OJR: The Online Journalism Review

Nikki Usher

Los Angeles, California

Nikki Usher is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.

Where does news come from?

October 20, 2009
Time after time again, people who want to save newspapers claim that newspapers are the primary source of news. But is their claim actually founded on anything other than self-importance?

I love newspapers. I want them to survive, in some form, but it's important to investigate where the truth in one of the linchpins of the "newspapers need to survive argument" comes from.

Tom Rosenstiel offered the claim before the Joint Economic Committee hearing on "The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy," on September 24, 2009. He's not the only one. John Carroll used to say that 80 percent of news came from newspapers. Len Downie and Robert Kaiser similarly claimed that newspapers were the originators of most content for most broadcast and cable news. And many studies of online blogs show that much of the linking originates from mainstream media, often newspapers.

But are newspapers where it all begins? In an online world, that's only sort of true. More...

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Staking out newspaper survival in Web analytics

July 21, 2009
This is part two in a two-part series on Web analytics and the future of news. [Part one]

The news industry is caught in a destabilizing position – each newspaper is going to have to come up with its own unique algorithm to give advertisers a sense of their audience.

The new metric that advertisers increasingly care about is something called "engagement" – how users are actually interacting and spending time with the site. But because each newspaper website offers unique content, there's no blanket measure for creating a uniform "engagement" score for the news industry from different points of comScore or Ominture data.

"We can't boil it down to X percent of unique users plus your time on site plus page views," said Alan Segal, director of audience development at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He explained that the formula in Atlanta would be different from elsewhere. "Engagement for us looks different for us versus the New York Times," Segal said. "It depends on your market and what the goals are and how you interact with your community."

Why engagement? Because it's a more robust way of looking at the world than just uniques, page views, visits, or clicks per minute.

As Alex Langshur, president of the Web Analytics Association, said, "Measures that reflect audience engagement are more valuable than metrics that just measure raw numbers." More...

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It's time to retire newspaper circulation data in favor of Web analytics - But which ones?

July 14, 2009
This is part one in a two-part series on Web analytics and the future of news

Newspaper circulation numbers are taken as report cards for survival. When worse than expected for too long, these numbers forewarn of future layoffs and corporate restructuring – and at the very worst, the death of a newspaper.

But we're putting our emphasis, energy, and nostalgia in the wrong place. The future is in Web analytics, but this extends beyond just knowing about page views, unique users, and visits.

"If newspapers have any chance of making it in an online and social media world with an ad based model, we've got to see much more living and dying by analytics," said Dana Chinn, a lecturer at the USC Annenberg School of Communication.

Nonetheless, a print mentality dominates our current understanding of the media landscape.

Consider, as an example of the formidable significance circulation numbers have in our industry, a June 15, 2009 AP story about the troubles facing the Boston Globe: More...

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Skills training is not enough for the digital journalist

February 18, 2009
As an academic, I've been given a front row seat to the unraveling of the news industry without having to worry about my job. But if I were a journalist, the first thing I would be thinking about is what kind of skills I might need in order to retool for the digital age.

However, my 500-foot view from the ivory towers urges caution: it's not the skills that you get that will save your job, or repurpose you for the future, it's whether you can learn how to think like a journalist in the Web 2.0, or what some are even calling the Web 3.0 world.

I make this observation after working with newsrooms who have tried to implement broad training initiatives, as well as after interviews with many journalists who have attempted to gain new skills themselves. Here I get to take some license in that the journalists I've worked with cannot be named, as they are given anonymity for human subjects research protocol by the university.

But I can say that one of my major discoveries has been that training – learning to take a digital photo, the writing for the Web, the digital audio and video editing, the flash, and the social media, to name a few – is not for everyone, nor should it be the answer for everyone. More...

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New business models for news are not that new

December 17, 2008
With online ad revenue down for the second quarter in a row and newspaper industry indicators suggesting that 2008 is going be the worst year yet, the frenzy continues for a new business model for news publishing that will magically boost revenue and stop the financial bloodletting.

But innovation is sorely lacking in the new business models proposed; the truth is that many of them have been around since the early 1900s.

In 1923, historian James Melvin Lee outlined in his History of American Journalism alternative business models that newspapers had tried to remove themselves from dependence on advertisers and circulation growth and that now seem strangely prescient: the endowment model, the municipal news model, an adless newspaper, religious news, and what can only be called the "bazooka gum" approach to circulation. More...

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