Lying, analyzing, breaking up: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

For your rest-of-the-weekend reading pleasure:

"Newspaper Execs: Still Denying, Still Crying and Still Lying to Themselves" (SimsBlog): Judy Sims, once an executive with the Toronto Star Media Group, writes about the same old same old she sees in mainstream media: "very smart people repeatedly do remarkably dumb things, killing their businesses in the process." The Internet is a disrupter, she says, and because history shows that disrupters eventually win, news execs need to convince themselves that

... their survival rests on becoming of the Internet, not merely residing on the Internet. That means becoming a platform. That means being open. The Internet is not just another content distribution method. It is social. It is collaborative. That means accepting that they are no longer publishers or broadcasters having a one-way “Gutenberg era” conversation with the masses.

Instead, newspapers talk about finding ways -- through pay walls, iPads, subscription models -- to re-create the scarcity they enjoyed until recently. "It’s a colossal waste of time," says Sims.

"‘Objective’ Journalism is Over. Let’s Move on." (Reflections of a Newsosaur): More and more it seems, the calls grow louder to shift away from some of the old conventions of journalism: Make journalists disclose any financial, political or other interests they might have in what they write, and allow them to show their own expertise/informed opinion in their work. The argument for both is that readers are better served: in the former, they're forewarned of any biases; in the latter, they benefit from years of accumulated knowledge in subject areas.

Music interlude.

"Analysing Data Is the Future for Journalists, Says Tim Berners-Lee" (The Guardian): Journalists may be more than scribes nowadays -- many can shoot video and many can code websites -- but among the most essential skills going forward will be mining data sets to find stories, says Berners-Lee. The Freedom of Information Law may be a journalist's best friend, but once you have access to reams of government data, can you make sense of them? That's where database skills come into play, a course of study few present-day journalists have mastered.

"Breaking up with Hotmail" (Slate): In this clever piece, Jack Shafer writes about his "promiscuous relationships" with various e-mail services as you suspect he would about women he has dated: some were easy to get along with, some were more difficult. And while Hotmail once had his eye, now it's Gmail:

Who do you think you're fooling, Hotmail? We all know you're the same broad we met back in 1996.

Lightning-round reads:

• "Financial Times Proves Better Read than Dead" (Crain's New York Business): The salmon-colored financial paper's "stick-to-its-knitting strategy" (staying niche) seems to have kept the big bad Murdoch machine at bay.
• "Unemployed, and Likely to Stay That Way" (New York Times): One badge of dishonor for the Great Recession is a record number of people out of work for longer periods of time. Could that be creating a new permanent "idle class" of unemployed in the U.S.?
• "Remember when Newspapers Gave Bonuses around the Holidays?" (Poynter): Here's a new money-saving idea: recalculate the formula for vacation time to the company's advantage.

Bonus video: This was where you landed from a link in the provocative tweet "Did you hug a journalist today?"

Readings for the weekend

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

It's the weekend. Time to kick back for some good reads.

"Book Excerpt: Can Videogames Be Journalism?" (The Atlantic): I was a skeptic before, but now I'm thinking that maybe videogames do have a role in journalism's future. This piece on the soon-to-be-published Newsgames: Journalism at Play, written by a trio of academics involved in videogame research at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talks about the various forms games can take that make sense for journalism: infographic newsgames; documentary newsgames; puzzle newsgames. As the authors note, "it's worth remembering that games have been a part of the news for almost a century, since the first 'word-cross' puzzles appeared in the New York Sunday World in 1913." Perhaps I should go back to school, quick, to get a gamers' degree so I'll be ready.

"Good Journalism Will Thrive, Whatever the Format" (The Observer): Here's the argument that old platforms may die and be replaced by new ones, but journalism will go on forever. Despite Chicken Little cries that the sky is falling, "any intelligent discussion about the future needs to make the distinction between a particular format (print) and the function (journalism) that society needs to nurture. And it's the function that really matters."

Video interlude No. 1.

"After the Collapse: Rebuilding News in Denver" (Save the News): This is an uplifting, attaboy postscript to the loss of The Rocky Mountain News in early 2009 -- one of most wrenching modern-day closings of a metro daily newspaper. From its ashes, though, has come a new effort to keep investigative journalism alive, a nonprofit news collaborative funded by foundation grants. Here, executive director Laura Frank talks about the founding and reach of the I-News Network.

"Reinventing How to Cover a Press Conference" (LostRemote): Big press announcement planned, but the newsmaker hasn't organized a live feed of it? Be a fly on the wall and do it yourself, using various social and other tools available: laptop, webcam, Twitter, blog. And in a new-age twist, viewers (who grew in numbers as the event -- the "new" Twitter reveal -- went on) were able to submit questions that then could be posed at the presser.

And speaking of new Twitter:

"Twitter as Broadcast: What #newtwitter Might Mean for Networked Journalism" (Nieman Journalism Lab): I was just blown away by this almost-instant analysis of the new, revved-up Twitter and what it signifies: "The sameness of tweets’ structures, and the resulting leveling of narrative authority, has played a big part in Twitter’s evolution into the medium we know today: throngs of users, relatively unconcerned with presentation, relatively un-self-conscious, reporting and sharing and producing the buzzing, evolving resource we call 'news.' Freed of the need to present information 'journalistically,' they have instead presented it organically. Liberation by way of limitation." Wow.

Bonus video to introduce bonus reads offered in classic point-counterpoint fashion (or, in this day and age, Old Media vs. New Media):

• "The Hamster Wheel: Why Running as Fast as We Can Is Getting Us Nowhere" (Columbia Journalism Review)
• "Teaching Journalists to Read" (Felix Salmon)

Enjoy.

Rejoice: Google will save the day

Google CEO Eric Schmidt
at Activate 2010.

It's good to know that Eric Schmidt has my back.

The Google CEO sees a future for newspapers -- an online one -- once we get over the hump of shifting from analog revenue to digital. (Dollars in the former are now pennies in the latter as advertising moves to the Internet)

"We're in one of those transition periods, and it's very painful," he said last week in an interview with Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, at the UK newspaper's Activate 2010, a conference held in London to discuss technology and the future. (You have to go here to view the interview, since I couldn't embed it, but it's worth the trip.)

"What does the news-reading experience look like some number of years from now?" Schmidt asks. "Well, it's clearly going to be on one of these digital devices because you carry it everywhere." It will offer deep dives in reads as well as targeted ads; it will be presented in full color and with video.

"It'll know what you read and so it'll show you what's changed, as opposed to repeating things over and over again," he said. "The newspaper often tells me things I already know, cause I already read it and they forgot I know it because it's static, not dynamic.

"But the most important thing," he added, "is it will be highly personal." (Just days before Schmidt's appearance at Activate 2010, Google News was redesigned to offer a personalized collection of stories under the heading "News for You" that users can build using keywords.)

And Google's role in newspapers' future? To offer the various components of this brave new world for media companies to choose from and build their business and content models.

And that's where Schmidt and the company have me and other laid-off ink-stained wretches covered: "I believe that ultimately not only will the revenue be replaced [in the shift from analog to digital] but I think it will be higher. And the reason I believe that is ultimately the medium is more personal."

Thanks for the upbeat outlook, Mr. Schmidt.

Prediction: Media chaos hangs on

You'd think, with all the thousands of layoffs over the last few years, we'd finally be at the trough in the business cycle for newspapers and other media, at which they're done contracting and now are ready to grow once more.

Bob Garfield

Not so, says Bob Garfield, author, columnist and pundit.

"In the short term, news organizations will simply retrench with painful cutbacks, not only on investigations and enterprise reporting, but on the basis of monitoring local, state and national government," he said this morning. "The medium term will be much worse as liquidation and consolidation reduce the number of newspapers and broadcasters by at least half."

Garfield, who last summer published The Chaos Scenario, a book on the effect of the digital revolution on mass media and marketing, was among today's speakers on the first of two days of discussion in Washington, D.C., on the future of journalism.

It's the second time the Federal Trade Commission has convened a workshop on the topic, which the agency sees as vital to protecting consumer interests in the Internet age. This one, like the one held in December, is meant to delve into the changing economics of journalism.

Garfield didn't paint a pretty picture.

"It's going to be a frightfully barren period of chaos for advertising as an industry and for the media industry it has for 350 years supported," he said.

Mass media and marketing have existed in "a mutually sustaining yin and yang" for centuries. "Consumers have put up with ads as part of the deal -- the quid pro quo, the unspoken compact that provided all of us with free or subsidized content in exchange for having to sit through 20 years of  Mr. Whipple fondling toilet paper," Garfield said.

But the Internet has changed that, breaking the bond that existed between media and marketing.

"People are consuming more stuff, including newspapers and TV, than ever before in human history but the audience is carved in smaller and smaller slices," Garfield said. "... The thing is, as audiences fragment, the amount of revenue coming in for any given piece of content goes down, down, down, below the point where the publisher or broadcaster can continue to produce the thing."

So rather than great drama or point-on sitcoms, TV, for instance, offers lower-cost fare. "It's cheaper to do," he said. "But it's also suckier and draws fewer viewers to the ratings, still less revenue and so on until oblivion."

"It was a magnificent ecosystem," Garfield said. "But it turns out to have been just an accident of history -- a happy accident, but an accident nonetheless."

Now, everyone with a blog is a publisher; everyone with a video camera is a filmmaker. "The time when folks at the apex of the pyramid got to dictate to the audience, the electorate, the congregation, the electioners -- that is coming to an end," he said. "Ladies and gentlemen, the herd will be heard."

You can listen to more from Garfield here, in an interview he gave last summer to NPR's "Talk of the Nation." (Garfield is a co-host of NPR's "On the Media.")



You can access the FTC workshop sessions (audio only) here.

It's déjà vu all over again

Years ago, I worked in a type- writer factory.

Yes, type- writers.

Not because it got me closer to journalism, but because the factory was one of the better-paying employers in town.

I was a college undergraduate, unhappy with my major and where I was headed. I was on a track to become a high school teacher, likely in social studies, but didn't want to be a teacher. I wanted to be a reporter, but couldn't afford to attend a school that offered journalism as a course of study.

So in answer to that conundrum, I quit going to classes and dropped out of college.

I'm not sure how I thought that would get me closer to journalism either, but it got me closer to the machines on which reporters then composed their stories.

In those days, you could walk into the Smith Corona typewriter factory, fill out some paperwork, pick up your safety glasses and be on the floor by the afternoon.

Like most factories, you made your money by piece work -- how much product you could produce during your shift. And if you were good, your pay was too.

I, unfortunately, was lousy at soldering the small metal components that were the typewriters' guts. An inspector would reject so many of my solders that I never made piece rate; I fled for the first retail job I could find. A few months later, I returned to college part-time, changed my major and took a journalism minor when one finally was offered.

But the factory experience stayed with me.

Foremost, it taught me I didn't have the temperament (or dexterity) for piece work. Later, it offered a fundamental lesson in business: adapt or die.

Smith Corona, which traced its roots to 1886, didn't anticipate the personal computer and other electronic office equipment. By the time it recognized the sea change, the company already was several product iterations behind. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1995, reorganized and re-emerged two years later, but never caught up. Another filing, in 2000, kept the name alive but not much else.

That sounds a lot like the newspaper industry today: Caught by surprise by the rapid adoption of everything digital, it's scrambling to survive -- cutting expenses (staff, editions, distribution) and frantically trying anything that might sustain readership and revenue.

"Our first priority," a Smith Corona executive told the New York Times at the time of the first bankruptcy filing, "is to stabilize our operations in the very short term while maintaining and building upon our longstanding relationships with key customers."

It's eerie how that could have been uttered just yesterday by almost any newspaper executive.

(Photo by me: the Smith Corona portable Deville Deluxe)

Mobile-to-Web adoption in a word: faster

Here's an update to a post earlier this month:

While Morgan Stanley sees mobile devices surpassing desktop PCs within five years as the preferred method to connect to the Internet, Gartner is laying bets on just three years.

The Stamford, Conn.-based information technology research firm released its 2010 IT predictions, including this one: "By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web-access device worldwide."

Gartner crunched the numbers and sees 1.78 billion PCs in use by 2013, vs. 1.82 billion units of smartphones and browser-equipped "enhanced" phones. What's more, the company says, that surpremacy will continue "thereafter."

The predicted adoption rate "does change everything," says Steve Smith, writing in minonline, a media industry watcher. "Mobile users do not click as often on sites from a mobile browser," he says. "Publishers without a credible mobile presence will lose that mobile traffic."

And then there's this Gartner finding cited by Smith: "Web sites not optimized for the smaller-screen formats will become a market barrier for their owners."

But Smith says some early adopters have found a financial benefit to fee-based apps: In the last month, The Guardian, a U.K-based newspaper and website, saw its $3.99 iPhone app downloaded almost 69,000 times. (It gets about 30 percent of the sales revenue, Smith says.)

It's just more evidence that newspapers that haven't gone mobile better hurry up and get with the app.

Fighting for journalism's future

File this under best-laid plans.

The idea originally was to travel post-Thanksgiving to Washington, D.C., to help auto-less daughter get ready for an overseas assignment. (You can't buy everything you need at the CVS Pharmacy located atop the nearest Metro subway stop. Eventually, you have to travel to Target in the 'burbs.)

Then, once she was in-flight, I could use her apartment as a base of operation for exploring job options in D.C. And, given the timing of the trip, I could also indulge a bit of wonkiness: taking in the Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism in the Internet age.

Ah, if only...

A Monday morning networking breakfast at the National Press Club was interrupted by a fire alarm and a cellphone call. The former was only a drill, but we nevertheless had to descend the stairs from the 13th-floor premises, cutting short the slim hour allocated for networking. The latter canceled a planned networking lunch that day, and took several e-mail exchanges to reschedule.

Then another e-mail moved a nice-to-finally-meet-you meeting with a prospective employer up a day, to Tuesday. The networking lunch formerly scheduled on Monday became a late-Wednesday coffee date instead. Both changes blew my plans to attend the FTC workshop in person, as those of us who pre-registered were told the early bird would get the seat and the rest would watch via videoconference in a hall a few blocks away.

So I cut my losses and saved the Metro fare by logging on to the webcast when I could. The morning session of the first day is here (bear with the intro video); you can get access to the other sessions here. (One downside to the webcast was its nearly stationary camera, meaning none of the speakers' data slides was shown as they talked.)

Big on the first day were appearances by News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch and Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington. Their presentations were critiqued by New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass, who himself was a panelist on the second day of the workshop. Or you can listen for yourself on the FTC webcast: Murdoch is introduced at about 57 minutes; Huffington at about 2 hours, 45 minutes.

The workshop ran for two days, from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day. Officials said it will be followed in the spring by more workshops focused on some of the policy issues related to journalism today: changes to copyright law or cross-ownership restrictions, for instance.

It's official: fewer newspaper publishers

The U.S. Census Bureau, best known for counting heads in this country, also produces an economic census every five years -- an accounting of businesses and their activities. Typically, two years after the data are collected, the findings are published.

Preliminary numbers from the 2007 economic census are starting to emerge, and I took note of this: fewer newspaper publishers existed then than in the 2002 census, and they employed fewer workers.

The Census Bureau says the U.S. had 8,375 newspaper publishers in 2007, compared with 8,603 in 2002, a drop of 2.65 percent. Workers numbered 356,943 in 2007 vs. 401,170 in 2002, a slide of 11 percent.

Despite the drop in workers, annual payroll rose: to $13.98 billion in 2007 from $13.73 billion in 2002, according to the Census Bureau.

Receipts (revenue) rose too: to $47.01 billion in 2007 from $46.18 billion in 2002.

The data were released Oct. 9 and will be updated as they are refined, according to the agency.