Weekend read: Are newspapers too, too slow?

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Even though it's been a busy week for news, here are some not-to-be-missed items:

"When the News Gets Old" (Recovering Journalist): To Mark Potts, a former print and online journalist, the breakneck speed of events in Egypt once again made newspapers seem so yesterday: " ... the advent of the Web, Twitter, mobile news apps, multiple cable news channels and any number of other new competitors is more and more rendering print newspapers, in their traditional form, obsolete." His suggestion: lose the "newspaper of record" mentality -- analysis is fine, though -- and "double down on their quicker digital news-delivery products." It's an echo of the "digital first, print last" credo being championed by Journal Register Co.'s John Paton.

(Note that Potts is more charitable than MG Siegler at TechCrunch, who'd rather that the print newspaper just disappear: "It’s a waste of paper, ink, and time. R.I.P.")

And speaking of Egypt and Twitter:

"Curating the Revolution: Building a Real-Time News Feed About Egypt" (The Atlantic): This is a really interesting how-to interview with NPR's Andy Carvin, who took to Twitter to create a running stream of tweets about the protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo that helped topple Hosni Mubarak. Because he's been tweeting and live-blogging for years and knows bloggers in North Africa, Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter) was able to become "a personal news wire for Egypt," says Atlantic writer Phoebe Connelly.

Time for a musical interlude.

"Our Disappointing Journalism" (Yelvington): Steve Yelvington, another former print and online journalist, laments the failure to fully utilize the Web in the news that is posted there: no links, no multimedia, no interaction with the audience. Technology offers tools, but they aren't being put to use, he says. (The concept of "contextualized journalism" mentioned in the intro is explained here.)

"Consolidation Seen as Inevitable for Southern California's Newspapers" (Los Angeles Times): This James Rainey column takes a close look at what could become the next chapter for newspapers post-recession, as likely to play out in the Southern California market: that hedge fund, which bailed out a number of big media companies during the downturn, look to consolidate properties to achieve some of the efficiencies of scale that will make those holdings more profitable -- and attractive for resale.

"My Eureka Moment" (Knight Garage):  Beth Duff-Brown, a former newspaper and Associated Press writer and editor who became a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, writes here about her decision to step away from a 25+-year career in journalism to create a digital storytelling platform to advocate for a better life for women and girls in developing countries. It's a commendable action.

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.

Ink on paper: Remember me when I'm gone

My daughter cried when she saw a forlorn can of Bud Lite on a shelf at the back of the refrigerator, the favorite of a friend who died too young.

The incident came to mind when I stumbled on mixed media daily, a blog by Erik Shveima, a West Coast animator and 3-D artist, who vows to draw the front page of his daily paper 365 days this year as a tribute to the medium:

      "   I love this quaint, old-timey news and coupon delivery system, and although I do get much of my news online like everybody else, I still enjoy the newspaper as a physical object --- the smell of it, the weight of it, the inky residue left on your hands from holding it. It's a small pleasure, but it's the small pleasures you'll miss the most when they're no longer available to you.   "    

You should read the whole explanation for yourself on why he's doing what he's doing; it's quite touching.

And his words ring true: any little reminder -- like a beer in the fridge -- can return the sting of losing someone or something held dear. Will this be the reaction to newspapers sometime in the future?

Bad math: 3 grads better than 1 veteran journalist

Here's a tit-for-tat on Twitter that put a smile on my face:

The exchange, as best I could tell, came about because @loisbeckett, a freelance writer on the West Coast, had blogged about newsrooms being understaffed and tweeted her findings. The perky @JessicaKRoy, it seems, had her own theory on the reason for the staffing woes: "older" reporters who command the salary equivalent of three recent college graduates.

The math is nearly on the mark (my back-of-the-envelope calculation was 2.5 new grads for one reporter with 10 years' experience), so I can't quibble with her about that. But I sure would disagree with the insinuation that three recent college grads could offer sufficient quality or quantity to equal one newsroom veteran -- even if the three did excel at social media.

Which is why I loved, loved, loved the @loisbeckett comeback tweet.

Someone has to defend the honor of us "older" journalists.

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.

What's old is new again: a Facebook 'newspaper'

World events stored in my basement.
(photo by me)

I'm more of an ink-on-dead-trees reader than a digital one: I like the feel and smell of newspapers; to study the typography and photos and story placement; to peruse the display ads as well as the bylines. I'll read the New York Times or Washington Post online, but I'm happier feasting on their printed editions.

Newspapers were with me growing up, and they still inhabit my house: yellowed pages in boxes in the basement shouting out horrific events; random titles in a bedroom closet acquired at airport newsstands; special sections filed away for -- well, I don't remember exactly what, but there they sit in a filing cabinet drawer.

But neither nature nor nurture seemed capable of passing along a love of newspapers to my children. Not even guilt worked: "If you don't read the paper, I could lose my job," I used to say. (It was offered in jest at the time, but turned out to be prophetic.)

So allow me a self-satisfied chuckle at PostPost, the "personal, real-time Facebook newspaper" (emphasis added).



Don't get me wrong: It's a cool idea and one of several services for use alone or on Facebook to organize news feeds coming to you via social media. (For example, I get a paper.li "newspaper" daily in my inbox with tweets shared on the topic of "journalism.")

Mashable, which offers a technical analysis of PostPost (isn't that nameplate reminiscent of the New York Post's?), sees it as a next step in sharing: "As more of us use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to find and share news, the traditional RSS reader is slowly getting replaced with these types of solutions."

Come Christmas break, I'll have to see whether either of my Facebook-focused Gen Y kids now "reads" a "newspaper."

Sales, hyperlocal, social media: Read!

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Time to catch up on some reading:

"Robust Ad Recovery Bypassed Newspapers" (Reflections of a Newsosaur): Alan Mutter offers his latest take on quarterly ad sales, noting that while results have turned positive for all other media, newspapers still had a stinky Q3. What's more, he says, the other media generally went from red to black by the second quarter, while newspaper ad sales continued to drop -- although industry executives contend the rate of decline has slowed. Be sure to take a look at the chart Mutter includes on various newspaper ad categories (auto, real estate, help wanted) that compares third-quarter numbers today with those of five years ago. The decline in ad revenue is striking.

"McClatchy CEO: Death of Newspaper Classifieds Greatly Exaggerated" (Poynter): As a bit of counterpoint to the above, McClatchy's Gary Pruitt indicated at a UBS investors' conference that he sees growth at his chain in classified ad sales, one segment of newspaper revenue punched repeatedly by the Internet and the likes of Monster and Craigslist. Interestingly, he credits much of the reversal to the shift to online classifieds.

Video interlude No. 1: Clever (and oh-so-discouraging) commentary on the state of freelancing.

"Determining Paths to Financial Sustainability: The Release of Our ‘Cookbook’" (Local Fourth): A class of graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism was given the assignment of figuring out how to make online hyperlocal news financially viable. As one of those students said in this post:

After 10 weeks of researching the subject, interviewing academics, residents, hyperlocal journalists and editors, one thing is for certain: there is no “secret” to making money in this space.

Bummer!

But the students did come up with a "cookbook" -- what they call "a step-by-step process that can be used to create a business out of a hyperlocal news website." Also take a look at other entries about the project on their class blog.

"Aron Pilhofer and Jennifer Preston on the New Shape of Social in The New York Times' Newsroom" (Nieman Journalism Lab): Not that long ago, it seemed that every media outlet was appointing a social media editor. Now, though, the thinking goes, there's less need for one individual to prod legacy newspapers toward social media (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) and engagement with readers because they're rapidly coming around. Key evidence in the about-face: the New York Times returning its former social media editor to a reporter's role. (News of the change originally broke on Poynter; another discussion on audience engagement is here.)

Also recommended:

• "The Foreign Correspondent is Dead. Long Live the Foreign Correspondent" (Guardian.co.uk): An appreciation of journalists' work in far-flung, often-dangerous places and why it's still important. 
• "Survey: iPad Newspaper Apps Could Slash Print Subscriptions" (paidContent): Could it be that the iPad is not the manna from heaven that newspaper publishers had hoped it would/could be?
• "J-Schools Shift from Learning Labs to Major Media Players" (MediaShift): Geneva Overholser, director of the journalism school at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, says the media revolution/evolution has offered new roles to j-schools. 

Video interlude No. 2: Confused about WikiLeaks' cable leaks? Here's a 3-minute summary.