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Some traditional media entities seem to be hoping for a single magic bullet that will cure their revenue problems, but it is more likely success will come from making a number of smaller bets. As traditional media revenues continue to fall off a cliff thanks to the precipitous decline in print advertising, there seems to be a desire on the part of media companies to somehow find a single solution that will magically cure this problem — hence the increasing popularity of paywalls. But as media industry analyst Ken Doctor points out in a recent post at the Nieman Lab, it is far more likely that success for media entities of all kinds will come by making smaller bets on a number of different things. The big problem for the industry’s traditional players is that they have spent decades getting good at doing one thing — but now not as many people want that thing, and experimentation and rapid innovation is not in their DNA....
National Magazine Award judges have a tough job this year as they choose a winner in the features category. There’s the sobering story about a corporate attorney’s mysterious death in Guatemala; the bizarre tale of a pair of young international arms dealers; the moving account of two dozen strangers braving a massive tornado; a fable-like piece about a man who rode out the Japanese tsunami on the roof of his house; and a high-larious (pardon us) story about a darker side of Disney World. The American Society of Magazine Editors will announce the winner on May 3, but until then here’s a sampling from those five fine finalists, written by some of the top names in narrative:... [Great writing and great reading - JD]
Near the end of the overview section of the Pew Research Center’s exhaustive study of the business issues facing American newspapers, one unnamed executive sums up the industry’s dilemma: ”There might be a 90% chance you’ll accelerate the decline if you gamble and a 10% chance you might find the new model. No one is willing to take that chance.” That’s it in a nutshell. The newspaper industry is standing on a railroad trestle 100 feet above a rushing river while a locomotive bears down on it. The only thing worse than getting hit by the train is jumping out of the way. The study outlines in depressing detail how paralyzed the industry is in its search for new business models, although there are glimmers of hope in the successes of a few innovators....
An interesting question: Who really said “The four most frightening words in the English language are ‘Mike Wallace is here’ “? The Los Angeles Times attributes it to Joseph Coors. “Wallace had such a fearsome reputation as an interviewer that ‘Mike Wallace is here to see you’ were among the most dreaded words a newsmaker could hear,” writes David Bauder. In the Washington Post, Adam Bernstein wisely goes with the passive tense: “For anyone hiding a secret, it was often said, four of the most dreaded words in the English language were ‘Mike Wallace is here.’” In an AP gallery: “His reputation preceded him: ‘The four most dreaded words in the English language: Mike Wallace is here,’ as the saying goes.” Someone get an investigative journalist on this pronto!...
Newspaper Map | ✰ Find and translate all newspapers in the world ✰... [Impressive: NewspaperMap shows & translates 10,000+ world newspapers - JD]
At the end of each year, the Committee to Protect Journalists counts the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide and lists the countries in which they’re locked up. These data are very helpful, but I think we can consider them under a new lamp by taking into account each country’s size. China and Eritrea, for example, have about the same number of journalists rotting in prison, 27 and 28 respectively. But the population of China is over 250 times that of the small dictatorship....
News.me asks: Can the way people characterize the news they share tell us about why they share in the first place? News.me bills itself as a service that delivers “must-read news” from your Facebook and Twitter accounts. In other words, it takes all of that baby-photo clutter (sorry, babies) out of your newsfeed and comes up with just the links your friends are sharing. But News.me also enables “reactions” to shares that are only visible within the app.... [A cool app worth exploring - JD]
He borrows the power of the truth business to create drama. He's like the politician that lies about his résumé. But is the lying pol better or worse than the demagogue who speaks from the heart? This American Life has gotten more attention for a retraction than it has for any show in recent memory. Not that the show is exactly suffering, but the combination of truth-telling and apology over its piece on Mike Daisey's The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs has struck a nerve. Pundits from Felix Salmon, in a long post this weekend, to his Reuters colleague Jack Shafer with his take, to The New York Times' David Carr in another article decry Daisey's argument that drama differs from journalism, and that the art demands a certain reordering and heightening of reality. In other words, drama may involve things that did not happen. Who can argue with this?...
NBC’s Chuck Todd Trashes ‘Tidbit’ Journalism... On this morning’s MSNBC “The Daily Rundown” host Chuck Todd went after what he and his panel dubbed “tidbit” journalism. Their repugnance was high after yesterday’s Etch a Sketch remark from a top Mitt Romney campaign advisor that, they joked angrily, “went viral.”...
Pinterest is the "in" site of 2012, and its phenomenal growth has sparked interest among millions of users. It's also spread to journalism educators, who are increasingly experimenting with it in the classroom. The social network launched two years ago, but in recent months has drawn red-hot excitement for its unique visual, topic-based curation approach. While its 10 million users, especially women, are drawn to it almost obsessively, brands, media firms and news organizations have also planted flags on the network. Now J-school faculty are increasingly in on the act....
Mike Daisey has been roundly and justly castigated for selling his bullshit stories about visiting the Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China, to This American Life. But even some of his harshest critics are buying into the idea that, in some contexts—just not "journalistic ones"—it's OK to tell little lies in service of a "larger truth." This is dreck. All truths are the same size....
We crunch the numbers from Gawker's pageview-chasing experiment. Oh, and what time does the Super Bowl start? [Great inside look at Gawker for the curious - JD]
The annual State of the News Media study from the Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism officially rings in the "age of mobile."... For anyone who can remember being floored by the mid-1980s Chrysler sedan that warned “your door is ajar” in delightful monotone, it’s still kind of thrilling that Cadillacs come with wifi these days. But for a growing number of Americans, it’s hard to imagine going anywhere without an iPhone in one pocket and an iPad within arm’s reach. Here it is, as if there was any doubt: The age of mobile....
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The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit investigative reporting organization, announced this week that it will launch a new channel on YouTube. The channel, which is expected to be launched in July, will be a hub of investigative journalism curated by CIR. The channel is being launched in part by an $800,000 contribution by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “One of the goals of this partnership will be to raise the profile and visibility of high-impact storytelling through video,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of CIR. “We hope this initiative generates revenue that supports the work of nonprofit organizations and independent filmmakers everywhere. Collaborative efforts like this are no longer the future of journalism; they are today’s reality.”...
The web has just made the obvious more visible; brutal but inevitable. Also, in my view, the FT may have a good case for charging people, but in general the added values is what it comes down to - and many publishers and their publications don't really have enough to offer in that respect - same problem that is facing the record labels....
Bloomberg News is one of the few news operations that's flourishing, and Knowledge@Wharton provides a glimpse of the editorial strategy that fuels its remarkable engine. Founded by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 1982, the financially oriented global information network today produces more than 5,000 stories per day from 146 news bureaus in 72 countries. Its TV network reaches 310 million people and it is in the middle of turning around BusinessWeek, which it bought from McGraw-Hill for $1 in 2009....
A reporter walks into a marketing agency and a “branded journalist” is born. What once seemed like the set-up to a joke is just a reality of the new media age, explains content marketer Biserka Anderson. ...Flash forward to the present. Content marketing is the buzzword of the year and empowered businesses are pumping out editorial content in a race to spread their messages and reach an increasingly active community of online users. For many traditional newsrooms, meanwhile, digitization appears to have spelled little more than doom and gloom – squeezed advertising margins, dwindling circulations, editorial layoffs....
They're rich, they're global, and they're snapping up A-list journalists—and maybe newspapers, even 'The New York Times'... Awash in subscriber revenue, Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are those truly rare things: news organizations that not only are healthy but also are on a hiring spree. Bloomberg boasts about 2,400 edit staffers, up from 2,100 three years ago, while Thomson Reuters has added 600 full-time journalists over the past four years for a total of 3,000. Each employs more newspeople than The New York Times and The Washington Post combined....
In March 2012 the faculty at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, together with an Honorary Committee of alumni, selected “the 100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years.” The list was selected from more than 300 nominees plus write-ins and was announced at a reception in honor of the 100th anniversary of journalism education at NYU on April 3, 2012....
Gawker.com—known for blatantly traffic-pandering headlines like Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life, and for burning out good writers—tried an experiment in January: Each day over a two-week period, a different staff writer was assigned to focus on posting only items that would garner the most traffic. This left the rest of the staff to “spend time on more substantive stories they may have neglected.” This week Nieman Journalism Lab published an analysis of how Gawker’s pageview-bait turn-taking experiment affected the site’s traffic and staff—and how their more serious journalism fared. It’s oddly good news….
Stereotypes? Fascinating look at media. Oregonians love NPR; Wisconsinites adore the Onion; the Huffington Post is widely read in Appalachia. These are a few of the favorites that the data team at Bitly uncovered when they parsed data from millions of clicks on their shortened links. We’ve turned their data into an interactive map and an illustration in the April 9, 2012 issue of Forbes....
The 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is out, and it includes some eye-opening numbers on who's making money from news these days.
Here's a hint. It's not newspaper companies....
"Our analysis suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people's lives," PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel said in a press release. "But it remains unclear who will benefit economically from this growing appetite for news."...
Findings from Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2012 report will have an impact on PR professionals. Better pay attention. ...“Our analysis suggests that news is becoming a more important and pervasive part of people’s lives,” Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, said in a press release. “But it remains unclear who will benefit economically from this growing appetite for news.” Problem is the tech companies that make these platforms are profiting from the ad sales. For instance, five technology companies accounted for 68 percent of all online ad revenue in 2011, the report said. Pew questioned whether these big tech companies will give a boost to legacy media brands, even tossing out the idea that Facebook could one day buy The Washington Post....
The spring 2012 issue of Nieman Reports asks newsroom veterans to critique their industry — and themselves. ...But it’s the cover package that might be of the most interest to Lab readers. Nieman Reports asked six former newspaper editors a simple question: What would you change if you were back in charge? Without worrying about tradition, how would you best organize the resources of a newsroom to do great journalism, serve your audience, and make the newspaper a sustainable business in 2012?...
Phew! Quite a heated debate (well, let’s just call it: Scrabble!) in our super-charged morning news conference today on the timeless news formula known simply as the “six W’s...
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