Weekend read: Don't forget the journalism

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Time to squeeze in a quick end-of-weekend reading list:

"Product First!" ((Re)- Structuring Journalism): I like the caution flag waved here by longtime journalist Reg Chua at the new slogan "Digital First," as championed by John Paton of Journal Register Co.: If it's just shorthand "for posting news faster and faster to the Web," says Chua, "it doesn’t really fundamentally rethink what we do, except make it go faster, at lower cost, with more bells and whistles." Instead, he says, "Wouldn't it make more sense to talk about 'journalism first'? That would at least put the focus on the quality of what we do."

"Some Thoughts on the Social Distribution of Mass Media...(SoDOMM)" (Silicon Valley Watcher): In one of those it's-so-obvious-why-didn't-I-see-it? observations, Tom Foremski suggests that the so-called social media revolution hasn't lived up to its potential: "If you look at the links people are sharing through social media, much of it is links to the same newspapers and big media organizations that people were reading, listening to, and watching before the advent of social media." Ha! He says a better descriptor of the terrain is SoDOMM: Social Distribution Of Mass Media.

"The Guardian Newsblog and the Death of Journalism" (The Louse & the Flea): Is live-blogging or live-tweeting good or bad for journalism? Both are being used more often by media organizations in the name of alternative story-telling. As a result, as-it-happens posts are being compiled by a reporter who is at a press conference or product demonstration or public meeting. If you know of the event and are interested in what's transpiring, it's the next best thing to being there. But when the event is breaking news, the result can confuse more than enlighten. But the Editors Weblog, in "Are Live Blogs the Future of Journalism?", contends online running commentary may yet have a place.

Musical interlude.

Quick takes:

• "The NYT's Melting Iceberg Syndrome" (Monday Note): "Could the New York Times be viable as a digital-only operation?" is the provocative question posed in the opening sentence. Why this what-if game? See the next item. 
• "Top 10 Dying Industries" (Real Time Economics): Of course newspaper publishing is on the list, No. 3 behind wired telecommunications carriers and mills.
• "Losing Our Way" (New York Times): Bob Herbert's last column.

Video interlude: Was I the only one who didn't get the memo on the planned musical extravaganza by "Grey's Anatomy"? Imagine my surprise flipping it on in mid-episode.

More weekend readings in journalism

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Here's some food for thought:

"A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting" (FiveThirtyEight): The headline on the New York Times politics blog may be a mouthful, but this is the bottom line: "A very small number of news outlets account for a very large share of the English-language reporting that is of national or international interest." That's according to Nate Silver, who tracked which publications were cited most often by everyone for their original reporting on a topic. It's an experiment he did to support the idea that good journalism isn't free and that the pay-to-read model -- like the Times' new metered plan -- is worth the price of subscribing.

" 'Who Needs Newspapers' Project Documents the State of Newsrooms Nationwide" (Editor & Publisher): Valid Sources, a nonprofit focused on finding outstanding practitioners of journalism, is about six months into its year-long effort to lay the foundation for a database that will highlight smaller newspapers that serve their communities well. The year-long project, called "Who Needs Newspapers," expects to identify one newspaper per state each week that deserves recognition; in year two and beyond, local press associations will help to grow the list. One commonality among the papers: they recognize the need to embrace the Internet and new media, and to work both to their advantage.

Visual interlude: The blog 10,000 Words calls "Bloggers vs. Journalists: It's a Psychological Thing" one of the five must-see presentations on digital journalism. The slides were prepared for the recent South by Southwest confab in Austin by Jay Rosen (New York University) and Lisa Williams (Placeblogger) for a discussion on the continuing debate between the two groups.

"Recent College Graduates and the Labor Market" (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco): Switching gears (a bit) from journalism, this report should lay to rest the debate over whether the current "jobless recovery" -- persistent unemployment -- is structural or cyclical. "Structural" argues that workers no longer have the skills desired by employers; "cyclical" says there's less demand for workers, period -- until the economy is firing on all cylinders. "Structural," to me, is demoralizing because it's akin to telling us jobless that we're suddenly unqualified for work; "cyclical" is less damning to individuals because the problem lies elsewhere, in the (im)balance of supply and demand. The San Fran bank, using recent college graduates as the control, concluded that the current downturn and recovery closely mirrors the 2001 recession and its aftermath, which was deemed cyclical. (Whew!)

"The Employment Situation, February 2011: Unemployment Down for Older Women but Not for Men" (AARP Public Policy Institute; pdf): If you're 55 or older and unemployed, according to this monthly report, you're screwed. "Once unemployed, older workers, on average, are out of work longer than their younger counterparts," it says. For the 55-and-older crowd, the length of unemployment rose in February to 45.5 weeks, from 44.4 weeks in January. (For younger workers, it also was up, but stood at 35.2 weeks.) Adds the report: "The recession may be over, but average duration of unemployment has continued to rise, increasing for the older unemployed by 48 percent between the start and end of the recession (December 2007-June 2009) and by 52 percent since the recession ended (June 2009-February 2011)."

Musical fadeout.

Weekend theme: Are readers being served?

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Unintentionally, here's a themed weekend read that revolves around this question: How can publishers create the best digital experience for customers?

"Ongo.com CEO: Centralized Subscription Removes ‘High Frustration Walls’ Between Readers & News" (Ask the Recruiter): Joe Grimm steps away from his usual column of career advice to dive into Ongo, the so-called "one-stop shop" for managing digital news. (Here's its intro video.) Funded by some of the biggest Old Media players, it's supposed to help us survive the constant barrage of online news by channeling the best of the output being offered. So rather than my having to surf various sites for the news, someone else is doing that and depositing it in one place for me -- at a cost of $6.99 a month.

" 'You Are What You Read': NYT CTO Marc Frons on the Paper's New Article Recommendation Engine" (Nieman Journalism Lab): The New York Times, one of the money players behind Ongo, debuted a story-recommendation service that offers other articles -- Times articles, that is -- you might like to peruse, based on your pattern(s) of interest at NYTimes.com. (Think of Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." way of recommending subject-related books.) This doesn't get you the best-of-the-best coverage on a topic -- as is the goal with Ongo -- but pushes Times content at you to build loyalty to the brand.

Video interlude: The Brits' sharp humor takes aim at digital devices.

"@Themediaisdying: The Brutal Truth From Two Years In The Twitterverse" (paidContent): Paul Armstrong, a social media strategist in London, uses the provocative Twitter handle The Media Is Dying to draw attention to FAILs (in the Twitter vernacular) by the media. Here he opines that publishers still haven't learned how to service readers in ways that make sense to them, not the media companies. "Stop trying to refine and redefine journalism and/or the written and spoken word and just serve the reader, not the business model," he says.

"The Daily Debut Flops: What Went Wrong?" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter wasn't impressed with The Daily, News Corp.'s long-awaited digital newspaper built specifically for the iPad. While the mechanics of The Daily have received good marks (aside from the widely criticized download time), the content hasn't. From Mutter: "The lack of intellectual heft makes The Daily feel more like the Etch A Sketch edition of Us Magazine than the ground-breaking news platform it purports to be." Ouch!

Musical interlude: It's Super Bowl Sunday, so ...

Bonus: Here's a useful tool from The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Open Government Guide to state Freedom of Information statutes.

C'mon in! Grab some coffee, write some news



The Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., posted this rendering
of its new "open newsroom" project.


Once upon a time, when I worked for a niche weekly, I delivered a camera-ready help-wanted ad to the big local daily. I walked in the front door of the daily's building, inquired at the information desk on where to go, then almost rode the elevator upstairs with the paper's editor and publisher.

I would have enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversation (Hey, fellas, got any news I can poach?), but they, alas, stayed behind after we exchanged some pleasantries.

I delivered my ad, took the elevator back to the ground floor, then returned to my own newsroom.

Fast forward a few years and I was working at that daily, and no one  -- employee or outsider -- got anywhere in the building without a company-issued swipe card. Security concerns post-9/11 were the immediate cause of the installation of new electronic door locks everywhere, but I'm sure there was some peace of mind that no one -- foreign or domestic -- with a gripe against the paper might wander in.

That's why it seemed so radical that The Register Citizen in Torrington, Conn., decided to move its newsroom to new, coffeehouse-like space and invite the public in. It's all part of an effort by Journal Register Co., parent company to 19 daily and 150 weekly newspapers and affiliated websites, to remake itself as an open system in which readers are encouraged to participate -- as tipsters, barometers of coverage, even writers.

"Bringing the audience into the physical space and providing a welcoming area for readers and staff to interact will continue to foster greater engagement," says John Paton, Journal Register CEO, who began to champion openness soon after joining the company earlier this year, just as it emerged from bankruptcy reorganization.

Newspapers talk a good game of audience engagement. We invite readers to attend editors' daily meetings on coverage and story placement, then are surprised when anyone wants to. And look at how the New York Times' TimesCast morphed from a videotaped peek at the morning news meeting to a high-quality broadcast more akin to a five-minute TV-headlines show.

So throwing the doors wide open in Torrington -- "With no walls, literally, between the Newsroom Café and The Register Citizen newsroom where reporters and editors work," says its publisher -- will be an experiment worth watching.

Corrections, smartphones, paywalls: Read!

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Another good weekend for reading:

"The Wrong Stuff" (Media Bugs): MediaBugs, a 2009 grant winner in the Knight News Challenge, an initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, just expanded to the national stage as a place where errors can be brought to the attention of the media in the hopes of having them corrected. As founder Scott Rosenberg once explained, news operations are horrible at admitting they got something wrong, oftentimes leaving readers, listeners or viewers apoplectic. So with the Knight grant he created a website in the San Francisco Bay area where those mistakes could be reported and tracked, ratcheting up the public pressure to make things right. (Think SeeClickFix, but not for potholes.) Now Rosenberg is attempting to do the same on a national scale -- and none too soon, judging from the survey MediaBugs did of the corrections practices of some 40 national newspaper and cable TV operations.

"Mary Meeker: Smartphones Will Surpass PC Shipments in Two Years" (TechCrunch): Morgan Stanley is back with more data on smartphone adoption, indicating their sales will move past laptop and desktop computers combined by 2012 and skyrocket from there. And newspaper publishers are beginning to pay attention (pdf), with near-unanimous agreement by respondents in a just-released Audit Bureau of Circulations survey that the public will be relying more and more on mobile devices -- not only smartphones but tablets and e-readers too.

Rap interlude: Take a listen to this catchy rap ode to NPR's shows and personalities.

"The Content Project: Building an 'EZ Pass' for Paid Content" (eMedia Vitals): This online newsletter, which describes itself as serving print media executives wanting to move their businesses online, offers a look at one idea for generating new news revenue: a system of à la carte options for paid content that might include things like day passes, annual subscriptions and metered access. Registration creates a credit card-backed electronic payment account that will buy access to the content on any website that participates in the project. Say organizers, "The key to making this work is making it as simple as possible for users" -- like the EZ Pass many motorists use to pay road tolls.

"Seven Reasons Newspapers Are Not Rebounding Financially" (Poynter Online): Rick Edmonds, who follows the business end of the news business, writes about the challenges still facing newspapers, despite the deep cost-cutting of staffs and news hole during the recession. But as he takes stock through three quarters of 2010, the scary point No. 6 on his list says alot: "The 'death spiral' cycle continues."

"Jim VandeHei Talks Politico Pro" (Columbia Journalism Review): Despite the above, Politico, the website and newspaper covering Capitol Hill in D.C., has big plans for a pricey news service that will deliver deeper looks at policy and politics to subscribers. It's among a handful of such plans by media companies -- including behemoth Bloomberg -- to offer everything under the sun to those who crave (and can pay for ) it.

Geeky interlude: The New York Times on Nov. 14 put online a companion graphic to a print story that allowed readers to "fix" the U.S. budget deficit. The blog 10,000 Words takes a look under the hood in the graphic's creation.

The weekend? Don't relax; read!

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Another weekend, another reading list:

"Meaty News Topics Are Popular -- And More Profitable" (Journalism 2.0):  This is encouraging: The top news topics over the summer involved serious issues -- unemployment, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates, egg recall -- as opposed to celebrity fluff. That's according to a company that works with publishers to monetize content, as measured by website traffic and ad revenue per thousand page views. Huzzah!

"The Newsonomics of the Ad Recovery" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Not so encouraging is this: Advertising is coming back, but newspapers aren't getting as much of it as their TV and magazine peers, says media analyst Ken Doctor. What's more, the pace of online ads is up, too, but newspapers haven't gotten digital as quickly as they should, so they aren't in a position to take best advantage of that trend. Sigh!

"This Is Not a Blog Post" (Slate): Did you know that blogs were morphing into Web magazines and 'zines were becoming blogs? Don't care? Well, some people do, and this piece in Slate explains why the descriptor "article" will bestow gravitas whereas "post" won't.

"How Free Can It Be?" (The Fiscal Times): More on paying or not paying interns -- from a writer who uses unpaid assistants to write a story about using unpaid assistants.

Dazed and Confused yet? Time for a video interlude with bonus music backup.

"New York Times to Launch Texas Regional Edition by Month's End" (PoynterOnline): Three of anything makes a trend, right? (Ask any newspaper assigning editor.) So that must be what we have with the New York Times partnering again with a new online operation to produce specialized pages for its national edition in select U.S. cities. The Times already set up such arrangements in San Francisco with the new (2010) Bay Citizen and in Chicago with the new (2009) Chicago News Cooperative. Now it's Texas's turn. I wonder what metro is next?

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."

Labor Day weekend reading

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It's a three-day weekend, so there's more time for reading. Here, with a Labor Day theme, are some gems:

"Most 'Re-employed' Workers Say They're Overqualified for Their New Job" (Pew Research Center): The folks at Pew have come up with some interesting statistics in this national survey, conducted in May and released on Thursday:

• A quarter of the U.S. labor force -- or 36 million of the 139 million currently employed -- faced unemployment at least once during the recession that began in December 2007.
• A third of those cut loose from jobs during the recession received a pink slip more than once; 16 percent found themselves out of work three or more times.
• Only 4 in 10 of those who found a new job say they're earning more now than in their former position; just 28 percent say their current benefits are better.
• More than half of the newly re-employed say their household is worse off financially than before the recession; 35 percent say they've had to make "major changes" in lifestyle.
• A quarter of the re-employed went from full-time jobs to part-time ones.
• While out of work, 6 in 10 of the re-employed thought about switching fields; 4 in 10 considered relocating to an area where jobs seemed more plentiful.

The survey's release preceded by a day the government's report on the U.S. labor picture for August, which showed a slight uptick in the jobless rate, to 9.6 percent. The number of long-term unemployed (six months or more) declined in August, to 6.2 million from 6.5 million, or about 42 percent of the jobless, vs. almost 45 percent in July. The median time unemployed also dropped, to just under 20 weeks, from nearly 23 weeks in July. (Incidentally, the payroll category that includes print journalists -- so-called publishing/except Internet -- saw a slight gain in jobs: to 761,600 in August from 761,300 the month before.)

"Warning: Why Cheaper Money Won't Mean More Jobs" (Talking Points Memo): The political blog featured a post by Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's labor secretary, that throws cold water on the idea that getting money into the hands of consumers and small businesses will grease the wheels of the economy. Neither is in a position to borrow, no matter how cheap the money may be, Reich says. Only large companies would benefit if the Fed made money cheaper, and "they're already sitting on mountains of money." As a result, he says,

If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they'll be subsidizing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs -- mergers and acquisitions.

And we all know that M&As usually seek economies of scale that endanger jobs.

Labor Day video interlude No. 1.

"What the Spot.Us Community Thinks of Objectivity" (MediaShift IdeaLab): There seems to be a lot of discussion of late as to whether reporters ought to routinely include a kind of confessional sidebar to the stories they write, to alert readers to viewpoints and experiences that might color their work. (Honestly, though, the talk isn't all that new.) Spot.Us, the website that allows reporters to pitch story ideas for funding, surveyed its "community" -- supporters and funders -- to see where they stood on objectivity in journalism.

Nearly 45 percent of the respondents agreed with the statement that "objectivity is possible but difficult," but almost 28 percent said they believed "transparency is the new objectivity." Said one respondent about the latter, "... reporters ought to reveal their biases in each story as part of the narrative so as to partially disarm whatever criticism of bias they may receive. Doing so will provide a better service to the public and will create better journalism."

Be sure to read the smattering of comments from respondents at the end. They're pretty interesting.

"A Journalist Laughs at the Thought that his Layoff Anniversary Is Worth a Story, But..." (Poynter Online): Broadcaster Michael Goldfarb interviews himself about his layoff five years ago from public radio station WBUR in Boston and the slow rebuilding of his professional life as a freelance journalist and author. His conclusion: "I commit as much journalism today as I ever did" -- but he now earns 50 percent less doing it.

Labor Day video interlude No. 2.

"All the Men That's Fit to Print" (The NYTPicker): In case you missed it, a discussion of gender inequality in the obituary pages of the New York Times, by the internal blog that keeps a critical eye on the paper. Interestingly, a Google search turned up a posting to an online version of a Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (2003) article, "Gender Discrimination after Death," by Robin D. Moremen, that cites numerous academic studies, dating from 1977, that looked at newspaper obituary pages to determine whether men received "greater public recognition after death than women." The answer, not surprisingly, was yes: more obituaries, longer obituaries and obituaries usually accompanied by a photograph.

Starbucks as public library

Starbucks' cinnamon dolce latte:
Espresso with steamed milk and cinnamon
dolce flavored syrup, topped with sweetened
whipped cream and cinnamon dolce topping.

Remember when public libraries worried they were losing patrons to the chain book- stores and chain coffeehouses and so began experimenting with adding coffee and pastry? Now, it seems, Starbucks is returning the favor: its Starbucks Digital Network, due in the fall, is library-like in some of the online services it promises.

Want to vault that Wall Street Journal paywall? You'll be able to do so while sipping a grande cinnamon dolce latte at your local Starbucks.

When the Seattle-based company announced it was making its wi-fi service free, many wondered why. Wireless Internet access already was available, but at a fee ($3.99 per two hours) to most customers. Starting July 1, though, the service became free and unlimited at company-owned stores.

Then the company began to fill out the "why": the Starbucks Digital Network, which would offer a collection of premium digital content -- iTunes, The New York Times, Patch, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo!, Zagat, Rodale, Nick Jr. Boost and DonorsChoose.org.

It's all part of what Starbucks long has called the "third place experience": a location beyond home and work where people choose to gather -- with Starbucks recommending music, books and movies to help them start a conversation. “We’re creating an online destination that will be true to, and expand upon, the Starbucks experience by delivering free, premium offerings that are selected specifically for our customers and localized for increased personal and community relevance,” Stephen Gillett, general manager of the company's digital unit, said in the Aug. 12 announcement.

And listen to this library-like description: "The Starbucks Digital Network will offer ... customers access to a one-of-a-kind destination featuring free access to various paid sites and services, exclusive content and previews, free downloads, career tools and local community news."

Alert the reference desk!

The content will be available to wi-fi-enabled laptops, tablets and smartphones through six "channels": news, entertainment, wellness, business and careers, My Neighborhood, and Starbucks. The news and "My Neighborhood" channels could be interesting for media companies, the former for the giants that will be part of the network (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today) and the latter for the online operations of smaller papers and local websites that might be able to elbow their way in alongside a hyperlocal like Patch.

Because as it has done with music, books and movies, Starbucks plans to "aggregate and compile the best content that [customers] can’t get any where else," Adam Brotman, another executive in the company's digital ventures unit, told Mashable.

And in music at least, that has meant a boost for newbie and legacy artist alike.

UPDATE: The service launched Oct. 19, according to cnet news. One thing I didn't realize was that Starbucks' network would be available only on wi-fi in its stores.

Time to pay up on internships

Need to be convinced that interns should be paid for their work at media outlets? Consider this:

"I was one of those interns, toiling away 10-12 hour days for six months, surviving off whatever I could garner bartending in the fratastic [sic] D.C. neighborhood of Adams Morgan on weekends. Did my friends and family think I was crazy to work for free? Of course, but I loved it and relished every opportunity offered to me while I was there."

It was penned by a young woman, a former Atlantic Media Co. intern, in response to the news that the D.C.-based publisher had decided to pay participants in its newly constituted internship program, dubbed Atlantic Media Academy.

The company, parent to The Atlantic and The National Journal magazines, said it was making the change retroactively (the academy is just a semester old) based on a story last weekend in the New York Times raising questions about unpaid internships and U.S. labor rules.

Internships are a fact of life in the media and other professions. Some are paid, but many are not. For the media (or at least at newspapers where I've worked), interns from college journalism programs are free labor.

Well, not exactly free. If you're lucky, you get bright but green kids who will quickly deliver on their promise, covering anything and everything with just moderate oversight. If you're not lucky, they're snarly or lazy and you find yourself spending way too much time babysitting or pleading with campus coordinators to get them out of your newsroom ASAP.

For years, the idea that college students would get academic credit for their internships seemed to offset concerns that what they did constituted unpaid work, running afoul of the government's Fair Labor Standards Act. Instead, if the internships met most of the government's criteria for training programs, the students weren't regarded as employees and didn't need to be paid.

It wasn't exactly black and white, but everyone seemed to understand the needed shade of gray.

These days, though, the picture has become murkier.

As newspapers have tightened their belt, we've seen college journalism programs assume greater roles in hyperlocal news initiatives, which has brought some criticism. And, it appears, some journalism schools may be rethinking the usefulness of unpaid internships, especially when they put at a disadvantage students who need paid work to finance their educations.

Atlantic Media hasn't yet revised its website to indicate its internships now are paid. (Interestingly, the six-month Atlantic Media Academy is "intended for recent college graduates" and includes classes, homework and a final exam. "At least by ambition, the course will be rigorous," the site says.)

But the company may have seen the handwriting on the wall: “If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” as one government official told the New York Times.

After all, assuming there wasn't a typo in the statement from the ex-Atlantic intern that she worked 10- to 12-hour days, that's a workweek few would want or in fact would work in the real world, absent compensatory time off or a big chunk of overtime.

UPDATE: On April 13 in the Washington Post, Atlantic Media advertised for editorial interns. The posts were listed as full-time and the pay was described as "negotiable."

I'm tired of being patted on the head

I always wondered whether journalism could ever become gender-blind and now know the answer: probably not.

Evidence this tweet Sunday morning from one of the profession's heavy hitters, commenting on his disillusionment with Apple's iPad, newly released the day before: "After having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I am having morning-after regrets. Sweet and cute but shallow and vapid."

Jeez.

It sent me straight to the public library for Nan Robertson's The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and The New York Times, which details the class-action lawsuit filed in 1974 by women at the newspaper who alleged inequities in pay, promotion and beats.

I'd read the book before, but wanted to revisit it, spurred by the Neanderthal weekend tweet, Robertson's death last fall, and the "Are We There Yet" reflection in Newsweek last month on the 40th anniversary of a similar gender-discrimination suit brought against the magazine.

The complaint against the Times dragged on for years before it was settled out of court in 1978; the newspaper paid $350,000 in back wages and other costs and agreed to an affirmative-action plan, according to Robertson's book. At Newsweek, the women who worked with the American Civil Liberties Union on the suit chose not to pursue it once the magazine agreed to hire more women as reporters.

Both cases (and others also filed at the time against Reader's Digest, Time, Newsday and NBC) threw open newsroom doors for a lot of women. But although we got in, I can remember feeling verbally patted on the head many times -- by male coworkers or city fathers -- and reminded that I bore a great responsibility as a reporter. Bletch!

Even today, we're still getting head pats. "In the world of journalism, women make up only 22 percent of the leadership roles, and they still have fewer bylines -- 1 to every 7 males at the top media outlets -- even though the majority of journalism majors since 1977 have been women," said an ABC News report looking back at the Newsweek case.

The three young women now at the magazine who wrote "Are We There Yet" conclude that  "No one would dare say today that 'women don't write here,' as the Newsweek women were told 40 years ago.

"But," they add, "men wrote all but six of Newsweek's 49 cover stories last year -- and two of those used the headline 'The Thinking Man.' In 1970, 25 percent of Newsweek's editorial masthead was female; today that number is 39 percent. Better? Yes. But it's hardly equality."

Neither was the spirit of that frat-boy tweet alluding to morning-after regrets with Ms. iPad.

Model staffing: pay or free?

I'm having a hard time getting beyond a knee-jerk reaction to the expansion of newspaper-college collaborations lumped under the "internship" heading.

The online newsletter Inside Higher Ed had a good roundup on the topic today, following The New York Times' announcement of a second pact with a journalism school to feed The Local, its neighborhood news site.

Under the headline "J-Schools to the Rescue?", Inside Higher Ed made this observation: "So why not make more explicit arrangements to have journalism students, who will work for course credit, fill the gaps left by the pros whom the news outlets could no longer afford to pay?"

Well, sure, why not take away my livelihood, and that of many, many other furloughed journalists, and put unpaid college interns in charge of reporting, writing and editing the news?

The Times has moved in that direction with The Local, an online hyperlocal news experiment launched a year ago in Brooklyn and northern New Jersey.

While expected to rely heavily on community residents for reporting and direction, the effort was led initially by Times staffers. But buyouts and reassignments at the paper soon altered that plan, and early this year, the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York was picked to handle day-to-day operations in Brooklyn. And last week, the Times said New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute would do the same for a new Local expected to debut by fall in Manhattan's East Village. (No j-school collaboration has been announced for the northern New Jersey Local, which seems to have built a robust roster of community participants.)

I have nothing against internships -- I had one in college that soon turned into a part-time paid staff position. And later as a newsroom manager, I coached my share of college interns and always gave extra attention to new graduates who listed an internship on their résumés when they applied for a reporting job.

But the pay-vs.-free staffing model is what bothers me here. Like other newspapers last year, the Times cut deeply into jobs (eliminating 100 newsroom positions by year's end), which usually necessitates a rejiggering of beats and/or outright elimination of some coverage. Yet through the j-school partnerships, news for some Big Apple neighborhoods will expand because there is no overhead for staffing.

One interview on the new East Village Local pooh-poohs that concern: "While critics cry foul over the Times' 'exploitation' of free student labor, they miss the point here: that this marks a progressive step for journalism training, and something students might actually want to do. Having your work appear on nytimes.com is worth a little 'free' labor now for bigger benefits later."

Let's hope those later benefits include a living wage.

When will the aftershocks end?

Every day seems to bring a new jolt:

• Some big bylines are included among the 74 newsroom workers who opt to take a buyout at the New York Times -- and on the Metro Desk alone that adds up to more than 80 years of experience.
• Nielsen Co. decides to close the venerable Editor & Publisher -- long a news and jobs bible for journalists -- as it sells off a handful of trade publications.
• The Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland, which has offered free, multi-day training for journalists for more than two decades, will be shuttered at month's end. (Disclosure: I've been a "fellow" there twice.) The website BusinessJournalism.org said grants from long-time funder the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation were not renewed. 

It feels as if the earthquake that has shaken the newspaper industry continues to send out powerful aftershocks. Just as you thought you'd regained your footing, another tremor comes through.

And it likely won't get better, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Labor.

The agency's Occupational Outlook Handbook 2008-09 Edition offers this pdf update on job projections in the category "news analysts, reporters and correspondents": whereas employment by newspaper publishers stood at about 33,000 in 2008, jobs likely will fall to 25,500 by 2018, down 22.72 percent.

Earlier, the projection was for growth in this jobs category of about 2 percent between 2006 and 2016.

I wonder how much worse the 2009-to-2019 outlook may be.

Brother, can you spare $20?

If you weren't paying close attention, you might have missed it: an article in today's New York Times' Science Times that was produced by a freelancer whose work was underwritten by Joe and Jane Mainstreet.

The story, both online and in print, offered this italicized explanatory note: "Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists."

It represents another kick-the-tires effort to see what new revenue streams might fund journalism in the future, now that legacy newspapers are struggling to make ends meet.

You may recall an earlier piece by Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt in which he discussed the proposal proffered by freelancer Lindsey Hoshaw to travel in early fall to what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating mass of plastic, rope and other detritus, aboard a boat skippered by Charles Moore, who discovered the garbage floe a dozen years ago as he returned from a sailing race in Hawaii.

Hoshaw proposed to take pictures for the paper and perhaps write a story, according to Hoyt. The Times agreed to look at the results, but declined to underwrite her expenses -- estimated at some $10,000 -- in keeping with the paper's standard freelance policy.

So Hoshaw turned to Spot.Us, a Web site that posts story pitches to which everyday people can donate. (Hoshaw's pitch raised $6,000 from 116 donors -- a technical glitch prevented resetting the fundraising clock to $10,000, reports site director David Cohn -- with many throwing in $10 or $20; Hoyt is listed as giving $50.)

The concept is called crowdfunding, which, like crowdsourcing, works to harness the power of the many to accomplish a task. Whether it's the future of journalism is still debatable; even Hoyt sees the Hoshaw article as one experiment among many at the Times.

Read Cohn's take on Hoshaw's fundraising here, which he says was Spot.Us' biggest to date. His young site isn't alone in trying this model, and he has some good insight into lessons learned to date here.

Humor in the face of outsourcing

Journalists are among the funniest people I've ever met.

They're razor sharp, have a dry wit, and can mimic with perfection the mannerisms and speech of many of the newsmakers they cover.

So I had to laugh out loud at the drubbing given to Toronto Star Publisher John Cruickshank at the hands of his paper's copy desk -- the same people whose jobs likely will be outsourced by management to save money.

The Star, Canada's largest-circulation daily, announced plans last week to restructure through buyouts and other actions, including outsourcing and layoffs. The outsourcing -- moving copy editing and page-layout duties outside the company -- could affect 100 newsroom jobs, according to the union representing the workers.

So in a bit of tit for tat, one (or several) of the creative folks on the copy desk took a red pen to the publisher's memo to staff. To the uninitiated -- and those of the digital-only age -- that means marking up the text for style errors, jargon and a missed opportunity on leading with the news. Gawker got hold of a copy of the red-penned text.

(Full disclosure: I remember when editing was done with what was called a red grease pencil (shown above), which subsequently became a red fine-point marker. I received a framed, red-penned "story" as a going-away gift from a reporter when I left one editing job for another at a cross-town rival. I guess the reporter didn't think so highly of my thoughtful tweaking of her work. I laughed then, too.)

The Star incident was full of the gallows humor that newsrooms are noted for. But, unfortunately, it masked a more serious issue: the continued pummeling of print journalists as newspaper companies scramble to make money. The Star is no different than its U.S. counterparts in reporting ongoing losses for its print holdings in the third quarter.

And it's not alone in trying to find new staffing patterns: The Nieman Journalism Lab today published the text of an address last week to the New York Times newsroom by Executive Editor Bill Keller in which he touched on several money-saving ideas, including the need to find new efficiency in staffing the copy and layout desks.

The one bright spot, though, was his statement on endless belt-tightening: "The idea that you can do 'more with less' is, in my view, one of the four great lies. ... What you can do with less, is less."

Let's hear it for toothpaste and newspapers

Here's a modest proposal for the future of journalism: consumer staples.



The New York Times brought to you by Charmin; Crest presents the Dallas Morning News; the Chicago Tribune sponsored by Gillette.

Why not hook up? The Washington Post just reported a third-quarter profit thanks to Kaplan Inc., the test-preparation company that also offers online graduate and professional degrees.

We could do worse.

Despite continued attempts to find the new business model for journalism, no one has discovered it yet. Just the other day, "some 50 of the foremost thinkers about journalism" gathered at Harvard University to ponder the future and how to make money in news, says the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

In the end, tweeted Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who was invited to attend, "Holy Grail undiscovered."

To be sure, the "media company" model hasn't worked: newspapers, radio and TV stations, billboards, and community weeklies all wrapped up together. And all were whacked in unison as the economy melted down last year.

So diversify: General Electric Co., which has been around since the late 1800s, knows it works. Why not newspapers?

Yet the Post took some shots for the strength of its Kaplan subsidiary. Said a headline on the Editor & Publisher website, "Q3 Profit Up at Washington Post Co. -- No Thanks to Newspapers." At MarketWatch, Kaplan was dubbed the Post's Mariano Rivera, "the reliable [Yankees] closer who strides out of the bullpen and saves the day."

For the Post, Kaplan produced 60 percent of third-quarter revenue, says MarketWatch. That seems an easier way to guarantee a positive bottom line than erecting pay walls for online content or crafting some kind of donations or outside funding system to pay reporters for their work.

(More) signs of the times

Tough times at the New York Times today, with the company announcing it will jettison 100 newsroom jobs (8 percent of staff) by year's end, either through voluntary buyouts or involuntary layoffs.

Having gone through the latter over the summer, I can sympathize.

The news didn't dissuade Times management from bragging that "These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world."

Are you sure? After 200 cuts in the newsroom in two years? Remember the other recent nip-and-tuck, one among many moves commonly made to cut expenses without paring essential services to the bone.

FishbowlNY has the full Times memo here.