Archive for the ‘journalism’ Category

Greater minds than mine — Jeff Jarvis, for one — have taken their run at newspapers and new business models recently.

This latest spasm of analysis began when New York magazine’s “Daily Intel” site reported that the New York Times would begin charging for access to its content. The model, according to that post, would be like the Financial Times, where you get very limited access to articles (1 per month when I tried it) and are then asked to register (10 articles free each month) and then subscribe (two levels of access to content, costing either 17.50 or 25 pounds).

The Times ran the TimesSelect paywall-based system from 2005-2007. TimesSelect was criticized by some of its biggest names, and was judged a failure. But some people, for example, Nicholas Carr, feel it was a reasonable business model to try. He points to an economic analysis by Matthew Gentzcow that suggests that online news is a substitute for newsprint, not a complement. If you buy Gentzcow’s argument, a fee for online access is reasonable.

All of this to say — where is the business model for newspapers?

We’re all hearing and reading seemingly contradictory information. Here in Canada, Canwest’s newspaper assets are in bankruptcy protection. But according to the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, that paper remains a profitable entry (with no paywall in place).

Newspapers in the US have been doing all kinds of things — shutting down, going online, going from for-profit entities to not-for-profit foundations. And Rupert Murdoch is calling sites such as Google or Digg “content kleptomaniacs” and threatening to block Google from indexing his publications (something that Google points out he could have done at any time by inserting a couple of lines of code)

People are pointing to the latest Pew Institute study of newsgathering in Baltimore, which suggests that the vast majority of reporting work still is getting done by traditional media. And to Jaron Lanier’s (left) new book “You are not a gadget”, which suggests a system of micropayments are necessary for media to continue to survive, if not thrive.

So it would appear that we have the following alternatives:

• Papers are still profitable (Ottawa Citizen)
• Papers are going bankrupt (CanWest chain)
• Papers need paywalls (Wall Street Journal)
• Papers need to meter access (Financial Times, New York Times)
• Papers need to get access to a global micropayment system (Lanier)
• Metered access won’t work (Jarvis)
• Micropayments won’t work (Clay Shirky)

Is it any wonder that I’m confused?

I don’t know the magic solution — I’m sure that if I did I could command a handsome price. It seems to me that there’s gotta be some room for paying media for online content. But what is that going to look like? What is one article on a newspaper web site worth? If a paper costs $1.00 and there are 200 articles in it, does that mean each article costs a half-penny? Who gets that money? What if they’re using wire copy ? Do I get to pay one rate if I just read it, and another if I link to it? Or should I get credit for a link? How much?

If I pay for the online side of things, does that mean I should pay at a library for using their online databases or their hard-copy newspaper indices? Or does their coverage give me full access?

I almost feel as if we’re in the media version of the Cretaceous period — a period characterized by intense diversity in approaches to surviving, thriving, and passing on the ol’ DNA. But instead of dinosaurs and wee scampering protomammals, we have these seemingly uncountable new ways of trying to make a business model for sharing information. The hard part for business, as in nature, is that the vast majority of adaptations will fail. Those best adapted to the circumstances will survive.

So many questions, and so few answers. What do you think?

(Lanier photo used with CC permission from Flickr user dfarber)

I’ve recently discovered Jorge Cham‘s “PhD comics.” Cham is not only a pretty great cartoonist, he’s a genuine PhD, who did his doctorate at Stanford, studying robotics. His two most recent panels that are VERY apropos for anyone doing PR or media relations in a science-based area

#1, from May 18:

And #2, just out today:

Love these. They’re keepers for the office wall for sure.

Ciao,
Bob.

Ottawa Citizen science writer Tom Spears is a good journalist. But having worked with him, I think it’s fair to say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He hasn’t been shy about criticizing media relations on his beat in the past — and it’s been bruising sometimes.

And now on his blog (where I wish he’d get some linkey goodness going) he has two recent posts about the Canadian Space Agency‘s media relations processes and performance.

His May 11 post, “Space news, the final frontier” used the results of an Access to Information request to parse the CSA’s media relations policies. He quotes from them at some length, and they seem unsurprisingly bureaucratic.

“Media Relations will then speak with the reporter and determine the nature of the request, the best person to fulfill the request, and the reporter’s deadline….Media Relations will complete the interview request form and forward it to the director overseeing the issue in question. The director will then recommend a spokesperson or send the form directly to the spokesperson designated by him or her…Media Relations will oversee strategic development (to be submitted to the Director of Communications for approval), logistical support, delivery of media relations services, and on-site assistance for all media events involving a CSA spokesperson…Media Relations prepares news release drafts with the support of the program team. The program team is responsible for providing the basic information needed to prepare a first draft… The news release is always approved by the Director of Communications and Public Affairs, the Program Director, the President, the Minister’s Office and other departments (as needed).”

You’ll be shocked to discover he doesn’t think much of this process.

Then he wrote one a few days later called “Space agency hits and misses” which explored a specific case study — that of the announcement of Canada’s two new astronauts, fighter pilot Jeremy Hansen (l) and Dr. David Saint-Jacques (r).

He notes that Saint-Jacques refused to answer what he refers to as “personal” questions, which he acknowledges was within his rights, but constituted a “missed opportunity.” What seems more serious to Spears is this:

“Applicants for the two new astronaut jobs were put through high-stress survival tests. Dunked upside down in cold water in a helicopter-crash simulator, made to fight fires and floods, and so on. Then, as part of this series of stress tests, the space agency made them do a media scrum, with fake reporters getting all aggressive at them. In other words, the agency set up the crucial job of telling their story as a high-pressure, adversarial prospect.”

I don’t know the truths behind this. But I doubt Spears is making stuff up. It’s a shame that astronaut David Saint-Jacques, who seems to me to be like most astronauts — incredibly accomplished people with awe-inspiring arrays of talents and charisma — couldn’t use his position to create a personal connection with media and through them the public.

So here’s my angle on this. Let’s assume that Spears is right, and that the agency sees media as the enemy. So why not focus on getting to people DIRECTLY, on their web site. To be frank, the CSA web site sucks. It’s a cookie-cutter Canadian government web site, with terrible ability to find pictures or video. They don’t have a YouTube channel. There are no photo galleries of their new astronauts, or anything else.

The only video on the media page is an incredibly dry press conference from March when they announced the 16 finalists for the astronaut position — a 52 meg Windows Media file lasting 25 minutes. There are podcasts for the Mars Phoenix mission, but that ended in November of last year.

By comparison, the NASA web is FULL of incredibly engaging stuff. They have a YouTube channel all set up.
And NASA has a full list of their media relations folks online with names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, while the Canadian Space Agency publishes a general phone number — no names, no e-mail. I called it shortly after five and got a generic message for a “media relations team” voice mail.

Again, it’s ironic that while Canadians are proportionately much more social-media friendly than our US neighbours, our government entities are lagging way behind — even ones like CSA, which have incredible stories they could tell directly to geeks like you and me, even if they don’t trust shifty-eyed cynical journalists like Spears. Talk about missed opportunities.

Ciao,
Bob.

Oh dear. According to J-Source.ca, a number of UK papers fell into the trap of Irish student Shane Fitzgerald (left) by reprinting a fake quote he added to the wikipedia entry for French composer Maurice Jarre. Jarre died at the end of March. Fitzgerald described what he did in an article for The Irish Times:

The death of the French composer Maurice Jarre was reported in true Sky News fashion in the very early hours of March 30th.

I immediately grabbed my laptop, went to Maurice Jarre’s Wikipedia page, clicked the edit button on screen and proceeded to lay the trap for my unsuspecting prey, the journalists.

“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” I wrote into the Wikipedia entry. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.”

He then described the outcome:

While I expected online blogs and maybe some smaller papers to use the quote, I did not think it would have a major impact. I was wrong. Quality newspapers in England, India, America and as far away as Australia had my words in their reports of Jarre’s death. I was shocked that highly respected newspapers would use material from Wikipedia without first sourcing and referencing it properly.

The issues about the media and quality reporting that this experiment raises requires a whole new article by itself – because the implications are far-reaching. If I could so easily falsify the news across the globe, even to this small extent, then it is unnerving to think about what other false information may be reported in the press.

The Guardian has addressed this slight embarassment with a post from ‘Readers’ Editor’ Siobhan Butterworth, which said in part:

Wikipedia editors were more sceptical about the unsourced quote. They deleted it twice on 30 March and when Fitzgerald added it the second time it lasted only six minutes on the page. His third attempt was more successful – the quote stayed on the site for around 25 hours before it was spotted and removed again.

The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source.

It’s nice to see at least one journalistic kerfuffle kick up that doesn’t end up being the fault of us PR folks.

Ciao,
Bob.

The New York Post is reporting, I read in Gawker, that there’s a feud between print reporters and bloggers covering the White House.

Back in the day (and by day I mean 1990) I worked at CBC Newsworld in Halifax.

I can remember speaking with reporters for “The National” on the main CBC network who responded witheringly to my request for an on-air appearance with “I don’t work for [sneer] Newsworld — I work for The National.”

Sigh.

No matter what, we can all depend on the inborn immaturity of the human species to subdivide and discriminate.

Ciao,
Bob.

Interesting New York Times feature on “Angelina Jolie’s Carefully Orchestrated Image” today.

Quick summary: Jolie plays hardball with magazines wanting to cover her life, demanding cash (for her charity work) and editorial control — apparently even guarantees of positive treatment into the future.

I would wager that Harold Hayes, the legendary editor whose tenure at Esquire magazine produced historic profile pieces like “Frank Sinatra has a cold“, is spinning in his grave.

My two questions:

• This is news?!
• If it is, is it news because they’ve been able to detail the terms of such agreements, or is the news that Jolie is so apparently good at it?

I couldn’t afford the million-dollar donation, so there’s no picture of Angelina to accompany the story.

To make up for this appalling lack of visual imagery, here’s the
Angelina National Forest in Texas, preserved in memory of the approximately one zillion trees killed to print celebrity rags each year.

UPDATE, 1/12/08: Phil Gomes provides his take on the story, and also points to People mag editor Larry Hackett’s internal e-mail response to the story, as reported by Just Jared.

Ciao,
Bob.

Following a couple of high-profile firings, (a CNN producer, a Washington Post reporter) over the issue of journalists blogging for outlets other than their employer, blogger Simon Owens decided to survey newspaper editors. He sent 250 e-mails to newspaper editors with a simple question:

The results, as reported in his post 44% of newspapers wouldn’t allow staff writers to blog during free time without prior approval:

“Of the 250 surveyed, 39 responded. Twenty-two — 56% — said they wouldn’t mind if writers blogged on non-beat issues without obtaining permission. The remaining 17 — 44% — either required disclosure of the blog, issued caveats over what subjects couldn’t be covered, or had outright bans on having personal blogs at all.”

I think Simon’s got it right in his final paragraph, though:

“What’s perhaps even more notable about my survey is that almost all the editors who responded to my survey said they had no written policy on blogs. This absence will likely provide a good bit of ambiguity in the future, leaving both reporters and editors between a rock and a hard place.”

News outlets, like all companies, should be thinking about these things before (to go a bit Yogi Berra on you) they end up between the horns of a dilemma and a hard rock.

Thanks for pointing this out to me, Simon.

Ciao,
Bob.

New survey out by Brodeur (part of Omnicom) about blogs and journalists. The short version:

• Blogs are a regular source for journalists. Over three quarters of reporters see blogs as helpful in giving them story ideas, story angles and insight into the tone of an issue.
• Nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week.
• Journalists are increasingly active participants in the blogosphere. One in four reporters (27.7%) have their own blogs and nearly one in five (16.3%) have their own social networking page. About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.
• The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

The survey was released as part of a panel at CES.

More detail on this later. Jeez, I wish you didn’t have to ask for the full survey findings.

Hat-tip: MarketingVOX.

Ciao,
Bob.

You have to hand it to the Venezuelan journalist who had the cojones to ask Venezuela’s Interior Minister about his Gucci shoes and Vuitton tie as he was declaiming about the evils of capitalism.

And you have to hand it to the Minister for his, um, poker face. (You can almost see the Spanish version of “Oh, SHIT” pass across his face.

Here’s the Reuters story on Yahoo News.

Ciao,
Bob.

Jeff Jarvis finally points me to the youTube clip I looked for and couldn’t find earlier today.

MSNBC news anchor Mika Brzezinski, unlike most of the journalistic establishment, knows what is news and what isn’t, and shows a refreshing amount of backbone in defending her position, live, on-air, on “Morning Joe“.