http://www.ojr.org/ojr New articles from OJR en-us http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200911/1798/ By Robert Niles: I've attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry's largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions' Expo. What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing. Which is everything. (Hang with me, okay?) Wednesday afternoon, a source I've had a good relationship with introduced me to several former Walt Disney Co. employees who are now legends within the theme park industry. Each worked with Walt Disney himself, and had gathered for a panel discussion about Walt's management style. The question they were to answer was... what could Walt Disney's approach toward management teach today's industry leaders? Plenty. And not just in the amusement business. Walt Disney's management philosophy contrasts sharply with contemporary management practices in the news industry, especially within "legacy" media companies. Might I suggest that difference in long-standing management tradition helps explain the sharp contrast between the recent financial performance of the Walt Disney Company and the newspaper industry? Disney today enjoys a market capitalization of nearly $55 billion, and its share price is up 13% over the past five years. How many newspaper companies can report that? So let's look at how Walt did things, and compare that with how things are done in the news business. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:24:46 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/BrianMcD/200911/1797/ By Brian McDermott: The October 20 survey was depressing and unsurprising news. Approximately 1,820 Brits out of 2,000- that’s 91 percent- told Lightspeed Research that they would never pay for news online. “Online it should be free,” said 19-year-old Shauna O’Brien, an economics major at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In the fatalistic gloom of the news industry, Shauna’s words and the British survey reinforce what a long string of failures, from Times Select to Salon Premium, have shown anecdotally: people just won’t pay for web news. Paired with stubbornly low online ad revenues and a high demand for news online, many news organizations find themselves cornered into a budgetary free-fall. The conventional wisdom is that changing this equation is impossible. Perhaps. But could there be a lesson from something Shauna O’Brien does pay for? Shauna buys a five-dollar pack of bottled water every few weeks. “My family has been buying water forever,” she said. In that the O’Briens have a lot of company: bottled water is a 12 billion dollar per year industry in 2009, double its size in 2000. Tap water, of course, is free, and available almost universally in the U.S. In taste tests, people often can't tell the bottled brand from the tap. So how are these companies making so much money? Does the bottled water industry have any lessons for online journalism? Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:44:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200911/1796/ By Robert Niles: Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece, Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter. A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet. Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too! Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:22:23 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/davidwestphal/200911/1795/ By David Westphal: At the recent Harvard session on new business models for news, I offered an off-the-beaten-path idea to the question of who will pay for the news. One answer, I said, was non-news organizations: NGOs, trade associations, businesses, governments and labor unions. Yes, labor unions. There are indications of a back-to-the-future trend in labor funding for the news. Just in the last several months, two labor unions in southern California have provided six-figure funding for very different kinds of operations - Voice of Orange County, an independent news site working toward a January launch, and Accountable California, a direct arm of Local 721, Service Employees International Union. The idea that legitimate journalism might flow from "special-interest" labor money would have seemed a non-starter to many of us not long ago. How could journalists provide fair and unfettered accounts when their paychecks were the product of an organization with a clear political agenda? In fact, though, Voice of Orange County and Accountable California are simply a revival of a kind of journalism that permeated American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - labor-backed newspapers. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:44:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/dchase/200911/1794/ By Dave Chase: It is painful to watch the steady decline of newspapers. For some, I expect we're about to see the dead cat bounce as the economy turns around. This will only delay the inevitable. The challenge they face at this late date is immense but surmountable. Their near death experience is similar to what Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and IBM faced. Only IBM remains a blue chip market leader. However, IBM completely reinvented itself from a "big iron" mainframe and minicomputer driven company to the market leader in I.T. related services. There were some valuable assets that they were able to leverage but it took an outsider like Lou Gerstner to make that wholesale change happen. Meanwhile, the vanguard company of the minicomputer era (DEC) wasn't able to make that shift and sold at a deep discount to Compaq (who in turn was bought by HP). It's important to recognize that IBM and DEC were in highly competitive markets. DEC along with countless other mainframe and minicomputer companies were unable to transform themselves and are mere footnotes of history. In contrast, the newspapers have largely operated in non-competitive markets by comparison. It will take a true newspaper leader and visionary to make this happen as opposed to someone just milking the cash cow until it withers and dies. Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:12:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/eulken/200911/1793/ By Eric Ulken: I'm not ashamed to admit it: The first time I saw Twitter, I thought, "What's the point?" Maybe you did too, or maybe you're just more perceptive than I am. Even Twitter's founders have said they didn't know exactly what it was when they started working on it. (Biz Stone: "If anything we sort of thought it a waste of time.") For every Twitter enthusiast, there was, I suspect, a point of realization that this thing could actually be incredibly useful. Some have cited the plane-in-the-Hudson story as their aha! moment. For me, it was less of a moment and more of a gradual understanding. I began to see its potential as a real-time information source when I first learned of a few important news items -- both big international stories and news of a more personal nature -- through Twitter. I began following like-minded people for the interesting links they would post. Before long, information overload took hold. I tried to cull my follow list so I could read everything. I worried I would miss something. Finally, I learned to embrace the firehose and not try to process the whole stream. But still I thought there must be a better way to separate signal from noise. And then I noticed that the most interesting and important items were appearing maybe three or four times in my Twitter feed. Since then, I've wished for a way to mine my feed for those links. Last week I heard about TwitterTim.es and was thrilled to find it does exactly what I wanted. I spoke with Maxim Grinev, the project's technical lead, about TwitterTim.es and where it's headed. Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:05:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200910/1792/ By Robert Niles: My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start. Here is your guide and checklist. Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success. Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:54:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200910/1791/ By Robert Niles: With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index. Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page. But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.) Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:23:11 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/TomEditor/200910/1790/ By Tom Grubisich: The new report "The Reconstruction of American Journalism" by Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson is one more example of what what's wrong with the debate about the future of journalism. The Columbia Journalism School-sponsored report shovels out overviews, conclusions and recommendations by the pound, but with barely a few grams' worth of critical thinking. Jan Schaffer, in her reaction to Downie and Schudson, said it best: "Darts for the mile-high, inch-deep reportage." Schaffer, who is executive director of American University's J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter and business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, zeroes in on the report's fatal weakness: "If we really want to reconstruct American journalism, we need to look at more than the supply side; we need to explore the demand side, too. We need to start paying attention to the trail of clues in the new media ecosystem and follow those 'breadcrumbs.' What ailing industry would look for a fix that only thinks of 'us,' the news suppliers, and not 'them,' the news consumers? I don't hear from any of those consumers in this report." Alan D. Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, provides a good share of the small amount of rigorous, economic-centered thinking that's gone into the journalism crisis, also gave a mostly scathing review to "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." Downie and Schudson come to their drastic recommendation of a "National Fund for Local News" using the kind of sleeves-rolled-up but shallow analysis that typically informs newspaper editorials on big issues (e.g., health care reform and the U.S. role in Afghanistan) Fri, 23 Oct 2009 06:27:00 MST http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/nikkiusher/200910/1789/ By Nikki Usher: Time after time again, people who want to save newspapers claim that newspapers are the primary source of news. But is their claim actually founded on anything other than self-importance? I love newspapers. I want them to survive, in some form, but it's important to investigate where the truth in one of the linchpins of the "newspapers need to survive argument" comes from. Tom Rosenstiel offered the claim before the Joint Economic Committee hearing on "The Future of Newspapers: The Impact on the Economy and Democracy," on September 24, 2009. He's not the only one. John Carroll used to say that 80 percent of news came from newspapers. Len Downie and Robert Kaiser similarly claimed that newspapers were the originators of most content for most broadcast and cable news. And many studies of online blogs show that much of the linking originates from mainstream media, often newspapers. But are newspapers where it all begins? In an online world, that's only sort of true. Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:19:00 MST