Robert Niles: May 2009 archive
Journalists must emerge from a culture of failure in order to survive
May 25, 2009
For a generation, journalists have been steeped in a culture of failure. Even during boom years, newspapers laid off employees, offered buy-outs, froze the hiring off new employees and cut the pay of the ones they kept. When the Internet brought unprecedented competition into the news business, and Chicken Little's sky really did fall, the industry amplified its toxic narrative: "No one can make money online." "Journalism is doomed!"But it isn't. All that's doomed is the reactionary management philosophy of monopolists who could not adapt to world where people, not papers, controlled the narratives of their lives. Good riddance, I say. Journalism is not doomed; people can make money publishing online. All that needs to change to make that happen is journalists' toxic attitudes toward themselves and the value of their work.
That was my message to the participants at the Knight Digital Media Center News Entrepreneur Boot Camp this week. We met at the USC Marshall School of Business for five days, working through a curriculum outlined by myself, KDMC's Vikki Porter and Tom O'Malia of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Marshall. We brought in a team of four faculty to finalize the camp's curriculum and instruct the campers: Mary Lou Fulton, Susan Mernit, Ken Doctor and Vin Crosbie. And we supplemented each day with expert speakers, including SEO expert Danny Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, entrepreneurs Shoba Purushothaman and Staci Kramer, and attorney Michael Overing.
Every day, the campers started by giving us their "elevator pitches" for their projects. Over the week, the pitches sharpened from rambling four-minute speeches to tight engagements of 20 seconds or less. At the same time, they learned how to flesh out their pitches into five-minute multimedia presentations, which they presented Thursday morning to a panel of business finance experts, including Lloyd Greif.
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Top 10 search engine optimization tips for online news start-ups
May 19, 2009
This week, OJR is helping present the KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at USC. We've brought 15 aspiring news entrepreneurs to the USC Marshall School of Business, where they are learning the basic of eliciting financial and community support while creating a small news business. They are building upon their existing journalism skills, learning how those skills have (or have not) prepared them to move from being reporters to publishers.You can follow our Tweets about the camp using the hashtag #uscnewsbiz on Twitter.
I'll write more about the camp, which ends tomorrow, with a wrap-up on Friday. But today, I wanted to dive into one important topic that we covered in a dinner conversation on Sunday evening.
Our invited speaker was Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, and a long-time expert in search engine optimization [SEO]. Danny's a news entrepreneur himself, having grown his 1996 Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines into two online news publications. (He also maintains a blog at http://daggle.com/, which I recommend for his sharp observations of the online news business.)
I asked Sullivan to come speak to our campers because of the importance of SEO to any boot-strapped online start-up. With few resources to draw readers to a new website, SEO provides start-ups a low-cost opportunity to get their site's links in front of an interested audience. The only cost is the time to learn these tips, and the effort required to implement them. More...
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How the newspaper industry threw away its lead in online search engines
May 15, 2009
Last week, I reviewed how a 1995 court decision led the newspaper industry to withdraw from interactivity with its online audience at a crucial moment, crippling the industry's ability to compete with new online rivals.Today, I'd like to take another trip down the memory hole, and show how the newspaper industry could have had the favorable position it now seeks from search engines... if only the industry hadn't adopted policies which gave that advantage away.
Recently, newspapers executives have been approaching search engine companies, notably market leader Google, asking the search engines to change their ranking algorithms to move up results from newspaper websites, arguing that they are more authoritative than other sites, given newspapers' experience and large reporting staffs, and that they are often the original sources of much information republished online. More...
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How a 1995 court case kept the newspaper industry from competing online
May 7, 2009
This week, the United States Senate held a hearing on "The Future of Journalism", prompted by the recent demise of two major U.S. newspapers. I won't rehash the many, many arguments and theories put forth by so many people on this issue, save to note one that I am afraid might be slipping down the memory hole.The particular decision I wish to remind folks of today was the industry's reaction to 1995 court case, one that prompted news managers across the country not only to dismiss opportunities to engage with their audiences online, but to directly order their employees not to do so. More...
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