in fact a journalist. Since Mr. Jaquith asserts the privilege, he bears the burden of proving that the privilege applies to his communications. ,See Anderson v. Anderson,2g Ya. App. 673, 681-682 (1999) (“The party seeking to establish the existence of a privileged communication carries the burden of proof.”) Howevet, he has merely asserted “upon information and belief’ that the privilege applies (Mot. to Quash !f 4.), and has not offered any evidence in support of this assertion.

In any event, it seems unlikely that Mr. Jaquith would be able to carry his burden. Although it appears that no Virginia court has yet articulated a test for determining precisely who is a’Journalist” entitled to assert the qualified reporter’s privilege, cases from other jurisdictions have held that the law “does not grant status to any person with a manuscript, a web page or a frlm.” In re Madden, 751 F.3d 125, 129 (3d Cir. 1998). Nor does a person become a journalist merely by proclaiming that he or she is a journalist. Id. at 130. As one scholarly commentator has stated:

Any such self-proclaimed joumalist could unilaterally decide to place certain information offlimits simply by agreeing to promise confidentiality to a source. This would potentially exclude a huge amount of information from the legal system, and would result in substantial litigation costs as parties battled over the applicability of the virtually boundless privilege.

Randall D. Eliason, The Problems with the Reporter’s Privilege, 57 Am. U. L. Rev. 1341,1367 (2003). Nor is a person considered a journalist if he merely relies upon another party as his sole source of information, uncovers no story on his own, and does not independently investigate any of the information provided to him by that other party. Madden,151 F.3d at 130. lvfu. Jaquith therefore cannot benefit from the qualified reporter’s privilege inasmuch as the Article contains no information arising from his own investigative reporting but instead simply recites information provided or uncovered by others, including information provided by The Hook.

So even journalists can’t call themselves journalists if they cite sources that are not their own. Good to know.

So the question becomes how does one qualify as a “journalist”?  Must they be card carrying?  Is there a decoder ring? Do websites not qualify as a news medium and therefore anyone working specifically on a blog does not qualify as a journalist?

And, if Waldo was unoriginal in his posting of this information, then why chase after him or his commenters?  How is posting this story any different than a man telling the story in a bar, to which the crowd reacts in one fashion or another?  Are you going to subpoena drinking buddies next?
Beyond that, it’s a question of free speech and association, another point argued against when Waldo refuses to release IP information of commenters.  What Garrett’s lawyers argue is that some speech and association is more free than others:

In opposition to this request, Mr. Jaquith argues frst that these documents should not be disclosed because to do so would “threaten the exercise of fundamental rights” of the commenters, namely, their First Amendment right to anonymous speech on the internet, and that therefore the Subpoena “is subject to the closest scrutiny.” (Mot. to Quash fl 5.) However, the precedents cited by Mr. Jaquith in support of this position dealt with far more weighty constitutional matters than those at issue here. In bothNAACP v. Alabama,357 U.S.449 (1958) and Bates v. City of Little Rock,361 U.S. 516 (1960), governments in the former Confederacy had sought to compel units of the NAACP to disclose their membership lists, thus threatening members’ exercise of their First Amendment rights of free association, and perhaps even threatening their lives. The standard of “closest scrutiny” (sometimes referred to as “exacting scrutiny”) applied in those cases applies to speech only when it touches on prime matters of public political life, such as debate over the qualifications of candidates, discussion of governmental or political affairs, discussion of political campaigns, and advocacy of controversial points of view, in which case such speech is described as the “core” or “essence” of the First Amendment. See generally Mclntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm’n,514 U.S. 334, 346-347 (1995) (“When a law burdens core political speech, we apply ‘exacting scrutiny”‘).  By contrast, the comments posted on Mr. Jaquith’s article are almost uniformly tawdry, sophomoric, and spiteful, and touch upon no issues of public or political interest that constitute the “core” of the First Amendment, such as those at issue in NAACP and Bates. (See generally Exhibit 2.)

But clearly these comments are “controversial points of view” toward Garrett. So, protected.  And, as Waldo points out:

The enormous irony is here is that the comments that fit that description were posted by Garrett himself (or, at least, somebody who says that he’s Garrett and demonstrates an extraordinary amount of knowledge about the man), all of which were pretty nasty attacks on me, libelously accusing me of committing criminal acts. And in an effort to claim that I have contempt for the legal process (as a reader of my blog, you understand that precisely the opposite is true), Garrett’s attorney cites a comment left by James Young, in which he recites a joke about judges told to him by a judge. (James, as you may know, is an attorney who recently argued a case before the Supreme Court.)

Clearly what we’re seeing here is an attempt by an individual to squash any negative remarks about him and his character.  The argument seems less to be about the merrits of the comments and more about the rights of individuals to express them, at least where Waldo is involved.

The precedent that Garrett and his attorneys are seeking to set here is a dangerous one and could very well harm the ability for bloggers who take what they do seriously continue to do so.  This could be a huge setback given the gains bloggers have made in being accepted and respected as members of the “press” throughout the state.  To segregate that playing field, to create a situation where some have more rights than others merely because you think you can bully an individual who has no corporate sponsor or means to pay for a high end legal defense, well, that says a lot more about you as an individual than any article on The Hook or repeated by any blogger.