Jim MacMillan is a journalist who left a newspaper but now delights in experimenting with new ways to gather and share news - in this case, photos of a fire on his iPhone. We need more of that inside papers.
Attention + Influence do not equal Authority.
In the dustup over whether it is a good idea to sort Twitter posts by authority - defined as the number of followers one has - John Naughton rises above the cloud to see a larger fallacy in the discussion: The number of followers one has does not equal authority. It stands for influence (or I’d say, it is a proxy for attention - and then, in some cases, influence).
The problem Naughton sees is the same one that plagues analysis of online discussion using media metrics. In mass media, of course, big was better because you had to be big to own the press: Mass mattered. We still measure and value things online according to that scale, even though it is mostly outmoded. Indeed, we now complain about things getting too big - when, as Clay Shirky says, what we’re really complaining about is filter failure. That is why Loic Le Meur suggested filtering Twitterers by their followers; he’s seeking a filter.
The press was the filter. And the press came to believe its own PR and it conflated size with authority: We are big, therefore we have authority; our authority comes from our bigness.
But the press, of all parties, should have seen that this didn’t give them authority, for the press was supposed to be in the business of going out to find the real authorities and reporting back to what they said. This is why I always cringe when reporters call themselves experts. No, reporters are expert only at finding experts. Now to put this back in Twitter terms: Reporters don’t have authority. They have attention and possibly influence because they have so many followers. But that doesn’t give them authority. There’s the fallacy Naughton pinpoints.
“So we need to unpack the concept of âauthority,â” Naughton argues.
One way of doing that is to go back to Steven Lukesâs wonderful book in which he argues that power can take three forms: 1. the ability to force you to do what you donât want to do; 2. the ability to stop you doing something that you want to do; and 3. the ability to shape the way you think.In my experience, the last interpretation comes closest to describing the authority of the blogosphereâs long tail. Itâs got nothing to do with the number of readers a particular blog has, but everything to do with the intellectual firepower of the blogâs author.
Naughton argues that the number to manage on Twitter is the Twitter_index - that is, the proportion of followers to (what?) followees. He believes it ought to be 1.0 - that is, equal - “otherwise one gets into the online celebrity, power-law nonsense that Le Meur describes.”
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I’ll go halfway there. When I wrote for TV Guide and People, I supposedly had an audience northward of 20 million. I’ll hasten to say that was utter bullshit on many levels - the idea that one could trust syndicated research to count readers (as opposed to purchasers) and the presumption that every reader read every page (or ad - which is the real bubble in old media). Still, those were the numbers we bragged about, as if they gave us authority.
Dare I say that this blog gives me more authority - in Naughton’s and Lukes’ terms - than those publications did? My hackneyed example of Dell Hell reached more people in a more meaningful way than any review of Babylon 5 (though I still get in trouble for panning it).
But note well that the authority in Dell Hell was not me. I didn’t have authority (I didn’t write about PCs or pretend to any expertise in customer service). It was my message that had authority or at least relevance, as that was the reason it was passed around. And it was the passing around that invested it with authority.
So to that extent, Le Meur’s not wrong when he tries to find a way to express and calculate the idea that it’s not the author who holds authority but his or her audience. But his critics are also right when they say that number of followers won’t get him there. I think there is no easy measure, but if it exists it will be found instead in relationships: seeing how an idea spreads (because it is relevant and resonates) and what role people have in that (creating the idea, finding it, spreading it, analyzing it) and what one thinks of those people (when MrTweet.net tells me that John Naughton follows someone, I’ll see more authority in that than, say, whom Robert Scoble follows - no offense, Robert - because Naughton is so highly selective). That is what the totality of the press-sphere will also look like as various players add varying value to add up to a whole (and in 3D, the sphere will look different to each of us, so one-size-fits-all measurements will become even more meaningless).
Part of the problem in the Twitter discussion is also that the number of followers is, in the end, a proxy for celebrity while links - which Google PageRank and, for better or worse, Technorati value - come closer to measuring at least relevance. As old media faced more and more competition it became more and more about fame (and that was when access to the celebrity became more valuable than access to the audience). The internet’s value is that it is more about relevance. So I think the reason some people reacted so much from the gut against Le Meur’s suggestion is that it unwittingly corrupted the new world with the crass celebrity of the old. The last thing we need or want in the web is Nielsen ratings.
: LATER: Case in point: Tim O’Reilly kindly retweets my link to this post and then I watch it get re-retweeted again and again. That happens because it’s O’Reilly retweeting and he has authority not becauase he has the most followers - though he has many - but because he’s smart and respected (he has authority); it also happens, perhaps, because my post is relevant to a discussion. Message + spreader (or author) comes closer to authority than mere reader ratings.
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger (disclosure: I work for him) recounts at length an expensive libel action against the paper by giant retailer Tesco over highly complex reports that included errors on the company’s alleged attempts to avoid taxes. Rusbridger calls for a reform of British libel laws (”Do not be lulled into a false security by the word ‘British’: in the Internet age the British laws can bite you, no matter where you live”) - particularly in the midst of a economic crisis, when we need more reporting about companies’ activities. He writes:
Whether we are dealing with banks, taxation, security, religion, or climate change, we need more than ever to find ways of encouraging, not penalizing, news organizations that try to report matters of the greatest complexity and significance. The financial crisis currently facing newspapers in America and Europe is grave and comes at a time when they are more needed than ever. In years to come people may not question why newspapers got things wrong about such complicated matters as corporate tax structures or the behavior of investment banks; they may express wonder that they even tried.In my various scenarios for the future of news that relies more heavily on independent practitioners and networks, libel suits remain a huge question for which I can’t find an answer. It’s enough to ask, as Rusbridger does, why a (financially struggling) news organization would go ahead in reporting on large companies with the chance of errors and crippling punishment for them or of legal harassment. It’s another matter for an individual reporter - a Josh Marshall (even if his wife and business manager is a high-level attorney who used to work for Dow Jones) or a HuffingtonPost blogger - to take on the risk of financial ruin for the sake of reporting. The Media Bloggers Association has arranged libel insurance for bloggers, but in the face of prosecution of the level Rusbridger describes, that would be just spitting in a volcano.
We need a frank discussion about the good, need, and risk for society of reporting. I think we also need to investigate new ways to make even the subjects of investigation part of the process of investigation, so it is clear they have the opportunity for correction and clarification earlier on - and if they forego that opportunity, they share risk. The more transparent they are, the more they mitigate that risk. To do this, we must acknowledge the public good of having watchdogs look over corporate activity, especially as governments fail to do so.
: LATER: John Naughton sees some hope:
There is, however, a chink of light in the gathering darkness. Rusbridger spells out in great detail the huge cost of retaining the specialist accounting and legal expertise needed to understand the Tesco transactions. But one rule of the new ecology is that there is wonderful expertise out there on the Net, and there might be ways of harnessing all that collective knowledge â rather as Linux harnessed the distributed skills of great programmers across the world to build a ferociously complex operating system; or as Larry Lessig and Charlie Nesson have crowdsourced the task of preparing legal briefs for pro bono cases.At a Consumers Union event at Columbia a few weeks ago, Consumerist editor Ben Popken told about his site being for sale by Gawker Media and I delighted in putting CU on the spot, saying that they should buy Ben et al. Well, it just happened. I want my commission. Popken says he’ll give me a dal on a slightly used toaster.
It’s a smart business move for CU that will bring them a younger audience - with attitude - and potentially a new source of subscription sales. Good on them.
One of the best things Pro Publica does - besides reporting - is link to the best of what it calls accountability journalism because that helps support that reporting (take note, link-dumb, web-killer Gatehouse). Now they’re smartly using a bookmark tag “pplinks.”
Though by the reputation given me by others, I’m supposed to be disagreeable, twice today, I’ve disappointed big, old media people by not disagreeing enough.
Business Week wanted a debate over the fate of print with me supposed to take the side that print is doomed while Chris Tolles of Topix was supposed to argue that it isn’t. But it turns out that we agreed too much and so they took out my first lines (though I put them back). Chris says that digital will lead the way. I agree:
Whether or not print dies, its business model will. Physical waresânewspapers, books, magazines, discsâwill no longer be the primary or most profitable means of delivering and interacting with media: news, fact, entertainment, or education. Itâs not that print is bad. Itâs that digital is better.And this morning, I appeared on the CBS Morning Show in a segment with Andi Silverman, author of Mama Knows Breast, about a dustup caused when Facebook took down photos of women breastfeeding. The producers were looking for disagreement, but they knew going in that we wouldn’t be arguing. Andi defended breastfeeding as hardly indecent and I said we have to stop paying attention just to complainers or we’ll end up in a media world in which anything that could offend will be banned - and most everything can offend someone.
You’d think these would be happy endings to discussions: agreement found, consensus gained. But that doesn’t fit the format. I like this as a new form of contrariness: not being contrary and agreeing - nodding as the new act of subversion.
: LATER: Chris Tolles, too, added back in notes of agreement to his side of the debate. Group hug.
The Kansan City Kansan - the only paper covering Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas - is turning off its presses and going online.
I would say this is a forward-thinking act of innovation, except it comes from link-hating Gatehouse, whose stock is stuck at $0.04 and so it could be an act of desperation; I don’t know which. This is a paper that earlier sold its building, shifted its printing, and cut back from daily to twice-weekly in print. from the Kansas City Star story:
General Manager Drew Savage said in an interview that switching to an online publication would save on overhead and allow for more investment in electronic media. In addition to eliminating the print publication, Savage said the paper would cut some of its staff of eight, but he declined to say how many employees would lose their jobs.Despite those cuts, Savage said the Kansan would continue to thrive. Rather than see the move as the death of a newspaper, Savage touted it as the birth of a new medium.
âWe thought maybe this is a trend that could be really viable,â he said. âItâs the wave of the future. ⦠Weâll be launching a different platform. Weâll have a lot more content than we have ever had.â . . . .
After the switch [from daily], the Kansanâs online traffic increased, Savage said. Although he declined to offer circulation numbers for the paper, Savage said readership is about 10 times greater online than it is for the print edition. Those numbers suggest to him that the Kansanâs online advertising rates will probably remain similar to the print publicationâs and will allow the publication to explore new online features.
âThis is not going to be a newspaper turned into an online product,â he said. âItâs going to have a completely different look.â
Dare I link directly to and quote from the Kansan’s own announcement? Oh, I’ll live dangerously:
Founded on Jan. 31, 1921, by U.S. Sen. Arthur Capper, the Kansan filled a need in a community devoid of a major daily newspaper. The Kansan continued to be the only daily newspaper in Wyandotte County until mid-2008, when its publication schedule was cut back to twice-weekly.Bit by bit, with bigger and bigger papers, we’ll see more and more of this in 2009.
Protecting student journalists.
California has a great set of laws that protects student journalists - and now their advisers - from retaliation for reporting. In the larger ecosystem of journalism, I think, students will play a larger and larger role.
“Allowing a school administration to censor in any way is contrary to the democratic process and the ability of a student newspaper to serve as the watchdog and bring sunshine to the actions of school administrators,” [State Sen. Leland] Yee said in a press release. . . .“California just happens to have some of the best student journalism programs in the country and where the more substantive and aggressive journalism is, that’s where administrators crack down,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Virginia.
Alan Mutter, Boswell to the Grim Reaper of journalism - he has done a great job tracking the business misfortunes of the industry - produces a harrowing year-end account of newspaper company market value. His chart:
His lowlights:
* Newspaper shares are down 83.3% in a year, erasing $64.5 billion in market value - more than double the drop in the S&P 500.
* “The shares of eight of the 14 publishers tracked in the survey fell by 90% or more. The best-performing companies were the Washington Post Co., New York Times Co., and News Corp., but WaPo, the least battered issue of all, still fell 51.5%.”
* “The biggest loser of all was Tribune Co., which is worthless as the result of the bankruptcy filed less than 12 months after Sam Zell bought its shares for $8.2 billion to take the company private.”
* “Trading for pennies, the shares of GateHouse Media, Journal Register Co. Lee Enterprises and Sun-Times Media Group are essentially worthless.” McClatchy may be headed for delisting soon.It is fair to surmise that newspaper stocks last year got trounced twice as badly as the broader market , because investors have not seen any plausible strategies from publishers to reverse the accelerating declines in readership, advertising and profitability that have been under way since 2006.Three neat new efforts to teach journalists the tools, tricks, and gizmos of new media:
In a McCormick Foundation-funded program, West Virginia University journalism students are making multimedia stories to be run on papers’ sites throughout the state. That alone is a good idea and I’ll argue that we need to harness the brute reporting power of journalism students everywhere to help create journalism for papers and the public. But the WVU program goes the next step: Once the students have learned the tools and made stories with them, they turn around and teach the pros how to use them. Great idea!
“About half at least, maybe a little more, of the weekly newspapers around the state have Web sites, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty rudimentary sites — they just have basically what’s in the print edition,” [Associate Dean John] Temple said.While readers get their news increasingly from the Internet, small rural newsrooms don’t always have the time or money to invest in their Web sites.
“So what we’re trying to do is give them some ways of improving the editorial content on their Web sites without expending a great deal of time in training or in the execution,” Temple said.
Chris Stadelman, editor and publisher of the Parsons Advocate, was deciding in late December exactly what he wants his paper to get from the program.
“John (Temple) basically sent us a menu of different training and software applications, and we’re trying to figure out which ones we’re going to pursue,” Stadelman said. “They are certainly going to help us with video, and we may look at some blogging.”
Producing multimedia stories in the fall semester was energizing for McMillion, a news-editorial major from Charleston and one of the six seniors involved.
“Writing is my passion, but I’m real excited to be able to graduate in May with videography and photography skills and leave the school with a knowledge of multimedia,” she said.
“I never thought that I would learn so much in such a short amount of time — and now I catch myself teaching others,” she added.
Next step: I hope the newsroom journalists can’t catch themselves from teaching others in the community to expand the network of journalism locally: the newsroom as classroom.
Second effort: Jack Lail tells us about NewsTechZilla, where a couple of journalists explain how to use tools and fix problems in new media. One of them told Lail:
So it made sense for us to find a way to mesh together a discussion of journalism and some of the technical issues specific to journalists (real writers) who are moving online, many of them out on their own.Note that: Many of the journalists will be the formerly employed now starting to work independently.
Third effort: A reporter experienced in computer-aided reporting is spending a year teaching fellow newsroom folks computer programming. I wouldn’t suggest that everyone needs to know how to program (and it takes much less time to teach web 2.0 tools) but the more that more people know in newsrooms about technology, the better.
I’ve argued for a few years now that news organizations should be training everyone - absolutely everyone - in the simple tools and gizmos of new media, for that would show journalists the possibilities and demystify technology (I used to complain that old-media journalists acted like a priesthood but the sad truth is that new media folks became their own priesthood in newsrooms, holding onto their knowledge). Journalists teaching journalists and journalism students teaching journalists are both great ideas but it’s unfortunate they’re filling a vacuum left by journalism managers (and educators).
: LATER: See also Gina Chen’s blog from a journalist helping journalists with blogs, Twitter, etc. (Here are her 10 tips for blogging and here is my addition in the comments.)
: And in the comments, Howard Owens adds WiredJournalists.com, which he blogs about here.
Via Ryan Sholin on Twitter, I find a post by journalism student and practitioner Suzanne Yada (what a great name for blogging) with great advice for journalism students. Ryan’s and my favorite bit:
Grow some cojones. Let me level with you. The world doesnât need more music reviewers or opinion spouters. The world needs more people willing to ask tough questions. The first step to reversing journalismâs tarnished image is to have the guts to dig for information the public canât easily find themselves, and be an advocate of unbiased, straightforward truth. If you can show depth and research with your reporting clips, if you can show you can ask the tough questions and be more than just a parrot for your interviewee, if you can fact-check the living snot out of your articles, you will rise to the top of the crop.She has tons more superb advice (including: be prepared to go entrepreneurial), which I recommend to all my students and j-students anywhere.
Newspaper Death Watch has a nice list of change and innovation in news last year. It’s there; you just have to look for it.
For a proposal I’m writing, I want to compile key stats that show the state of the news business (at least the incumbents, plus a view of demand). Here’s what I have. Do you have other stats that reveal the state?
Bad newsâ¦
⢠Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008âtwice the fall of the S&P 500âwiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutterâs Newsosaur blog.
⢠Since 1994âand the release of the commercial web browserânewspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%.
⢠Viewership for network evening news continues to decline, to 23.1 million in 2007, according to Nielsen. The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA.
⢠Since 1994, newspaper print advertising revenue fell on an inflation-adjusted basis by 10% (from $34,109 million in 1994 dollars to $42,209 million in 2007 dollars, says NAA).
⢠Since 1994, the number of newspapers in America fell from 1,548 to 1,422, according to NAA.
⢠In 2008 alone, 15,586 newspaper jobs were lost, according to the Papercuts blog.
⢠In 2008, the Pew Research Center found that the internet surpassed newspapers as a primary source of news for Americans (following TV). For young people, 18 to 29, the internet will soon surpass TV, at nearly double the rate for newspapers.
⢠54% of Americans do not trust news media, according to a Harris survey. A Sacred Heart University survey says only 20% of Americans believe or trust most news media.
⢠Jeffrey Cole of the University of Southern California Annenberg Schoolâs Center for the Digital Future found in a 2007 survey that young people 12 to 25 will ânever read a newspaper.â Never.
⢠In 2008, the American Society of Newspaper Editors took “paper” out of its name.
Good newsâ¦
⢠But newspaper online site audience has long since surpassed print circulation, reaching 69 million unique users in fall 2008, according to NAA.
⢠And the total online news audience is about 100 millionâmore than half total U.S. internet usersâaccording to ComScore.
On the Dallas Morning News opinion blog today, the paper brags about what sets its letters apart from online discussion: identity. They quote a frequent letter writer named Chris (irony: no last name given) who says:
There was a statement in this guide whose importance is understood by far too few. Maybe it should have been entered in bigger and bolder lettering. The statement went as follows:“There is no shortage of online forums where people can make up facts and throw bombs. But in our published letters to the editor, people sign their names and publicly stand behind their opinions.”
In a free society, opinions without sources reflect poorly on both writers and readers. This fact, along with the feedback that hard copy journalism has concerning government at all levels, constitute a valuable rationale for the necessity, existence and continuation of such journalism.
I’m not sure I can parse that last sentence into anything approaching clarity. But the point of the rest is clear: identity is good.
But then there’s a comment left by one PaulC (no last name, either), who argues:
Really?“In an important case for privacy and free speech advocates, the
Supreme Court ruled recently that the First Amendment protects
anonymous political speech. In McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission,
decided April 19, 1995, the Court struck down an Ohio law that required
the disclosure of personal identity on political literature. . . .Justice Steven’s opinion for the Court note that arguments favoring
the ratification of the Constitution advanced in the Federalist Papers
were published under fictitious names. Justice Stevens said “quite
apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her
ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her
identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be
personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her
message simply because they do not like its proponent.” Stevens
concluded “Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a
pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of
advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of
the majority. “Each is right. I have long said here that I give more credence and value to the opinions of those who stand by those opinions with their names, as I do here. But there is a place for anonymity in political discourse (and in whistleblowing and under repressive regimes).
Fred Wilson - bless his heart - blogs on my book, saying nice things (”It’s a good read, perfect for a flight. It’s not too dense, full of great quotes and insights. I’m enjoying it.”) and he pulls out one of the ideas that fascinates me most, one I’m thinking about writing on again: publicness.
It starts with Catarina Fake telling how she and Stewart Butterfield made a fateful and wise decision when they started Flickr and “defaulted to public.” Then Fred retells the story I have in the book of Mark Zuckerberg and his Tom Sawyer moment in an art class: how public interaction helped an entire class. Next, Fred quotes a commenter who had a similar story about a class working through problems in front of the entire class (though the school stupidly requiring killing the product of this work).
Here’s the lovely irony: Because Fred discusses this publicly and because he has wonderful discussions o his blog, there are more good ideas and viewpoints: a debate about whether Facebook is really public because we can control and restrict our publics here; discussion about competition and secrets; opinions about the foolishness of erasing knowledge; more talk about the value of secrecy vs. execution; a neat thought about the positive pressure of publicness; how publicness - being first to an idea shared in public - can lead to thought leadership.
The double irony for me is that the book itself isn’t public yet. Fred shared a bit of it in public and that is what lead to this discussion. I can’t wait for it to be public - though, of course, books are only so public since they are sold. We’ll be putting some of the book online - I need to talk with the publisher this week about what exactly that will be - and I hope we’ll test the limits of the benefits of publicness.
The Guardian’s Anna Pickard issues a rousing endorsement of online friendships on Comment is Free:
The friends I’ve made online â from blogging in particular, be they other bloggers or commenters on this or my own site â are the best friends I now have. And yet, when I say this to people, many times they’ll look at me like I’m a social failure; and when surveys like this are reported, it’s always with a slight air of being the “It’s a crazy, crazy, crazy world!” item last thing on the news. Some portions of my family still refer to my partner of six years as my “Internet Boyfriend”.Call me naive, but far from being the bottomless repository of oddballs and potential serial killers, the internet is full of lively minded, like-minded engaging people â for the first time in history we’re lucky enough to choose friends not by location or luck, but pinpoint perfect friends by rounding up people with amazingly similar interests, matching politics, senses of humour, passionate feelings about the most infinitesimally tiny hobby communities. The friends I have now might be spread wide, geographically, but I’m closer to them than anyone I went to school with, by about a million miles.
For me, and people like me who might be a little shy or socially awkward â and there are plenty of us about â moving conversations and friendships from the net to a coffee shop table or the bar stool is a much more organic, normal process than people who spend less time online might expect.
Depending on the root of the friendship, on where the conversation started, the benefit is clear â you cut out the tedium of small talk. What could be better?
See also Leisa Reichelt’s seminal post on ambient intimacy. And also my column in the Guardian on how constant connection will change the nature of friendship. And here’s what I said in the last chapter of my book on the larger impact of Google and the internet:
I believe young people todayâGeneration Googleâwill have an evolving understanding and experience of friendship as the internet will not let them lose touch with the people in their lives. Google will keep them connected. . . .Thanks to our connection machine, they will stay linked, likely for the rest of their lives. With their blogs, MySpace pages, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Seesmic conversations, Twitter feeds, and all the means for sharing their lives yet to be invented, they will leave lifelong Google tracks that will make it easier to find them. Alloy, a marketing firm, reported in 2007 that 96 percent of teens and tweens used social networksâthey are essentially universalâand so even if one tie is severed, young people will still be linked to friends of friends via Facebook, never more than a degree or two apart.
I believe this lasting connectedness can improve the nature of friendship and how we treat each other. It will no longer be easy to escape our pasts, to act like cads and run away. We will behave with this knowledge in the present. More threads will tie more of us together longer than in any time since the bygone days when we lived all our lives in small towns.
Today, our circles of friends will grow only larger. Does this abundance of friendship make each relationship shallower? I donât think so. Friendship finds its natural water levelâwe know our capacity for relationships and stick closest to those we like best. The so-called Dunbar rule says we end up with 150 friends. I think that could grow. But remember the key insight that made Facebook such a success: It brought real names and real relationships to the internet. Itâs about good friends.
I just asked Anna to be my Facebook friend.
I Twittered:
My son says his problem with Twitter is too much Twittering about Twitter. Judging by today, heâs right. And I just added to it.Then David Weinberger, the Emeril of online thought, kicked it up a notch:
That used to be the case with blogging when it first started. Every other post (including mine) was about blogging. Blog blog blog blog.If you want to get out ahead of the curve when the next new social writing phenomenon happens, be the one who never writes about it.
Herewith, I put myself behind the curve. And of course, now I’ll tweet about this blog post about twittering. Jane, stop this crazy thing.
LATER: Nice exchange in response to this on Facebook (which might as well be Twitter, so it’s still morally the same):
Eric Effron : It’s only natural, though. I suspect that when people first got telephones, they talked a lot about…telephones!
Steve Safran: Agreed. My parents still talk about how wonderful it is they can email.
Lamar Graham: My mother still calls to tell me she sent me an e-mail.
Steve Safran: I get that too, but I have a feeling it’s just a Jewish mother’s way of saying “why haven’t you answered it yet?”Among the great benefits - yes, benefits - of the internet for newspapers are opportunities to find new efficiencies. Do what you do best and link to the rest is one. Share is another. Newspapers have always been bad at sharing. That’s why they never managed to start a consortium to work together online (RIP NCN). That’s why they each spent a fortune buying custom computer systems even though they all did the same thing - because they thought they were special.
Now they’re learning to share because they have to. The AP has a roundup of what they’re doing with a sidebar I hadn’t seen before listing their efforts so far (to which I’d add the New York area newspaper consortium): There are content-sharing networks in Ohio among eight papers, Maine among five, Florida among four, Texas among two, the Washington area among to, in addition to the Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times sharing a capital bureau and Mcclatchy and the Christian Science Monitor sharing international bureau stories.
I was going to start a collection of the letters to readers that newspapers are publishing these days explaining every cutback and consolidation and where surviving features are moving to save paper and money because the times are tough, you know. But there are too many such letters.
Here’s one sample from the Advertiser in Louisiana. What’s scary about it is not what the paper says but what a customer says in the comments:
The article says “newspapers are not going away”, well The Daily Advertiser is. I’ve spent thousands advertising in The Advertiser over the the last eight years and have noticed a dramatic decline in returns from those ads. I quit advertising altogether last summer. People just don’t read the hard copy of The Advertiser any more.Gulp.
Rather than telling readers what they’re not doing anymore and where they’re moving this and that - here’s where you’ll find that vital Sudoku and horoscope! - it might be better for papers to say what they are doing.
How about just saying: If it’s local, it’s here, if it’s not, it’s not.
And how about saying: If you want depth and currency and conversation and more, go online.
I don’t intend to quote every review What Would Google Do? gets but I can’t resist this one from Michelle
Archer in USA Today, short and sweet:Blogger/columnist Jeff Jarvis’ treatise on how â and why â companies should think and act like Google brings to mind several trite words from the world of literary criticism: eye-opening, thought-provoking and enlightening.There’s something for everyone in What Would Google Do? For newbies still struggling to comprehend the Internet, Jarvis puts it in context. For floundering industries, Jarvis suggests reforms via Google’s philosophy or strategies employed by entities such as Facebook and About.com. And for people and groups hoping to launch the next big Google, Jarvis takes a page from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: Make something useful, help people use it and then get out of the way.
: Craig Newmark, a humbler man than most, quotes the review but takes out the reference to himself.
A lovely review of the Folger Shakespeare Library show on the birth of newspapers by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post has some gems:
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It’s like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there’s nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it’s scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.
Kennicott susses out these themes through the ages:
When John Taylor, a bargeman and alehouse keeper turned journalist, published an edition of his Mercurius Aquaticus in 1643, he included a complete reprint of a rival paper, the Mercurius Britanicus — followed by a point-by-point smackdown of its contents. This was “fisking,” 17th-century-style: a form of argument beloved by bloggers who cut-and-paste something that offends them and then interlard it with commentary.The extra margin space included in a 1699 issue of Dawks’s Newsletter was meant to allow readers to write notes and commentary before passing the paper on to someone else. Web site designers may think that posting reader comments, which all too often devolve from sincerity to silliness to bigotry and ad hominem attacks, is a brave new invention of the interactive world. But interactivity is ancient. It’s at least as old as graffiti, and often just as useful.
There’s also a slick swipe at cable news, but I won’t ruin the punchline.
: I was going to buy a copy of the exhibit book until I saw that they charge $10 for shipping. Damned print.
Inventions and opportunities lost.
I ran out of time this morning before I had a chance to praise Jack Shaffer’s piece about newspapers’ failure to invent the web and reinvent themselves. Talk about burying the lead: His best lines came in his kicker:
From the beginning, newspapers sought to invent the Web in their own image by repurposing the copy, values, and temperament found in their ink-and-paper editions. Despite being early arrivals, despite having spent millions on manpower and hardware, despite all the animations, links, videos, databases, and other software tricks found on their sites, every newspaper Web site is instantly identifiable as a newspaper Web site. By succeeding, they failed to invent the Web.As Adrian Monck points out, this is really just another chapter in the ongoing soap opera about the culpability of journalists for the state of journalism today.
Shafer is inspired by Pablo Boczkowski’s 2004 book Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers and I have in my hand his thick and thoughtful 2001 dissertation on the topic. He chronicles attempts by papers to figure out and adapt to new media as it (they) emerged, including the creation of NJ.com’s Community Connection, which I lead and which died soon after Pablo wrote his treatise. It was one attempt among many to figure out the internet. And it’s one of the indictments against my tenure in online newspapers, for it was an attempt to be too controlling over the creation of communities. In my book, I quote Clay Shirky and Mark Zuckerberg as I learned that newspapers don’t create communities but might be lucky enough to serve them.
So there were many attempts by papers to adapt. There were many mistakes. Mine were among them. And so - to address Shafer and Monck - the question remains whether newspapers tried hard enough. Shafer says they may have tried but they barked up wrong trees.
I am accused by some of dancing on the graves of journalists’ jobs, of being happy that papers are dying. That’s not true. It’s a willful misinterpretation. If I have an emotion associated with newspapers’ fall - and I’m not sure I do - it’s anger and disappointment at what Shafer describes as papers’ failure to think past a world seen in their own image, to bring news into the future and give it adequate stewardship.
For every honest attempt to change that Shafer and Boczkowski talk about, I saw many more efforts to avoid and even torpedo change: newspaper editors and executives who told me that it was not their job to help this internet thing, to share content with the internet, to link to anyone else on the internet, to interact with readers on the internet, to rethink their procedures because of the internet, to teach new skills because of the internet, to promote the internet, and on and on. I saw too many direct attempts to subvert the future. That’s where the fault lies.
So Shafer’s quite right that newspapers failed because they couldn’t think past seeing the web as an extension of their past - they insisted in seeing the internet in their own image. But there’s more to the story.
Have to love this: English atheists - upset over an inflammatory (in many senses of the word) ad campaign on buses to warn nonbelievers of the hellfire of damnation - used the internet to raise money to buy ads on those same buses to assure the public that there’s probably no God, so “now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” They used the Guardian’s Comment is Free to kick off the campaign and hoped to raise 5,500 pounds but ended up raising 135,000. It’s very MoveOn: using the web to organize and raise money and then use old media.
: LATER: Just as I posted this, I saw that the Times of New York covered the story, giving the atheists even more bang for their buck.
I see that my baby, Entertainment Weekly, has a new editor, its fourth: Jess Cagle, who was part of the launch team at EW (when he was known as “young Jess”). My congratulations to him.
Post-paper and after the tears.
The great thing about Michael Hirschorn’s piece in the Atlantic about the death of the print New York Times is that it sees beyond the period of mourning and imagines what a post-paper Times could and should be. That’s what journalists should be doing - imagining a different - and perhaps even better - future.
“Ultimately, the death of The New York Timesâor at least its print editionâwould be a sentimental moment, and a severe blow to American journalism,” he says. “But a disaster? In the long run, maybe not.”
Hirschorn imagines many of the elements of the paperless paper that I also envision: more specializing, aggregation, collaboration. Individual brands - Friedman, Krugman, Sorkin - standing out on their own.
In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reportersânow reporters-cum-bloggers, in many casesâcould use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.I also love that he presents the model for the new Times as Huffington Post. The Times would surely quibble with that. But they’re not as far apart as they might seem. Both respect good reporting. As Arianna told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in London a few months ago, the reason she hires reporters is because their stories get more traffic. The public, too, respects good reporting. So maybe the Times should buy the Huffington Post - or vice versa - and they can start to learn from each other now. Naw, that’s going too far.
But having this discussion about life and journalism post-paper is valuable and I’m glad it’s happening.
Refresh.