OJR front page archive for December 2008
Happy holidays, from OJR
December 23, 2008
We're about to take a short break here on OJR, reappearing after the New Year's holiday, but I first wanted to take a moment to wish you a very happy holiday season and to thank you for reading OJR.It's been, uh, an interesting year for OJR. But I think I can say, without doubt, that if it were not for your very public support of the site, OJR would not be here at its new home at the Knight Digital Media Center. So, thank you.
As we enter the new year, I would like to renew my invitation to each of you to become a writer for OJR. OJR readers are (almost exclusively) new media and journalism professionals, people who are doing what we write about here.
3 Comments | 
Archive Link
Well-known news sites to use Knight money to deepen reporting
December 19, 2008
Four poster children for the community online news movement plan to use new cash infusions from the Knight Foundation to strengthen reporting resources on their hometown sites.The Knight Foundation, journalism's biggest funder of digital innovation, announced it was giving $390,000 to the Voice of San Diego, the St. Louis Beacon, MinnPost and ChiTown Daily News. All are non-profits, and the first three represent some of the most ambitious efforts to marshal community news reporting solely on the Web.
By relying on major gifts and foundation money, the sites are trying to create large enough audiences to sustain themselves – through advertising and/or continued philanthropy – when the initial funding peels away. Other, mostly smaller, online news startups are trying to build businesses from the ground up by relying on advertising alone.
No comments | Archive Link
Newsrooms must get active to survive the economic meltdown
December 19, 2008
The past few weeks have seen the newspaper industry accelerate toward a previously unthinkable collapse. The Tribune Company (one of my former employers) filed for bankruptcy. E.W. Scripps put the Rocky Mountain News (another one of my former employers) up for sale, and might close the 150-year-old Denver paper should no buyer be found within the month. The Wall Street Journal reported that Detroit's two newspapers would stop home delivery on certain weekdays. (Their websites would update seven days a week.) Rumors continue to swirl that the Miami Herald is next up on the block.The financial trouble throughout the industry is leading many to consider a future without newspapers. Or, at least, without newspapers as we now know them. LA Observed's T.J. Sullivan asked "Ever wonder what the world would have been like if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein hadn't uncovered Watergate? I fear we'll learn the answer in the next couple decades."
With all due respect to T.J., I fear that we already know the answer. Because we've been living in that world for the past 10 years already, a time when traditional journalists failed to uncover emerging scandals and to warn the public about abuses of power at the highest levels of government and industry.
Allow me to suggest that the U.S. news industry's collective failure to accurately portray the world over the past decade has done as much, if not more, to drive readers to the Internet than any inherent attractiveness of this new medium. If existing news businesses wish to have any hope of surviving the current downturn, in any medium, they cannot continue to perform as they have over the past decade.
3 Comments | Archive Link
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.
2 Comments | Archive Link
An online journalist's guide to entering the Pulitzer Prizes
December 12, 2008
Set one more milestone along the road toward the convergence of the online medium with the rest of the field of journalism.This week, the Pulitzer Prizes announced that it will accept entries from online-only news publications. The highest honor in American newspaper journalism now is simply the highest honor in American written journalism. Print and online, at last, will be judged as one.
Of course, I'd argue that distinction between the media long since been lost among our readers, the public. News is news, regardless of its medium. People will turn to the news sources that are, for them, the most informative, engaging, immediate and convenient. But I'll let other wax about the cultural significant of the Pulitzer decision. Today, allow me to address a more practical matter...
How do you nominate your website for a Pulitzer Prize?
Many print veterans are familiar with the entry process. But many worthy bloggers and online reporters won't be. And putting a site up for a Pulitzer isn't as simple as pasting your best URLs into an online form. A Pulitzer win, however, could catapult an online-only news site, fighting for attention in a hyper-competitive news marketplace, into a leading position in its market. The $10,000 cash award also could help plump the lean budgets at many online news start-ups.
2 Comments | Archive Link
Let's build a database of independent news sites
December 10, 2008
Ever since completing some reporting this fall on the status of community news Web sites, I’ve wanted a better sense of whether these new startups have a realistic chance of surviving and ultimately thriving. Last week I got my chance to ask an expert – my OJR colleague Robert Niles.The answer, said Niles, is yes – though I should note his response came after a long pause. Not surprisingly, he had some caveats. The main one is that startup operators need a back-up way to pay the rent and buy groceries for as long as a year after launch. It can take that long for most sites to build an audience and advertising base, Niles said, and the duration seems to be growing, as Internet users’ options grow. Even then, Niles said, operators need to know that costs have to be kept “as close to zero as possible,” and profits are going to be modest. “But yes,” he said, “it’s possible to make money.”
5 Comments | Archive Link
Eyetracking research shows how younger readers view news websites
December 10, 2008
In January 2008 a group of interactive producers from news websites gathered at the University of Minnesota for the first Eyetracking Research Consortium, part of the Digital Story Effects Lab project run by Nora Paul and Laura Ruel. Following is the first in a series of articles about findings from the studies conducted for the Consortium members. 1 comment | Archive Link
A new Web application that (might) help pay for the news
December 8, 2008
Assume for the moment that the chemistry which made newspapers a business success for hundreds of years no longer works. Assume that billions of dollars in revenue vanish from newspapers because advertisers discover that they have better, targeted options on the Internet. (Given this week’s bankruptcy filing by the nation’s second-biggest newspaper company, Tribune Co., these assumptions shouldn’t be much of a stretch.)What, then, happens to the content that was part of that chemistry? What happens to the news and information we’ve always thought was an integral portion of keeping our democracy humming?
About four dozen people interested in this question were offered a possible answer last week at the University of Missouri: You build an entirely new kind of chemistry, a Web concoction so compelling that people are willing to pay a few bucks a month for it, and part of that money will be used to pay for news content.
6 Comments | Archive Link
The top gifts for online journalists, 2008 edition
December 5, 2008
Last year, OJR presented its list of top gifts for online journalists, and today we continue the tradition with this year's list.In recognition of the current economy, we've kept all the items on this year's list under $200, so we won't be talking about the laptops, digital cameras, video equipment and other goodies that many of use want, but that would break a bank account faster than being bought by Sam Zell.
Feel free to e-mail this list to your friends and loved ones (or print it out for the Luddites), if you're the type of person who never can come up with a list on your own.
5 Comments | Archive Link
How the New York Times can fight back and win: a reprise
December 3, 2008
The New York Times Co. -- the whole caboodle, including the esteemed and necesssary flagship paper, 18 other, mostly monopoly dailies, the spunky About instructional search engine and minority ownership of the half-redeemed Boston Red Sox -- is worth less than what the company paid for just one of its properties, the Boston Globe. That's what the stock market said as of Wednesday, Nov. 26, and that was after a bounceback from a near-historic low -- $5.34 – on Nov. 21.With advertising in its print edition continuing to slide by double-digit percentages, the Times is pursuing, in the words of President/CEO Janet L. Robinson, a "strict cost discipline." But, happily, it's looking as if the company finally understands that it can't cut its way back to financial health (and a stock price that doesn't look like an unfortunate misprint).
In August 2007, when the company's stock had already fallen to a 12-year low, I argued in these pages that the Times could fight back by leveraging the power of its nytimes.com website through the force of social networking. Finally, it's begun doing so.
8 Comments | Archive Link
RSS Feed
