by Pat McNees (updated 2-2-24), orig. published 10-2-15)
The days of "the internet wants to be free" are ending. As the advertising-pays-for-print-journalism model stops working, will the blog-for-free-because-it-will-give-you-exposure-and-a-platform model replace it in the name of "citizen journalism"? What are the alternatives? Here are links to some of the debates and articles circulating on this topic -- most recent at the top:
• Soaring newsprint costs make life even harder for newspapers (The Economist, 11-6-21) A British newspaper boss tells The Economist, “It’s like tasering an elderly person who’s already on pacemaker.”
• Tough Business (Columbia Journalism Review series, 60th anniversary issue,12-20-21) Sewell Chan on the journalism industry’s persistent struggles.
---What E.B. White Told Xerox The literary demigod delivers a broadside against corporate sponsorship of the news
---Build the Wall (David Simon) Most readers won’t pay for news. But if we move quickly, maybe enough of them will
---The Baby Bind (Mary Ellen Schoonmaker) Can journalists be mothers?
---Balance of Power Jean Schwoebel on the miracle Le Monde wrought
---A ‘Daily News’ Diary (Mary Ann Giordano)A play-by-play of a paper up for sale
---The Pain of Being Terminated (John Long) A veteran TV reporter reflects on being unceremoniously ousted
• Does Journalism Have a Future? (Jill Lepore, New Yorker, 1-28-19) The more desperately the press chases readers, the more it resembles our politics. In an era of social media and fake news, journalists who have survived the print plunge have new foes to face. "Even as news organizations were pruning reporters and editors, Facebook was pruning its users’ news, with the commercially appealing but ethically indefensible idea that people should see only the news they want to see....Every time Facebook News tweaks its algorithm—tweaks made for commercial, not editorial, reasons—news organizations drown in the undertow....BuzzFeed surpassed the Times Web site in reader traffic in 2013. BuzzFeed News is subsidized by BuzzFeed, which, like many Web sites—including, at this point, those of most major news organizations—makes money by way of “native advertising,” ads that look like articles. In some publications, these fake stories are easy to spot; in others, they’re not. At BuzzFeed, they’re in the same font as every other story....
"The Times remains unrivalled. It staffs bureaus all over the globe and sends reporters to some of the world’s most dangerous places. It has more than a dozen reporters in China alone. Nevertheless, BuzzFeed News became more like the Times, and the Times became more like BuzzFeed, because readers, as Chartbeat announced on its endlessly flickering dashboards, wanted lists, and luxury porn, and people to hate."
"The broader problem is that the depravity, mendacity, vulgarity, and menace of the Trump Administration have put a lot of people, including reporters and editors, off their stride."
• BBC & The New York Times — where the R&Ds meet the news (Global Editors Network, 1-31-19) "Some things obvious to newsrooms today, were most probably thought of by a Research & Development team before becoming norm. Though some R&D teams have been around for years, others are just now starting to develop interesting projects. Whether focusing on AI and machine learning, blockchain, or smart speakers and voice devices, the R&Ds are aiming to help advise newsrooms on what’s next; identifying where technology and news, unitedly, can fuel what will drive the media industry forward...."In a media landscape where twists and turns are common, the Research & Development teams don't only have to help in the now, but also predict the future. So where do they get their ideas from, how do they interact and implement their solutions, and in what direction do they see news and technology to be headed next?"
• Five myths about the news business (David Chavern, Outlook section, Washington Post, 12-3-2020) 'Clicks' pay for newsrooms, Subscriptions alone will pay for journalism, Newsrooms depend financially on coverage of Trump, Billionaires will save the news business, and ...what's #5? from the Post's excellent5 Myths series.
• Newsonomics: Tronc’s selling, and buying, and just generally shapeshifting (Ken Doctor, Nieman Lab, 5-31-18) Patrick Soon-Shiong, the one-time Tronc vice chairman, finally close on his nearly $600 million buy of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune. For a company that’s known little but chaos in its short life, the degree of uncertainty is now as high as ever. Just about the only thing we know: Tronc execs will come out well in the end. Could the Los Angeles Times come out a better paper?
• Mort Rosenblum Laments AP (Aileen, AdWeek 2-20-06) Suggestions for preserving AP's virtues from a man who worked for AP for decades. A good inside-the-biz story.
• Newsonomics: “Everything I believe about the news business is being violated” at The Denver Post (Ken Doctor, Nieman Lab, 5-7-18) "The Post has been totally gutted of news coverage and of editorial coverage. That's a fact."— former Denver Post owner Dean Singleton. Meanwhile, the current owners plan still another round of cuts, under hedge fund control — and consider killing editorial pages entirely.
• The Hard Truth at Newspapers Across America: Hedge Funds Are in Charge (Gerry Smith, Bloomberg, 5-22-18) Coast to coast, financial firms are playing a bigger role at local papers struggling to adapt in digital age. Investors like Alden Global Capital LLC and Fortress Investment Group LLC have acquired ownership stakes in newspapers that have struggled to adapt in an online world, from the Denver Post to the Providence Journal. Funds have brought their cost-cutting know-how to help restructure several newspaper chains in heavy debt after the 2008 financial crisis. “They’re not reinvesting in the business,” Ken Doctor, a longtime newspaper analyst and president of the website Newsonomics, said about Alden Global. “It’s dying and they are going to make every dollar they can on the way down.” A hedge fund's news formula: Cut well-paid but unproductive reporters and ask the rest to write more.
• The Denver Post’s rebellion and ‘a crisis in American journalism’ (Pete Vernon, CJR, 4-9-18)
• The American experiment was built on a government-supported press (Will Meyer, CJR, 5-7-18) The advertising business model for journalism only gained traction 150 years ago. From the 1790s onward, news publications received a postal subsidy that slashed as much as 90 percent off postage fees. (It was met with resistance in the South; slaveholders loathed it.) Today, the United States trails far behind many of its industrialized counterparts in supporting the press.
• What Could Blockchain Do for Journalism? (Nicky Woolf, Medium, 2-13-18) For an industry under siege, a potential solution to account for “billionaire” shutdowns and funding challenges. 'An ecosystem of micropayments, in which everyone pays fractions of a penny for every article they read, has long been thought of as the holy grail for online journalism, the theoretical future solution. But there has never been a way to process payments like that in reality — until now. “Blockchain technology can create both chains of authenticity and a level of security,” Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, tells me....On top of that, she says, cryptocurrencies offer an opportunity for “marketplaces which bring journalists and interested communities together to fund work.”'
• Blockchain Will Be Theirs, Russian Spy Boasted at Conference (Nathaniel Popper, Technology, NY Times, 4-29-18) 'Another delegate who had a separate conversation with the head of the Russian group remembers a slightly different wording: “The internet belonged to America. The blockchain will belong to the Russians.”'
• Industry Insight: How a New Breed of Billionaire Owners is Shaping the Newspaper Business (Matt DeRienzo, Editor & Publisher. 4-17-18) Certain points are highlighted in this review of Dan Kennedy's book The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century. Basically: "Hoping a random billionaire buys your local newspaper and makes everything great again is probably not a solid plan for saving journalism in most of America. But examples of just that in Boston and Washington, D.C., are providing room for experimentation." Kennedy's book "explores turnarounds at the Washington Post and Boston Globe, failed attempts elsewhere, and the overall limits and pitfalls of the 'billionaire savior' model....Instead of a Jeff Bezos, you could end up with a Sam Zell, whose leadership of Tribune newspapers was disastrous, or a Warren Buffett, who has taken a hands-off, wind-down-the-business approach similar to the most-criticized corporate newspaper chains."
• Journalism’s New Patrons: Newspapers deepen embrace of philanthropy (David Westphal, CJR, 2-8-18) On January 30, the Charleston Gazette-Mail staff learned it would receive philanthropic support for two news-side reporters in 2018. The money, from Report for America and ProPublica, will cover about 15 percent of the Gazette-Mail’s news reporting salaries (excluding features and sports reporters). And it becomes the latest example of how philanthropy is becoming an ever-larger part of the revenue streams of newspapers and other for-profit news companies. The West Virginia paper is one of seven news organizations being subsidized by ProPublica to intensify investigative reporting over the next year. Separately, it’s one of three participants in a Report for America pilot program that will shine a spotlight on life in Appalachia.
• Bikini slideshows and other click bait: Do paywalls usher in better content? (Mollie Bryant, Big If True, 2-1-18) An interesting discussion of online ads, paywalls, clickbait, slideshows of bikini contests, and other approaches to declining revenue for journalism. "Wired’s new subscription package is a helluva deal. For $20, readers get a year’s worth of the magazine’s print and digital products, including online access. To sweeten the deal, the package offers a rarity in online subscriptions – no website ads. That means no standalone ads thrust in your face like a jack-in-the-box while you’re mid-sentence. What a concept!" But it’s not going to save print journalism.
• Learning from the New Yorker, Wired’s new paywall aims to build a more “stable financial future” (Ricardo Bilton, Nieman Lab, 2-1-18) “People who have studied the information age at this point recognize that there were a bunch of problems and side effects to the fact that people weren’t asked to pay for content in the early years of the internet.” "Wired’s brand and mission may align it closely with the koan of the internet revolution that “information wants to be free,” but the days of unlimited free content at Wired.com are coming to an end." Wired editor-in-chief Nick Thompson, who joined the magazine last January after seven years as editor of NewYorker.com, said that developing a Wired paywall topped his agenda from the earliest stages of taking on the job because “it is my strong sense that paywalls are an essential part of the future of journalism.
• Paywalls make content better, Wired editor Nick Thompson says (Eric Johnson, Recode, 2-1-18) Wired’s wall goes up today: Four free clicks, then $20 a year.
• The Problem With Journalism Is You Need an Audience (Hamilton Nolan, Gawker
h, 1-14-16) "Many writers believe that our brilliant writing will naturally create its own audience. The moving power of our words, the clarity and meaning of our reporting, the brilliance of our wit, the counterintuitive nature of our insights, the elegance with which we sum up the world’s problems; these things, we imagine, will leave the universe no choice but to conjure up an audience for us each day.
"The problem is that nobody ever bothers to inform the audience....The history of journalism is littered with the corpses of good publications. The “new media” world is no different. The “long tail” and “audience segmentation” and every other buzzword term does not change the nature of the business. The audience for quality prestige content is small."
• Three tools to help digital journalists save their work in case a site shuts down (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab, 11-21-17) “So many people who work professionally on the Internet really don’t know, until too late, that their work is this fragile.” She writes about
---Save My News, site launched by Ben Welsh, editor of the Data Desk team at the Los Angeles Times, lets journalists (about 300 of them so far) save their links to Internet Archive and WebCite, so they won't be lost when sites suddenly shut down.
---If You See Something, Save Something – 6 Ways to Save Pages In the Wayback Machine (Alexis Rossi, Internet Archive, 1-25-17)
--- Gotham Grabber (available as open source code on Github).
• Why a divided America has united against the media (Gillian Tett, Financial Times Magazine, 7-14-17)
• Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online (Data & Society, 5-15-17). Download free report. "the spread of false or misleading information is having real and negative effects on the public consumption of news."
"Online communities are increasingly turning to conspiracy-driven news sources, whose sensationalist claims are then covered by the mainstream media, which exposes more of the public to these ideas." Great links to other, related stories, including: Who Controls the Public Sphere in an Era of Algorithms: Case Studies (Laura reed and Robyn Caplan Data&Society, 5-13-16), "a collection of case studies that explores how algorithmic media is shaping the public sphere across a variety of dimensions, including the changing role of the journalism industry, the use of algorithms for censorship or international compliance, and more." and Google and Facebook Can’t Just Make Fake News Disappear Danah Boyd, Wired, 3-27-17) "That’s the beauty of provocative speech: It makes people think not simply by shoving an idea down their throats, but inviting them to connect the dots."
The Web of Deceit: Can Journalism Survive the Internet? (Aidan White, Ethical Journalism Network, 2-12-15) Andrew Keen, a veteran of Silicon Valley, says cyberspace "has become a dangerous place for everyone except power-hungry capitalists and snooping governments and the rest of us are its victims....Keen underscores how the net’s free for all culture, including news, has caused havoc in the creative industries. There were promises that the Internet would come up with solutions for the crisis that has overtaken people in publishing, music and entertainment, but 25 years on nothing has emerged....although the Internet, together with the World Wide Web, personal computers, tablets, and smartphones, has ushered in a mighty communications revolution, and one of the greatest shifts in society since the dawn of the industrial age, as Keen points out it also has had deeply negative effects....His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content. He then asked how quality content can be created in an online environment (including journalism) that demands everything for free." Interesting analysis.
See also The great internet swindle: ever get the feeling you've been cheated? (Jon Henley, The Guardian, 2-9-15) The internet was meant to liberate and empower its users. But the real effect has been to create vast monopolies and turn us into victims, argues web sceptic Andrew Keen in his controversial new book The Internet Is Not the Answer.
• How will journalism survive the Internet Age? (Reuters, 12-11-09) "First, journalism is not synonymous with newspapers... Second, journalism will do more than survive the Internet Age, it will thrive. It will thrive as creators and publishers embrace the collaborative power of new technologies, retool production and distribution strategies and we stop trying to do everything ourselves.... I continue to believe and support the link economy....Like many we grapple with the coverage, cost and value issues of content scarcity vs. abundance as well as content uniqueness vs. utility. We choose to maximize the value of each of these four quadrants and have adaptive business models and markets which allow us to. For example, we focus principally on the importance of vertical and niche markets that have subscription-oriented models — this where our firm derives the vast majority of its revenues.... the newfangled aggregators/curators and the dominant search engines are certainly not the enemy of journalism."
Can Journalism Survive?: An Inside Look at American Newsrooms by David M. Ryfe
Meet The Modern-Day Journalist (Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, Association Media and Publishing, May/June 2015) "The nature of how journalism gets done has changed drastically in recent years – digital communications and social media, media organization consolidations, downsizing and disappearances of traditional newspapers, citizen journalism, blogging as an alternative to professionalism, and multiple responsibilities for reporters....The big driver, of course, is the transformation in the ways that digital technology has changed or ruined business plans, such as advertising, which has been undermined until it's difficult to make the kinds of profits that larger publications need to survive."
American Press Institute Conducts Largest-Ever Journalism Survey (Rob Stott, Associations Now, 8-14-15). American Press Institute conducted a survey of more than 10,000 journalism and communications graduates spanning two generations and hailing from 22 U.S. universities. "News flash: Journalism in 2015 looks lot different than it did 30, 20, and even 10 years ago. Newspapers are still around, but they’re struggling. Content marketing is on the rise. And social media is becoming the go-to news source for all Americans—not just millennials."And 60% of journalism and communications graduates "have a mostly negative view of sponsored content and believe it crosses ethical boundaries.... Still, 50 percent of journalists said their news organization publishes sponsored content."
Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism by Thomas E. Patterson The message: .As the journalist Walter Lippmann noted nearly a century ago, democracy falters “if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news.” Today’s journalists are not providing it. Too often, reporters give equal weight to facts and biased opinion, stir up small controversies, and substitute infotainment for real news. Even when they get the facts rights, they often misjudge the context in which they belong.'
Bringing the trolls out of the dark: Russian ‘troll’ awarded 1 rouble damages (Joanna Gill, EuroNews, 8-18-15) "Samchuk claims that she and hundreds of other employees in the St Petersburg agency were paid to run several social media accounts, flooding the internet with pro-Putin comments as well as doctoring images that ended up on Russian and Western websites."
Riptide: An oral history of the epic collision between journalism and digital technology, from 1980 to the present (Nieman Lab, September 2013). Three veterans of digital journalism and media — John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, and Paul Sagan, Fellows at the Joan Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School — interviewed dozens of people who played important roles in the intersection of media and technology — from CEOs to coders, journalists to disruptors. Riptide is the result: more than 50 hours of video interviews and a narrative essay that traces the evolution of digital news from early experiments to today. It’s what really happened to the news business.
Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?
(Michael Massing, NY Review of Books, 6-4-15--the first of three articles) "The distinctive properties of the Internet—speed, immediacy, interactivity, boundless capacity, global reach—provide tremendous new opportunities for the gathering and presentation of news and information. Yet amid all the coverage of start-ups and IPOs, investments and acquisitions, little attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of Web-based journalism, despite its ever-growing influence."
‘Farewell, readers’: Alan Rusbridger on leaving the Guardian after two decades at the helm Rusbridger reflects on two decades of sweeping change – from broadsheet to Berliner, Aitken to Snowden, and newsprint to pixels – and recalls his fervent wish when he took the job: “Please, please let me not drop the vase.” Excellent overview of basic changes in the industry.
The decootification of media companies (Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine, 8-5-14). Do read this one. "...media companies do not have the stomach, patience, capital, or guts to do the hard work that is still needed to finish turning around legacy media. So they spin them off. What used to be Gannett, Tribune, Scripps, and Belo are now TV companies. What used to be News Corp. and Time Warner are now entertainment companies — companies that might merge not, in my opinion, because that’s such a wonderful deal but because the best path they see to growth is not innovation there either but instead cutting costs and consolidating negotiating power to outmaneuver (with help from legacy telcos) the Netflixes of the future. "
The Economist hosts online debates on the future of news (July 7 to Aug. 3, 2014) (ijnet) What business models will best serve news firms? How important is objectivity in the news industry? Is the power of the press now diminished? And how much does that matter? See related story What is the future of news? (The Economist 7-7-11)
Small Pieces, Loosely Joined: On the End of Big News (Nicco Mele, Nieman Reports, Spring 2013). Fascinating analysis of what's happening to newspapers, and especially to investigative journalism--with some hints of new ways to support it.
Change Starts Small: The Texas Tribune Chooses Efficiency Over Size (Kate Galbraith, Nieman Reports, Spring 2013)
“The Story of a Lifetime” (David L. Marcus, Nieman Reports, Spring 2013) Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory on the Boston marathon bombings, paywalls, misinformation, and social media.
Five questions publishers need to ask before charging for content, or Pitfalls of the pay wall. "Before they jump into charging for content, news organizations must bypass the 'quality journalism' argument and answer these five questions instead," writes Michele McLellan, and you can read about those five questions on the Knight Digital Media Center website.
Among columnists she thanks for blogging about paid content, which helped her understand the issues: Steve Yelvington (Fatal Assumptions), Steve Outing (Attributor: Will it be used for good or evil?) and Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine The Golden Link, on whether to charge for linking to content. (I don't know if those are the specific blogs she was grateful for, but they are interesting, and take you to those bloggers' sites.)
Low pay or no pay, but exposure. Discussions about writing for low pay or no pay, partly for the "exposure, " can get fairly heated. Here are a few examples.
• A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist—2013 (Global Editor of the Atlantic Magazine digital edition asks Nate Thayer to write a story, for no pay. Say what?? Nate Thayer responds.)
• A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013 (Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at The Atlantic, responds to Nate Thayer. "The biz ain't what it used to be, but then again, for most people, it never really was." And "You have to want to be jacked into the Internet all day long, every day. This is not the life most journalists imagined when they were looking at 1970s magazines." And "As a rule of thumb, it sucks to take free work from people who are freelancing for a living."
• Joe Dator New Yorker cartoon on working "for exposure".
• When People Write for Free, Who Pays? (Cord Jefferson, Gawker, 3-8-13)
• Artisanal Journalism (Reg Chua, (Re)Structuring Journalism blog, 6-11-12). Chua recommends rethinking three aspects of journalism: information gathering, presentation ("everything from a tweet to a 10,000-word piece, graphics, data visualizations, photo slideshows, documentaries and forms yet to be invented"), and publication ("not just getting it in print/on a show/online, but the entire process of thinking about what news product should be presented, and how. Should you report on politicians’ statements, or create a site that tracks how truthful they are? How much automation/machine-generated content should you embrace? What focus and audience should you aim for?").
The Newsonomics of the shiny, new wrapper (Ken Doctor, Nieman Journalism Lab, 6-21-12). "Publishers are getting more aggressive about repackaging their work into ebooks, iPad magazines, and other new forms, in the hopes of creating something readers will pay for....Consumers aren’t paying just for content; they may not know or care a product’s origin. They are also paying for some sense of discovery and convenience. Credit the iPad, the table-setting, placement-rearranging marvel of our times, for this new thinking. It is making possible reader — and publisher — reassessment of news and magazine product. In a sense, the tablet is just a new container.... news and magazine design never found a metaphor that seemed pleasing for readers. Tablet design, borrowing many of the principles of print, but making use of features print could never support, connects with readers."
• Brand-Name Journalists Cross a Vanishing Journalistic Divide (David Carr, NY Times 10-20-10).
• Internet con men ravage publishing John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, makes a powerful argument about how fast-talking Internet promoters have fooled publishers and writers into thinking they can make any money publishing online. (Providence Journal blog, 3-12-12). MacArthur quotes from Screened out and isolated (Tyler Brûlé, Fast Lane columnist, Financial Times, 1-20-12). "What Brûlé was describing was the physical manifestation of what the novelist Scott Turow calls 'siloing,' that is, the cordoning off of information and elimination of the haphazard, sometimes random, adjacencies, so vital to learning and, for that matter, romance. Adjacencies such as the story on the lower-left-hand corner of the page adjacent to the less interesting story you happen to be reading. Adjacencies such as the book on the shelf next to the book you were looking for."
• Paper Con Man Ravages the Internet Alexis Madrigal's response to John Macarthur's essay attacking the whole enterprise of online journalism (The Atlantic, 3-13-12)
Two interesting reviews of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price: Malcolm Gladwell's
Priced to Sell: Is free the future?, in the New Yorker (7-6-09), and $0.00 by Virginia Postrel (NY Times Sunday Book Review, 7-10-09)
The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition) by Ian Shapira (Washington Post, Outlook, 8-2-09), with follow-up discussion on Tuesday, August 4: Outlook: How Gawker Ripped Off My Story and Why It's Destroying Journalism
Priced to Sell: Is free the future?, in the New Yorker (7-6-09), and $0.00 by Virginia Postrel (NY Times Sunday Book Review, 7-10-09)
A conversation with entrepreneur and software engineer Marc Andreessen. (video) On the Charlie Rose show, the founder of Netscape talks about how print newspapers are on the way out, to be replaced by a web of Internet interactivity
• All Hands On Deck: 4 Editors on the SF Chronicle Implosion (the Daily Anchor Editorial Team)
• An extremely expensive cover story — with a new way of footing the bill Zachary M. Seward, Nieman Journalism Lab. Sherri Fink's 13,000-word story about the New Orleans hospital where patients were euthanized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a New York Times Magazine cover story that is simultaneously available on ProPublica's site, may be "the most expensive single piece of print journalism in years." The new economics of journalism. Investigative journalism is labor-and-brain-intensive! Mother Jones on the same story: Cost of the NYT Magazine NOLA Story Broken Down (Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones 8-28-09)
Barry Diller: ‘The Internet is a miracle … Newsweek is an evolutionary process’ (L.A.Lorek, Poynter Online, 3-14-11). “We are in the very early period of a great revolution,” he said. “Once you can push a button and publish to the world you can go over the top and around all of these systems.” Diller's advice to entrepreneurs: “only get enough money to get it started, give away as little as possible, keep your head down, do not listen or talk to anybody, when it gets out there. Listen to your audience, unless it makes no sense, early audiences don’t always get you,” Diller said. “Keep going on your path. It will either work out gloriously or it will be another failure.”
• Brill's secret plan to save the New York Times and journalism itself (Stephen Brill, Romenesko, 11-08)
• Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried (Richard MacManus, NYTimes, 12-13-09). See also Content Mill Demand Media Expands Its Reach -- To More Newspapers! (Erik Sherman, b-net, on race to the bottom, 5-21-10)
• Craig Newmark: I Didn't Kill Newspapers, it's an "urban legend" and David Carr Agrees (Beet.TV)
David Simon's Testimony at the Future of Journalism Hearing (David Simon, Real Clear Politics, 5-9-09). Simon says, among other things, "...high-end journalism - that which acquires essential information about our government and society in the first place -- is a profession; it requires daily, full-time commitment by trained men and women who return to the same beats day in and day out until the best of them know everything with which a given institution is contending. For a relatively brief period in American history - no more than the last fifty years or so - a lot of smart and talented people were paid a living wage and benefits to challenge the unrestrained authority of our institutions and to hold those institutions to task. Modem newspaper reporting was the hardest and in some ways most gratifying job I ever had. I am offended to think that anyone, anywhere believes American institutions as insulated, self-preserving and self-justifying as police departments, school systems, legislatures and chief executives can be held to gathered facts by amateurs pursuing the task without compensation, training or for that matter, sufficient standing to make public officials even care to whom it is they are lying or from whom they are withholding information." But it is not the internet that is killing newspapers, says Simon. "...my industry butchered itself and we did so at the behest of Wall Street and the same unfettered, free-market logic that has proved so disastrous for so many American industries. And the original sin of American newspapering lies, indeed, in going to Wall Street in the first place....In Baltimore at least, and I imagine in every other American city served by newspaper-chain journalism, those ambitions were not betrayed by the internet. We had trashed them on our own, years before. Incredibly, we did it for naked, short-term profits and a handful of trinkets to hang on the office wall. And now, having made ourselves less essential, less comprehensive and less able to offer a product that people might purchase online, we pretend to an undeserved martyrdom at the hands of new technology."
• The Deal from Hell: A Cautionary Tale Every Publisher Should Read (Peter Cook, Publishing Perspectives, 7-5-11). Guest book review of The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea
• The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition) by Ian Shapira (Washington Post, Outlook, 8-2-09), with follow-up discussion on Tuesday, August 4: Outlook: How Gawker Ripped Off My Story and Why It's Destroying Journalism
Editors Only: The Newsletter of Editorial Achievement (discussing the changing nature of content delivery), sister pub to STRAT: The Newsletter of Print and Online Magazine Publishing Strategy
• Disrupted: The Internet and the Press Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky discuss what's happening in journalism after its disruption by technology, conversations sponsored by NYU Journalism/Primary Sources)
• 8 Industries That Will Sit Out a Recovery. (Rick Newman, US News & World Report). Moody's rates media as one of the industries that won't be climbing back up any time soon. "... Media. It's hard to imagine what else could go wrong for traditional print and broadcast media companies. Even without a recession, newspapers, magazines, and TV and radio broadcasters have been losing their audience to the Internet. At the same time, a crushing downturn in the retail, automotive, and financial industries has led to double-digit cuts in advertising, the biggest source of revenue for many media companies. And there's no historic election, accompanied by millions in political advertising, slated anytime soon to help pick up the slack, as there was in 2008. Many newspapers are in such bad shape that investors have virtually no interest in buying them, at any price, according to Moody's. Magazines are doing so poorly that McGraw-Hill is struggling to find a buyer for BusinessWeek, one of the most venerable titles on the market."
• The End of Hand Crafted Content (Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, 12-13-09)
• End Times:Can America’s paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism? (Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, January-February 2009) and End Times: A Response from the Times
• Enter Austin Post: New online venture seeks to create a 'conversational democracy' (Kevin Brass, Austin Chronicle, 7-10-09, on how "citizen journalism" may be an aggregation of "sloppy bloggers" in a system offering exposure for personal agendas instead of payment for professional journalism).
• Five questions publishers need to ask before charging for content, or Pitfalls of the pay wall. "Before they jump into charging for content, news organizations must bypass the 'quality journalism' argument and answer these five questions instead," writes Michele McLellan, and you can read about those five questions on the Knight Digital Media Center website.
Among columnists she thanks for blogging about paid content, which helped her understand the issues: Steve Yelvington (Fatal Assumptions), Steve Outing (Attributor: Will it be used for good or evil?) and Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine The Golden Link, on whether to charge for linking to content. (I don't know if those are the specific blogs she was grateful for, but they are interesting, and take you to those bloggers' sites.)
• Gerry Marzorati on the future of long-form narrative
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Q&A at Newspaper Association of America convention, on advertising, micropayments, and subscriptions (Julie Moos, Poynter Online, and you can listen to the speech)
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and BoingBoing on Clay Shirky's masterpiece (with links to more Clay Shirky pieces)
• Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I (Russ Juskalian, CJR archives, 12-19-08) "There's always a new Luddism whenever there's change. What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people."
• Interview with Clay Shirky, Part II (Russ Juskalian, CJR archives, 12-22-08) "Newspapers have discovered civic function awfully late to be taken seriously. Except for NPR."
• How to Save Your Newspaper (Walter Isaacson, Time) and The bell tolls for Time, too (Alan Jacobson, Brass Tacks)
• The Intelligence Briefing model of media (Conover on Media, a front-row seat at the final bonfire, 9-23-05)
• Lesson from WisconsinWatch: Nonprofit Journalism Isn't Free (Robert Gutsche Jr., Poynter Online, 8-11-09)
• Let’s Invent an iTunes for News (David Carr, NY Times, argues for a pay-for-news-by-item business model to save newspapers)
• Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy by Alex Jones. "[S]ignificance may not be governed by the clock. The most valuable element in journalism is often enough not an episode that occurred today, yesterday or, horrors, the day before. It’s the creation of a new awareness provided by either months of investigation or relentlessly regular coverage," writes Harold Evans in The Daily Show, his review in the NY Times of this book, which Howard Gardener calls an "authoritative account of why journalism is vital, how it has lost its bearings," and what can be done to reinvigorate this foundation of a democratic society.
• Monetize Online (Brass Tacks)
• The newspaper business isn't dying, it's evolving (Kirk LaPointe, Vancouver Sun, 5-1-09)
• Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (Clay Shirky)
• The Newspaper Suicide Pact (Xark 6-3-09, on "paid content")
• Over 60, and Proud to Join the Digerati (James R. Gaines, Preoccupations, NY Times 11-28-09)
**• The Price of Truth (Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones, Sept/Oct 2009). "The old model, where journalism was heavily subsidized by advertising, is over. The recession has made the divorce faster and more acrimonious, but the knives were already out. And online advertising is turning out to be a harsh mistress....Sure, information wants to be free. Alas, it's not....Reporting takes money." A concise summary of the issues.
• Priced to Sell: Is free the future? Malcolm Gladwell's review in the New Yorker of
Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. See also $0.00, Virginia Postrel's review of the book in the NYTBook Review.
• The Printed Blog ("Publisher Rethinks the Daily" by Claire Cain Miller, NY Times)
• Spackman of Times Online, UK, speaks of interweaving journalism and search optimization, counsels against becoming a "traffic tart" (Martin Stabe, Press Gazette, UK)
• StreetVibes: Advocating Justice, Building Community (Gregory Flannery on a newspaper with a sense of purpose)
• Talk Radio Gets Angrier as Its Revenues Drop (FrumForum on radio hosts who believe that anger is their only path to survival)
• TimeSelect Content Freed (Holly M. Sanders, New York Post)
• True/Slant: Angling for News Sponsors Howard Kurtz, Media Notes, Washington Post 6-8-09)
• True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism (Walt Mossberg,WSJ, Personal Technology, 4-8-09)
• United, Newspapers May Stand (David Carr, The Media Equation, NY Times 3-8-09)
• Urgent Deadline for Newspapers: Find a New Business Plan before You Vanish (Knowledge@Wharton Strategic Management Research Article - Requires free membership)
• End Times:Can America’s paper of record survive the death of newsprint? Can journalism? (Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, January-February 2009) and End Times: A Response from the Times
• U.S. bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers (Reuters, 3-4-09, on allowing newspapers to become nonprofits)
• Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs (Richard Pérez-Peña, NYTimes, 11-17-09, onVoiceofSanDiego.org
• Storyful, a startup that started filtering videoclips about the turmoil in Egypt, is partnering with YouTube's CitizenTube, YouTube’s news and politics channel, in an experiment in teamwork to "curate" the news knowledgeably. Read Storyful Now: Egypt in Revolt (Nieman Journalism Lab, 2-4-11)
• Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004 Tom Windsor, Nieman Journalism Lab, 2-10-09
• Why Obama should stiff-arm "save the newspapers" legislation Jack Shafer, Slate, on Saving Newspapers From Their Saviours, 9-21-09)
• Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business (Clay Shirky)
• Why Small Payments Won’t Save Publishers (Clay Shirky)
• Why the End of Newspapers Is Not the End of News (Larry Kramer, The Daily Beast)
• You Can't Sell News By the Slice (Michael Kinsley, NY Times opinion page, 2-9-09)
•All Hands On Deck: 4 Editors on the SF Chronicle Implosion