"Undeniably, there is money to be made in digital publishing with free reader access, but whether that revenue leads to profits depends upon the scale and scope of the organization. The potential revenue does not appear to be of the magnitude that will support the massive operations of existing news organizations. What works in today’s web landscape are lean and mean organizations with little or no management bureaucracy — operations where nearly every employee is working on producing actual content."

John Gruber hits it out of the park in his article Charging for Access to News Sites.

This seems to be the crucial factor separating the news sites making money from the news sites hemorrhaging money. As Gruber points out, the old media dinosaurs who refuse to see the light about online profitability are precisely those whose jobs are all about management, and not about content.

The Political Graveyard →

Awesome site for researching politics & politicians. What did we ever do before Google/the Internet?

"The issue is not saving newspapers. The issue is, among other things, seeing that good journalism survives. It’s also about making sure that people who “consume” media demand better than they’ve been getting, by persuading them to become activists in the way they consume."

Boing Boing guest blogger Dan Gillmor writing in Saving Newspapers, Part MMIX: Collude and Conspire. Here’s some cold water for the increasingly hysterical “save our newspapers!!!1” crowd. They’re not going to get saved.

"

There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.

Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.

"

The Wire’s David Simon, writing in his article In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police

Saving newspapers →

Fred Clark examines Walter Isaacson’s recent Time cover story:

His big solution, in short, is that somebody needs to invent some kind of convenient micropayment system that would allow newspapers to charge for the online content we’re currently giving away for free. Web advertising, Isaacson figures, will never produce sufficient revenue to cover the cost of producing all that free content.

Well, maybe that would help. Partly. Perhaps. Although I’m far from convinced that newspapers are really suffering from a problem of insufficient revenue as much as they are from a problem of foolishly inappropriate revenue expectations.

Oh yes all that, and then the added problem of any such magical micropayment system breaking the freaking Internet. As in, suddenly an entire class of Web pages are available only to users with Web browsers and operating systems blessed by content providers. It would be like the old browser wars all over again, except that anyone using a minority Web browser or operating system will be left out in the cold. A good rule of thumb: if you’re considering a Web policy that will lock some users out, it’s a bad idea. Don’t do it.

But I agree with Fred that newspapers are dying and there’s little we can do to prevent that. What we need to do, somehow, is figure out how to preserve the best qualities of newspapers in this new media world.

"

Part of the problem is right there in the name: e-book. In the print world, the word “book” is used to refer to both the content and the medium. In the digital realm, “e-book” refers to the content only—or rather, that’s the intention. Unfortunately, the conflation of these two concepts in the nomenclature of print naturally carries over to the digital terminology, much to the confusion of all.

This is not the case with music, for example, where the medium and the content are separate. The medium changes—vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, MP3—but music is still music. Music is the product. Music is what you’re buying. The medium is just a vessel, and that vessel changes ruthlessly. When a better, cheaper, faster, or more convenient medium appears, the music follows—with or without the content owners.

"

John Siracusa: The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

Northwestern's Medill School is looking for a few good coders wanting to earn a master's degree in journalism →

This is pretty rad. Interactive media (like this NYT campaign contribution guide) are the future of journalism online. Good on Medill for pulling code nerds into j-schools. Journalism needs them.

Google settles with book publishers, becomes bookseller →

The old model buys books from authors and publishes them. It’s dying, just like all traditional print models.

The new model is more like a literary agent: edit, package, and market the text, in exchange for a portion of the profits (NOT royalties). The “publisher” doesn’t actually publish the book—Google and Amazon do, as a print-on-demand service.

Discuss.

"Stop and think about where you are reading this column. If you are one of the million or so people who are reading it in a newspaper that landed on your doorstop or that you picked up at the corner, you are in the minority."

I’m guilty as charged. (From this NYT article about the Christian Science Monitor’s announcement that, after more than 100 years, it will cease publishing a daily paper. It’s only going to get worse from here.)

At Frankfurt, Many Say Digital Will Take Over Print Books by 2018 →

Reading between the lines here, it looks like the Internet is making certain types of books obsolete. BUT (and this is a big deal) not everything.

While 39 percent of respondents agreed that online bookselling was the most important industry development in the 60-year history of the fair, some 25 percent forecasted that the traditional retail bookseller would be obsolete in the next 60 years; the literary agent (21%) and the editor (14 per cent) also were said to be facing a slow demise.

See, the doom-and-gloom forgets that people don’t buy book solely for reading. A book is a device for transferring information, sure — just like a newspaper, and those have been facing some issues of their own lately. So perhaps the Scott McClellan expose-type books will be going away for good. But on the other hand, certain categories of books are bought just as much for their physical existence as objects as they are for the information they contain. And those books won’t be going away. We may not have bookstores, but we will have coffee table books, cookbooks, and big honking literary novels. Trust me.

Publishers should all have a /covers directory →

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow:

… publishers should create default directories called “covers” at their server-root (e.g., tor.com/covers, harpercollins.co.uk/covers, etc) filled with high-rez PNGs or JPGs (or both) named after the book’s ISBN — for Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, it would be http://harpercollins.co.uk/0060530928.png. Tweak your robots.txt file to make sure the search-engines all crawl these directories, so when you search on images.google.com or images.yahoo.com for an ISBN, the publisher’s high-rez would be right there at the top.

Noted.

Olympics Tracker →

I can’t believe I haven’t noticed this before, but the NYT has an amazing interactive Olympic infographic. This is top-notch journalism.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web →

I’m in love with this site. Text-heavy Web design seems to be my thing — and I’ll definitely need to make use of this guide later.

"…having a journalist “badge of tribal fealty” enables one access to public officials and records, while scribes with the “blogger” label induces those same authority figures to cast aside requests for information that the public has a right to know. … Governments must inject more transparency into their activities and records, but this task may be an inherent anathema to those holding power."

AZspot: Blogging and Journalism

At the same time, most organizations are pretty lax on their definition of “press.” When I was in j-school, we needed press credentials to get into the county jail to write a story on overcrowding there. Our professor made us nice ID cards that nevertheless identified us as contributors to one of the j-school’s blogs. The fact that we had verification that we were writing for something, though, was apparently enough.

(via Jack Shedd)