What David Carr said

New York Times media columnist David Carr delivered the keynote yesterday at the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, a half-day program presented at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. (agenda)

It was a bit of a rambling talk (beginning at about 57:00 above), but here are some sound bytes:

* On the technology available to backpack journalists: "I think there's more power in here," gesturing to his own backpack, "than there was in the whole newsrooms [of yore] ... Reporters get more and more powerful every single day."

* On discussions on the failed business model for news and its effect on the quality of journalism: "What people are missing is how much deeper and richer journalism on the fly has become." In future content analyses, "They're going to see the quality of journalism not going down but going up because it's got all this information [databases and other research] built into it."

* On the power of branding, illustrated by his turning to the new hyperlocal D.C. news site tbd.com to find out about the standoff at Discovery Channel, rather than the Washington Post: "It's a freaky age that we live in, in that way, where brands can pop up and become really, really meaningful."

* On the tech-savvy of younger journalists: "Multi-tasking [is] baked into them"; for them, consuming and producing news "are not separate acts."

* On new media vs. mainstream media: "What's happened is the insurgency and the mainstream media are creeping toward each other, where some of the voicings of mainstream media are changing and some of the best practices of mainstream media are beginning to affect [new media], and ... you're going to end up with another hybrid form that will not necessarily be distinguishable in terms of what you're looking at."

* On the realization by content-hungry operations like Demand Media that quality, human-produced copy matters: "Algorithms won't get you everything. Algorithms will not make phone calls."

* On an uptick in ad revenue this year: "This toboggan ride to hell that we've been on [is] finally slowing down."

* On misinformation on the Web: "I look at the Web as a big self-cleaning oven where stuff will live for a day or two and then the high mind will take over."

Saving freelancing, one writer at a time

In the spirit of the aphorism "It's better to light a candle than curse the darkness," one freelancer is helping another break away from so-called content mills in order to make a living from writing.

You may recall that early in the year, the Los Angeles Times wrote about the sorry state of freelance pay. In part, the article blamed the recession for cutting the budgets at newspapers and magazines that use freelancers. But it also cited the likes of Associated Content and Demand Media, companies that use armies of freelancers to fill vast websites with how-to and other service pieces.

"Seasoned professionals have seen their income drop by 50 percent or more as publishers fill the Web's seemingly limitless news hole, drawing on the ever-expanding rank of under-employed writers," said the LA Times.

Indeed, an oft-cited reference to Demand shows that the freelance copy editors it uses to read through all those stories for its website are paid $3.50 per piece.

And Demand isn't alone: A quick check of my local Craigslist found a freelance offer from a travel website that pays $20 for a minimum 1,000-word article -- or 2 cents a word. (Compare that to a regional magazine in my area that pays 30 cents a word for freelance feature stories of 2,000 to 4,000 words -- or up to $1,200.)

The trend toward lower pay so infuriated one freelancer that she penned a couple of anti-content mill pieces and called on others to steer clear of Demand and its brethren.

Then, in the spring, came the offer from Jenn Mattern, a freelance writer since 1999 and niche blogger since 2004 who operates a website that provides advice and assistance to freelancers. Her proposal: free one-on-one coaching "to help a freelance writer move beyond content-mill work to something better."

She selected a "winner" from among the pitches received, and has been blogging weekly about the "student's" progress in branding herself via a new website; soliciting clients who will pay at least 25 cents a word for her work; creating a marketing plan; and so on.

It's interesting reading. Will it inspire others to leave the content mills (and perhaps rescue freelancing)? Maybe -- or maybe not. But at least those who do exit will have a road map to follow.

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."