More readings on journalism

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As the weekend winds down, here's some food for thought:

"Who Owns Newspaper Companies?" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Martin Langeveld, a former newspaper publisher, continues to document whose fingers are in the newspaper pie. Here he inventories the investors in publicly traded newspaper companies, concluding "that with a few exceptions, ownership is diversified to the point that no single entity owns more than 10 percent." That's not the case in what he calls the "distressed sector" -- the companies that have gone through bankruptcy court -- where certain investors seem to hold greater stakes.

"The Danger in the Doldrums" (Xark): With the earthquake and tsunami in Japan as backdrop, newspaper veteran Dan Conover (loooong bio here) contemplates the paradox of the news biz: that people seek out good journalism during crises, but could care less otherwise. And since doing top-notch reporting is as expensive on "slow" news days as it is on breaking ones, most media companies back-fill on the former: car chases, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan -- because readers still have to be delivered to the advertisers buying space. "It's what we do -- or don't do -- on the slow days that's killing our reputations," he says.

Musical interlude.

"The New Watchword? Deconvergence" (ReJurno): Journalist Jane Stevens makes a case for flipping the newsroom on its head: that reporters write for the Web, rather than print, and that their work then is repurposed for the newspaper. That way, she says, papers' online operations won't get pulled down along with the print operations. "[J]urnos just focus on building and managing their communities, their web and mobile coverage," she says, although she'd allow that "Maybe a couple of print-centric staff writers provide Sunday feature stories, but that depends on who the print audience is and what they want."

Bonus reads:

1. "The Newsroom Rush of Old" (Smithsonian): Think speed is new to the newsroom? Think again, as reminiscences born of an old city desk photo show.
2. "Dan Rather: Inside Mark Cuban's Gilded Cage" (Mother Jones): The 79-year-old former news dean of CBS is happy again as a shoe-leather reporter. 
3. "How to Not Get Hired" (Forbes): Humorous tales from the job hunt. Or, "been there, done that!"

Bonus video: In case you were worried about Maru (of course we watch cat videos on the Web!), word came from Japan that he is safe.

Can't get a job? Then you must not have one already

Let's hear a "Hallelujah!" from the congregation on this one: that employers seeking only currently employed applicants for advertised openings may need to rethink that strategy.

You probably know this as the need-a-job-to-get-a-job maxim. By any name, it stinks. But whether it's illegal is not so black and white, as you'll see from this segment that aired today on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street":


As explained by Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, policies that are neutral on their face ("no layoff candidates") but that fall more heavily on particular groups -- African Americans, women, older workers -- "can be illegal under certain circumstances."

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating.

Owens says no law or regulation mandates that an employer consider for a job someone who is unqualified. "But," she says, "if someone is qualified, except for the fact that he or she hasn't recently been employed in that job [field], that's a very arbitrary kind of exclusion."

As an act of discrimination, "It's hard to prove," Owens adds. "But it's not impossible to prove."

If ever there's a class action on this, I just might sign up.

Weekend reading: Can hyperlocal work?

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Here's the latest installment of things worth reading:

"Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven't Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?" (ReadWriteWeb): With Aol's deal to acquire neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in as a backdrop, author Marshall Kirkpatrick tries to figure out why various attempts to develop sites in this niche have yet to work. Is it an idea ahead of its time? Don't enough people care about what's happening down the street? Is the revenue model too elusive? "I care about what's happening in the neighborhood around me," he writes, "and I want to see the fabulous new technologies of open government data, online news syndication, social networking and data mining all put to service to fulfill hyperlocal news wishes and dreams I didn't even know I had yet."

"Q&A: Jim Brady on the Death of TBD" (Columbia Journalism Review): Brady was one of the brains behind TBD, the online-only local news site in Washington, D.C., that saw the rug pulled out from under it by parent Allbritton Communications just six months after launch. Here he offers an extended post-mortem on the rise and fall of the site, which he says has been wrongly characterized as a hyperlocal effort.

Musical interlude.

"Memo to Newspapers: Incremental Change Is Not Helping" (GigaOM): Check out the graphic in this post by Mathew Ingram, which originally accompanied an analysis by Frederic Filloux of the disruptive changes now facing traditional media. It shows how rapidly print advertising revenue has declined -- with the Washington Post as a model -- vs. the slow rise in online revenue: there's no intersection of the lines as "digital pennies" are no match for "print dollars." For the Post, it means in real terms the loss of $5 in print revenue for every $1 gained in online revenue.

"Journal Register's Localized Video News Strategy Is Driving Profitability: CEO John Paton" (Beet.TV): In a video interview, Journal Register Co.'s John Paton explains the technology his "digital first, print last" company uses to get video to the web quickly -- including eliminating the bottleneck (emphasis added) of central editing.

Bonus reads:

"A Day in the Life of a Liveblogger" (MobileCrunch): This is a delightful, insightful tale of live-blogging, as one reporter psyches himself and syncs his mobile "office" to cover the folderol of new tech-product releases.

"So Long Again, Chicago Daily News" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Newsosaur Alan Mutter reminisces about the 1978 closing of the afternoon paper in Chicago. "But this isn't just ancient history," he offers. "It is a valuable reminder to today's media companies of what happens when you run out of readers, revenues and ideas all at the same time."

Economy's improvement in eye of beholder

The friendly folks at the state Labor Department sent a letter my way that offers this encouraging assessment: that I have been unemployed for so long (nearly, gulp, 20 months) that "your prospects for finding work in your customary occupation are classified as 'not good'." (Sigh!)

The boldface, which is theirs, then continues to inform me that I now must look for suitable work, which is defined as anything else I could do using the skills from my former occupation or anything else at all that I could do no matter my training or lack of training, as long as whatever comes up in the crap shoot pays "at least 80 percent of your high quarter base period wages."

I vaguely recall that language from somewhere deep in my then-new unemployment insurance booklet, which I dutifully read eons ago. At the time, of course, I knew that it never would apply to ME, since I was a well-educated careerist who had climbed the ranks in my profession and would land in a new job tout de suite.

But -- oops! -- it was indeed meant for me.

So you'll understand the agita that resulted today from a couple of news snippets I caught:

1. The monthly jobs report;
2. A discussion of corporate profits.

The U.S. Labor Department this morning reported an improved employment picture in February, with the nonfarm payroll number up (+192,000) and the unemployment rate down (8.9%). According to the New York Times, the recovery is gaining traction, even if the 64.2 percent of working-age adults in a job or looking for one "is the lowest labor force participation rate in 25 years, an indication that many Americans are waiting for hiring to get better before resuming the job hunt."

Then there was this piece of an interview I caught this morning on CNBC with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. If you skip to about 4:03, you'll hear an exchange between Greenspan and Steve Liesman, the network's senior economics reporter:



"Corporations are as profitable as they've ever been," says Liesman showing a chart indicating after-tax corporate profits as a percentage of gross domestic purchases. "How bad can business conditions really be, given how much corporations are earning these days?" he asks Greenspan.

The former chairman offers a long, considered, Greenspan-esque response, but then adds: "I grant you your point ... there's no question that profits are doing exceptionally well."

"But," he goes on, "you can still have very considerable profitability and not be willing to invest it in illiquid assets."  Um, like what, new workers?

Two years later, stories of survival from 'The Rocky'

It's a video that still leaves me choked up: the farewell to the Rocky Mountain News:


Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

It's now two years since the Denver paper closed -- a casualty of the Great Recession and the demise of publishing's traditional revenue model (ads on a printed page to reach the masses). To mark the anniversary, John Temple, who was The Rocky's editor and publisher, offers a couple of surveys on what his former colleagues are up to.

He found that many remain in journalism; others went into different fields, chose to retire or are still unemployed. All miss the "family" they had at the paper, and most worry about what the newspaper industry has lost as companies responded to the recession and media turmoil by cutting people and pages or closing operations.

You should read through the respondents' comments -- they're easy to relate to, especially if you were cut loose from a newspaper career, too (for me, via layoff). Take former sports columnist Bernie Lincicome, who decided to retire: "The daily feeling I have is one of irrelevance," she says. YES! I say out loud.

She continues: "I tried blogging for a while, mostly out of habit, partly from denial. It was just calisthenics with no game to play. ... I have done some freelance work, but, to be honest, have not worked very hard at finding more." YES! I say again.

The journey wasn't any easier for some of those who landed back in journalism. Kathy Bogan, who now works in Kenya as a design editor, says she battled "a sense of worthlessness" as résumé after résumé sent to prospective new employers went unanswered. (Yup, I can relate.)

Still, "I am fortunate to be working full-time, to be working in a newsroom again," she says. And, as an added bonus, in a place where newspapers are appreciated: "Here, hawkers tout at least four dailies in the traffic jams all day, there's a newsstand on every sidewalk, the news seems to be part of the daily diet, and print still dominates."

I'm not ready to become an ex-pat, but I'll look to take a smidgen of hope from their stories and soldier on.

Weekend reading: Experiments in journalism

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Let's get right to it:

"As TBD Staff Tweet News of their Layoffs, a Look at the Rise & Fall of Innovative D.C. News Site" (Poynter): Poynter's Mallary Jean Tenore offers a timeline on the unexpected and surprising reorganization of TBD, a Web-only news site in Washington, D.C., that had been hailed as a new-models-for-journalism experiment. Launched by the folks who successfully founded Politico, the site was seen as way to up the ante on local coverage in much the same way as Politico focused intensely on politics. But six months into the experiment, parent Allbritton Communications pulled the plug. Some say Allbritton wasn't up to the task; others say the experiment was flawed from the get-go.

"Rockville Central: Set to Become a Facebook-Only Outlet" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Here's another new-model experiment worth watching: making Facebook the platform for a hyperlocal news site, rather than putting time, energy and money into a separate online address. Nieman offers a look at some of the pros and cons of this idea.

Video interlude: Beware of "churnalism," or the overuse of press releases in news stories. A new website offers to uncover the problem.

"New Yorker, Harper's, NYRB and TNR Editors on the Dearth of Female Bylines" (The Sisterhood): Occasionally, concern will surface that women aren't widely represented in the media: as guests on the Sunday news shows, as commentators or experts in public radio stories, as executives in media organizations. The latest discussion is on female bylines in national journals of opinion, which a handful of magazine editors acknowledge here is lacking. A writer at The New Republic has another idea, though: that opinion journalism "disproportionately attracts men."

"The Fast-Finger Twitter Dilemma: A Small Confession" (George Brock): Given the fast-paced events in Libya, Egypt and the rest of North Africa and the Middle East, here's a reminder from London journalism professor George Brock that you still should think before you (re)tweet:  "It’s so simple ... to bypass the usual check in your head. Do I know that this is true?"

Musical interlude: Blast from the past.

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".