Weekend read: looking back, ahead on journalism

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Time to catch-up on worthwhile reading:

"Historic Changes in the News Business" (The Atlantic): Former foreign affairs journalist Peter Osnos uses the announcement of the Aol-Huffington Post merger to take inventory of the past couple of years in journalism -- the bankruptcies, the nonprofit initiatives, the "fire sales" -- and concludes that "history, I predict, may well be as much about what has been added in this era as about what has been lost."

"Eight Trends for Journalism in 2011" (Nieman Journalism Lab): In a talk in Toronto, lab director Joshua Benton offers predictions not only for the year but also for the evolution of journalism -- such as the loss, perhaps, of some of the new nonprofit news models as foundation money wanes and is not replaced by memberships, donations or subscriptions. "I think we will see a thinning out that will be difficult, because it will counterbalance the optimism that these organizations brought with them," he says.

Video interlude: A spot-on take on aggregation by cartoonist Mark Fiore. (Love the announcer's "newsreel" voice!)

"Print Newspapers Have a Place in a Tablet-Heavy Future" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Jason Klein, head of the Newspaper National Network, defends newspapers (as you'd expect) against the claim that their days are numbered in the era of tablets. Rather than being driven by Gen Y's love of technology, he says, the tipping point for print will come when significant numbers of older, loyal print readers make the switch -- and that could take decades, not just a few years.

"Speed-Reading The New Mary Meeker Deck about Mobile" (PaidContent): Former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker made a name for herself at Morgan Stanley for her tech stock calls. One well-watched analysis was her annual call on The Mobile Internet, an exercise she continues in her new gig at a big Silicon Valley venture capital firm. The bottom line: mobile has hit critical mass.

Musical interlude from "Tommy".

Reading for the weekend

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

For your mind's enjoyment this weekend:

"AOL, Journalism Schools Team Up to Offer Students Credit for Patch Work" (USAToday): I thought we had turned the corner in the debate over whether interns should be paid. But now, come to find out, a handful of journalism schools has signed on with Patch, the hyperlocal news initiative owned by AOL that is setting up shop in towns and cities across the country. And these worker bees will be working for college credit, it seems, not pay. Which kind of flies in the face of AOL's big brag that it's going to be the "largest net hirer of journalists in the world" -- when the common definition of hire assumes that pay is involved.

"The Second Great Migration to New Media" (Salon): Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and new-media thinker, puts together an interesting piece linking the recent moves to online organizations by some well-regarded print journalists. His conclusion: They no longer want to be antiseptic in their reporting, but to add some voice. (Coincidentally, that also turned out to be the reason cited this week by a new-media hire, poached by Yahoo, in returning to his old employer, Gawker.)

Video interlude No. 1: If you've never seen Steven Johnson draw and narrate a graphic: enjoy! You also can watch his talk at TED on "Where Good Ideas Come From" here.

"You Are What You Tweet: Balancing Journalism with Social Media" (Journalism 2.0): I haven't yet gotten through the whole Ustream presentation contained here of the panel discussion in Seattle organized by the Online News Association. But its topic is related to the issue raised in Salon by Dan Gillmor: If journalists are being encouraged to engage readers on social media, how personal vs. professional should they (and can they) be.

Bonus music video.

Why clicks shouldn't decide what's written

I learned a new phrase today: page view journalism.

And suddenly, in the echo chamber of the Web, it was everywhere, passed along by blog and tweet. But before its latest surfacing -- spurred by the suggestion that journalists were choosing stories that would generate Web traffic over more obscure (but important) topics -- I found a thoughtful discussion dating to 2008.

Then, Edward Wasserman used the phrase calibrated journalism to describe a new system under which "the commercial value of specific editorial offerings is estimated with precision, rewards and punishments doled out accordingly, and coverage cut to fit."

And what's wrong with that, he asked on his blog, and then proceeded to answer:

"The problem with online popularity pay is it that it mistakes journalism for a consumer product, and conflates value with sales volume. Journalists don’t peddle goods, they offer a professional service, a relationship. The news audience renews that relationship to get information and insight on matters it trusts journalists to alert it to, even though the news may be disquieting or hard to grasp."

More recently, Wasserman, a longtime newspaperman who now is a professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., had more to say on the subject, particularly as it is rolling out at AOL (bear with me on the long quote block; it's worth the read):

"When I warned two years ago about the direction online news seemed to be going, some readers objected that my complaints showed why traditional news was on the rocks: I was spouting the obsolete, arrogant insistence typical of the old-guard journalist, who believes editors can dictate taste to their readers and that news organizations can thrive even if they refuse to listen and heed.

"In fact, the calibrated news model that we’re seeing now isn’t really about keeping readers satisfied. It’s about keeping some readers satisfied. Counting up readers doesn’t pay the bills, ad revenues do. That means the readers have to be people advertisers want to pitch to.

"The new model will enable news managers to figure out how profitable a particular story is. Calculating costs isn’t hard, and now, thanks to behavioral tracking, advertisers can measure and profile the audience for that story and determine how much renting space alongside it is worth. Add up how much the story brings in, subtract costs from revenues, and you have an indication of profit per story.

"More important, news managers can see how certain topics have performed and get a pretty good idea how remunerative continuing coverage will be. It’ll be possible to consult something very much like a profit-and-loss statement before deciding whether to assign a story. Already, AOL is considering sharing a piece of its own profits with reporters whose work draws the greatest traffic."

Paying writers by how popular their stores are with advertisers and readers isn't new; it's part of the model at Demand Media, for instance, which produces scads of how-to and advice content through freelancers paid little for their work. But replicating that model wholesale on news sites is troubling.

Yes, pay for reporters at Bloomberg News is tied in part to the number of market-moving stories they produce. And each writer has a board "where the metrics determining his compensation -- any scoops, hits an article attracts -- are tracked," reported the New York Times in a story on the Bloomberg-BusinessWeek merger.

But, Wasserman says, "calibrated journalism feels like a capitulation to the foolishness of the marketplace." And even though many will find it hard to ignore "the snazzy new metrics," he offers this advice:

"... one of the lessons of such technologies is that much as we might think they relieve people of the need to make hard choices, they really don’t. Technologies may clarify options, but it’s people who are left with the toughest of jobs: weighing values, deciding what matters, exercising judgment."

But you've got to eat your spinach, too

As AOL launches as a stand-alone company (disentangled from its ill-regarded merger with Time Warner), attention will focus once again on whether "content mills" are the model for journalism in the future.

Newspapers for years have been bad chefs in planning their daily spreads, trying to balance how much spinach vs. cotton candy to serve up to readers -- in other words, what an informed citizenry ought to know as opposed what it (secretly or otherwise) wants to know. Derivatives or Britney? Public option or Tiger?

In some ways, the Web has made the menu-planning harder, since it can easily measure the "traffic" a story generates. A horrific ax murder in an affluent neighborhood? Not only will the news bulletin on a newspaper's website produce a lot of clicks from local readers but it also will bring hundreds of thousands more through a national aggregator.

So a package of stories on the ax murder is developed for the next day's newspaper, perhaps to the detriment of stories on shrinking ice sheets, famine and war, nuclear politics or other thumbsucking esoterica.

The more the murder resonates with readers, the more stories are produced around it. And the more eyeballs those stories draw in print or online, the more happy are advertisers who happen to be on display nearby.

But companies like Demand Media, Examiner.com, Suite 101 and Associated Content have upended that model: They watch online searches for keywords on what interests readers, sell that audience to advertisers, and then produce the content to keep readers coming back. They pay freelance writers pennies per word -- $10, $15, $20 a story, vs. the historical $200 and up -- but promise to share future revenue as the stories or adjacent ads are clicked.

(The model, by the way, irritates professional freelancers, judging by this call to arms by one Seattle writer to petition "sweatshop-content users and content-mill owners to pay writers fairly," as she described it on LinkedIn.)

Now enter the 800-pound gorilla, AOL.

The company has been gearing up to create deep content around highly sought-after topics, like Demand and its brethren do. It even has created a mechanism, called Seed, to automate the process of conceiving of and assigning stories to writers.

It's a tough model to accept for those of us who formerly earned our living via legacy media. Fifteen bucks per story and pennies per click? The other day, one wag did the math and came up with a staggering volume of page views that a reporter would need to earn a modest $40,000 annual salary.

And what of the spinach, the stories that help shape an informed citizenry?

Consider this offered by Lauren Rich Fine, a former Merrill Lynch analyst who now is associated with Kent State University’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She participated in a panel discussion on new business models in news at last week's workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age, held by the Federal Trade Commission:

"The idea of matching advertisers with content like Demand Media and AOL I think it is actually very smart. ... I think the flaw in the model is, what this whole workshop is getting at, is if you're trying to preserve democracy, giving people what they want probably won't end up with the kind of coverage that most of you in this room really want to provide, and therein lies the real challenge."