Mobile, hyperlocal, Twitter: Read!

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Hooray for the weekend! Time to read.

"Ready for the Mobile Ad Revolution?" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter, in a piece for Editor & Publisher, offers a look at some of the mobile technology that currently seems so very Buck Rogers. Yet for all the gee-whiz, "the true power of mobile advertising is its ability to put the right ad in front of the right person in the right place at the right time," Mutter says. And for how long have we been talking about newspapers' need to get out in front in mobile? Certainly a lot longer than this. (Note the posting date is a year ago to the day.)

"Backfence Founder Mark Potts: Hyperlocal Takes Patience" (StreetFight): This new website, which bills itself as covering the business of hyperlocal, offers a Q&A with Mark Potts (Recovering Journalist), a mainstream veteran who has tried his hand (and failed) at the hyperlocal space, for some perspective on what does and doesn't work. (Potts touches on mobile, too.)

"Handwritten Newspapers from Ravaged Japan at Newseum" (Newseum): Here's the kind of inspired journalism we all admire, going after the story and publishing against all odds -- even the monstrous earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The Newseum in Washington, D.C., relates how it came to acquire copies of one daily newspaper that were handwritten and published pen-on-paper in the days after the Japanese disaster. They will be put on display as "a powerful testament to the timeless human need to know and to journalists' commitment to providing that information."

Musical interlude.

Short takes:

• "Rolling Stone Writers Talk Long-Form Journalism at Housing Works" (Bookish): Can long reads survive in a short-attention-span world? Yup, according to this account of a standing-room-only talk at a NYC bookstore: "A great story is a great story."
• "No, Bob Woodward, Google Did Not Kill Newspapers" (The Atlantic): The celebrated Washington Post writer and editor is chastised for comments made at a college near Chicago. While the narrative is nothing new, the accompanying graphic on newspapers' ski-slope-like circulation decline is eye-popping.
• "Trouble@Twitter" (Fortune): Or, will the 140-character site survive its leadership vacuum?

Bonus read:

"The Straight Dope: Bill Moyers Interviews David Simon" (Guernica): A superb conversation with the one-time Baltimore Sun journalist who created The Wire, the HBO series that told the story of life in Baltimore through its institutions. I'm not an HBO subscriber, so I missed the series when it ran for five seasons on television (2002-08). But I've been making my way through the 60 episodes on DVD as a patron of my local library. (The library is even springing for a new Season 1 DVD set, which had been listed in its online catalog as "lost." W00t!)  

Music bonus: The Wire theme from Season 5, which focuses on the media as an institution. 

Weekend read: looking back, ahead on journalism

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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".

Weekend read: How the news business has changed

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Time to get back into the weekend reading habit. Check this out:

"Colorful Hyperbole and Newspapering in 1982 and 2010" (McGuire on Media): Tim McGuire is a former editor at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis who now teaches journalism at Arizona State University and blogs regularly about the media. This recent post is interesting because it asks a handful of newspaper veterans to evaluate the sea change that has roiled the industry over the last several decades. (Note the reminder of how transformative the telegraph was for newspapering in an earlier era.)

"The Shakeup at MediaNews: Why It Could Be the Leadup to a Massive Newspaper Consolidation" (Nieman Journalism Lab): The crux of this long piece -- the "nut graf," if you will -- doesn't show itself until the subhead titled "Consolidation?" And the point is this: With so many newspaper companies now controlled by the same one or two investment groups, isn't further consolidation of the industry inevitable? Author Martin Langeveld, a longtime daily newspaper publisher now working as a consultant, offers a handy list of investor-owners to make his case.

Musical interlude: "The Dow Piano", or how the stock market's ups and downs in 2010 would be scored.

"Is Mobile Affecting When We Read?" (Read It Later): Yes, is the short answer from the people behind Read It Later, a platform to which readers save digital articles in order to, ahem, read them later. An analysis of what has been posted to RIL reveals that we're so thoroughly bombarded by online material that we're forced into priority triage, setting aside certain things for a leisure-time read. The iPad could find a big following as a result, say the RIL folks.

"The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving" (Columbia Journalism Review): Two recent instances of off-the-record comments being attributed once their source died offers a topic for discussion: Does the identity protection ever expire automatically?

Video interlude: I hadn't seen this Nike Foundation anti-poverty video (or its follow-up) until I came across this article in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the controversy that has resulted.

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.

Ready! Set! Read!

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

"The Newsonomics of Journalist Headcounts" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Ken Doctor supplies an exhaustive rundown of journalism jobs lost in the last decade and those being created today. Bottom line: We've lost more than we've gained, even as "technologies and growing audiences have built out a huge capacity for news."

"When Campaigns Manipulate Social Media" (The Atlantic): Here's some food for thought post-midterm election: 140-character attack campaigns may be more worrisome in the future than deep-pocketed interest groups.

Creative video interlude: "A Life on Facebook."

"Rusbridger: Openness, Collaboration Key to New Information Ecosystem" (Poynter Online): Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief of The Guardian newspaper in London, writes about the "mutualisation" it employs that embraces Web attributes of openness (linking) and collaboration (working with readers and others). Be sure to follow the link to one example he gives, "Comment is Free," a cool comment website.

"U.S. Mobile Data Traffic to Top 1 Exabyte" (GigaOM): An exabyte, you'll learn here, is "a unit of information equal to 1000 petabytes or a billion gigabytes" -- which I still can't fathom, but the short of it is that our appetite for access to data whenever and wherever we want it is growing rapidly. Hello smartphones.

An appropriate music video interlude.

"I Am a Blogger No Longer" (The Atlantic): Marc Ambinder bids adieu to his gig as blogger for The Atlantic, saying he missed the rigor of print and found the 24/7 nature of online exhausting. "What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called 'Marc Ambinder' that people read because it's 'Marc Ambinder,' rather than because it's good or interesting."

The post got folks talking on Twitter, and also spawned this: "Escape from Thunderdome" (Snarkmarket), a three-fer that dissects Ambinder. One interesting comment to the dissection, though, raises this point: maybe Ambinder got tired of being a brand, a supposed goal of all journalists going forward. Sacrilege!

Hilarious video interlude: The Washington Post generates a lot of chatter for a video -- featuring a befuddled Bob Woodward -- that introduces its new iPad app. (It even earns a jab from Washington City Paper.) But I want to know about the hole in the sole of Ben Bradlee's shoe -- real or a prop?

Make it a to-do: Mobile

I wonder how many newsroom execs, just back from the annual meeting of the American Society of News Editors, put  MOBILE in big block letters at the top of their to-do list.

Capitalizing on smartphones as a news and revenue strategy figured into the keynote delivered by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the conference's opening and at a session two days later that featured Yahoo's Matthew Idema, a vice president in charge of local initiatives.

Idema offered a peek at his company's soon-to-launch smartphone app, which should have scared the bejesus out of the newspaper editors: It will offer where-you're-at weather, traffic, news, tweets and blogs, as well as nearby specials offered by businesses.

"(S)ounds like a potential 'newspapers should have created it first' moment," said one observer on Twitter.

Indeed, technology watchers like Gartner and Morgan Stanley have predicted that mobile devices soon will overtake PCs as the preferred tool to connect to the Internet -- they just differ on whether that will happen by 2013 or 2015.

Currently, about a quarter of American adults get some of their news via cellphone, the Pew Research Center reported last month. It described the typical "on-the-go" news consumer as a 34-year-old white male, college-educated and earning a comfortable living ($75,000 or more for about a third of them). In addition to grabbing news from multiple sites, he also uses his phone to send text messages, take pictures, blog and tweet.

With such an eager consumer, newspapers would be foolish not to reach out via mobile devices, right? Here's an even more compelling reason: Mobile is expected to grow rapidly into a lucrative advertising vehicle.

Yesterday, Borrell Associates, a research firm that analyzes local advertising spending, called mobile "the new disruptor" in advertising and marketing, and predicted it will skyrocket to some $57 billion in spending by 2014 -- from $2.7 billion last year.

Mobile coupons, sent via text messages, already are showing promise, according to the company, citing the example of a restaurant in Texas that paid $37 to send out buy-one-get-one-free coupons for burgers and added $1,000 in incremental revenue daily. Borrell called coupons the first "killer app" for mobile.

Newspapers have always made money by delivering eyeballs to advertisers. With a mobile strategy, they'd link on-the-go news consumers with nearby businesses via smartphone.

To miss that opportunity would mean passing up needed revenue -- a point not lost on one observer at Idema's Yahoo presentation:  "Be afraid newspapers. They'll drink what's left of your milkshake," she tweeted.

Look to future, not past, for digital 'do-over'

How can you tell old-media reps from the new-media ones?

• They wear suits instead of T-shirts at industry conferences;
• Few of them live-tweet at events;
• They haven't heard of Chatroulette or use Foursquare.

Or so claimed some snarky observers on Twitter during the annual meeting of the American Society of News Editors, which concluded today in Washington, D.C.

And, it appears, old-media types also would rather get a "do-over" on the just-concluded decade, when aggregators grabbed content from newspaper websites and made it widely accessible on the Internet.

"Do news execs know where their companies went wrong?" asked a headline at an online-journalism news site, reporting on a poll released at the conference. The survey, conducted in December and January by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, showed that members of ASNE and the Radio Television Digital News Association are worried about their operations' sustainability.

Asked what they could have done differently in the past decade (see chart), many editors in particular said they should have invested in new technology sooner and should have put their papers' online content behind a paywall.

Source: Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism

"These answers could indicate that perhaps many of today’s news industry execs still don’t quite grasp what caused their companies to fall on hard times," said Amy Gahran, who posted the "Do execs know" item on the Knight Digital Media Center site. Her concern: their thinking could hamper old-media's adoption of new-media strategies in the future.

Indeed, "Charging for Digital Content: Fix or Folly?" was a topic for discussion yesterday at the ASNE conference, when two media executives and two media observers debated paywalls and other suggestions (philanthropy, government assistance, pledge drives) for propping up traditional -- but declining -- revenue from print ads.

They split evenly, 2-2, on whether free access to online content should be curtailed. The pro-paywall side had some support from the Pew survey, which found 10 percent of respondents working on charging fees for access, while 32 percent are considering the idea. (Of the others, 11 percent rejected the idea and 35 percent haven't even considered it.)

But Jim Brady, a former washingtonpost.com editor who is heading up a soon-to-launch online local-news site in the D.C. area, called paywalls "more folly than fix" because they ask people to pay for something they don't want to pay for.

Instead, he and Ken Doctor, a media analyst, said editors and broadcasters should develop strategies to charge for news access via mobile phones -- where more and more Web traffic is expected to shift in the near future and where smartphone users already are accustomed to paying for apps.

They said that's a better do-over than trying to take back content already set free by the aggregators.

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.

Time to get (iPhone) mobile

If you're a newspaper publisher and haven't thought yet about a mobile strategy, go sit in the corner.

Mobile is where it's at (or will be soon). Consider this prediction last month from Morgan Stanley in The Mobile Internet Report: "The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years."

That is, more people will access the Internet through things like smartphones, rather than waiting until they can get their hands on a computer keyboard.

So what does that mean for newspapers? The possibility of more eyeballs on their Web sites, which then could possibly be sold to advertisers to bolster a revenue stream that hasn't yet come close to matching the sales seen from traditional ads on newsprint.

Morgan Stanley credits the convergence of five factors for the "dramatic growth" it foresees in mobile Internet usage: 3G adoption, social networking (aided by Facebook), video (YouTube had 466 million global users in October, up 35 percent from the same month in 2008), VoIP and "impressive mobile devices."

Of the latter, the report says, "Apple’s iPhone, iTouch and App Store launches over (the) past 2.5 years created the spark for mobile Internet liftoff, as Microsoft’s launch of Windows 3.0 did for the PC in 1990 and the Netscape browser (and its IPO) did for the desktop Internet in 1995." (Report's pdf here.)

To be sure, news organizations like the New York Times and Reuters are actively pushing their product to mobile devices, and others are hiring to follow suit. But far more operations haven't taken the plunge, leading one newspaperman-turned-deep-thinker to plead for a mobile-first strategy.

He's worried, though, the response will be reminiscent of the "Web-first" rally cry that caused so much indigestion in newsrooms, where the concern was that pushing stories to the website as they were filed would scoop the print product. Yet one comment included in his mobile-first manifesto (Scribd here) offers some hope: "The only way you can do this wrong is to not do anything at all. Let's try SOMETHING other than talk about it."

To which those of us who want to make a living in newspapers say "Amen!"