Respected journalist James Fallows (right) could be excused for scolding new media entities like Gawker for trivializing the news and playing to its audience’s most base instincts. He could also be forgiven for mourning the emergence of “truthiness” as a substitute for fact in an Internet-driven culture that has become more concerned with immediacy that accuracy. Yet Fallows does neither of these things in a thoughtful and well-sourced 8,000-word piece in this month’s Atlantic entitled Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media.

In fact, Fallows drops in on Gawker founder Nick Denton and spends time learning to appreciate a scene in which reporters compete to repost the most salacious and bizarre stories about celebrities and the weirdness around us. Their progress is tracked by big-screen TVs that display real-time traffic to the company’s properties, which include Gizmodo, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Gawker and others. Writers do almost no primary sourcing, but mainly dig around the Web for nuggets posted by others. They’re rewarded based upon the number of first-time visitors they attract.

Denton is unapologetic about his model, which has turned the art of story selection and headline writing into an analytical science. He’s giving people what they want, and if you have a problem with that, go elsewhere.

Which kind of sums up Fallows’ conclusions about the state of new media. Upon considering input from experts ranging from Tom Brokaw to Jeff Jarvis, his conclusions are basically that the world is what it is and we will have to figure this stuff out. On the one hand, we’re giving up the luxury of knowing that the news reaches us has been vetted  by professional journalists. On the other, we are getting a whole lot more information than we used to get. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We have to figure out how to do less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff.

The piece bristles with great quotes. “Everything is documented, and little of it is edited. Editing is one of the great inventions of civilization,” says Jill Lepore, a professor of American history at Harvard and the author of the recent The Whites of Their Eyes.

Artificial intelligence pioneer Jaron Lanier, author of Digital Maoism, adds, “We have created a technology that has wonderful potential, but that enormously increases our ability to lie to ourselves and forget it is a lie. We are going to need to develop new conventions and formalities to cut through the lies.”

Fallows resists the urge to pass judgment on what is right and wrong about new media. He sees some merit to Gawker’s lowbrow model, praises Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for inventing a new approach to journalism and even gives Fox News a pass for at least being honest about what it is.

He also dips into historical analogy to make a case that the media world has never been very stable. For example, Time and Newsweek were Depression-era experiments that were given little hope of success in their early days. National Public Radio didn’t exist during the Johnson administration. Television trivialized news, but it also gives us great shared experiences like the Apollo moon landing. All of these institutions were ridiculed in their early days because they broke with the way information had traditionally been delivered.

We are breaking the mold again, Fallows sums up, and very little can be done about it. So let’s look for virtue in new models and try to minimize our losses.

“I am biased in favor of almost any new project, since it might prove to be the next New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, NPR, or Wired that helps us understand our world,” he concludes. “Perhaps we have finally exhausted the viable possibilities for a journalism that offers a useful and accurate perspective.”

Miscellany

Alan Mutter asks “Will classified advertising come back?” The short answer: No. The people who used to buy real estate, automotive and recruitment advertising have found new and more-efficient channels and simply moved on, Mutter says. He has some interesting stats about newspaper classifieds:

• Recruitment advertising is down 85% since 2005
• Real estate advertising is off 76% in the same period
• Automotive is down 73%

Not only has that business permanently migrated elsewhere, the Newsosaur writes, but the one bright spot in the newspaper classified picture – legal advertising – is likely to shrivel as the economy improves and foreclosure and bankruptcy notices disappear. You can’t win for losing.

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Matt Waite (left), who was the primary developer behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact fact-checking application at the St. Petersburg Times, comments on the reluctance of news organizations to embrace meaningful change with extraordinary clarity.

The daily newspaper is the result of a finely tuned process in which each component must perform exactly as expected or else there’s hell to pay, Waite says. This process has been developed over the course of the last 150 years and is embedded into every aspect of the newspaper culture. Whatever you do, don’t mess with the production system.

This is why newspaper websites continue to be little more than digital versions of their print products. Process is so important that publishers can’t imagine doing things any other way. Waite notes that while innovative applications have emerged at many newspapers, they all exist on separate servers outside of the production system. These ideas won’t go mainstream – and news organizations won’t change what they do – until technologies like map mashups, real-time updates and crowdsourced fact-checking are integrated into the content management system. That will happen slowly, if it happens at all, he writes on Nieman Journalism Lab. A culture that is so hidebound by process is not one that sparks innovation.

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Perhaps Mozilla can provide an answer. The organization that created the Firefox browser, among other things, has partnered with Knight Foundation on a fellowship program that will deliver 15 technologists to major newspapers to develop “new, adaptive tools for the future.” The idea is that these fellows won’t be simply hired hands, but will bring innovative ideas based upon open source concepts like sharing and assimilation of other applications. They will spend the next three years working with some major newspapers on projects that will be available to anyone.

 

Wow, that was fast.

Just six months after it was launched as the most ambitious hyperlocal news operation in the US, Washington’s TBD has cut expenses deeply and narrowed  its mission to arts and entertainment. One third of the staff – or 12 employees – were let go this week. The apparent chaos at TBD is evidenced by the fact that general manager Bill Lord, who came on board just two weeks ago, said layoffs were only one of several options being contemplated at that time. Owner Allbritton Communications cited low traffic figures as the cause of the cutbacks. Considering that TBD racked up 6 million page views in January, it must have needed a lot of traffic to cover expenses.

The breathtaking speed with which Allbritton reined in the TBD venture shouldn’t be lost on other hyperlocal publishers. Alan Mutter sums up the difficulties that all such organizations face:

• Small audiences are difficult to monetize in the first place;
• Finding and converting advertisers to reach small audiences is expensive;
• Advertisers are reluctant to spend a lot of money on online ads in general, particularly when the audiences are small.

Mutter calls AOL’s Patch.com, which now encompasses more than 800 hyperlocal sites, the next litmus test for the concept. AOL is reportedly spending $50 million on the venture, but the tone of Mutter’s analysis is that that money is probably wasted.

Keep reading, though,  if you want a different perspective. Nearly every one of the 20 or so people who weigh in on Mutter’s post disagree with him, some vehemently. They argue that hyperlocal news does work if publishers don’t get too greedy. Comment writers include several people who are successfully running the kind of small operations for which Mutter see so little hope.

“Hyperlocal is just a way of expressing the need for news that is more local, closer to the neighborhood or town level, than the metro daily ever could be,” notes  Jay Rosen. “And of course it corresponds to a class of advertiser that was priced out of and ill served by the metro daily and TV stations.”

Adds Oscar Martinez (left) of NeighborsGo, a successful hyperlocal venture by the Dallas Morning News, “If nothing else, [the Patch.com] effort should be applauded because the competition will remind newspapers that there IS money on the table and, more important, there’s still time to go after it.”  We interviewed Martinez more than 2 1/2 years ago, and his hyperlocal operation is still alive and kicking.

Our take: Mutter’s analysis is accurate, but publishers continue to debate the wrong thing. The issue isn’t whether there’s enough advertising out to fund a lot of successful hyperlocal ventures; there probably isn’t. The solution is in finding other ways to monetize small businesses in the area. We laid out our proposal two years ago, but with the exception of Sacramento Press, a hyperlocal venture that is truly flourishing, we haven’t seen a whole lot of interest.

Promoting Newsroom Innovation

Lauren Rabaino picks up on a Twitter chat with Jay Rosen in which the professor said newsrooms need to radically revamp their culture. Rabaino points to a few examples of how tech startups break the mold in interacting with the customers and investors. While her use of the word “awesome” is a bit excessive, her examples aren’t.  Why are biographies on news sites so boring? Probably because newspaper cultures have traditionally buried the identities of all but their most prominent columnists. In contrast, tech startups use bio pages to point out that there are real people behind the products. Why not humanize the staff that brings you the news? Chances are they’re members of the community, anyway.

There’s also an interesting idea about bringing webcams into the workplace, something that text-messaging startup Tatango has reportedly done for its investors (although we can find no evidence of it on Tatango’s website). We’re not sure if webcams in the newsroom would be very interesting to look at, but the idea of opening up news meetings to the public has always intrigued us. Yes, competitors would be free to watch the action, too, but might the involvement of the community in the news gathering process also give the open newsroom a competitive edge? We’ve always thought that when it comes to reporting the news, more participation is better than less. Some traditionalists still resist that idea.

In a similar vein, Editor & Publisher has an essay by Neil Greer, CEO and co-founder of ImpactEngine.com, about how to motivate people to innovate. We think the recommendations are mostly management common sense, but they’re valid anyway.. T

Miscellany

The Selma (AL) Times-Journal will put up a paywall next Tuesday, becoming the latest in a trickle of small papers to charge for access. It’ll cost you $48/year or $4.95/month to get the news, and PayPal is accepted. Print subscribers will get in for free, but only after paying the online fee and then asking for a rebate. The story about the paywall is bylined by Times-Journal news editor Rick Couch, who temporarily abandons journalistic impartiality in failing to explore the controversy around paywalls or the possibility that this could actually be a bad idea.

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The University of Colorado should eliminate its standalone journalism major in favor of an integrated information science or digital communications program, according to the chancellor of the Boulder campus. If approved, the shutdown of the current journalism school could happen as early as  next year. Chancellor Phil DiStefano isn’t calling for journalism education to fade from this earth. Rather, he thinks it should be incorporated more holistically into a liberal arts education and perhaps become a minor concentration. Boulder’s Daily Camera presents both sides of the debate, including anxious statements from the current journalism faculty who will be moved, like displaced persons, to other corners of the campus.

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The Detroit Media Partnership is borrowing an idea from the fast-food industry and offering a $5,000 prize to the person or group who can come up with the best idea “for helping The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press increase their audiences or better serve the community.” Management is taking suggestions now and will hold a public vote in early April. Finalists will pitch their ideas to a panel of judges that includes Domino’s Pizza Inc. CEO Patrick Doyle, whose policy of responding to customer complaints about his company’s crappy product is credited with turning Domino’s around.

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Detroit’s second most famous business – rapper Eminem – shook up the local journalism world a bit by snubbing hundreds of media supplicants and granting a rare interview to East Hills Middle School eighth-grader Annie Reed. Reed, who had pursued the interview at the urging of her newspaper instructor,  talked to the 38-year-old rapper for about 10 minutes. The word “cool” was apparently used several times. The Detroit Free Press story is more about how Reed got the audience with Eminem than about what was said on the phone. It’s an uplifting tale and the photo is great. Lose Yourself.

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“Launch glitches” will keep Rupert Murdoch’s tablet-only Daily free for at least several more weeks, according to Publisher Greg Clayman. Users have been reporting frequent crashes and freezes, which Clayman said is not surprising for a digital news publication that sometimes exceeds 100 pages per day. While people we know who have tried the Daily mainly dismiss it as gossipy fluff, Clayman says subscriptions are running ahead of plan, although he wouldn’t be more specific

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The quarterly earnings season is upon us, and newspaper publishers are reporting better results, but not on the print side. The Washington Post Co. earned $11.59 a share in the quarter, which is nearly $3 dollars better than analyst consensus estimates.  However, print advertising revenue dropped 12%, continuing the ugly trend of the last five years. The good news: online revenues were up substantially.

A.H. Belo Corp., which publishes the Dallas Morning News and Providence Journal, among others, lost $119.5 million, or $5.65 per share, during the final quarter of 2010. That’s way down from earnings of $5.6 million, or 27 cents per share, in the same period the previous year. However, a large charge to cover pension expenses responsible for much of the drop. Revenue was down about 4%.

Gannett reported a fourth-quarter profit increase of 30%, largely due to cost-cutting and strength in its broadcast division. However, advertising revenue on the publishing side dropped nearly 6% and circulation revenue was down 4%.

And Finally…

Thanks to Legends and Rumors for calling out this correction from The New York Times, which we publish in its entirety:

An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor. No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.

It’s disconcerting when the CEO of one of the emerging giants of online publishing is quoted referring to the acquisition of a news organization as “the future of the content space.” However, that’s how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong apparently sees the hundreds of millions of dollars in recent investments his company had made to acquire properties like TechCrunch, Patch.com and now Huffington Post. He’s filling a space.

He could do worse than to fill it with the staff at Huffington, however. The $315 million deal, which was announced late last night, puts HuffPo founder Arianna Huffington (right) in charge of all of AOL’s editorial properties, which include TechCrunch and the rapidly growing Patch.com network of local news sites. She also gets Mapquest and MovieFone thrown into the deal. This should be a dream come true for Huffington, who launched HuffPo as a blog six years ago and who has taken only $1 million in investment capital since then.  The New York Times has all the facts.

Huffington has a chance to shape a new kind of media company as AOL struggles to recover from its disastrous merger with Time-Warner and its reputation for editorial superficiality. AOL has made some innovative strides in investing in Patch, and its earlier acquisitions of TechCrunch and Engadget demonstrate a willingness to invest in distinctive editorial models that challenge mainstream media. However, as The New Yorker noted in a recent critical profile of AOL and Armstrong (summarized on PaidContent.org), the company’s failure to hire an editor-in-chief has made it appear strategically aimless. The installation of Huffington in that job is a chance to fix that.

HuffPo is growing like a weed. The organization now has more than 200 employees and is on track to generate $60 million in advertising revenue this year. Paywall fans might want to note that HuffPo has no paid subscription model. In fact, as The New York Times points out, readers’ ability “to leave comments on Huffington Post news articles and blog posts and to share them on Twitter and Facebook has been a major reason the site attracts so many readers.”

AOL has been such a backwater of editorial mediocrity for so long that it’s hard to shake the assumption that the company will find a way to screw this up. However, Armstrong does appear willing to place bets on some properties that are breaking the mold of how journalism has traditionally been done. With Huffington at the helm, AOL has a strong leader in this “space.” Please just don’t call it that.

Shaky Daily

Have you downloaded your copy of Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily for the iPad yet? Don’t rush. A lot of early adopters are apparently still waiting for it to load. PaidContent.org says the app routinely takes a minute or more to start and that crashes and freezes are common. In ratings on the iTunes store, “even the positive reviews mention load problems and crashes,” writes Staci Kramer. Adds John Gruber, “My opinion of it has declined each day.”

Alan Mutter is a little more definitive, pronouncing The Daily “a dud” based upon its first issue. With “the barest possible news report back-filled by a bunch of vapid features,” the journal is “more like the Etch-A-Sketch edition of Us magazine than the ground-breaking news platform it purports to be,” he writes. Ouch.

To be fair, The Daily is in start-up mode, and anyone who has ever launched a new publication will tell you that the first issue is usually not portfolio material. Few people will remember these early negatives if the venture turns out to be a hit (remember Amazon’s frequent outages in the late 90s? Neither do we). One impressive achievement for the new publication is the stable of blue-chip advertisers it’s lined up. AdAge says they include Macy’s, Verizon Wireless, Land Rover, Pepsi Max and Virgin Atlantic. It also ran a 30-second ad on the Super Bowl, but that achievement is made less notable by the fact that its parent company owns Fox Broadcasting.

The Times They Are Delaying

It’s been nearly a year since The New York Times announced plans to charge for access to its online content starting in January. Now January has passed and we’re still waiting for what publishers hope will be a model for other subscription wannabes across the Internet.

Perhaps the Times is dallying because it doesn’t want the paywall to be another Daily. Times staffers are laboring to fix more than 200 bugs in the technology for charging readers, Bloomberg says. The difficulties apparently stem from the complexity of the app, which has several payment tiers and which must balance limited access with the offsetting needs to be visible to search engines and to enable readers to easily post links  on Twitter and Facebook.

While the world waits for the time strategy to unfold, the paper has quietly launched an unrelated and useful recommendation engine. Neiman’s Megan Garber caught up with Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations, and discovers that the engine does a lot more than simply spit back articles that share similar tags. Frons says the program also looks at “people’s patterns, and how they move around the site, and what sorts of different things they might look at.” It tries to figure out what you might like even if you haven’t read stories in that domain recently. On the back end, it gives the Times greater insight into what readers want, which probably has some value in determining what they will pay for.

And Finally…

We were so stunned by the ad for coupon broker Groupon that ran on the Super Bowl last night that we fished it out of YouTube to be sure we hadn’t heard it wrong. We hadn’t. Actor Timothy Hutton delivers a solemn soliloquy on the suffering of the people of Tibet under Chinese rule. “Their very culture is in jeopardy,” he says. But there’s a bright spot: “They still whip up an amazing fish curry,” and you can get it for half off with your GroupOn membership.

We hope this ad is a subtle joke. If so, it sets new standards for subtlety. In a posting on the Groupon blog, founder Andrew Mason explains that the ad is partly satirical. “What if we did a parody of a celebrity-narrated, PSA-style commercial that you think is about some noble cause (such as ‘Save the Whales’), but then it’s revealed to actually be a passionate call to action to help yourself (as in ‘Save the Money’)?”

Actually, we think it’s a terrible idea. Using the suffering of people and the peril of entire species to sell advertising is sort of baldly offensive on its face, don’t you think? If the ad is intended to raise money for Tibet, it would have been nice to offer diners the option of sending their savings directly to Tibetan relief. But the ad neglects that detail.

If you agree that this campaign is over the top, please tweet your thoughts to Andrew Mason. Better yet, give to The Tibet Fund, where Groupon is saving face by matching donations up to $100,000.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is profitable again, and “This ensures that we can continue to produce the quality journalism that you’ve told us is important to you,” crows Publisher Michael Joseph in a 1,000-word tribute to all that the paper is doing for its community. “Our improved financial picture is allowing us to again expand content offerings that are targeted toward what you’ve told us really matters in your lives.”

It will be interesting to see if area readers agree with this publisher’s optimism (comments are disabled on the essay), for the AJC has suffered some of the worst cutbacks of any major metro daily. In early 2009, the paper laid off 30% of its editorial staff, reducing its total size to less than half of what it was in 2006. Distribution to seven outlying counties was discontinued, coming on top of an earlier decision to cut all its regional editions. The AJC daily circulation fell 52% between 2002 and 2010, although some of that loss was self-inflicted due to distribution cutbacks.

The question is whether a newspaper with a staff of 230 journalists can produce the same quality of material as one with 500. We don’t want to dismiss out of hand the possibility that it can, but it won’t look anything like the paper it was a few years ago. In a desperate bid to survive amid its circulation free-fall, the AJC has completely upended its editorial model over the last five years, turning most of its attention to the suburbs and vacating its downtown offices in August in favor of cheaper space near the northern suburb of Dunwoody It has taken steps to address a perceived left-wing bias and chosen not to endorse candidates in recent elections. The AJC has partnered with local Cox TV and radio stations on tag-team reporting projects, attempted to partner with local weeklies to share content and even run occasional pieces from Demand Media, the crowdsourced editorial engine that assigns stories by keyword relevancy.

Can you cost cut your way back to success? The AJC will be on the leading edge of answering that question. There’s nothing like a near-death experience to focus the mind, and in slashing its costs, the paper has had to make some grueling decisions. Its experience is probably familiar to many in the industry, where the shift of the audience to the suburbs has challenged publishers to remain relevant at the local level its audience cares most about. It helps that the AJC has a near monopoly in its market, and that its website is the default destination for news about all things Atlanta. There’s nothing particularly special about its Web presence, but it was one of the first major dailies to release an iPad app.

Its free classifieds service is an acknowledgment that there is no more money in that business anymore. The question is where the revenues are going to come from? A lot of eyes in Atlanta will no doubt be on The New York Times as it attempts to launch a paid online subscription model in the first quarter. For a paper with the regional clout of the AJC, that may be just what the doctor ordered.

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The New York Times asks if comedian Jon Stewart is the modern-day Edward R. Murrow, citing Stewart’s advocacy for legislation awarding health-care benefits to 9/11 responders that passed in the last hours of the 111th Congress. Stewart devoted his Dec. 16 show to the bill, which had received little coverage in mainstream media and was about to die with Congress’ adjournment. That show is widely credited with having resuscitated efforts to get the measure approved. Stewart says he isn’t a journalist, but the Times points to similar advocacy reporting by Murrow and Walter Cronkite that shifted public opinion about events in their time, and suggests that Stewart’s appeal to young audiences may kindle an interest in advocacy journalism by a new generation.

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People passing by newsstands in Sacramento may do a double take when they hear the “talking news rack” deliver a 15 second recorded message each time a newspaper’s purchase. The news racks also have a scrolling LED that can display news, messages from the editor and even ads.

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In the weeks before her death from the rare disorder of peripartum cardiomyopathy, Shana Swers documented her ordeal on Facebook. Reporter Ian Shapira was intrigued, and when the Washington Post assigned him to tell the story, he chose to anchor it in Swers’ own Facebook posts. The clips from Swers’ wall were annotated by Shapira, who did the traditional blocking and tackling of interviewing family members and medical experts, but the writer chose to sacrifice the journalist’s traditional privilege of owning the narrative. The piece is already being held up as one of the most innovative alternative news stories of the year. Mallary Jean Tenore provides more background on Poynter.

How much will The New York Times charge per month for unlimited access to its Web site when it debuts a firewalled service early  next year? Ten bucks. At least that’s the median consensus of the nearly 10,000 Slate readers who have taken a poll aimed at projecting the access fee, which remains a mystery more than 11 months after the Times announced plans to charge a fee in January. The average fee suggested by the crowd is actually somewhat lower – $8.30 – but we like $10 because it’s such a round number. We’d like it even better if hundreds of Death Watch readers stormed the Slate site and voted $1 to bring the average down. That might turn heads at 620 8th Ave.

Poynter’s Rick Edmonds pried a few more details out of Times executives about the much-anticipated online access charge. He thinks $19.99 is the nut. That’s what the Times charges for its Kindle version, so maintaining that price for standard Web access would minimize price conflict. Times Co. execs are also on record as saying that visits that come from links won’t be firewalled, but readers presumably won’t be able to navigate to other parts of the site without paying a fee.

Edmonds runs the numbers: of NYT.com’s 40 million monthly unique visitors, 15% are considered “heavy” users (viewing 40 or more pages per month), and so are the ideal candidates to convert to paid online subscribers. If there are six million of those people, and if 5% of them can be converted to paying customers, then that drops an additional $6 million to the bottom line each month. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Times Co.’s overall annual revenues of $2.4 billion, but it’s also pure profit. It might help offset the $13 million quarterly impact of recent price increases for newsprint, a line item that’s expected to continue growing more than 10% a year for the foreseeable future. Ouch.

Corky Boyd thinks the Washington Post will be the spoiler. While newspaper industry executives huddle in secret confabs that have overtones of price-fixing,  the Post has been militant in insisting it won’t charge for access to its website. Boyd thinks the Post is awaiting a windfall of readers when the walls go up in Manhattan. “If the Times goes the pay route and the Post doesn’t, the Times readers will gravitate to the Post, jeopardizing the Times’ reputation as the ‘newspaper of record.’” Perhaps, but we’re not so sure the Post‘s Beltway-centric view is going to appeal to the average Times reader. We think it’s more likely that the audience will simply continue to fragment as it has for years. Readership is increasingly driven by search engines, RSS feeds, tweets and e-mailed links, not brand loyalty. Price-sensitive readers will find their new sources wherever Google takes them.

Gaming the System

How many e-mails does it take to move a story on NYT.com onto the hallowed “most e-mailed list?” About 1,300. At least that’s what Thomas Weber estimated after he and a global team of lackeys recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service moved an obscure, three-week-old story from the Science section to the second slot on the list. Writing on the Daily Beast, Weber describes how he conducted dry runs in the weeks preceding the Dec. 14 experiment to first see what it took to move a story onto the list in the Science section alone (about 45) and then to break into the top-25 list for the NYT.com site as a whole (about 300).

Conclusion: “Out of the 30-plus million Times website visitors each month, it takes only one out of every 25,000 emailing a particular story to secure it a spot, at least for a day, in the hallowed most-emailed list.” Which indicates that the wisdom of crowds can be manipulated by the wisdom of a very few people within the crowd. We’ve always known this, of course; story placement on Digg.com is famously influenced by less than 1% of its visitors. Weber’s experiment demonstrates, though, that a carefully coordinated campaign by just a few hundred people could gain something like a positive movie review considerable visibility at little or no cost. Maybe others figured this out long ago and just haven’t told us about it.

Keep an Eye on Patch.com

AOL’s rapidly growing Patch.com local news network is beginning to draw some veteran journalists to its fold, or at least that’s the case in LA. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Rainey tells how veteran reporter Nancy Wride scooped the Long Beach Press-Telegram with her reporting on a police shooting that happened just two blocks from her home. Wride worked at the Times for nearly 30 years before being caught in one of that paper’s many layoffs. She now splits her time between mothering and tending the Patch site in Belmont Shore. Several of her former colleagues from big media have joined her on a freelance basis, including “former Times photographer Lori Shepler, former Times outdoors writer Pete Thomas and former KFWB radio reporter Sharon Katchen.”

It isn’t just Belmont Shore that’s enjoying the bounty. Rainey lists a handful of other local media fixtures who contribute to Patch. The pay isn’t so good, and the hours can be long, but at least it’s some reward for people to do what they do best. Patch just opened its 600^th local outlet and is continuing to hire aggressively. Its jobs page lists 236 open editorial positions.

Miscellany

Online ad spending nearly doubled in 2010 and is expected to surpass print newspaper revenues for the first time, according to eMarketer. Meanwhile, print revenues are expected to continue their tailspin in 2011, dropping another 6%. EMarketer now estimates that by the end of next year, annual print revenues will have dropped an astonishing 55% in just six years and total industry revenues will have fallen by half.

If you use the venerable Delicious.com bookmarking service, you should be aware that owner Yahoo is trying to get rid of it. Yahoo says it had no intention of shutting down Delicious, which used to go by the geeky URL of del.icio.us, but that the site is no longer a strategic fit. We wonder just what is a strategic fit any more for the aimless Web directory.

And Finally…

The movie-making site Xtranormal had somehow evaded our awareness until a friend sent us a funny/sad/provocative video about a would-be journalism student. The site lets you create movies by submitting a dialogue in text and choosing avatars to play the characters. The characters speak in a monotone and gesture robotically, which makes the result all the more amusing. Only some of the topics can be quite vicious. For example, check out “So You Want to Go to Law School,” which has more than one million views on YouTube. In the meantime, we hope the dialogue below helps make your season bright.

We won’t try to paraphrase the presentation that Journal Register Co. CEO John Paton gave to the INMA Transformation of News Summit last week because Paton stated everything so beautifully. So we’ll just give you a few quotes from the transcript that we highlighted. Paton gets it like no other news executive we’ve encountered.

“You don’t transform from broken. You don’t tinker or tweak. You start again – anew

“Doing more of the same with less results in the same done worse. It is prolonging the death of a broken business model rather than adapting to the realities of the present.

“Just about everything we are doing at JRC – and just about what every newspaper or legacy media company is doing – is focused on getting ON the Web. Very little is being done to position legacy media companies to be OF the Web.

“There is now an even bigger audience for our core product – news – than ever before.  And in the crowded marketplace that is the Web, it is the deep trust the audience has for print that is leading us and them online.

“To be in the news business now means you must run your business as digital first.  And that means print last. That is how this new world works.

“[The reason the industry isn’t changing faster is] fear, lack of knowledge and an aging managerial cadre that is cynically calculating how much they DON’T have to change before they get across the early retirement goal line. Stop listening to the newspaper people and start listening to the rest of the world.

“We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Reduce it or stop it. Outsource it or sell it.

“We bought every reporter – and now some ad salespeople as well –a Flip video cam. They paid for themselves in about a month as we have gone from 100,000 video streams a month to about two million.

“One [JRC] group in Pennsylvania is trying to meet a challenge set by Jay Rosen [called] the ‘100% solution:’ Cover everything that happens on a particular subject in a particular area. Using the crowd, Twitter, smartphones plus Google Docs to manage it all, they are attempting to create real-time game coverage of high school sports. That’s every game in real time.

“Citizen Skip Harrison of Trenton New Jersey has an all-abiding interest in the New Jersey educational system. He is part of the Community Media Lab at our paper The Trentonian. We are training interested citizens to be journalists.

“We have successfully printed pages on a press using only free Web tools. The next time some rep comes to your shop brandishing a $20 million system, tell him the price just went down. Way down. Our capital expenditures have been reduced by half.

“In Torrington, CT at the Register Citizen, our young publisher Matt DeRienzo deputized his entire community to fact check all of his products online and in print…He issued an invitation to every reader, source and community member to hold them accountable and engage in correcting, improving or expanding the story. Matt’s innovative approach…has created an online audience 6.5 time greater than his print audience and he has taken what was a money-losing operation into a profitable one.

“As of Q3, year to date, the Journal Register Company['s financial performance] is handily outpacing the industry as compared to figures provided by the Newspaper Association of America. JRC’s ad performance has been three  times better than the industry. More importantly the company’s digital revenue has grown from negligible to 11% of ad revenue in November – in less than a year. With each passing day, that revenue is also less tied to the print buys. More than 60% of digital revenue this month is NOT tied to print sales. Our company which was bankrupt in 2009, is projected to have a profit margin of 15% this year.”

A couple of weeks ago, we profiled Sacramento Press, a bootstrapped startup that appears to be doing a lot of things right, including adopting a diversified revenue model and partnering with other small publishers to share in advertising contracts. Well, they’re moving fact. Ben Ilfeld, the 29-year-old founder of Sacramento Press, sent us this announcement yesterday. He’s hoping to expand and duplicate the Sacramento business model in other towns throughout California. Tomorrow, the world! Here’s to the renamed Macer Media’s success.

The following is an edited press release:

Looking to help communities elsewhere build successful new local online media models as traditional media struggle to survive, the founders of The Sacramento Press have chosen a new corporate identity – Macer Media LLC – to underscore their philosophy to keep their operations lean, even as their business continues to develop new sources of revenue and grow at a healthy pace.

Macer Media will serve as a corporate umbrella over several operating entities, including The Sacramento Press, Sacramento Local Online Advertising Network (SLOAN), The Bay Area Publisher Partnership (BAPP) and DealTicket, an online local daily deal site.

Macer Media aims to assist 21^st Century publishers in other markets in understanding and obtaining the innovative blends of news gathering, advertising, social media and technology needed to succeed at seeding their own “hyper local” new media outlets.

“We want to run a lean company in the spirit of these local and hyper-local champions and be a company that not only has a stake in the hyper-local fight in the form of The Sacramento Press, but also helps out others in our space by providing the tools to build healthy local media ecosystems,” said co-founder Geoff Samek.

The Macer Media team is focusing initially on creating trusting relationships with local publishers throughout California to test the sharing of news, as may be appropriate for their readers, and as a means for local advertisers to expand their reach.

The Macer Media team encourages publishers to develop their own distinctive blends of news gathering, advertising, social media and technology infrastructure rather than adopting a “cookie cutter” approach to serving local audiences.

“We learned fairly quickly that people respected what we’re doing with The Sacramento Press in terms of our mix of technology, advertising and news gathering,” Ilfeld said.  “We’ve demonstrated an ability to innovate with technology and then leverage our strengths in technology and marketing to start SLOAN, our local ad network.  Those are hallmarks of what we do.”

We got an invitation to speak to the founder of the Sacramento Press a couple of weeks ago, and since few hyper-local publishers have the desire or financial means to do any PR these days, we were curious to hear what Ben Ilfeld (right) had to say.

Ilfeld is a 29-year-old entrepreneur who has created a different approach to community journalism. He has no journalism background, and that’s probably a virtue, because Sacramento Press is unencumbered by preconceptions about how publishing should be done. It is also experimenting with a diversified business model in which advertising is only a piece of the revenue picture. That’s an idea we’ve been advocating for some time.

Anybody can contribute to Sacramento Press and about 1,200 people have. About 65% of the content is generated by the community and managed by a full-time editorial staff of five people. The underlying principle, though, is what is sometimes called a “Folksonomy.” In other words, the community organizes the site.

Ilfeld and co-founder Geoff Samek created Sacramento Press’ content management system from scratch in Java. It incorporates a new navigation concept called a “story line.” Everyone who registers is asked to create one.

A story line links together all the work an author has done on a particular topic, providing a sort of background narrative. The site also relies heavily upon tags to give members the means to self-organize its content. “You can create a tag like ‘Marshall School Park’ and apply that tag to any other content,” Ilfeld said. “We then give you a URL and that creates your own front page.” The site also employs a traditional section taxonomy and its default front pages are laid out by human editors.

Merit Rewards

Members are urged along through a system of merit badges that rewards them for accomplishments like covering the fire department beat or participating in one of the many free workshops the company offers on topics like “writing for readers” and “interviewing techniques.” Basically, the more you contribute, the more recognition you get. This rewards system is a staple of user-generated content sites like Yelp and Kaboodle.

Sacramento Press’ greatest innovation, however, may be its business model. The company created a local vertical advertising network called Sacramento Local Online Advertising Network (SLOAN) that gives advertisers and independent online publishers a chance to participate in national and regional ad campaigns. SLOAN takes care of negotiating deals and each publisher shares in the revenue. The network now represents over 50 sites and brings in over $10,000 a month.

But it goes beyond advertising. “The number one thing we do as an organization is provide marketing services,” Ilfeld says. “If building a Flickr account will help a client’s business, we’ll do that for them.” Advertising now comprises less than 50% of revenue. “Most of our sales are coming from social media work, events and services,” he says.

Sacramento Press isn’t profitable yet, but that doesn’t worry its founder. “Every time we approach profitability, we reinvest in the business,” Ilfeld says. With 90,000 unique monthly visitors and a 10% to 15% monthly growth rate, Sacramento Press is quickly becoming a significant force in the local media scene. Its ad network is also raising a barrier to entry for others.

Sacramento Press is demonstrating that a hyperlocal news model can work if publishers discard assumptions and think of new ways to generate revenue. Local media organizations are ideally positioned to provide marketing services to small businesses that lack the resources to manage their own campaigns. By diversifying their businesses, publishers can insulate themselves from disasters like the current collapse in advertising rates and position themselves as essential partners to local businesses.

We find ourselves, once again, completely in Jeff Jarvis’ camp on the issue of tearing down the advertising/editorial wall. Jarvis makes his case here in response a thoughtful but retro post by the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade. The ad/edit wall that has existed in newspapers for the last three generations is a luxury that media institutions can no longer afford and also an insult to the journalists within them. Are reporters children who are so incapable of safeguarding their own integrity that they need to be shielded from the business? Are advertisers such a corrupting force that they must be prohibited from any contact with the people who create the product they support with their ad dollars?

Jarvis notes that nearly everyone who’s starting a media operation these days has to wear both editorial and sales hats. And guess what? Many of them still manage to deliver fine products. In fact, we’d argue that the informal standards that top bloggers apply to their work are at least as good as the written standards put forth by various news organizations. That’s because integrity is one of the few assets media people have, and they know that bartering it away undermines their future. Readers are also smart enough to figure out when they’re being taken for a ride.

We’d go one step further and suggest that one reason that the American public has been blindsided by affairs like the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the S&L meltdown is that the quality of business journalism in this country is so terrible. At most newspapers, the business desk is either Siberia or a necessary labor one must complete on the track to a glamor job in the State House. How can a company like Enron build a financial house of cards that ultimately collapses and throws 20,000 people out of work without someone at the Houston Chronicle noticing if something was fishy (BTW, did you know Enron had a code of ethics?)

Probably because newspaper reporters have traditionally been told that business is evil, ad-buyers are a corrupting influence and you’re best off staying as far away as possible. That’s not really an option any more, and maybe the new breed of online publishers will prove that journalists don’t have to be treated like 10-year-olds in order to do their jobs effectively.

Miscellany

Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has kicked off quite a ruckus at the Miami Herald over his skewering of citizen journalism.  His target is James O’Keefe III, the political activist whose hidden-camera wizardry is credited with bringing down the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It turns out O’Keefe’s videos exhibited questionable editing practices that caused prosecutors to decline to file charges. What’s more, O’Keefe has been in a raft of trouble since then. “It is a mark of the low regard in which journalism is held that that load of bull pucky ever passed as wisdom,” Pitts writes. “If some woman flashed a toy badge, would you call her a citizen police officer? Would you trust your health to a citizen doctor just because he produced a syringe?” No, but the contexts there are somewhat different. We agree that the O’Keefe case is an example of citizen journalism gone wrong, but we think trashing the whole concept over a few bad examples is no more responsible than dismissing traditional journalism because of Jayson Blair. About 80 commenters weigh with their views.

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Let’s keep this death watch thing in perspective. World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers CEO Christoph Riess told the World Editor’s Forum in Hamburg last week, “Whatever form the newspaper takes, it will remain the dominant media force in the world.” He cited the 61% growth in print newspaper circulation in 185 countries over the last year as evidence, and noted that print newspapers “reach more audience than the Internet.”Riess is right that newspaper circulation is growing dramatically in many developing countries. However, whether that trend holds up for long is questionable. As these economies mature, it’s likely that more-prosperous citizens will leap directly to online outlets and bypass the 15-year learning curve that the U.S. went through.

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Which may not be such a bad thing. Scarborough Research reports that the 9 million people who use e-readers are also avid news consumers. “E-Reader households are 11% more likely to read a newspaper regularly than an average adult,” writes Editor & Publisher. What’s more, e-reader households are nearly 50% more likely than average consumers to visit a newspaper website. You can find the press release here.

And Finally…

From The Onion:

Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.

Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.

Read more…

Only 25% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in either newspapers or TV news, according to a Gallup survey. That puts mainstream media on par with banks and slightly better than health maintenance organizations on the trust barometer. The stats are from Gallup’s annual Confidence in Institutions survey. At the top of the trust heap? The military. And at the bottom? Congress.

The results varied significantly by age. Nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 said they had confidence in newspapers. However, disillusionment evidently sets in early, as the confidence level dropped to 16% among 30- to 49-year-olds, making them the most cynical group. Even liberals, who have traditionally been a stronghold of support for mainstream media, expressed support to the tune of  only 35%. It’s important to keep the results in perspective, though. Gallup has been conducting this survey annually for the last 20 years, and confidence in newspapers has never exceeded 39% during that time. However, confidence dipped from the low 30s to the low 20s about four years ago and has been stuck there ever since.

Good News for Hyperlocals

Hot new DC news startup TBD “resembles a sleek, coolly designed, high-tech house with several unfurnished rooms — and a market value yet to be determined,” writes Howard Kurtz in a generally favorable review of the most ambitious hyperlocal launch of the year. The site, which has 15 reporters buttressed by an army of 127 local bloggers, “has a voice, a sense of fun and a knack for packaging short items that creates the appearance of flow and momentum,” Kurtz writes. It also has some good political reporting, although the staff seems to be more focused on local news than national or global politics. TBD has been closely watched as a potential model for hyperlocal startups because of its inclusive approach to community journalism and its backing by a major media company, Allbritton Communications, which also owns The Politico, as well as a collection of regional television stations

Also on the hyperlocal front, BringMeTheNews, an aggregation and podcasting venture founded by former Twin Cities news anchor Rick Kupchella (right), just raised $1 million from two local investors. The site has an interesting business model and has reportedly been profitable since day one. It aggregates headlines and summaries from “hundreds of online news and non-traditional sources” around Minnesota and publishes them on its website. It also produces audio news summaries that are picked up by Minnesota radio stations and broadcast to about 1.5 million listeners each day. At the moment, the site produces no original content.

The advertising model is also novel: The site carries no more than four paid sponsors, who buy contracts of at least six months’ duration. Sponsors are also expected to “provide informational advertising of interest to our audience.” According to MinnPost, “Sponsored copy is integrated into the links BringMeTheNews curates, and carries the sponsor’s logo. Theoretically, the copy is useful information for readers (Explore Minnesota tourist guides, OptumHealth wellness tips) while still advancing the sponsor’s interest.”

Despite having only one-eighth the traffic of MinnPost, BringMeTheNews has apparently hit upon a revenue model that works, even at low volume levels. Kupchella said the business would still be viable without the radio component.

Miscellany

The Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette will begin charging up to $15/mo. for access to local news articles. Non-print subscribers will be able to read 10 stories for free before the paywall goes up. The T&G is owned by The New York Times Co., which plans to build a paywall at its flagship newspaper in January. The Worcester experiment may be a pricing trial balloon. If a lot of people will pay $15/mo. to read the T&G, it’s good news for the Times. We doubt it, though.

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More good news: PaidContent.org is hiring reporters. If you are  “deep into areas like online video or digital advertising or gaming,” “can pick apart a media company’s balance sheet” and/or “are dogged and enterprising,” drop a line to jobs@paidcontent.org. You’d better have expertise in media, though. That’s a given.

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Having driven Tribune Co. into the ground in record time, Sam Zell now wants his money back. The Chicago real estate mogul invested $315 million in Tribune Co. back in 2007, which was arguably the worst time in history to invest in a newspaper company. He then demonstrated near-total ignorance of the business challenges facing the $6 billion company that he designated himself to run, and succeeded at steering the company into bankruptcy in a little more than 18 months. Well, that was fun, but now it’s time to cash out and go home. Chicago Business sorts through all the legalese, if you’re interested.

And Finally…

As if to underline the shrinking attention span of the American news consumer, American Public Media’s Marketplace Radio devoted all of six sentences to summarizing the world financial situation last week. The idea came about during a daily news meeting, when staffers were boiling down the factors underlying the global financial crisis and thought it would be funny to express them as simply as possible. Megan Garber has the background on Nieman Journalism Lab. We snipped out the 90-second segment below for your listening pleasure.

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