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Hope for the news business

A friend of mine sent me an interesting article about how Coldplay inadvertently got a #1 album in terms of sales and #1 song by giving away music. The music industry is facing a lot of the same problems as the news business in that, with so much media available for free on the Web, people are not as willing to pay for it anymore.

Or are they? A small nugget at the end of the article gives hope for the news person:

Following the precedent of Radiohead, Wayne has demonstrated that giving away music can actually be good for business. But, just as significantly, he has made something so exciting people will pay to hear it. This, rather obviously, may be the key to the music business’s malaise: quality begets sales.”

One of the big problems in the past 30 years in newsrooms is that management has cut newsroom staff to increase profits, or to make up for profit shortfalls when they don’t meet projections. This shareholder-driven way of managing newsrooms have been criticized by media scholars such as Phil Meyer for years as a “death spiral.” In this scenario, newsrooms eat their own seed corn by getting rid of the very people who produce strong original content and then fill those spaces with AP or other wire copy. The drop in quality is noticeable to the news consumer.

But perhaps Coldplay has inadvertently demonstrated that you can give some of it away for free and still charge for content. The key is it has to be quality. The romantic journalistic view of our work is that, of course, it is all quality. But journalists readily acknowledged they are crushed for time and being asked to do more with less. Investing in the newsroom during lean times can increase quality. People will pay for that in their music, why wouldn’t they pay for it in something that has an even greater impact on their lives such as news?

Posted 26 June 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (0)

Vanity Fair’s history of the Net

jpkthumb.jpgThis month’s (or actually next month’s, July-month’s) Vanity Fair has a great article “An oral history of the Internet: How the Web Was Won.”

The article does just that, with quotes and anecdotes from the big names today, the guys and gals who made all the dough and quotes from the egg-heads who made it all happen.

Here’s some highlights in case you don’t want to shell out six odd bucks:

Jim Clark is one of the founders of Netscape:

“One of the things that struck me at that early embryonic state (the early 90s) was that the Internet was going to mutate the newspaper industry, was going to change the classified-ad business, and change the music business. And so I went around and met with Rolling Stone magazine. I met with Times Mirror Company, Time Warner. We demonstrated how you could play music over this thing, how you could shop for records, shop for CDs. We demonstrated a bunch of shopping applications. We wanted to show the newspapers what they were going to undergo.”

The venerable Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone wasn’t a taker and neither were the newspapers. DOH!

They got another chance, however.

Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems with some Stanford buddies and later joined a prestigious venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The media people essentially did not think the Internet would be important or disruptive. In 1996, I got together the C.E.O.’s of 9 of the 10 major newspaper companies in America in a single room to propose something called the New Century Network. It was the C.E.O.’s of The Washington Post, and The New York Times and Gannett and Times Mirror and Tribune and I forget who else. They couldn’t convince themselves that a Google, a Yahoo or an eBay would be important, or that eBay could ever replace classified advertising.”

DOH! DOH!

Don’t even mention Craigslist to them. And speaking of that list. Continue Reading »

Posted 12 June 2008 † Joe Kokenge § Joe Kokenge § From The Cyberbrains ‡ Comments (1)

TV strikes out; CJ’s in the bullpen

As hard as it might seem on sports fans now, the demise of local sports on television might be the precursor to a jock-world bonanza.

KRCG in Jefferson City, MO recently eliminated its sports department as part of a cost-cutting binge of layoffs. ???????? ????? ????????Clyde BentleyBut it is not the first station to do so. Stations from Norfolk to Las Vegas have given sports the ax in a move that seems antithetical to our belated realization that “local” means “popular.”

The trouble with local sports on television, however, is not the content itself. It’s the demographics of the market and the logistics of television.

Sports sections, be they on TV broadcasts or in newspapers, are advertising dogs. I cannot tell you how many times when I was a newspaper general manager I had to discount agency ads when they ended up in the sports section.

Sports fans are loyal readers or viewers. But they are guys. And guys seldom make buying decisions in American households. A study by Mediamark in 2004 showed that just under half of male readers go to the sports section but that less than a quarter of women do. That alone might not be a marketing challenge, but 63% of women peruse the general news section – joined by 57% of the men. You can also get a closer point spread in business, opinion, classified and even the comics.

An advertiser has to ask why they should display their wares to a bunch of fellows who don’t know a sale from a sail when they can get both the men and the real buyers in many other sections of the paper or segments of the TV news.

That’s bad for newspapers, but the emphasis on local news is doubly bad for television.

A newspaper typically covers a city and a few small towns around it. But the television station in the same market beams its programming over hundreds of square miles. The newspaper may have three or even a half dozen high schools in its coverage area. Even a small market station like KRCG has dozens of high schools, scores of junior highs and perhaps thousands of Little League teams. No one can afford to send reporters to all the games and no evening newscast has enough time to air all the stories.

TV stations do best covering what a whole lot of people want to watch. Local sports are important, but I have absolutely no interest in the junior varsity volleyball scores from a town I’m not sure how to drive to.
Fortunately, there is a great solution in the wings. And we don’t even have to invent it.

The Internet provides an easy way to disseminate that information widely without requiring everyone to read or watch it. As my old friend and media watcher Vin Crosbie once said, “The Internet is not a mass medium. It’s a massively delivered niche medium.”

Internet-facilitated coverage is ideal for sports. It’s cheap to publish, easy to access and allows the consumer to pick just the stories that interest them.

Of course, the technology alone doesn’t answer the staffing problem. That’s still a whole lot of games to cover. So bring in the citizen journalism cavalry.

I spent several years as a Little League then youth soccer dad. I bought an outrageously expensive telephoto lens so I could capture the mud on my goalkeeper-son’s face as he dove for the ball. And I wasn’t alone. It was surprising how many times I had to jockey for shots with other parents.
The parents are there, they are interested and they are shooting photos and recording stats. The hard work is organizing the effort to collect that information. Those of us who have worked in citizen journalism for any time at all know the fallacy of the “Field of Dreams Syndrome.” Just because you build the Web site doesn’t mean they will come.

Good. That means careers for journalists. Organizing parents and sports fans is not all that different than coordinating a huge newsroom. Or riding herd on the freelancers for a magazine. It can be done.
So sorry, sports fans. The tube is going dark. But not to worry, as the game will go on. Just stay tuned.

Posted 26 May 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (0)

Taking CJ to the ‘hood’

What happens when citizen journalism collides with traditional journalism?

Bentley bookcaseLike any collision, you could expect a few injuries – at least damaged egos. But so far neither type of journalism has been fatal to the other. What is of concern, however, is that the bumper of the CJ Prius doesn’t mesh well with that of the Traditional News SUV.

Here at the Missouri School of Journalism, our citizen journalism efforts are narrowly focused on its relationship with traditional journalism. We are the world’s oldest journalism school and have served that profession for a century. My charter from Dean Mills was to find some way to keep trained journalists in the user-contributing future media picture.

Our first research planning meetings were marked by loud arguments over whether it was even possible, whether we would ruin journalism or whether it would make any difference at all. The first consensus was unexpected: Citizen journalism approached by a traditional organization must have a revenue stream.

The blogs, discussion boards and news groups that spawned citizen journalism had little profit motive. We quickly realized that the burden of paying a staff significantly changed a medium.

Continue Reading »

Posted 24 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (1)

Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

jpkthumb.jpgSix weeks ago, the first MyMissourian site died an ignominious death at the hands of rogue spammers (which is the Web equivalent of choking on a hot dog.)

Needless to say, as with any total Web site annihilation, there was a fair amount of teeth-gnashing, fingernail biting and general angst from the staff. I think I even saw Jeremy weep one manly tear of grief.

But, with the gracious help of the tech boys in the back room, we downloaded some content to fill the newshole of the print version of MyMissourian, refilled the grave of the Mambo version of MyMissourian and let her Rest In Peace.

Clyde, ever the master of HTML tables, rigged a quick placeholder to fill the URL and we waited a few days for the boys in the back to recode the site into WordPress. Now, six weeks later, it’s like it never happened. We have a new home, with more functionality with barely a beat missed. Indeed, if I weren’t so lazy, I could have written this post a month ago. The fluid changeover was almost imperceptible — so easy, in fact, I had to stop and reflect to realize what had just taken place.

Imagine if we were a print-only publication and our presses or whole building even had burned down? What would we have done, then? The teethgnashing and nailbiting would have been far more dramatic, to say the least. And, with the present financial state of the newspaper industry, it’s doubtful there would be such a swift rebirth, if a rebirth at all.

Sure, replacing a Web site is easier than replacing multi-million dollar presses, but that’s not the point here. Iterating is the point. That’s a word I first heard uttered in a Web setting by the Star Warsian Roelof Botha.

Botha is one of the “big-wigs” at Sequoia Capital and has made money as a venture capitalist on projects like PayPal and YouTube. His name gets bantered around with the likes of Michael Mortiz and Elon Musk. I once worked at a Web site in Santa Monica, mahalo.com, in which Sequoia Capital was a principal investor. Botha came to the office one day to give us a pep talk, not about the vulnerabilities of the Death Star, but about what would happen once mahalo.com went live. Continue Reading »

Posted 15 April 2008 † Joe Kokenge § Joe Kokenge ‡ Comments (1)

Something is brewing in journalism

I am up to my digital derriere in a project to write a “definitive” paper on cititizen journalism. The problem with “definitive” is that, well, it’s not very definitive. My mind has raced back and forth over the various aspects of this phenomenon that have either pleasantly surprised me, met my expectations or sideswiped both me and the journalism world.

clyde-tea.jpgLast week I had the good fortune to get the journalist’s traditional source of inspiration: A new and very short deadline. The Donald W. Reynolds Institute at Mizzou asked me to knock out a quick look at citizen journalism for its Web site. Isn’t it amazing how much better you can write with an editor breathing down your throat?

So here it is, right out of the microwave: A nice cuppa CJ:

It’s difficult to imagine two words that have caused more anxiety among news media professionals than “citizen journalism.” There have been endless arguments over what the term means, who it includes and whether it will kill or save the American new industry.

For the past four years, a team at the Missouri School of Journalism has studied citizen journalism from the closest of quarters. Although we were all traditional journalists and all professional skeptics, we followed the “do it to learn” philosophy of the world’s oldest journalism school and launched MyMissourian.com on Oct. 1, 2004. Aimed at the community around the University of Missouri rather than the school itself, MyMissourian features content written by non-journalists but lightly edited by the staff. We then insert a selection of the content in the free-circulation Saturday print edition of the Columbia Missourian.

Four years later, I’m very comfortable with both the citizen journalism concept and the phrase, but I’m still frustrated that my colleagues have such difficulty with it.
Citizen journalism is no more a replacement for traditional journalism than teabags are a replacement for water. Both can stand alone comfortably, but when combined they produce something quite wonderful.

The “citizen” in the term is a continual irritant to news people, who complain that it implies they are excluded from citizenship. Wrong definition of citizen. The better analogy is “citizen soldiers” — the militia and National Guard that serve our country “part time.” As my chief warrant officer father explained, Guard members want to help shoulder the responsibility of defending the nation – they just don’t want make a career of it.

Similarly, citizen journalists don’t want newsroom jobs – they just have something to say. And often they want to say it because those of us on the professional side are too busy with the big stories to see the little items that mean so much to people. It’s unlikely citizen journalists will ever effectively cover Congress, but they sure get their neighbors’ attention with tales of pets, kids and community activities.

Our research continues to show that citizen journalism expands the range of topics available in the mass media as it expands the range of voices. And the team – now known as the Cyberbrains – is confident that the recipe for the future of news is to drop that citizen journalism teabag right into that boiling pot of newsroom water. The resulting brew, as Thomas Lipton said, is more than good. It’s “brisk.”

Posted 08 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (1)

Light my fire

A bunch of fellows with calloused hands, tattooed arms and ability I envy recently taught me an important lesson about the new era of journalism.

Clyde the welderFor the past four years, I’ve talked, research and cajoled my colleagues in an effort to get them over their fear and loathing of citizen journalism. But when I look back at it, my efforts were pointed primarily at the loathing part of the equation. My assumption was that once they overcame their biases about news-like content from untrained non-journalists, the fear would vanish also.

What a mistake. I learned that in spades by donning a heavy leather apron, pulling on a Darth Vader-ish mask and trying to burn up the world.
My son Garrett, who is soon to graduate from engineering school, has a knack for picking the right presents. Even as a little one shopping Dad’s money, he could point to just the right piece of jewelry or clothing to light up Mom’s eyes.

Last Christmas he surprised me beyond words. His gift to me was a four-week class in welding at the Columbia Area Career Center – our local vocational training facility.

Keep in mind that the qualities I’m often known for are a lack of coordination, the dexterity of rhino and a touch of impatience. OK, more than a touch. But I also subscribe to the mantra of doing what you fear most – at least once. I know computers, I know writing and I can even hammer nails. But sparks, flames and glowing metal were out of my league.

But there I sat in a room full of guys with hot-rod T-shirts and gimme caps as a gravel-voiced instructor showed us how to turn on an oxy-acetylene torch without blowing up the building. I’m sure I looked like the proverbial deer in the headlights.

Somewhere near the end of that introductory demonstration, I realized my panic was the same as I had seen on the faces of dozens of students, friends and fellow journalists when I tried to explain the wonders of online citizen journalism.

It’s not the loathing, dummy. It’s the fear.

My failing as an evangelist for citizen journalism is the paucity of reassurance I offered to those who see their jobs, their passion, their worlds at risk by the new twist on the word that defines their lives. I’m a change junkie, so “new and improved” makes me happy.

Unless I’m faced with something as alien as a welding torch.

I eventually took my own advice, checked that there were plenty of fire extinguishers around and just did it. By the end of the four weeks, I could shower the floor with sparks, adjust a torch flame to a needle point and fuse two chunks of steel together into something that was more-or less-recognizable.

Just like me, citizen journalism won’t burn down the world. It may singe a few hairs and it will undoubtedly produce journalism only “more-or less-recognizable,” but the concept, need and utility of news will survive. Just as I learned that using a cutting torch employs some of the same skills I learned with an X-acto Knife, we need to enjoy finding how our traditional journalism skills apply to citizen journalism.

Now if we could just find an excuse to wear one of those helmets …

Posted 03 April 2008 † Clyde Bentley § Clyde Bentley ‡ Comments (0)

Leading, not following

Jeremy LittauMark Cuban had an interesting post pertaining to the news media and blogging this past week. Cuban’s a sharp guy, he’s an entrepreneur who “gets it” when it comes to striking that balance between technology and content distribution. Plus he remade the Dallas Mavericks, maybe he can take over the LA Times next and make that thing work too.

He correctly diagnoses a big problem with media sites and blogs, in that they don’t seem to have a direction:

“Why. Why ? Why do you do what you do. Is it because:

  • You get paid to do it ?
  • Because you want to promote something or to promote yourself ?
  • Because you want to start a discussion ?
  • Because you want to communicate with customers, fans or ??
  • Because its a way to say whats on your mind ?
  • Because you want to make money from it ?
  • I’m sure there are other reasons to communicate on the web. What software you use, even whether you use video, text and/or pictures, really doesn’t matter.

What matters is why you do what you do.

I see this over and over again, both on content sites and in newsrooms I’ve been in (past and present). They tell a reporter one day they’re blogging, then leave them to figure out what that means. Oh, the technology is set up by the company, but determining the content? On your own, dude.

Clyde has already said before on this blog that journalists are afraid of too much commentary on their blogs, because having strong opinions might bump up too much against their strained notions of objectivity, and he’s right on that point. Many newspaper blogs I’ve read seem to be extensions of a reporter’s own reporting, stuff that doesn’t make it into the story. In doing this, news sites are falling into a trap, churning out blog material that pretty much mirrors what non-legacy media already are producting. Cuban sums it up nicely:

“If you are a blogger, and you work for a major media company, you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You are granted a platform with traffic. Thats the good news. The bad news is that you also have ratings. If you can’t hold your traffic or build upon it, you better hope you generate sufficient value in other places, or your days of publishing on the web may be numbered. For those of you who haven’t noticed, paid bloggers do come and go from media websites if they don’t produce. But wait, there is worse news.

The media companies that have traffic foundations and can dual purpose people so that they can publish off line and online come with their own set of problems. They are paddling as fast as they can to retain their offline businesses. Newspapers, to continue to use them as an example, are pushing as hard as they can to sell papers and retain advertisers. For those who think that a newspaper is just like a newsletter, you have never been a paperboy.”

And later …

“That is the endgame I see for newspapers that publish complimentary content on their website. You can call it blogging. You can even call it something else. The point I didnt make clear enough in my previous post, is that it has to be something else. No matter the quality of the writer, its just another stab at an audience in a medium where there are no barriers to entry. Its just one more example of the newspaper business following everyone else onto the web and doing exactly what everyone else is doing, but expecting they will be better because they are “The big paper”. Thats a huge mistake.”

Cuban’s post is worth reading, I just gave you the highlights. But by trying to keep a foot in both camps, a lot of people are starting to wonder if journalists are degrading the product. Just producing news content on a blog won’t cut it; that is being done by everyone else.

When I teach students here about how to blog for their job, I tell them to get out of the concept of reporting the news. And don’t do the “check out today’s issue for a story on such-and-such” posts either. Instead, consider the other things related to your beat (or even NOT related to your beat) that you can talk about:

  • The process of making the news. Apply some transparancy to enhance the story a person reads. What was it like to gather info for this behind the scenes?
  • Color material. What is a source like during an interview? Tell them details that are irrelevant to the story
  • Blog about things off your beat. What has your attention these days? What’s in your CD player? Doing this kind of thing humanizes the reporter (and this CAN’T be worse for credibility than the ivory tower mentality, could it?). It also is exactly the kind of commentary that makes blogs interesting.

The key seems to be to find a way to have your blogging job not cannibalize content the content from your regular job, but also to do it in a way that enhances your reporting, making the NEWS more valuable. In this manner, the blog is there to grab eyeballs and keep them there so they read the news, sort of a gateway drug for news use.

That would be my idea. I am curious what others think about Cuban’s post and how we can reimagine this thing.

Posted 22 March 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (3)

Standing behind what you print, even if you didn’t write it

Reviewing anything is a daunting task for a newspaper. Believe me - I know firsthand. After using a poor auto review Thinking in the sunfrom a wire service and losing our biggest advertiser at a weekly I helped I start, I don’t think I ran another review again. But newspapers and other media organizations cannot ignore reviews either. It’s fundamental to the community mission of providing objective information. Most importantly, if a news organization has the guts to run a review, it must stand behind it, no matter who complains - and in today’s converged age of journalism - no matter who writes it.

A case in point - The Columbia Missourian rarely writes reviews anymore. That’s why all of us citizen journalism watchers cheered when they began to include reviews from CoMoWhine and Dine, a local blog from five frequent diners who claim “the only thing we’re sugar-coating is the desserts,” in the weekly free circulation paper. The site deserves the publicity because its authors write some pretty good, and I think pretty fair, reviews. It’s the first place I go now before deciding where to eat in town. What I like about the blog, that I think it would be hard for a media organization to duplicate, is the reviewers divergent tastes. They review everything from fine dining to fast food. They differ on whether to hate or love the national chains or whether fast food is barely edible or ultimately satisfying. One of their contributors gave Arby’s 5 for $5.95 a glowing review (just don’t try to eat all 5 sandwiches yourself, Revee cautions). Continue Reading »

Posted 16 March 2008 † Hans Meyer § From The Cyberbrains ‡ Comments (1)

True citizen journalism

We had an interesting email come in the Powers That Be here at Mizzou the other day. It was from Vadim Gorelik, one of the people run the citizen journalism Web site Neaju, promoting the site’s work and some of their activities. A couple lines from an email exchange caught my attention (and emphasis is mine):

As a mentor to future journalists, I am certain you are aware of increasing profiteering and sensationalism that is increasingly dominating American journalism, often at the expense of the value we all hold near and dear to our hearts – journalistic integrity. It is for that reason that we’ve created the first true citizen journalism site on the Internet – www.Neaju.com.

The first “true” cit-j site. When our own Clyde Bentley wrote back and pointed out that OhMyNews has been online for, like, the whole millenium so far and that others (including MyMissourian) had been up since 2004 and beyond, the response was even more interesting.

I will take an issue with your reference to OhMyNews as a true citizen journalism site. Although they have been around for a long time, and is probably one of the most successful CJ efforts, they do exercise editorial control over their submissions, which I believe is stepping away from being true to the ideals of citizen journalism.

This is not meant to criticize those doing what they’re doing over at Neaju, but I believe that the sentiments expressed by Vadim get to the heart of a lot of debates we’re having in both the industry and academia about the citizen journalism phenomenon. Is it journalism? Is it news? Are they journalists or citizens doing journalism? What makes Timmy’s art class drawing journalism and not the latest refrigerator-magnet fare?

If anything, Vadim’s response misses the point: the rise of cit-j has led to a really cool discussion within the industry, and that is the question of what true journalism is. Four years ago I would have had a pretty unequivocally narrow definition; today, I am not nearly as easy to pin down. Thus, I’m not sure anyone really has the right to claim what “true” citizen journalism is, because we can’t even agree anymore on what real journalism is. Except in the j-schools of America, of course. But no amount of navel gazing is substitute for an honest-to-goodness public discussion on the issue.

The definition of citizen journalism is so diverse and hard to capture that any definition from a cit-j practitioner that excludes a large class of what currently constitutes cit-j is bordering dangerously close on Web bigotry 2.0 (e.g. the “YouTube is so last year” crowd). And by overemphasizing the notion of control, I believe Vadim mistakes the process of individual self-publishing for that of a large group. If an individual self-publishes, they are wholly responsible for what is printed. If someone submits to a site, the law is still a little fuzzy on who is responsible for what when all hell breaks loose. Control is not a mechanism for shutting down viewpoints, but rather a mechanism to make sure the site that publishes those viewpoints isn’t shut down.

Truthfully, it makes no sense for any cit-j publication to shut out those who submit. Contributors are the lifeblood of a cit-j publication just as subscribers are for a traditional publication. If you try to weed people out, all you’ll do is discourage people from submitting.

In addition, a quick perusal of Neaju shows there is some editorial control happening. The very notion of a “Highest Ranked News Stories” or “Top 10 Reporters” automatically elevates some stories and writers to the front page. This is editorial function (helllloooo, gatekeeping!). My guess is it’s based on user ratings and Web stats, but it is gatekeeping nonetheless whether it is done by a computer or done by the mob.

The point, of course, is that we can play semantic games all day about what constitutes “true” citizen journalism, but it really misses the point. The conversation is new, growing, and exciting. And it is diverse. Let the people decide how much control they want by whom they choose to write for; you’d be surprised how many of our submitters appreciate a light editorial touch now and again.

Posted 18 February 2008 † Jeremy § Jeremy Littau ‡ Comments (19)