Corrections, smartphones, paywalls: Read!

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

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.

Word to the wise: brand yourself

"Overwhelmed with the challenges facing the media, but excited about its future prospects. I have a lot of learning to do," tweeted Adam Falk, who expects to earn a degree in magazine journalism in 2011 from the University of Missouri at Columbia.

"The conference is over, my brain is full, my to-do list is long, but I couldn't be more excited about the future of journalism!" tweeted Michelle Flandreau, a broadcast journalism major at the school.

The two were among the journalism students who attended today's Carnegie Corporation of New York/The Paley Center for Media conference in New York City on the future of journalism education and tweeted about the program. (According to the site What the Hashtag, which tracks Twitter traffic, they were among more than 200 contributors offering nearly 800 tweets on the day-long event.)

I saw Falk and Flandreau in the audience as I watched a live stream of one of the day's sessions, which featured Jeff Jarvis of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism leading a panel on entrepreneurship and journalism. (Below is a photo posted to twitpic showing Jarvis, standing right, taking audience questions and comments as the panel wrapped up.)

There's been a lot of discussion lately (see here and here, for instance) about the state of journalism instruction, now that the bedrock of legacy newspapers has cracked.

One emerging theme is the journalist as entrepreneur, a favorite topic for Jarvis, which subscribes to the idea that reporters no longer will be identified with their employer but will be a franchise unto themselves. It's a "business" they'll need to develop.

Jarvis' panel offered up four entrepreneurs in online journalism --Rafat Ali, founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media; Phil Balboni, president and CEO of Global Post; John Harris, editor-in-chief of Politico; and John Thornton, chairman of The Texas Tribune  -- and he asked each of them what kinds of skills the next generation of working journalists should be taught.

And that's where Falk and Flandreau got their headaches: branding, marketing, creating business plans, developing niche specialties -- all in addition to learning to write and report well. Concurrently, j-schools should throw out the study tracks (print, broadcast, Web) into which students have always been slotted: "Digital should be the core of everything," Balboni said.

"Teach the business of news," he added. "... (It) is more important in many respects than the journalism."

The Paley Center promised to archive video from the conference here over the weekend.

Can't we all just get along?

File this under head-scratching.

The editor of an online news site in New York City has a post on a group blog known as the Idea Lab that seems to chastise fellow online news site Politico for its advertising success -- in print.

"Politico, of course, is fortunate enough to have both a print and Web presence. Those of us at Web-only publications ... cannot help but be frustrated by seeing ads -- and revenue -- going to print publications that may have fewer readers and weaker content," says Gail Robinson of GothamGazette.com, a site that covers in the Big Apple what Politico covers in Washington, D.C.: policy, politics and personalities.

Whether by "fewer readers and weaker content" she means Politico specifically or is just blowing off steam at the current wild and wooly media market isn't clear. But it sure sounds like sour grapes.

The post, titled "Advertisers Still Prefer Print to Online," recounts the news, reported earlier this week by paidContent.org, that Politico showed a profit in fiscal 2009, ended Sept. 30, for owner Allbritton Communications Co. of suburban D.C.

The family-owned Allbritton, which operates television stations from Virginia to Oklahoma affiliated with the ABC network, is closely held and not subject to the financial reporting rules that govern publicly traded companies. But it filed an annual report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission "under the terms of certain long-term debt."

For fiscal '09, Allbritton shows a loss of $5.6 million on revenue of $200 million -- vs. a profit of $12.9 million on revenue of $216.4 million in fiscal 2008 -- primarily due to the recession. Auto advertising, for instance, which accounted for about 14 percent of broadcast revenue last year, was down 41 percent from fiscal 2008, according to the filing.

Politico was a bright spot, though.

Founded in January 2007, it employs about 100 in Arlington, Va., in online and print operations. The four-color, tabloid-sized newspaper circulates about 30,000 copies five days a week while Congress is in session (only once a week during recesses) and targets Capitol Hill, D.C.'s K Street lobby corridor and government agencies. It's also free in honor boxes outside the Metro (subway).

Allbritton's SEC filing shows Politico made about $901,000 in fiscal '09 on revenue of $18.6 million. In its first year of operation, revenue was about $4 million.

The revenue from print advertising comes in large part from full-page ads, many of them advocacy or issue-oriented. When I was in D.C. just after Thanksgiving, I was amazed by the number.

In the 28-page Monday paper, I counted 10 full-page ads. In the 36-page Tuesday paper, there were 17, several of them by the same companies or groups (General Electric, EADS North America, Georgetown University, the Republic of Kosovo) that had advertised Monday. Tuesday's paper also had two "double trucks" -- a single ad running across two adjacent pages (Northrup Grumman, Chevron). On Wednesday, by the time I got to the Metro, no papers were left in the honor boxes.

Sure, the GothamGazette's Robinson may opine of Politico's results: "A rare bit of good financial news for journalism points once again to the difficulty of financing online media." But you've got to offer a big Huzzah! to the D.C. folks for finding a workable hybrid for these times: a multimedia Web site with in-the-know immediacy for Beltway wonks and an ink-on-paper platform for advertisers to pitch their message to power brokers.