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Co-operative-etition, Chicago style

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

The festival of links you can create these days when writing about new business models for the news industry is a wonder to behold. As we have noted here before, it seems sometimes there are almost as many conferences on the topic as there are stories about paid content, most of them involving Rupert Murdoch and/or Google.

One prominent example, of course, is beginning to play out right here in Chicago: The Chicago News Cooperative launched last week, publishing two-page reports in the Friday and Sunday editions of the New York Times. I of course am watching with much interest, given that, by my count, I worked at the Tribune with around three-quarters of the 20 people named on the staff page today.

I suspect the Tribune and Sun-Times are watching with interest, too, given that the Tribune chose Sunday to publish another [not "the second" as originally reported--ORY] in a series of spadeas about its priorities (Capturing the Chicago Experience – click to download PDF, 3.44 mB). Its letter to readers from editor Gerry Kern ends, “We are Chicago’s newspaper. We tell your stories.”

(By my lights, the most remarkable thing about the Chicago News Cooperative example is that the NYT’s own journalists actually wrote about the launch. I guess that’s another example of how the world is changing; in the Olden Days, writing about anything your employer had done to try to improve its business prospects had a good chance to get you hooted out of any newsroom in America.)

But let’s not spend any more time here on background. If you want more, read Alan Mutter’s piece at “Reflections of a Newsosaur” from earlier this month. Instead, let’s see what Chicago readers found in their driveways and newsstands Friday and Sunday morning, and not just in the NYT (using the acronym consistently today, to avoid confusion).

After all, CNC editor Jim O’Shea and his colleagues say they’re not out to supplant the existing newspapers; they are out to protect and sustain a kind of reporting they perceive as threatened, the public-service journalism “that we feel is crucial for a democracy . . . and provide accountability for the institutions and public officials in the city, county and state.” (Quote is from a WTTW interview with O’Shea, video after the jump.)

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Tags: Chicago News Cooperative, New York Times, WTTW
Posted in Business of media, By ORY, Journalism | 2 Comments »

Looking for business models? Mind the gaps

Friday, October 30th, 2009

I suppose that every day is a good day to talk about how and whether the journalistic enterprise will remain commercially viable as the world turns in these days of our lives, or indeed whether all my children can recover from their financial ailments, be released from the General Hospital, and find a guiding light to lead them to the promised land of free cash flow. Progress on “new business models,” however, seems to move along at about the same pace as a soap opera plot – even though hardly a day passes without an announcement that someone is going to try something new, or someone else is going to essay something old in a new way.

Indeed it was thus on Thursday, a day when I opened the New York Times to read about the plans by the folks behind Politico to compete online with the Washington Post on local news. And I was actually in a good spot to keep thinking about their admission that they didn’t know how the Web economics might work; since the dean of Medill, John Lavine, had another commitment, I was at Harvard, sitting in at an “executive session” on, ahem, news business models.

Entitled “How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century,” the event gathered an intentionally small group at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge: about 20 panelists for the day’s three discussions, and about 30 additional participants on hand both to listen and to take part. Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, and author most recently of Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, was the convener.

As it turned out, the three panels were so packed with speakers with something to say that many of us other participants – who sat in chairs ringing a central square of tables where the panelists faced one other – got in our licks à la mode du 21ème siècle: 140 characters at a time.

Now, granted, this may not have been optimal. In her prepared remarks, MIT’s legendary Sherry Turkle – generously not calling attention to anyone seated behind her or on the flanks – pointed to the substantial body of research that shows “your ability for any single task goes down when you multitask. No matter how much we want to jump on the bandwagon, multitasking degrades performance.”

I therefore must cop to the fact that none of my listening, note-taking, or tweeting were as good as they might have been. On the other hand, I must also say that those of us who were intermittently posting and reading got a window in what an additional 10 people were thinking, were piecing together, or were valuing as interesting (or, in some cases, not thinking, not piecing, not valuing). If you’re interested, you can recreate the moment by searching Twitter for the hashtags #Shorenstein and #newsmoney, with far more at the former; I certainly won’t get to all the sound bites here. My own tweetstream is at twitter.com/YoungOwen.

Multitasking, Harvard Square style: in-mirror televison

(Oh, while we’re on the subject of multitasking, staying at the Charles Hotel provided me with a new model. I guess they’ve been around since 2006 or so, but the Charles’ bathrooms feature “in-mirror TV’s” from a company called Séura, whose web site explains, “Enhanced color correcting technology allows the LCD picture to appear when on, while flawlessly concealing the screen behind a bright reflection when off.” Turkle, I am sure, would rightly caution us that there is a risk of degrading the quality of one’s ablutions in the process.)

Turkle’s actual multitasking point, by the way, was centered on how journalists should choose their methods and channels of communicating. “Newspaper reading creates a ‘reading space’ that journalism occupies,” she said. “The teenagers I study leave us with a profound question: Will we be able to have journalism when we don’t have newspapers to appear in? Reading on the Web, if it is all you do, does not favor complex lines of thought. So the implication for news is to stay with narratives that need to be read with all one’s attention.”

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Tags: Twitter
Posted in Business of media, By ORY, Crystal-ball gazing, Journalism | Comments Off

Dead trees and dying cities

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

The New York Times’ decision to add pages of metropolitan-area news to copies of the papers circulated in San Francisco (last week) and Chicago (Nov. 20) is, if nothing else, an interesting juxtaposition with its nearly contemporaneous announcement of 100 layoffs in the newsroom. By contracting with newly formed local news entities, it doubtless will acquire high-quality content at less cost, and with less long-term liability, than had it staffed up to do the same thing (or had transferred folks to the hinterlands).

Official word came today that in Chicago, several of my former Tribune colleagues are launching the Chicago News Cooperative – not only to supply stories to the Times, but also to repopulate some of the beats and coverage areas that have been affected as the Chicago papers have laid off staffers, reduced newshole, and changed their focus and approach. (When current Tribune editor Gerry Kern delivered the Crain Lecture here at Medill recently, the editorial changes at the Tower were among the topics he addressed; the text of the lecture is here, and here is an interactive video that includes both his remarks and the slides he used to illustrate them. The video requires Microsoft Silverlight. The fact that I delivered the introduction to the lecture may be reason enough not to download Silverlight and view it.)

Of course, the number of Starbucks available to sell the Friday and Sunday NYT in Baghdad-by-the-Bay and Beirut-on-the-Lake might also be a reason for the Times to start its metro news initiative in those two cities. But I think an answer even deeper than journalistic idealism or straight competitive instincts is lurking in the cover story of the November issue of Harper’s, by Richard Rodriguez: “Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper.” (It’s not available online except to subscribers.)

Wrinkle in Time (detail), by Steve Mills: Cover art from the November issue of Harper's.

Rodriguez got my attention back in June when he gave an interview to New American Media on “The Death of the SF Chronicle” that included the following: “I don’t think the Chronicle is dying so much as I think that San Francisco is dying. When a metropolitan newspaper of that magnitude stops publication it indicates that there has been a death of the metropolitan ideal.”

This piece in Harper’s expands on his theme of “the death of place,” but also is far more expansive on the Chronicle in particular, newspapers in general, and most especially of San Francisco.

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Tags: Chicago News Cooperative, New York Times, Richard Rodriguez
Posted in Business of media, Essays, Journalism | 1 Comment »

How America was 2-1-3′d

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Brett Favre or no, instead of ignoring Monday Night Football by reading or writing last night, I ignored it by watching a two-hour documentary on PBS.

“Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times” (PBS companion site) (NYT review), a film by Medill alumnus Peter Jones, treads some of the same ground traveled by David Halberstam 30 years ago in The Powers That Be. In fact, it leads off with a Halberstam quote: “No single family has dominated any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated Southern California. They did not so much foster the growth of Los Angeles as invent it.”

With 25 fresh interviews; access to a multitude of Chandler home movies and the L.A. Times archives; and an interesting diorama-like visual effect that imparted depth to collages of archival still photos, Jones and his team breathed even more life into an already larger-than-life tale of power brokering, Chandler self-interest, civic vision, and Times self-interest. The PBS site calls it a “character-driven tale”; indeed, Jones is quoted as saying, “Revelation of character must anchor a film’s narrative trajectory. Character is best revealed one detail and one story at a time. We rely on evidence more than exposition.”

There are characters, all right, more of them wearing black hats than white. Truth be told, some of them are actually character-shaped holes in the narrative; while the film elicits wonderful sound bites from a few contemporary Chandlers in the non-Norman-and-Otis branch, they are mostly absent except when uncharitably referred to.

Harry B. Chandler

Which is not necessarily a problem. My early Internet colleague Harry B. Chandler, Otis’s son, was on camera extensively. He remains passionate about the role of newspapers and the importance of the Times (as evidenced in this November, 2006, piece written after the firing of Dean Baquet), and he lent a very human touch to a story so big that it broke the town called “this town” wide open.

Watching it reminded me again why relationships between the newspaper staffs in Chicago and Los Angeles were so fractious after Tribune took over Times Mirror in 2000. (There was the time, for instance, when the editor of the Times told the editor of the Tribune that they couldn’t possibly run any stories by Tribune writers because “we’d have to label them as advertorial.”) The Times both had built Los Angeles and had constructed a pervasive sense of itself as Maximum Leader, large and in charge, as the saying goes.

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Tags: Los Angeles Times
Posted in Business of media, Journalism | Comments Off

A festival of Twitter

Monday, September 28th, 2009

TrendsMap: "Real-Time Local Twitter Trends"

A couple of weeks ago, on the NYT op-ed page, former ad executive James P. Othmer had some advice for President Obama: “Don’t Tweet About Health Care.” Well, that was the headline, anyway. The kicker was the slightly more nuanced “Here’s hoping that the next time Mr. Obama needs to deliver a complex idea, he’ll once again use more than 140 characters at a time.”

No way to tell if the president’s Twitter team was paying attention; there have been a few new healthcare tweets from @whitehouse to its 1.2 million followers since then, though most seem to be of the descriptive, not prescriptive variety. But as most of the Twittersphere knows by now, apparently someone else who could have paid attention and didn’t was Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti, whose “personal” tweets about this and other topics were the proximate cause of a new WaPo policy severely limiting how its journalists deploy those limited-length thoughtlets. Not to mention whom they friend or discuss online. (Props to Staci D. Kramer (@sdkstl) – one of my favorite freelancers when I was the Tribune’s AME for business – for obtaining and publishing the guidelines on PaidContent.org.)

In his blog, “Pursuing the Complete Community Connection,” Steve Buttry of the Cedar Rapids Gazette (with whom I worked on the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project a few years ago) has a good summary of the fooferaw, some balanced reflections on the idea behind them, and some strong opinions on what appears to be wrong with them. Fairly worthwhile way to start the morning if you were able to take the weekend off from reading and tweeting and blogging and such.

And the fact of the matter is, it probably would have been a good idea if you did. Twitter exhaustion has not yet set in the investment community, given the company’s apparent $1 billion valuation last week. But as useful a tool as it appears to be, I am wondering if it’s really worthwhile to make sure I haven’t missed any of the 102 articles mentioning Twitter in the NYT this month.

‘Tis a far, far better thing we do, perhaps, when we start exploring some of the remarkable things that programmers are doing with the Twitter API and a few other miracles. That leads us to the map at the top of this post. My old Tribune Interactive pal Carlos Barrionuevo pinged me on Facebook the other day to tell me about trendsmap.com by Stateless Systems. “Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now,” says the Web site. Actually, you don’t have to be content just to see what topics are trending; you can drill down on any box and see the tweets flash by.

: Chicago-area Trendsmap from Sunday night

Today being Sunday (well, it was Sunday when I started writing), there were a heck of a lot of NFL team nicknames in large, easy-to-read type. Zooming in on the Chicago area (click on image at right to enlarge) brought additional granularity: hester, cutler, jaycutler6, touchdown. When I played with this on Friday morning, there were big stacks o’ tweets about “Paranormal” in all the cities where it had been screened the night before.

“In the last two days I have found real time info on two events before the local/national media reported it,” Carlos told me. “Really scary what true crowdsourcing can produce.”

Scary or no, it’s these apps that probably give Twitter much of its potential for staying power, even as the nattering about its lack of a revenue model percolates away. Later Friday Mashable ran another one of those Hitwise charts indicating that traffic to Twitter.com may be plateauing, after a year in which its growth ranged between, oh, 422% and 1382%.

But, once again, wait a minute. People build enough of these interesting sites that tell you something about the world, as opposed to just showing you the tweets, and you know what? You might be nuts to go back to Twitter.com except to change your background image.

Or to learn about health care, half a thought at a time.

ADD END: What, you don’t think this is such a festival? Here, let’s allow Mashable to help. Posted this morning: 10 Hilarious Twitter Parody Videos, including a “tutorial” from the Onion on stalking your kids via Facebook and Twitter.

Tags: Social networks, Twitter
Posted in Business of media, Digital media | Comments Off

Curses, moguled again

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

The October issue of The Atlantic gives us a chapter from a forthcoming book that, at the very least, has some eye-popping blurbs from marquee names. It’s The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies, and among the raves available on its Amazon page are recommendations from James B. Stewart, Sylvia Nasar, and Joseph Stieglitz.

"The Curse of the Mogul," due Oct. 15 and excerpted in the current Atlantic

Due to be published Oct. 15, the book is the work of two Columbia professors and a consultant who say that the media industry’s current fix shouldn’t be blamed on the Internet and Craig Newmark; nor can it simply be laid at the door of newspaper editorial boards that endorsed Republican candidates, entertaining Michael Moore rants on YouTube notwithstanding. Instead, they set out to demonstrate that media companies “generate consistently bad financial results” because of their ongoing strategic failures.

The Atlantic’s excerpt focuses on four specific bad strategies:

“Executives, investors, analysts, and the press seem to agree that the primary imperatives are to accelerate growth, diversify internationally, invest in content, and exploit digital convergence. Unfortunately, these are precisely the strategies that media companies pursued aggressively during the past lackluster decade. Understanding the fundamental flaws of these four tenets of conventional media wisdom—growth, globalization, content, and convergence—is essential to saving media shareholders of the future from the anemic returns of their predecessors.”

(Hmm, are we ready to predict that there actually will be “media shareholders of the future”? Well, leaving that aside….)

Ever notice how book covers generally can't be as entertaining as magazine illustrations? Especially illustrations of strategic visionaries.

Of course they had me at hello, given that they started with the AOL-Time Warner deal (and you know what I thought about that). Newspapers are largely missing from the excerpt – News Corp. is there, but Rupert is treated better in the text than in the Atlantic’s illustration (above). Nevertheless, it’s perfectly fine to generalize when the authors argue that no matter who coined the phrase, content is not and cannot be king.

“But content cannot be king, because the talent required to create it cannot provide a sustainable competitive advantage….It is no coincidence that Google, the most profitable and successful new media company, is an aggregator, not a content creator.”

Sometimes the authors have fun with the obvious, other times they are obviously having fun (from a section debunking the value of convergence, a myth dear to the hearts if not the pocketbooks of ex-Tribune Co. types: “Whenever someone suggests to you that breaking down barriers to entry is good news, hold tight to your wallet”), it’s going to be not-put-down-able.

Which is the opposite of what the authors are saying about the moguls.

Posted in Business of media | Comments Off

Throw out this lifeline

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Throw out the lifeline with hand quick and strong:
Why do you tarry, why linger so long?
See! he is sinking; oh, hasten today
And out with the lifeboat! away, then away!

(Refrain:)

Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is drifting away;
Throw out the lifeline! Throw out the lifeline!
Someone is sinking today.

– From the hymn by Edwin S. Ufford, 1888.

Today I was one of six lecturers at the annual kickoff symposium for “Know Your Chicago,” a 61-year-old fall tour series run out of the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies. What quickly became clear as I delivered my talk, “When Worlds Collide: The Journalist, Technology, and the Audience,” was that this particular audience … several hundred folks who were mostly my age and older, mostly women … was deeply invested in being reassured about their morning newspapers.

In fact, I was only interrupted by applause twice, and then only in the Q&A: once when I said I was one of those folks who valued having a printed paper in the morning, and once when I opined that some newspapers would certainly be around as long as I am (or words to that effect). This after I had pointed out that Col. McCormick’s classic definition of a newspaper —

“The newspaper is an institution developed by modern civilization to present the news of the day, to foster commerce and industry, to inform and lead public opinion, and to furnish that check upon government which no constitution has ever been able to provide.”

— really didn’t require that the newspaper actually exist in newsprint form. What folks cherish is the idea of a newspaper, whether the Colonel’s or someone else’s.

(more…)

Tags: Google, New York Times
Posted in Audiences, Business of media, Digital media, Journalism | Comments Off

The next miracle (v11.0): Owen Youngman

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Archive for the ‘Business of media’ Category

Co-operative-etition, Chicago style

Looking for business models? Mind the gaps

Dead trees and dying cities

How America was 2-1-3′d

Curses, moguled again

Throw out this lifeline

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