Musician Amanda Palmer (Joi/Wikimedia Commons)

Jeff Jarvis writes that the value of media should be based increasingly on relationships, rather than solely on the content produced.

He cites Google ad exec Susan Wojcicki and musician/artist Amanda Palmer. Palmer had a famously successful Kickstarter campaign for an album she chose to do without major label support. She championed the notion of relationship-building as business model recently in a TED talk:

“By asking people [to pay for your work], you connect with them, and by connecting with them, they want to help you. ‘When we really see each other, we want to help each other. People have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, How do we make people pay for music? What if we started asking, How de we let people pay for music?’”

Wojcicki applied similar logic to advertising in a post on Google+, writing “In years to come, most ad views will effectively become voluntary.”

If media (as content and as advertising) are voluntary, Jarvis suggests, then the “argument about paywalls — and copyright and the value of content — is the wrong argument. Instead, he writes, “The discussion we should be having is how better to build valuable relationships of trust with people as people, not masses, and then how to exploit that value to support the work they want us to do.”

OJR opens a new chapter today with a fresh look and even more of the content you’ve come to trust. Not only that, but we’re looking to involve the greater journalism community in the discussion. We are now accepting submissions from reporters and media observers who can offer keen insight into the future of news.

But first, the look. OJR has developed a reputation for thoughtful, in-depth reporting and commentaries on the changing media landscape. That focus remains the cornerstone of our brand. Front and center you will always find one of our signature reports or commentaries, and the latest offering is a perfect example. Geneva Overholser, director of the journalism school at our host institution, USC Annenberg, raises critical questions about the nature of public interest reporting in a time when information is easier than ever to obtain but concerns over privacy threaten to muzzle discourse. Her focus is on the recent spate of government attacks on news organizations for publishing information about gun permit holders following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Conn. Overholser draws on some hard-knock experience as an old-school journalist and editor and weaves in spot-on observations about how open data is changing the business to come up with a compelling argument for openness, as painful as it may be.

The first thing you’ll probably notice that’s different, aside from a new color scheme and masthead, is that conspicuous center column. This is a new department we’re calling The Repeater. Here you will find news and views from other outlets that we think are worth passing along.

Beyond the website, we recently launched a Facebook page. There, and on Twitter, you will find more of the stuff we’re paying attention to that we didn’t have time to include in The Repeater.

With these advances, we will be able to build on our continuing commitment to help our readers understand and contribute to the revolution taking place in news.

And that’s where you come in. Defining online journalism has never been more interesting. Is it about the ever more important role of data? The burgeoning reporting potential of social media? The ever-richer conversation between communities and journalism? The changing role of professionals amid the convergence of news platforms? We want to hear from you. Maybe you have a topic you’d like to see discussed, or maybe you have an article to pitch. Either way, we want to hear from you.

If you have a question, a story idea, or you’re interested in contributing, send your pitch to editor[at]ojr[dot]org. Or feel free to just leave a comment below to share your thoughts about this new direction for OJR.

As a large, vibrant and diverse undergraduate and graduate School of Journalism, USC Annenberg is grappling with all these questions. They play out in our multiple newslabs, they inform our teaching (and learning!), they determine the nature of our research. We will continue to draw on all these experiences with contributions from our faculty, staff and students, and we hope you’ll join us.

This isn’t your mom and dad’s Internet anymore. (Credit: LSE Library/Flickr)

Pew released its research on the demographics of social media users for 2012. Jim Romenesko put them together in a pithy breakdown. Two-thirds of adults who use the Internet use Facebook, which was way ahead of all other sites. Sixteen percent are on Twitter, doubled from November 2010. Young people are more likely to use Facebook and Twitter, and women are more likely to use Facebook than men. Pinterest attracts more white people. Instagram has more African-American and Hispanic users than whites. Though Tumblr brings up the rear with only 6 percent of Internet users, it’s much more popular among young people, with 13 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds online signed up.

(Screenshot of Visual Revenue website logo)

Analytics firm Visual Revenue is offering services to big-time news outlets like The Atlantic and USA Today to help them determine the best ways to use their online presences. According to Nieman Journalism Lab, news organizations with specific personalities develop specific needs in their publishing and social media strategies.

“Even fantastic content can die if you don’t put it out right,” Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen told Adrienne LaFrance. “The Atlantic can put out content from four o’clock in the afternoon to nine in the evening and it’s equally powerful. It is very much property-specific. I can’t take my learning from The Atlantic and copy over to the Economist.”

LaFrance says that one thing remains constant for all publications: “tweeting more is better than not tweeting enough but tweeting all at once is worse than not tweeting at all.”

Visual Revenue uses editorial information provided by publications and inputs it into an algorithm that objectively determines optimal tweet and publishing timing. The robotic element, they say, makes the publication as productive as possible. Mortensen said that before The New York Daily News began using Visual Revenue, it was putting new content on its homepage about 80 times a day. Now it updates 160 times a day.

A more public form of oral history, sure, but JFK found his roots in ancient forms. (Flickr Creative Commons: State Library and Archives of Florida)

We know the tumultuous start that the Twitter video app Vine had with their infusion of porn. With the Internet, journalists have infinite opportunities for trial and error in creating apps and programs for expanding their abilities to tell stories. Perhaps the most ancient and ingrained human form of storytelling is oral history. Many books have adapted this strategy to capturing the essence of an era or situation.

Now, Knight News Challenge winner TKOH wants to create an app to apply to this ancient form. Like Vine, TKOH’s app will benefit citizen storytellers as well as so-called “professional journalists,” those who will be dedicating themselves to such a stature in the future.

“It’s a need we all have,” Kacie Kinzer, of TKOH, told Justin Ellis of the Nieman Lab. “There’s someone we know, a friend, a family member, who has incredible stories that must be kept in some way.”

The app will be for mobile devices.  TKOH, a design studio in New York, won $330,000 from the Knight Foundation.

(Wikimedia Commons)

Over at Poynter, Tom Rosenstiel talks about China’s recent censorship protests.  “It is telling that the protests in China this week over government control involve a newspaper and censorship–not a military tank in a public square.”  About half of China’s population is online.  Rosenstiel discusses how the web causes interesting fractures in what kind of information gets shared (many Chinese willing to talk movies and music, very few about politics).  While the web provides an equalizer of sorts (or the opportunity for equality) in international information trade, repressive governments find a way to study and adapt to new technologies (better, faster, stronger than journalists?).