Police Roam MA Suburb In Search Of Boston Bombers (Photo: Talk Radio News Service)

Those who fear that crowdsourcing may soon make professional journalists obsolete should take a look at some of the links below related to an amateur sleuthing experiment on the popular Reddit social news site that went horribly awry last week.

The goal was commendable enough. A “subreddit” was set up to enlist the members of this massive community (14 million monthly visitors by one report) in the hunt for suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. Participants were told not to name names and to focus their effort on combing through thousands of photos posted on the Internet in hopes of finding the origins of the backpacks that exploded, killing three people and injuring 282 others.

The rules quickly went by the wayside, though. Names began being tossed out more or less at random, photos of anyone carrying a backpack were flagged as suspicious and chatter from the Boston Police Scanner were posted as fact. Most damaging was a rumor that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing for a month, was one of the bombers.

Twitter did its part both to spread misinformation and to serve professional journalists who sought to calm the hysteria.  Some mainstream media organizations picked up on the Tripathi rumors and amplified them, while other journalists tried to settle the crowd by pointing out, among other things, that police scanner reports are unconfirmed and often wrong.

The accusation that Tripathi was involved in the bombings was particularly damaging. When the popular @NewsBreaker Twitter account reported that the missing student had been confirmed as a suspect based upon police scanner chatter, “social media went crazy,” said Reddit General Manager Erik Martin in an interview on Atlantic Wire. “It was posted so many times in [Reddit subgroup] /r/FindBostonBombers that I had to stay up the entire night deleting them.”

Martin called the experiment “a disaster,” and issued an apology to the Tripathi family on behalf of Reddit, which is owned by Conde Nast. Media critics have been swarming in the wake of the incident, with Reddit getting nearly universal condemnation. About the only contribution the crowd made to the investigation was to identify one photo of the suspected bombers that the FBI hadn’t seen. However, the distraction the experiment caused as professional reporters tried to untangle the web of amateur accusations more than offset the small benefits. A chastened Reddit has since launched a new crowdsourced campaign to help locate Tripathi.

Questioning Crowdsourcing’s Value

Does this mean crowdsourcing is a bad idea? In certain situations, yes. Criminal investigations require specialized expertise that no group of amateurs can match. FBI and police investigators had access to intelligence that enabled them to evaluate and discard spurious information that the Reddit crowd didn’t. In a highly charged atmosphere like this, investigation is best done behind closed doors, with information revealed selectively when it can move the process along. The crowd is enlisted to help authorities but not to solve the case.

We can’t help but wonder what the public response would be if police officials conducted their investigation the way Reddit did. If every rumor and bit of speculation was held up to public comment, then our opinion of law enforcement might be quite different. Sometimes there’s good reason to withhold information from the public, as the irresponsible actions of the Reddit crowd made very clear.

However, we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath. Crowdsourcing can have great value when applied to analysis of very amounts of data or eyewitness accounts. Witness the comprehensive Wikipedia report on the Marathon bombings for an example of how many eyes can tell a story better than a few.

The incident also offered some shining examples of traditional media at its best. On Friday the Boston Globe, which has been a poster child of newspaper industry tumult, posted this marvelous account of the factors that set two likable young men on the road to terrorism. It was mainstream media at its best.

Update

Mathew Ingram has a different view. He believes Reddit, Twitter and other popular tools are capable of producing quality journalism, but not in the way we’ve traditionally defined it. Ingram believes that journalism is “atomizing” into component parts, and that the fact-checking and validation functions can be better handled by a crowd.

Related articles

• Inside Reddit’s Hunt for the Boston Bombers
• Reddit apologizes for ‘online witch hunt’ for Boston bombing suspect
• Reddit, Boston and the missing student
• Three things that Reddit did right during the Boston bombings and why that matters [GigaOM]
• Reddit apologizes for fueling ‘witch hunts’ after Boston blasts
• Media, old and new, takes heat for Boston coverage – Chicago Tribune

In a dying industry, the sensible thing to do is to maximize your revenues before you die. Paywalls might well make money for newspapers. But that doesn’t mean that newspapers aren’t dying. Quite the opposite.

–Felix Salmon, Reuters

That quote, which we first saw in this Mathew Ingram piece on paidContent, gave us new insight on why we dislike paywalls so much. Yes, the newspaper industry seems to be adopting them at a rapid pace, and yes, the paywalls at The New York Times and Financial Times are reportedly successful, but there’s something about putting the subscription genie back in the bottle that strikes us as a step backward.

Salmon puts his finger on one of the weaknesses of most current paywalls: They are defensive strategy. They’re designed to keep loyal readers on board, but they repel potential new readers.

Alan Mutter shares worrisome statistics: More than two-thirds of regular newspaper readers are over 45, their average age is 57 and the average age of the online newspaper audience grows one year older every year. This industry is still headed toward a cliff. Unless those demographics turn around, it’s only a matter of time before the audience dwindles to a size that is no longer economically sustainable.

What’s the answer? Unfortunately, no one has come up with one. In another piece this week, Ingram criticizes paywalls for being a no-growth strategy. His article is mostly a restatement of Mutter’s analysis, but the really interesting part is in the comments section that follows. Both critics and supporters of paywalls vigorously debate the alternatives, and both sides make good points. Done right, it seems that paywalls actually could attract new subscribers, but no publisher is reporting the kind of circulation gains that will be needed to replace this rapidly aging audience.

The time seems right for micro payments, but that idea has never gained any traction. Kachingle was one of the early players in newspaper micro payments, but it has now morphed its business model into a co-marketing app content somethingorother that we can’t figure out. People seem to be OK with using Google Checkout for 99-cent purchases, but not for five-cent purchases. We think there’s a psychological barrier to micro payments. Below 99 cents, people don’t want to be bothered to think about paying. In fact, charging a nickel to read a 5,000-word article seems a little absurd, as if the article has no value. At some point, micro payments work against you.

Reuters’ Salmon argues that paywalls as currently implemented are too inflexible. They impose a limited number of subscription options on visitors regardless of what the visitors want or how they behave. Paywalls should use a sliding scale that maps to the needs of the individual reader, he suggests. People with an intense interest in sports will pay more than those who care deeply about entertainment, so they should pay a different price. Few publishers understand their audiences in that kind of depth, though.

We did see one bit of encouraging news this week. The Newspaper Association of America reported that advertising revenues continued their seven-year-long string of declines, dropping 6% in 2012. However, overall revenues were down only 2%. The reason is that publishers are finally diversifying their revenue streams, and not just by charging readers:

These new revenue sources, which include such items as digital consulting for local business and e-commerce transactions, now account for close to one-in-ten dollars coming into newspaper media companies. They are significant enough in scale that NAA has begun to collect detailed data about these revenue categories and track their trajectory year-to-year for the first time.

Consulting? Affinity programs? Marketing Services? Where have we heard those ideas before?

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The Pew Research Center’s annual State of the Media Report paints a dismal picture of the condition of mainstream media – in particular broadcast and magazines – but Slate’s Matthew Yglesias says the report looks at the wrong things. Which side are you on?

There’s no question that Pew’s annual media audit and survey of 2,000 consumers is about as depressing as any of the 10 annual reports that the nonprofit media watchdog has completed. Among the lowlights:

• Nearly a third of U.S. adults have stopped using a news outlet because it no longer met their needs.
• That’s not surprising when you consider that low-cost sports, weather and traffic information now account for 40% of the content produced on the average local newscast.
• The population of full-time professional newsroom employees fell below 40,000 for the first time since 1978. It’s down nearly 30% from its 1989 high.
• In an election year, the declines in coverage were particularly evident. Live broadcast reports fell from from 33% of the news hole in 2007 to 23% in 2012. And 2007 was not an election year. Commentary and opinion, which are cheap to produce, now make up 63% of  news airtime on cable channels, while straight news reporting comprises only 37%.
• An examination of 48 recent evening and morning newscasts found that 20 led with a weather-related story. Weather coverage is cheap.
• Only about a quarter of statements in the media about the character and records of the presidential candidates originated with journalists, while twice that many came from political partisans. The report runs down a list of informational websites that political parties and advocacy groups have set up to influence media, but some are now actually becoming the media. Pew notes several examples of major news magazines that have carried partisan reports as part of their branded news stream.
• In that vein, Pew notes a 2008 analysis of Census Bureau data by Robert McChesney and John Nichols that found that the ratio of public relations workers to journalists tripled from 1.2-to-1 in 1980 to 3.6-to-1 in 2008. That gap has likely grown since then.
• In summary, “News organizations are less equipped to question what is coming to them or to uncover the stories themselves, and interest groups are better equipped and have more technological tools than ever,” Pew states.
• Incredibly (to us, at least), the public is mostly unaware that the news media is struggling. Only 39% of the 2,000 consumers surveyed said they have much awareness of the industry’s problems.

Newspapers actually come off pretty well in this year’s report. Thanks to paywalls, which are in place or in the works at one-third of U.S. newspapers, circulation held steady year-to-year. The New York Times said its circulation revenue now exceeds advertising revenue for the first time.

Warren Buffett (source: Wikipedia)

However, the long-term trends are still negative. Newspapers lose $16 in print ad revenue for every $1 in digital ad revenue gained, and that figure is up from $10-to-$1 in 2011. Equally ominous is that Facebook and Google are doing a better job of figuring out how to target digital advertising locally, which threatens one of the few pockets of revenue strength newspapers have left.

Because the long-term outlook is so bad, newspapers have become an attractive investment vehicle. Pew notes that value investor Warren Buffett has been snapping them up at a rapid clip because they are so cheap. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News were bought for $55 million last year, which is 1/10 of the price they commanded in 2006.

Out of Mind

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the low public awareness of the news industry’s crisis, and that’s where Yglesias’ analysis on Slate is most interesting. “American news media has never been in better shape,” he states at the outset, using the Cypriot economic crisis as proof. We’re not sure the media itself is in great shape, but readers are doing fine.

Yglesias cites a “bounty” of online resources that provide context, analysis and even an interactive calculator that lets visitors try out different ideas for solving the island nation’s financial problems. It’s easier than ever to produce news using public sources and simple publishing tools, and the Internet makes boundless background information available in seconds.

Assessing the state of media by looking only at the health of traditional outlets creates “a blinkered outlook that confuses the interests of producers with those of consumers,” he writes. “[T]oday’s readers have access to far more high-quality coverage than they have time to read.”

The finding that only four in 10 Americans are even aware of the media’s struggles can be interpreted in several ways. The pessimistic view is that Americans are basically dumb, lazy and happy with the partisan screaming matches that characterize a lot of broadcast news.

A more positive view is that Americans have already moved on to using other sources and haven’t noticed the loss of their once-trusted brands. It’s impossible to know without further research, but we have to acknowledge Yglesias’s point that the decline of mainstream media certainly hasn’t resulted in a dearth of information.

No Expiration

One important point the Slate business writer makes is that news no longer carries an expiration date. Traditional media assumed that news would be consumed within a few hours or days. Archival or background information was tedious to find, so readers were mainly limited to whatever the newspaper or broadcast provided within its limited space.

Now everything is part of a grand, searchable archive, which permits people to go as deep as they want whenever they want. Those who don’t have the time to come up to speed on the banking crisis in Cyprus can put off learning about it until later. Then they can go to a resource like Wikipedia’s coverage and spend hours digging into background for more than 40 sources cited there.

We prefer the glass-half-full perspective. While the loss of the media’s watchdog function is troubling, the power of having timeless access to resources we didn’t even know existed is energizing. The challenge is to find ways to fund the valuable services that media has provided in the past so that the information that doesn’t attract search engines and sponsorship dollars still has a platform.

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Occasionally a tool comes along that is so drop-dead useful that it causes you to change the way you work. We encountered such a tool a couple of weeks ago via an interview with Craig Silverman, founder of the Regret the Error blog (now hosted by Poynter) and the new Director of Content and Product Strategy at Spundge.

Spundge is a tool for content curation, a discipline we’ve written about in the past that helps readers cope with information saturation by aggregating and summarizing relevant material by topic. We think there’s a lot of value in curation, and if publishers can get over their not-invented-here mentalities, they can take advantage of it.

It’s hard to describe Spundge; it’s best to try it. If you consume content by reading RSS feeds – as we do – then its value is immediately obvious. The basic Spundge service includes RSS feeds from more than 45,000 sources that it calls the “fire hose.” It also has publicly available feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and several other social networks. You can add your own RSS feeds by pasting in individual URLs and uploading OPML files.

Users create a “notebook” for each topic and specify keyword combinations that are either required, optional or excluded. We created a simple one for this site that you can see here. You can create as many workbooks as you want and optionally share them. Other people can contribute to your notebook or just watch.

Spundge from Spundge on Vimeo.

Once you specify your keywords, Spundge goes to work filtering the fire hose to deliver items that match your query. Results consist of headlines and the first 500 characters or so of each article. This is usually enough to get a sense of what the piece is about. You can accept or decline each result. Accepted results go into a workspace for later use, while declined results disappear. Spundge is supposed to learn from your decisions and deliver more targeted results over time. That particular feature is a work in progress that will get better with time.

The items you save can be published as embeds on any site that accepts Javascript. Embeds don’t actually live on the target site, but are hosted on Spundge and displayed there. YouTube videos are commonly shared via embeds, and Storify is an example of a popular curation service that uses embedding. We’ve included an embed below that shows you how it works. One cool feature is that embeds are updated every few minutes, so the content actually updates even after you’ve published it.

Everything we’ve described so far is part of the free Spundge service. If you pay $9 a month, you get a WYSIWYG editor that enables you to customize content, write your own headlines, add comments and generally munge content however you want. The resulting HTML can be posted on any website or blog. At that price, it’s a no-brainer.

Love at First Byte

We love Spundge, and we’re recommending it to everyone who’s tired of picking through RSS feeds or filtering tweets looking for nuggets of information. We’ve long used an RSS reader to monitor the sites listed in the lower left sidebar of this site. That’s more efficient than visiting each site individually, but the lack of filtering is still a problem. We have to scan each headline and summary manually.

With Spundge, we imported our favorite feeds from an OPML file, specified some keywords and were off to the races. Plus we got to take advantage of those 45,000 feeds that the Spundge developers had already found for us, not to mention Twitter and LinkedIn. Our reading time has been reduced dramatically and we’re discovering stuff we didn’t know existed before.

Spundge is still in development, and it’s not perfect. The workspace can’t easily be customized, so you can’t selectively display items without jumping through hoops. Spundge lets you specify how many items to embed, but not which ones. The service makes it easy to share items from your workspace on social networks, but links go to a copy of the content on Spundge rather than to the source. We think content providers will have a problem with that.

The biggest shortcoming we’ve seen so far is the recommendation engine, which is supposed to “learn” from your choices and deliver more targeted content over time. We haven’t noticed that the quality of our feed is improving, but let’s be fair: Machine learning is devilishly difficult to implement. If Spundge is successful, the investments will come and the quality will improve.

For now, we give the basic Spundge service an unqualified endorsement as a leap forward in technology to filter and organize information. We’re going to experiment with the paid service, and you’ll see the results here. In the meantime, our recommendation is to get thee to a Spundgery.

If you need that link again, Spundge is here.

Traditional media took it on the chin in marketing plans researched by Aquent and the American Marketing Association (AMA). One in three marketers plans to decrease spending on newspaper advertising, making newspapers the big loser in the study. They were joined in the cellar by consumer magazines, radio, trade magazines and television, all of which were cited by more than 20% of respondents as targets of budget cuts. The winners? Mobile media, social media and marketing automation. More than three in four marketers plan to increase spending in those areas.

Perhaps marketers are simply reflecting the interests of the audiences they want to reach. Alan Mutter gathers some statistics that point to ominous demographic trends:

• Only 6% of people in their 20s and 16% of 40-year-olds regularly read newspapers, compared to 48% of people over 65.
• Only 29% of the U.S. population regularly read a newspaper in 2012, down from 56% in 1991.
• Three-quarters of the audience at the typical newspaper is 45 years of age or older. In comparison, over-45s comprise only 40% of the population.
• Print advertising still generates between 80% and 90% of revenues at the typical major metro daily.

Mutter asserts that newspaper publishers will never pull out of their tailspin unless they can create products that appeal to the new generation of digital natives who can’t be bothered to drag around paper, CDs or books. For them, the phone and the tablet are their windows on the world, and that will change industries ranging from news to travel to banking.

There are always ways to make statistics say what you want them to say, of course. More people read a newspaper than visited a social network in the past month, according to KPMG International. Traditional electronic channels fared even better: 88% of respondents to the survey said they’d watched TV in the previous month and 74% said they’d listened to the radio. That compares to just 57% who had tweeted or Facebooked. The survey measured habits of more than 9,000 people in nine countries. It did not ask how much time respondents spent with each media.

There’s some evidence that the novelty of Facebook is wearing off. A new Pew Research study finds that 28% of Facebook users say the site has become less important to them, and a third have cut back on the amount of time they spend on Facebook. Asked about their plans for allocating time to Facebook in the coming year, 38% of 18-to-29-year-olds said they’ll cut back, compared to only 1% who plan to spend more time.

And speaking of Pew, another recent study finds strong support for a bastion of the print world: libraries. More than half of Americans 16 or older visited a library during the past year, and of those who did, 26% plan to increase library usage during the next year while 22% plan to cut back. Asked if libraries should clear out some of their book stacks to make way for more technical resources, 36% said definitely not, compared to 20% who supported such a change. It would appear that while print may be on the decline, the role of the library as a community gathering place is still secure for now.

Miscellany

Writing in Scientific American blogs, Frank Swain tells of  a new initiative by the Royal Statistical Society’s BenchPress project to teach young journalists how to interpret statistics. The program sends volunteer working scientists into schools and newsrooms across Britain to help ensure that “journalists produce science news stories that are as robust and accurate as possible.” This seems like a great idea to us. Any yahoo with a SurveyMonkey account and a mailing list can field a survey these days, and publishing tools make the results look like they came from Gallup. Scientists complain of having to squeeze the conclusions of complex research studies into tweetable sound bites in order to get attention – and more funding. There’s so much bad research out there, and statistics isn’t a core part of the curriculum at many journalism schools. Maybe it should be.

The Washington Post has come up with a “Truth Teller” app that compares statements made by public officials and corporate spokespeople to databases of facts in near real time. The project, which was funded with a $50,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund, is said to be able to extract audio, convert it to text and then conduct searches based upon the content. We’re somewhat skeptical, given that our Google Voice app still converts all our voice-mail messages to Martian, but maybe the Post found better technology.

The video below tells more, and stresses that this is a prototype. The technology is ultimately intended to be used behind the scenes to help reporters more quickly scope out falsehoods. We see huge potential for politics and mischief with this technology. Imagine a CNN vs. Fox “Leaderboard of Lies” or a plug-in that tweets falsehoods in real time. That we would follow.

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We were just added to the 100 Best Sites for Journalists in 2012 list put together by JournalismDegree.org. Yay. Seriously, thanks for the recognition, and thanks for pointing us to some useful sites we weren’t aware of. We’ll add them to our blogroll at the lower left, which you can add to your own RSS reader by clicking “subscribe.”

The point of this post isn’t to toot our own horn, though, but rather to point out why JournalismDegree.org undertakes this occasional exercise (they did it before in 2009). Lists like these are all about search engine optimization (SEO), and they’re a smart way to raise visibility quickly.

JournalismDegree.org is basically a lead generation site. It lists colleges and professional development providers that offer communications-related courses. When you click through to a listed institution, you’re taken to a page on eLearners.com, where you can fill out a form requesting more information. Sponsors pay eLearners.com for each inquiry that comes in this way, and eLearners.com pays affiliates like JournalismDegree.org a commission for referring the lead.

It’s a perfectly legitimate business. Those Amazon banners you see all over the Web (including on this site) are the same basic idea. Anyone who contributes to the sale gets a small cut of the revenue.

JournalismDegree.org – and many sites like it – are very dependent on search engine visibility. It wants to be the number one or two search result for “journalism degrees” on Google, and it’s been successful in that respect. A big reason is lists like the this one. A representative sent the owner of each site on the list a congratulatory e-mail with a snippet of HTML code that easily adds a badge to the site. The code includes the alt tag “Best Site for Journalists – 2012,” which basically tells Google that JournalismDegree.org is a great place for journalists to visit.

The strategy works. JournalismDegree.org is number seven in our search results on “best site for journalists” and will no doubt move higher as more sites display its badge. Which we just did (although we changed the alt tag to something more descriptive). The more reputable the sites displaying the badge, the better it is for JournalismDegree.org.

This is smart search marketing, and any blogger or news site can benefit from its example.  Half of the equation for search engine success is in factors that you control, such as domain name, page titles, headlines and keywords. JournalismDegree.org does all of these things well. The tough part is the other half, which is getting reputable sites to link to you. One quickly way to do that is to hand out awards like this one. At least a half dozen of the sites we visited are already displaying the logo above, and more will probably follow. Which all adds up to high-quality links that fuel search success.

There are flaws in JournalismDegree.org’s list. The numbering scheme implies a hierarchy, which we hope isn’t the case because there’s no way we deserve to rank higher than Neiman or Poynter. Several of the sites on the list haven’t been updated in months and one – EatSleepPublish - has been dormant for nearly two years. Still, there’s value in the list and a lot of time and thought was put into it. We’re flattered, even though we know what the publisher’s true agenda is.

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Back in May, the New Orleans Times-Picayune became the most recent major metro daily to reduce its print publishing schedule, going from seven to three days a week. The story must really be important, because now 60 Minutes has sent Morley Safer to cover it. Watch this Sunday, Jan. 6 on your local CBS affiliate at 7:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times. We will.

Here’s the CBS promo blurb:

It’s a sure sign of the digital times when the New Orleans Times-Picayune, published every day for 175 years, goes to a three-day-a-week publishing schedule. As Morley Safer reports, it’s a fate many more newspapers face as the Internet becomes the source of almost instantaneous news. What does the Mayor of New Orleans think about this? See the clip below for a preview.

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Media critics have been buzzing for more than a week about “Snow Fall,” John Branch’s feature in The New York Times about a tragic avalanche that claimed three skiers’ lives in the Tunnel Creek area of Washington state early last year. Some people say it‘s the future of journalism, and they’re right – in a way. A loud chorus of naysayers who point out that “Snow Fall” is just the Times showing off. They’re right, too.

What’s important isn’t whether this package – which doesn’t fit neatly into the category of article, video documentary or e-book – is a turning point, but rather its importance as an evolution in story-telling. There’s nothing revolutionary about the technology the Times used. It’s the way the elements were combined that makes “Snow Fall” a great experience.

For example, some of the graphics unfold as the reader scrolls down the screen, illustrating elements of the narrative in a way that feels seamless and natural. Embedded slide shows appear next to the names of key people in the tragedy, showing them in happier times. It’s a moving tribute to dead and their families that doesn’t seem heavy-handed or maudlin. It’s just part of the story.

Romenesko says the package racked up 3.5 million page views in its first week and that one-quarter of them were new visitors to nytimes.com. Ad Age complains that the ads the Times ran next to the copy nearly ruin the reading experience. Mathew Ingram superbly balances comments from both fans and critics. He concludes that, for all its elegance and beauty, “Snow Fall” still doesn’t address mainstream media’s frustrating fiscal woes. Laura Hazard Owen suggests that the “e-single” version of the feature – which sells for $2.99 – is an important endorsement of the growing mini-book concept.

We dropped by to see what all the fuss was about and ended spending an hour reading every last word and viewing every last video. “Snow Fall” is a visually stunning example of what a well-resourced news organization can produce when it spares practically no expense to break the mold. Few media companies can attempt something so ambitious (although there are some corporate marketing departments that could foot the bill). What’s important about “Snow Fall” is the ideas it introduces – ideas that will be adopted and iterated by other publishers on a smaller scale. We don’t think that’s showing off. It’s just being creative.

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Physician and award-winning documentary filmmaker Ben Daitz (now there’s a combination you don’t see too often) Has been keeping us up-to-date on his latest project, a documentary that celebrates small-town newspapers. We haven’t had a chance to watch the whole film yet, but we like the trailer. Ben writes that the film has had “very successful screenings at festivals and J-schools and will be shown at the Newseum” in Washington.

Here’s a description. You can order a copy for $29.95 at New Deal Films.

Smithsonian Magazine once asked the rhetorical question, “Can a weekly paper in rural New Mexico raise enough hell to keep its readers hungry for more, week after week?”

The Rio Grande Sun, published in Española, NM, is considered one of the best weekly newspapers in the country. Bob Trapp, the Sun‘s founder, editor, and publisher, is the quintessential newspaperman—the last of a vanishing breed—a scrupulously honest, fearless, independent journalist, and a mentor to generations of young reporters.

The Sun is known for investigative reporting. The paper broke the story that its own rural community had the highest per capita heroin overdose rate in the country. It has led the fight for open records and open meetings in a county where political shenanigans are the rule.

The film follows the Sun’s
 reporters and editors as they write about the 
news, sports, arts and cultures of a 
large rural county.  John Burnett, a
 National Public Radio correspondent,
 reports on the Sun‘s Police Blotter—“the
 best in the country.” The Sun‘s 
journalists investigate the largest
 embezzlement in the state’s history, and the 
widespread use of tranquilizers in the county jail.

“The Sun Never Sets” is narrated by Bob Edwards, National Radio Hall of Fame and Peabody award-winning news anchor and radio host. It is an official selection of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Ojai Film Festival, and will be screened at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.

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Statistics portal Statista (which we rate officially awesome) has this graphic showing that Google’s advertising revenues now exceed those of the entire print media industry put together. “Google, a company founded 14 years ago, makes more money from advertising than an industry that has been around for more than a hundred years,” writes Felix Richter. It’s actually more like 300.

The comparison isn’t entirely fair. The chart shows Google’s global gross global sales against the U.S.-only print business, and Google did pay some $4 billion in commissions to media partners. But still…

More on Slate.

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