“Twitter did/did not break news” is the new “bloggers vs journalists” I tweeted today that “Twitter did/did not break news” is the new “bloggers vs journalists” - a tired old trope that gets periodically trotted out. It was this dreary ReadWriteWeb piece about the origins of news of Whitney Houston’s death that provoked it. If you are in the position where you are trying to argue that news can only be “broken” by organisations that historically owned printing presses or have a licence to use scarce broadcast spectrum, then you are fighting last century’s battle. Being first really mattered when your rivals had a 24 hour print cycle before they could catch up. It mattered in a world of limited TV channels with finite news output. It mattered a lot less once 24 hour TV news arrived, and frankly the web, social media and SMS has blown that all away. Don’t get me wrong. Being fast is important for organisational reputation. I first heard about the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster from my mum.
Compare this to a few months ago. Why Bloggers Should Self-Publish. How newspapers are faring: A little local difficulty. Social media: The people formerly known as the audience. THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT Barack Obama would shortly appear on television came late in the evening on May 1st. “POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10.30pm eastern time,” tweeted Dan Pfeiffer, communications director at the White House.
This caused an explosion of speculation on Twitter. Had Muammar Qaddafi been killed in an air strike? Had Osama bin Laden been tracked down at last? His message quickly rippled across Twitter. The next day a picture that purported to show bin Laden's bloodied face began to circulate online, but on Twitter it was swiftly exposed as a fake. Surveys in Britain and America suggest that 7-9% of the population use Twitter, compared with almost 50% for Facebook. Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information.
At first many news organisations were openly hostile towards these new tools. WikiLeaks and other newcomers: Julian Assange and the new wave. Impartiality: The Foxification of news. The end of mass media: Coming full circle. Why We Need the New News Environment to be Chaotic. The business environment for newspapers continues to be grim. Pew recently reported that advertising revenue rebounded in 2010 for all forms of media, except newspapers. * This might just be a matter of transitioning from print to digital revenues but for the fact that the market values a print reader far more than a digital one.
The more or less official label for this problem is “analog dollars to digital dimes”; because of the enormous difference in assumed value per reader, lost value from print is not made up for by gains in digital readership. The ‘analog dollars to digital dimes’ problem doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. It seems to be a feature of reality. Digital revenue per head is not replacing lost print revenue and, barring some astonishment in the advertising market, it never will. Seeing this, several people have started looking for ways to exit that market. One proposed response is to radically reform newspapers as both organizations and businesses.
CNN's Washington Bureau Chief On How The Network Grew To Love Twitter. Information’s triumph? Three ways TechCrunch challenges ideas of journalism. The future of their business looks a lot more like TechCrunch than The New York Times. Love it or hate it, that’s the truth. It’s inevitable. In the spirit of doing what one does best and linking to the rest, I’ll dispense with a lengthy overview of the controversy that erupted when AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Silicon Valley power-broker and TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington announced the launch of what they called “the CrunchFund” — a venture fund that will “invest in start-ups, including some that [Arrington] and his staff write about” on TechCrunch, their incredibly popular and powerful tech industry news site.
Instead, some summary links: I spent most of the late 1990s dot-com bubble as an underpaid community organizer, working in Houston to eliminate the predatory lending practices that had just begin to plague homebuyers. The one time I went to Silicon Valley, I couldn’t get the words to the Radiohead b-side “Palo Alto” out of my head. Transparency is the new objectivity So. Press Office - Richard Sambrook Poliak lecture. Advanced twitter for journos. Heron: “I think my job will probably not exist in five years.” Is the most up-and-coming job in journalism — the social media editor — a permanent position at news outlets, or a transitional role? At a panel discussing social media best practices at the Journalism Interactive conference this morning, The New York Times’ co-social media editor, Liz Heron, said that her own position probably falls on the side of transitional. “I think my job will probably not exist in five years,” she said.
But! That’s “not because social media will die out or fade,” Heron noted. Quite the opposite. That won’t be the case for much longer, Heron suggested. Image by Widjaya Ivan used under a Creative Commons license. Transparency is the new objectivity. A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge. Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy.
The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. This change is, well, epochal. Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Could a free Kindle be the final death knell for print newspapers? It’s easy to imagine that some day, in the not too distant future, paper distribution of news will become obsolete.
It seems that in most concept videos about consumer electronics in the future, a person is featured sitting at a kitchen table, coffee in hand, swiping through the morning’s news on a transparent, flexible display. Prompted by the iPad revolution, I’m sure many people have already traded paper and ink, for glass and pixels to consume the news. About a year ago there was a piece by John Lanchester on the future of the newspaper industry. In it, mention was made of a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which claimed an estimated 28% of the total cost of a typical print newspaper could be attributed to printing and an additional 24% to sales and distribution. Now, in this paperless future we imagine, which company leads the way in bringing about the extinction of traditional print newspapers? But, what about Amazon?
Image: NS Newsflash. Philly Tablet | On the Media: Will computer tablets help save newspapers? Cash registers should be whirring happily this holiday season with sales of Apple's iPad, Amazon's Kindle Fire and other computer tablets. If the wave of buyers behave anything like those who went before, they'll be spending a lot of time on their new gadgets following the news. But how best to capture, and profit from, the latest digital phenomenon? Most news companies have placed their bets on building customized tablet applications. Remold your content, produce catchy tablet-specific features and a new generation of readers and advertisers will follow. One traditional media outpost, though, is trying something more audacious.
It's admirable, and about time, to see a newspaper company (one that happens to have a proud tradition of public-service journalism) reaching aggressively for new customers. Chief Executive and Publisher Gregory J. At the Sept. 12 tablet launch, the publisher predicted that the first batch of 5,000 units would sell out in a week. Picking the right tool for the journalism job.
If you’re not familiar with the monthly Carnival of Journalism, it’s worth knowing about because it plugs you into a conversation amongst other journalists. The topic for October’s Carnival was about how to choose the digital tools and platforms. (I’m just getting in under the wire, but my travel schedule and moving flat took up more time than we actually had.)
Dave Cohn aka digidave asked: How do you decide to dedicate time to a new tool/platform/gadget? What is the process you go through mentally? This really struck a cord with me. Although the job was to be aware of digital tools and platforms, I always approached it in terms of editorial challenges that I needed to meet. Simply put, I asked of tools and platforms: Does it make a journalists job faster and easier? It’s a very similar checklist to Jack Lail’s. Moreover, we need metrics. My former colleague at the BBC, Alf Hermida, flagged up the Forrester Research’s POST methodology to evaluate new technology. Like this: Like Loading... Newspapers Becoming Video-Centric as Visitors Learn to Watch | Beet.TV on Blip. Newspaper ad sales head to new low: $24B. Newspaper advertising sales this year will come in at less than half the record $49.4 billion achieved as recently in 2005, according to an analysis of the year-to-date performance of the industry.
With industry revenues declining in each of the first three quarters of this year, publishers are unlikely to surpass a collective $24 billion in revenues for 2010. Here’s the math: After slipping by 9.5% and 8.9% in the first two quarters of the year, print ad revenues took a turn for the worse in the third period, tumbling by 10.8%, according data complied by the Newspaper Association of America. If you add the total $17.1 billion in sales reported by the industry in the first nine months of this year to the $7.3 billion in revenues achieved in the final quarter of 2010, publishers would be looking at $24.4 billion in revenues for 2011.
The last time newspaper revenues were this low was 1984, when the industry had $23.5 billion in sales. Why We Should Stop Asking Whether Bloggers Are Journalists - Technology. In the rush to defend blogs as a medium of journalism, we ask the wrong questions about what press freedom seeks to protect Last week, a federal judge ruled that Crystal Cox, a blogger in Montana, owed $2.5 million to an Oregon lawyer and his company, Obsidian Finance Group.
The judge ruled that as a blogger not employed by a media organization, Cox was not protected by Oregon's state shield law that gives privilege to journalists from these sorts of lawsuits. In his decision, Judge Marco Hernandez went out of his way to say that Cox does not count as a journalist (later deciding that it didn't matter): First, although defendant is a self-proclaimed "investigative blogger" and defines herself as "media," the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cabletelevision system. Image: Pixelbliss/Shutterstock. After Crystal Cox Verdict, It's Time to Define Who Is a Journalist.
Last month, the Crystal Cox verdict re-energized a debate among journalism’s most passionate and articulate thought leaders and professionals by begging the question: Who is a journalist? Just about anyone with a laptop or cell phone can use free technology to create quality media and reach audiences larger than any newspaper or television network. Indeed, we are all publishers now. But are we all journalists now, too? Never has technology unraveled an industry so fast that its professionals no longer agree on what it is that they do. If someone happens to be at the right place at the right time and captures a significant event on his cell phone, it will be newsworthy to some audience. Thought leader and colleague Dan Gillmor insists we’ve been asking the wrong question: The way we frame this discussion is important.
In other industries, the problem would resolve itself once the technological chaos subsided and a new world order emerged. One Less Journalist I reject the premise. I get it.