News Industry
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Richard Gingras , the head of news products for Google, visited the Nieman Foundation last Friday to talk about Google’s approach to news and information discovery, but also the pace of change in technology and how it has affected the future of news. Recently Gingras has spent time talking about his 8 questions that will define the future of journalism . On Friday he said newspapers need to completely rethink their approach to news, how the design of their site responds to the flow of audience and the ways news companies can separate their business model and content model to help increase audience and generate revenues.
Google’s Richard Gingras: We are at the beginning of a journalism renaissance
A Twin Cities turnaround? The Star Tribune carves a path back through growing audience
In 2009, the Star Tribune found itself on a dubious list: Time’s 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. That was the year Minnesota’s largest daily entered into bankruptcy after rounds of cost-cutting couldn’t help the company ease its debt load. It wasn’t particularly unusual to see a newspaper company enter into Chapter 11 in those dark days.
The Philadelphia Inquirer was recently saved by a group of investors who bought the paper for "the benefit of the community." Is this a trend that can stabilize the industry? Lewis Katz, center, addresses a news conference while accompanied by William P. Hankowsky, left, and George Norcross III.
The Last Savior of Newspapers: Rich and Local Owners - Peter Osnos - Business - The Atlantic
Google’s Richard Gingras: 8 questions that will help define the future of journalism » Nieman Journalism Lab
Editor’s note : At TechRaking 2012 today — a conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, sponsored by Google and the Center for Investigative Reporting — a group of journalism doers and thinkers will be talking about how news and technology can evolve together. Opening the gathering was Google’s head of news products, Richard Gingras , a man with longstanding experience in the space where news and tech meet, who provoked discussion by raising eight areas of inquiry that might prove fruitful for the day. Here are those eight, in the form of his prepared remarks. These are extraordinary times. These are exciting times. There has been tremendous disruption, but let’s consider the huge positives that underly that disruption.
April 12, 2012 Nearly three quarters of Americans (72%) report following local news closely "most of the time, whether or not something important is happening." Local newspapers are by far the source they rely on for much of the local information they need. One-third of local news enthusiasts (32%) say it would have a major impact on them if their local newspaper no longer existed, compared with just 19% of those less interested in local news. Most likely to report a major impact if their newspaper disappeared are local news followers age 40 and older (35%), though even among younger local news followers 26% say losing the local paper would have a major impact on them.
72% of Americans Follow Local News Closely - Pew Research Center
Mobile and the news media's imploding business model | Michael Wolff | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
Smartphones will soon be the primary news source for most Americans. That's if anyone can still make money by reporting Pew research has a new survey showing that tablets and smart phones are now 27% of Americans' primary news source. The overwhelming share of this is phones, not tablets; and a reasonable view says this will rise to 50% in three years.
Is a paywall coming to The Washington Post? - The Washington Post
The Post feels that it first has to accomplish two goals before it would even consider charging for digital content. Step One: The Post has to attract more readers to its Web site. Indeed, the company is increasingly focused on this goal, and according to internal numbers, The Post’s online traffic has steadily, and significantly, grown in the past year. Industry experts say that, to make a paywall work, you have to have a loyal core of readers who come frequently to the Web site and stay awhile. This core has to be several hundred thousand readers strong before it makes sense to charge them and take the risk of losing more fickle users who will go elsewhere for online news.
Newspapers Are The Fastest Shrinking Industry In The U.S.
If you want to be a journalist, think online. Newspapers have shed a greater percentage of jobs since 2007 than any other industry in the United States, according to data published today by LinkedIn. That's not surprising, given how ad revenue in the newspaper industry has fallen off a cliff since 2000. LinkedIn has professional profiles from millions of users, and also is a big tool for recruiters, so it's got a ton of accurate data about jobs.Where’s the money coming from? Fresh Pew data on the uncertain economics of newspapers » Nieman Journalism Lab
It’s a story that wouldn’t exactly merit a “BREAKING” crawl on CNN: American newspapers aren’t in great financial shape . But a new report from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism fleshes out that fact, showing that within the industry there’s quite a bit of diversity in how well newspapers are adjusting to the disruption of their business models. Pew found that, while some are doing better than others, the gap between digital and print revenues is still yawning , and that efforts at expanding the digital base — through daily deals, mobile advertising, or other experiments — are only slowly having an impact.
After 18 months of work and countless pinky-shake vows of confidentiality, my colleagues at the Project for Excellence In Journalism have a fresh report out today on the newspaper industry’s search for a new business model . The report, “The Search For a New Business Model,” burrows inside newspaper organizations for fresh internal data and commentary by top executives. The PEJ effort drew six participating companies, providing data for 38 newspapers. Executives from seven more companies agreed to be interviewed on the findings, while keeping their data to themselves. Having contributed modestly to the planning with some suggested questions, I’ll leave it to others to summarize the findings .
News executives acknowledge ‘toxic’ cultural divide between print and digital | Poynter.
Call it creative if you want, but this is what economic destruction looks like. Print newspaper ads have fallen by two-thirds from $60 billion in the late-1990s to $20 billion in 2011. You sometimes hear it said that newspapers are dead. Now, $20 billion is the kind of "dead" most people would trade their lives for.
The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic
2011 a year of record growth for latimes.com - latimes.com
A note to the staff from Managing Editor/Online Jimmy Orr: No better way to put it: 2011 was a remarkable year for journalism at the Los Angeles Times on the digital front. Not only did our overall readership soar by unparalleled numbers but we recorded significant growth in every major category.Investors acquired the newspapers in several major American cities in the second half of 2011, including The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Omaha World-Herald, The San Francisco Examiner and the 16 newspapers that made up The New York Times Company’s Regional Media Group . Seventy-one daily newspapers were sold in the United States last year, for a total “just under $800 million,” said Owen Van Essen, president of Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, a company that specializes in newspaper mergers and acquisitions. Investors included billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Philip F. Anschutz, a newly created media company called Wrapports, and media investors like Halifax Media Holdings and the Black Press Group.
Behind Newspaper Deals, Web Ads and Real Estate - NYTimes.com
Food Network Executive to Run YouTube Food Channel - NYTimes.com
Electus, the multimedia studio formed by , the former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, will announce on Monday that it has recruited Mr. Seidel as chief executive of the channel, which has not been named. It is scheduled to start in July. The hiring of Mr. Seidel from a television channel is a coup because of what it says about the seriousness of YouTube’s effort to create an alternative to cable television on the Internet.CNN’s just-revamped iReport: Imagine all the data! » Nieman Journalism Lab
Today brings the launch of an overhaul of CNN’s iReport , the network’s platform for citizen journalism. As of today, iReport will look much less like a straight-up content site…and much more like a social network. One that, CNN.com participation director Lila King told me, “turns the site into something that’s focused on people far more than news stories.” For a good summary of the overall changes in iReport, check out Mallary Jean Tenore’s overview over at Poynter, which is chock full of detail about how the revamped site will run. Though the idea of a social network for citizen journalism — particularly one that exists within the confines of a sprawling cable news website — is intriguing, I’m especially interested in what the revamped iReport will offer CNN in terms of knowledge about its own audience and participants. The new site will focus on user profiles, a big part of that being the areas of interest and expertise that users have identified.AnnenbergTeam