Interesting description of a way magazines can survive in the strange new era of the internet. Basically, it’s the model I’ve been thinking of: content lives online first, and the best eventually migrates to a high-quality printed version that people pay for. (8020 Publishing produces JPG, which takes user-submitted amateur photography from its website and turns them into beautiful bi-monthly glossy magazines.)
The Sacramento Bee’s public editor reports that, starting soon, the paper will be accepting video letters to the editor:
Holwerk said that, to his knowledge, no other large paper is accepting such videos, so there’s no one to learn from or “past practices” to follow.
The idea is that by using YouTube or similar sites, readers would make their videos and e-mail them to the paper.
The main task right now for Holwerk and his editorial colleagues is figuring out how things will work. There are more questions than answers. And the questions are many.
Those questions, though, mainly cover content and editing questions. (And they’re mostly unnecessary questions with ready answers — letters to the editor are already restricted in length and content.) There is one question that doesn’t need to be asked, and that’s, “Why?” There’s no need to ask that because this is a freakishly brilliant idea.
The report continues:
The video letters to the editor would have no such filter and, in theory at least, would be a product of the reader’s own initiative, work and creativity.
Who knows how it will turn out. It could be a big hit or a big flop. Maybe it will drift somewhere in between.
But, in my opinion, it’s worth the effort. I like the freshness of the idea and trying something new, particularly when it comes to tinkering with something as venerable as letters to the editor, which have always served as the vehicle for readers to interact with their paper and each other.
Exactly. The newspapers that will survive the industry’s impending collapse are the ones that use their old-media knowledge to build vibrant new online communities. Letters to the editor were a wonderful way for ordinary citizens to find an audience; now, blogs, podcasts and videoblogs fill some of that functions online. The trick is for newspapers to build platforms enabling people to use these new technologies, and I think the Bee’s online videos are a step in the right direction. I also think that once readers are faced with the immediacy of video (especially if editorial responses are made in video form as well) they will prefer the format to written letters to the editor.
A printed newspaper can’t do photos as well as a Web site can, and it can’t do video at all. Driving readers online to find these features can help keep them online and build the paper’s online audience until it can handle being, not a “paper,” but an online news portal that serves up written articles, videos, sound clips and photo montages. Newspapers don’t need to compete with online; they need to become online. (Via Romenesko.)
If I’m going to succeed after j-school, I’ll need to know video; video online is the future. The CNN-YouTube debates are one sign of where things are headed, as is the Sacramento Bee’s decision to begin accepting video letters to the editor. Newspapers can do video better than TV can, because (as Jeff Jarvis observes) they’re not bogged down with the expensive and cumbersome satellite trucks and equipment. All a newspaper videographer needs is a camera and a laptop.
What does this mean? Newspaper websites can truly leverage the power of broadband and short-form video to leapfrog old media video outlets. The new media “newspaper,” made up of text, audio and video, provides a far richer media consumption experience than anything out there. For me, in the long term, it means the future is going to be a very interesting place indeed. In the short term, it means I’ll need to learn to apply my film skills to journalism. It also means I need to add more sites to my RSS reader.
Robin “Roblimo” Miller, of Slashdot fame, writes an article for USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review on how newspapers can use the internet to their advantage. Slashdot is nearing its tenth birthday — making it positively ancient in Web terms — and even predates the modern blog era, so it’s safe to say that Miller knows what he’s talking about. He has a great love for online media, and, as a tech pioneer, he has hugely influenced the modern internet (and me — I was reading Slashdot back in the day, when I first got on the Web in 1998).
Miller’s advice boils down to a few things newspapers can do online to really distance themselves from their old-media peers. For the most part, these are things that are in striking distance for mid-market papers or for new media startups trying to carve out a niche for themselves in larger markets. The entire article bears reading, but here are a few points that I find particularly useful as I’m heading off to school this fall.
The first thing that Miller targets is the calendar, a staple of “weekender” Saturday editions or Sunday arts pages. Online, event calendars are often hard to find on newspapers websites, and even then they’re usually not as complete as their dead-tree cousins. This is a situation that newspapers need to fix, because calendars provide useful services for readers:
A website that can tell me about every upcoming meeting of the Bradenton City Council and every upcoming appearance of my favorite local bands and alert me to the next meeting of the Tamiami Trail Business Association is going to get a lot of visits from me — and from a lot of other people, too.
Maintaining a comprehensive local calendar takes work, but it is not highly-skilled work that requires a journalism degree or other specialized education. Anyone with good typing skills, the ability to send and receive faxes and emails, and enough self-discipline to call organizations and government agencies regularly to check the accuracy of their listings ought to be able to handle it.
I suspect that one of the reasons why it’s not often emphasized is precisely because it doesn’t require much specialized education. But neither does maintaining the classified pages in the print edition. Since there are already sites out there that blow the classifieds away, why not provide people in the community with a resouce they can use? Besides, if the newspapers don’t someone else will, eventually:
I suspect that two or at most three people could maintain a comprehensive online calendar for all of Southwest Florida or any other medium-sized metropolitan area. Add one or two aggressive salespeople who understand ad targeting (and a targeted ad-delivery system), and you not only have a valuable local resource, but one that ought to bring in substantial profits.
Newspapers don’t need to leave this one to chance. Establishing a locally-based service like this is one way to both aggressively expand an online presence and grab visitors — once they’re looking at the calendar, it’s easy for their eyes to wander over to a bit of sports news listed in the margins, and then they’re hooked. Not maintaining a convenient, up-to-date calendar is a big mistake for newspapers, and the clock is ticking until a tech-savvy entrepreneur comes and takes that market away from them.
Miller also wants newspapers to take on the local TV news. Text is something old media can do, maybe better than new; video is something old media can do, maybe better than new. But put them both together, and new media blows old out of the water. TV news items are short and consist mostly of talking heads — even when placed online, they don’t make for a very good viewing experience. But, Miller writes:
Meanwhile, the Washington Post and New York Times run interesting and engaging news videos, made by print reporters who often do their own camerawork. Post and Times news videos don’t look like TV news at all. For one thing, the average story length is minutes, not seconds. For another, they have better and more probing interviews, and use more ordinary people and fewer official sources on-camera than most TV news shows. Sometimes the camera movements are a little more casual than what you see on big-city or network TV news, and the reporters aren’t nearly as dolled-up as TV reporters, but that’s okay. It helps give these newspaper-based videos a “take you there” quality that formulaic TV news lacks.
Plus, technology makes new media videography a heck of a lot cheaper and lighter than TV:
It is now possible to outfit a reporter with a “backpack video” newsgathering rig, including a high-definition digital camcorder, all necessary sound equipment, and a compact tripod, for less than $3000. This equipment is nearly 100% “point and shoot,” too. It doesn’t take any great technical skill to operate.
…
For a fraction of the cost of running a single news helicopter, a newspaper could field a veritable army of “backpack videographers” who could provide intense, close-up coverage of events that now get overlooked by TV news operations — or that are covered only from 1000 feet in the air instead of from ground-level.
This is how newspapers with online video can make television obsolete. One of the local news stations here runs ads for their news team that show a man struggling to run with an enormous video camera to the scene of a breaking news story. TV stations continue to use huge, expensive satellite technology while a new media reporter can fit all her gear in her purse. This one area where new media can really make a killing. TV stations refuse to change with the times and are stuck with a mid-1990s business model, one which new media can exploit to their advantage.
Facebook might be hurting the already tiny circulation numbers of the campus weekly at my small liberal arts alma mater, but it sure did streamline one thing: getting in touch with people. Before Facebook (dark ages for colleges, I’m sure), contacting a source meant calling a dorm phone line that often wasn’t even hooked up to a phone or sending email to an email address that might not be checked more than once a week. It was awful.
These days — after Facebook — connecting to a source means sending a Facebook message. Finding out club officers means a quick look at a group page. Even obtaining photographs is streamlined — just go see if anyone’s posted any, then ask for permission to reprint them. Bang. Boom.
Of course this doesn’t scale well outside the walled garden of academia, but it is a sign of the usefulness of these social networking sites. They take all kinds of information that used to be spread out and hard to find and make it easy and accessible and centralized. The Google of people? You bet. Of course, it doesn’t help with the real work of interviewing and digging and writing, but it helps to automate some of the mindless chores of finding contact info and setting up interviews.
Case in point: I’m doing a story package for my alma mater’s alumni mag on a film an alum wrote and produced with a bunch of current students and other alumni. Before Facebook, tracking down contact info for all involved and then calling them would have been a chore. Today, I just joined the film’s discussion group and Facebooked them. Easy as pie.
GetReligion’s Molly Ziegler profiles a new faith/journalism website:
Rather than looking critically at the parameters set out by the project and readjusting to reflect the reality of different religions, the group simply excludes the religion that doesn’t fit. I’m not saying I’m not sympathetic, but it’s just interesting to contemplate how this works in story assignment and development.
When sources don’t say what you want them to say, do you ignore them? Do you exclude them? Do you rethink your story’s premise? I’d say how you answer that question says a lot about the quality of the piece you end up with.
Hits home for more than just religion coverage.
Boing Boing toots its own horn about a nice article on copyleft in The New York Times, of all places.
Cory Doctorow, co-editor of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, said the recording industry lawsuits were not “scaring students away from file-sharing, but scaring them into political consciousness.” Last year, Mr. Doctorow was an adviser to the Students for Free Culture chapter at the University of Southern California while teaching a course on the history of copyright law.
The Newsroom is copylefted, btw.
The Google–AP deal is now more than a month old, and it looks like pretty much everyone but Google and the AP hates it. Keith Robinson, AP Indianapolis bureau chief, came to speak to my reporting, writing and editing course earlier this week. He talked about the AP’s history and how it operates today. He even talked about freedom of information and the AP. But what about the Google deal?
He laughed at the question, and then turned to our professor and joking that we really were asking the hard questions. “The newspaper market has matured,” he told us, meaning that it had grown as much as it was going to, and that the AP was turning elsewhere to look for revenue. He took pains to explain that the money gained from the Google deal was going back into the AP cooperative, and thus theoretically back to the newspapers damaged by this deal, but that seems like small comfort.
Newspapers sites have been suspicious of Google News for a long time. On the surface (in the beginning, at least) Google News wasn’t really competition for newspaper sites. It was just a serious of links. Sure, while a surfer was using Google News, he or she would see contextual AdSense ads, but hopefully they wouldn’t distract the reader from finding what he or she was looking for and going to the newspaper’s site — and straight to the newspaper’s ads.
Before the Internet, papers shared content with one another through the Associated Press. It was a way for them to get information to their readers from places where they couldn’t afford to send a reporter, or a way to fill out anemic pages with ready-made content. Papers’ markets were defined by geographic area; there was no overlap (or virtually none) between markets, so it was OK for several papers to have the same content. People would read the local paper, and pay for it. Otherwise they’d get no news.
With the Internet, though, both the geographic specificity — the idea of the “local” paper — and the expectation that people will pay for news have been thrown out the window. It’s a media free-for-all, and the only way for media outlets to make money is through advertising. Problem is, the Google–AP deal kills advertising possibilities. If an AP member runs a great original story, they can’t do anything to stop the AP from coming to their site and copy-and-pasting the story onto the wire. Then suddenly all the hits — and ad revenue — that would come to their Web site go to the Google News AP service instead.
What news organization would want to be punished for producing a killer original piece? But in the post-print era, that’s what’s happening. What incentive does a paper have for being an AP member if they’re going to be treated like this? Steve Boriss on his blog “The Future of News” says that they should jump ship:
The question AP member papers should now be asking is not how Google could be so mean, but how they, themselves could be so blind about their relationship with the AP. These newspapers originally established, and now fund, control (in theory), and contribute their own local stories to the allegedly “not-for-profit” AP. But with their members’ money and content, AP first grew into a leviathan with an empire of more than 240 bureaus and 4,000 employees worldwide, and now into a cross between a Frankenstein that has turned on its master and a Dracula that is sucking its blood. […]
But now that the Internet and Google News have essentially installed an AP News Terminal on the PC of everyone with broadband service, newspapers who are members of the AP are funding their own destruction. AP members would be better off sitting in their newsrooms, launching their word processors, typing in “According to the Associated Press,” then copying and pasting from Google News, modifying the content every once in awhile to avoid copyright litigation.
With print ad revenue shrinking, newspapers might be better served ditching the AP and trying something else. They also need finally come around the the magic of the hyperlink, the thing that makes the Web the Web. Jeff Jarvis contrasts the old, AP way with the Web way:
A commenter on Matthew’s blog gives him a real-life example: the AP picked up a unique story from the Nashua, NH, Telegraph and that’s what Google displayed — along with other AP clients’ versions — above the original story from the paper. Now I know that the AP has been sensitive to this in many cases; they’re not out to hurt their own members and clients.
Nonetheless, the Google deal does rob traffic, thus revenue, from the paper that invested in journalism. And that will not help sustain journalism.
Note that the Nashua editor chuckles because Fark.com picked up the story and linked to the original — we pride ourselves in that in this world — and sent it good traffic. So Fark served journalism better than the wires and Google. That is telling.
Damon Kiesow, the editor mentioned above, adds a comment Jarvis’s post:
AP should just add an “original source” URL field to their feeds — which Google is now picking up. Google would then simply need to match the ‘source’ URL with news articles they spider and let the algorithm give some extra points to the originating publication.
Robinson mentioned something like this in his talk to my class — the AP is working on a tagging system to offer links back to originators’ sites. This doesn’t solve the original problem of lost ad revenue, though.
And it’s just a temporary solution. As newspapers wane, the AP will continue to face a revenue crunch. It may turn increasingly to tactics like the Google deal to ensure its survival. Then again, it might not. But if newspapers want to thrive on the Web, they’ll need to embrace the techniques of the medium — hyperlinks. It would be great if every news story out there contained at least one. Here’s Jarvis again:
Whenever reporters at a wire service — or a newspaper, web site, TV station, magazine, or blog — sit down to write a story, they should include links to their source material, whether that is others’ stories or web sites or original documents … or even, yes, Wikipedia. We bloggers do it, it’s not hard. If they’re writing this for online, the links should appear as they do in blog posts.
Let’s get on that.
Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it does come with a smart-looking pleather case.
The most interesting item on its insanely huge product page is this one:
Top U.S. newspapers including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post; top magazines including TIME, Atlantic Monthly, and Forbes—all auto-delivered wirelessly.
That’s really revolutionary, for several reasons. Because Kindle has its own cell-phone-style network connection, you can get these updates anywhere there’s cell service (without paying data fees, which is nice). Kindle also has a 160 dpi electronic paper display that approximates the way printed paper looks. A portable device that wirelessly downloads articles each morning and displays them on a crisp paper-like screen? This is the device that’s going to save the newspaper industry from the Internet, right?
Well, not really. True, if you were debating about the newspapers vs. Internet a few years ago, someone might have proposed a device exactly like Kindle. (Like Kindle except for one detail: the hypothetical paper-saver would be supercheap, instead of $400 like Kindle.) But the Internet’s threat to the traditional newspaper business has evolved over time. For one thing, Kindle isn’t interactive. For another, there’s still the ad problem: if newspaper content on Kindle comes free, how are the newspapers getting making money? Will there be ads on Kindle?
Web sites are too deeply ingrained at this point for Kindle to get people back to reading the E-newspaper. Plus, unless there’s a very strong and aggressive ad system on Kindle, newspapers won’t be making much money either. Then there’s the ethical problems with Kindle: everything on Kindle belongs to Amazon and the content creators, not you, and you can’t lend Kindle books or articles to other Kindles. Amazon also makes it difficult to upload content to Kindle. Philosophically, Kindle (and other E-book readers) are a change for the worse in the way we think about writing, reading and intellectual property. Mark Pilgrim has assembled a nice collection of the different voices on this issue in The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts).
Kindle is already being referred to as the “the iPod of books,” and people will probably continue to refer to it as such. It’s best summed up by John Gruber:
You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader — and whether they’re readable at all in the future is solely at Amazon’s discretion.
Doesn’t sound like a win to me
I speculated that the newspaper and magazine subscription service was the Kindle’s killer feature. A device that is automatically pushed the day’s paper every morning is the future, right up there with flying cars and an insolvent social security. So I subscribed to The Journal. To be sure, its neat having a copy of the day’s paper always on hand, and the $9.99/month price is fair. But, while the Kindle successfully captures the book metaphor, it is not so good with newspapers.
I’m impressed with the level of care put into every aspect of this site.
News orgs need to play to the strengths of their medium; i.e. make hypertext documents that act like hypertext documents.
Just as the reported quote is an essential element of journalism, on the web the “reported link” must become an essential element of journalism.
There is a fear that once readers leave the news org’s site they won’t come back. That’s valid, I suppose, but there’s no point being on the Web if a news org won’t act like it’s on the Web.
Now that Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo political blog has won a George Polk Award for legal reporting, can we please officially bury the tired old nonsense about blogging not being real journalism?
That’s fantastic news.
Yesterday a federal judge ordered WikiLeaks off the internet.
Nice try.
What’s that quote? “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”?
