OJR front page archive for November 2009
American government: It's always subsidized commercial media
November 30, 2009
By Geoffrey Cowan and David WestphalGeoffrey Cowan is university professor at the University of Southern California and dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. David Westphal is a senior fellow at USC’s Center on Communication Leadership and Policy and former Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers.
A mythology about the relationship between American government and the news business is again making the rounds, and it needs a corrective jolt. The myth is that the commercial press in this country stands wholly independent of governmental sustenance. Here's the jolt: There's never been a time in U.S. history when government dollars weren't propping up the news business. This year, federal, state and local governments will spend well over $1 billion to support commercial news publishers through tax breaks, postal subsidies and the printing of public notices. And the amount used to be much higher.
This topic is back in the news because of the rapid economic decline of newspapers, news magazines and many broadcast outlets. Amid deepening concern about the impact on our democracy, some are calling on the government to get involved.
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How thankful are you for your role in journalism today?
November 27, 2009
Here's my shout-out to all you fellow journalists, working today instead of hitting the malls, sleeping in or lounging on the couch, like the rest of America today.(Okay, I suppose some of you have been assigned to covering folks at the mall, but still....)
Allow me to turn things over to you today. How are you feeling about your journalism career, as the first decade of the 21st century moves toward its finish? How thankful are you for your role in journalism today?
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Microsoft and News Corp. are pursuing yesterday's solution to today's challenges
November 24, 2009
News Corp.'s alleged plan to shield its online content from Google's search engine in favor of having it indexed by Microsoft's Bing is a brilliant content business strategy... for the 20th Century.But, today, it illustrates just the latest example of backward-thinking by legacy media executives who've been left lost and clueless by the Internet revolution.
Microsoft needs to do something to distinguish Bing from market leader Google. (And simply renaming its Live search engine didn't get that done.) News Corp., like any business looking for growth, wants to find a new source of revenue.
So, instead of making its content available for indexing on all search engines, News Corp. could decide to make it available only to one search index, in exchange for payment or some other consideration from that search engine's owner. On the surface, the deal makes great sense for both sides: News Corp. gets cash (or some other payment of value) and Microsoft gets unique content in its search results - pages that readers can't find elsewhere.
That's the way many successful content deals have happened in the past. Think how sports leagues sell broadcast rights to their games to selected networks or channels. Or how cable and satellite companies have split popular channels across several packages, "encouraging" customers to move up to more expensive subscription tiers. It's all about exchanging cash for access.
But that model is beginning to fail.
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Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites
November 20, 2009
I've attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry's largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions' Expo.What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing.
Which is everything. (Hang with me, okay?)
Wednesday afternoon, a source I've had a good relationship with introduced me to several former Walt Disney Co. employees who are now legends within the theme park industry. Each worked with Walt Disney himself, and had gathered for a panel discussion about Walt's management style. The question they were to answer was... what could Walt Disney's approach toward management teach today's industry leaders?
Plenty. And not just in the amusement business. Walt Disney's management philosophy contrasts sharply with contemporary management practices in the news industry, especially within "legacy" media companies. Might I suggest that difference in long-standing management tradition helps explain the sharp contrast between the recent financial performance of the Walt Disney Company and the newspaper industry? Disney today enjoys a market capitalization of nearly $55 billion, and its share price is up 13% over the past five years.
How many newspaper companies can report that?
So let's look at how Walt did things, and compare that with how things are done in the news business.
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Can Bottled Water Save Journalism Online?
November 17, 2009
The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000- that’s 91 percent- told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online.“Online it should be free,” said 19-year-old Shauna O’Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna’s words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won’t pay for web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible.
Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O’Brien does pay for?
Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. “My family has been buying water forever,” she said. In that the O’Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap.
So how are these companies making so much money? Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism?
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Starting your news website: How to get the most promotional value from Twitter
November 13, 2009
Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece, Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter.A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet.
Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too!
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No revenue model for news? Labor steps up
November 10, 2009
At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions.Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union.
The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers.
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Time for newspapers choose between the DEC or IBM model
November 6, 2009
It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable.Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen.
Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies.
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TwitterTim.es: Personalized news done right?
November 3, 2009
I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.")For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter.
I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream.
But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links.
Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed.
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