"Predisposed to miserabilism"

While we're thinking Big Thoughts about what to do after the last press wheezes to its end, I thought I'd share this funny graf about newspapermen from James Lileks, newspaperman:

You can’t avoid being tagged as habitual downers when you’re in the news business, because the Truth Hurts, or at least Hurts Someone Else - but sometimes I suspect many people in the news business are temperamentally predisposed to miserabilism, because the idea of an unjust world run by monied smileys explains why the cheerleader turned them down for a date in high school. But I know too many who don’t fit that mold. So ignore the above, except when it seems to explain something. Except when you read someone who seems to think that by afflicting the comfortable, the afflicted are automatically comforted. As if writing is charity.

From today's Bleat.

Einstein proves advertising and content are not necessarily opposites

The current newspaper business revenue crisis has led to some old ideas being dusted off and presented as new (Paid content! Micropayments! Preservation of print circulation!), and who knows? Maybe some of the experiments rumored and foreshadowed in Long Island and Seattle and across the Hearst Empire will net some needed dollars for the ongoing operations.

But what about advertising, which remains a huge part of any revenue strategy? Surely the banner ad isn’t the sum total of our creativity in commerce? Google couldn’t have managed to build the most perfect form of commercial speech on their first try, could they? Where is the creativity in commercials? How can local newspaper companies — with their deep ties into their communities, their newsrooms full of subject-matter experts, and their platoons of sales people — have managed to not move the needle more than a few notches in 15 years of building and selling ads online?

I was wondering this last week as found my mind drifting away from the evening clot of sheet metal and tires inching northwards toward the ‘burbs and thinking about the life of Albert Einstein. My Einstein reverie wasn’t out of the blue; it was prompted by an equal parts funny and entertaining riff by The Chicago Sun-Times’s tech columnist Andy Ihnatko, who was recommending — at length — an audio book about the atomic genius.

And here’s the point: it was an ad. It’s part of a weekly feature on the popular podcasts from Leo Laporte’s TWiT network in which journalist panelists on the showstep ever-so-slightly out of their traditional roles to talk about a book that they love that happens to be available for download as part of an Audible.com subscription.

Listen below as Ihnatko and Laporte talk about Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson.



Forget TiVo-proof 30-second spots, that’s a 12-minute ad! Or, to be more precise, it’s 10 minutes of interesting and entertaining content that happens to also be the largest part of an ad.

(More at the Nieman Journalism Blog)

The “new newsroom” is being created one reporter at a time

(Cross-posted to Nieman Journalism Lab)

What does the journalist of the future look like?

PR whiz Steve Rubel says he looks a lot like Peter Abraham, who is not some vaporware demo from 2015, but a flesh-and-blood reporter covering the Yankees spring training camp in Florida.

Abraham is the Yankees beat writer for the Journal News in Westchester county (a NYC suburb). According to Burrelles Luce, it's the 94th largest newspaper in the US with a daily circ of 100,000 readers.

Abraham is on the scene in Tampa where the Yankees are training and he's doing it all - in addition to filing regular reports for the paper that appear in print. Here's an inventory of his social media footprint....

First, he has a blog with a full-text feed that includes several posts/day and hundreds of comments/day from readers. It dates back to 2006.

In addition, Abraham has a Facebook group that has about 1600 members.

He is posting photos from spring training using his iPhone. Note the gear the others are using by comparison.

There is a podcast up on iTunes that right now is updated daily with audio.

Finally, today he was using both CoverItLive and Mogulus to have a live video/text chat with readers.

While Abraham is still a bit of an Edge Case, what's really heartening is that, with each passing day, stories like this become less amazing, as they become more common. What examples have you seen in your market or nationally of journalists redefining the profession?

Will paid content work? Two cautionary tales from 2004

Given the recent secret memos and TIME cover stories, the topic of "paid content" has once again grabbed the spotlight, offering at least a slim hope of revenue redemption to some newspaper people -- largely on the print side, but with some notable digital advocates as well.

For those of us who went down these paths previously, there's definitely a bit of Groundhog Day to the increased media thumb-sucking, but at least this time some of the people doing that thumb-sucking are in better positions to make actual change. At the very least, ideas are bouncing around and occasionally creating new synapses. (At the very worst, of course, we're polishing the glassware behind the bar on Deck Three of the pride of the White Star Line.)

But can we learn anything from paid content attempts in the past? After all, this has been tried at varying levels before. Until The New York Times opens the books on its mothballed Times Select service, which kept certain content -- mainly columnists and archives -- behind the pay wall, these two examples, from 2003-2005, will have to serve as examples:

(Continue reading on Nieman Journalism Lab)

Paying for foreign reporting requires creative financing

Whether the shuttering of foreign bureaus by metropolitan newspapers and some TV networks in recent years -- to refocus efforts stateside as budgets tightened -- was a good thing or bad is certainly worthy of debate.

But what is certain is that, as a result, there are now fewer reporters covering fewer stories in foreign countries for American news organizations.

Some of those that do remain are still in the employ of the few remaining deep-pocketed organizations with bureaus. But an increasing number are independent or loosely confederated reporters, chasing stories first and finding buyers for them second.

Read more at The Media Lab...

How to grow local revenue, despite the ad inventory glut

So, what to do about this over-abundance of advertising inventory in our local markets?

Unlike some in this industry who are looking, again, at some form of paid content as the solution to the revenue crisis, I still believe that there's a lot of life left in the ad-supported model. We haven't been particularly creative in building ad solutions that work well for advertisers and that generate sustainable revenue for newspaper companies.

Given the diminishing returns of the CPM market outlined yesterday, the move is on to find a better model. Recently, The New York Times' David Carr looked to Apple for inspiration:

Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like (Apple's Steve Jobs) comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

For a long time, newspapers assumed that as their print advertising declined, it would be intersected by a surging line of online advertising revenue. But that revenue is no longer growing at many newspaper sites, so if the lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement.

The iTunes Solution.

And yet there is no parallel between selling songs -- which customers will play over and over -- and selling a recap of the City Council meeting. Apple didn't simply say "What do we have that we could sell to people?" They looked for a need in the marketplace -- a better way to buy music -- and created it.

Continue reading at The Nieman Lab...

Five people I wish Jim Romenesko quoted more

(This is a follow-up to Friday's list of five people outside journalism that all journalists should read.)

I will forever be in Jim Romenesko's debt for a number of reasons.

• First, he's a great read, reporting as he does every last scrap of news about the journalism biz.


• Second, he's wicked fast, an example many of our local market reporters could still learn from. If there's a document that has news, he doesn't rewrite it -- he links to it (or reproduces it whole). The joke is that he's already published the internal memo before the publisher has finished writing it.


• Third, for about a year in the early 2000s, he was my handy answer to any reporter or editor who asked, with clear disgust at the word, "What's a blog?" Instead of spending ten minutes explaining the blogger ethos, I'd just start out with, basically, "You're soaking in it!" by pointing out that the venerable Romenesko "page" or "site," as it was called, was essentially a very robust and well-done linkblog. From that point, the conversation was much simpler.

But one thing I've always wished was that he would open up his stable of industry types that he'd quote or link to. For every Howard Kurtz or David Carr, there are dozens of other industry thinkers, some writing and saying quite interesting things.

That's not to say that the voices in Mister Romenesko's Neighborhood haven't grown in number in recent years. If I were writing this in 2007, I'd be complaining about the absence of Jeff Jarvis, Mark Potts, Alan Mutter and the incomparable Jay Rosen, NYU professor (one day of his @jayrosen_nyu Twitter feed features a week of challenging ideas), all of whom are featured with some regularity now on the premier industry blog.

But, never being satisfied, here are a five writers I wish were exposed more frequently to the newsrooms of America:

1. Morris Digital's Steve Yelvington has been striving mightily to get newspapers to look over the horizon for years. So it's no surprise that his recent posts, while acknowledging our current sour turn, often focus on ideas for how to move forward. For instance, he's been offering a peek behind the curtain as his team moves Morris's Jacksonville.com from a legacy system to a home-brewed Drupal solution more attuned to the needs of readers. Also, his post from December, Explaining Twitter to journalists, is a great elevator pitch to colleagues for using Twitter as a listening tool:  "It's like a big caffeine party. Everybody's talking at once. Really fast. But you have magic ears."

2. Roy Greenslade, the media columnist for the UK Guardian, offers the view from Blighty. He's prolific, occasionally maddening, and always a good read. I like that he gets me out of my US-centric view of the journalism business. Bonus points for working at a paper that got blogging and other social media while many news organizations here in the US were still refusing to utter the words.

3. Terry Heaton, a former TV producer and current "blogger for hire" at Audience Research & Development, focuses on the emergence of newer, more participative forms of media. In his essay "2009: The Great Beginning," he uses the example of Kodak's reinvention in recent years as a beacon of hope for the news business:

Kodak embraced the disruption that was decimating its film business. The company is riding the disruption into the future by never looking back at the "good old days." It did not come without real pain, however, for reinvention has no respect for those who fight or otherwise refuse the future it offers, nor does it — or can it — concern itself with the unfortunate souls who are, through no fault of their own, caught in its need to save the many at the expense of the few. Note that 60 percent of Kodak's workforce wasn't there four years ago.

It's like that when customers demand something other than what they've been getting.

4. Paul Gillin is a double-threat, with two essential blogs. The first, Newspaper Death Watch,  is a chronicle, not a celebration, with solid reporting and analysis about the death throes of the old ways, and the shoots of new life that are appearing amid the carnage. His other blog is simply PaulGillin.com, where he reports on the growth of social media. And he writes books. Because writing two high-volume blogs apparently leaves him with entirely too much free time on his hands.

5. As I wrote elsewhere recently, Gina Chen is really no different than the thousands of journalists in newsrooms around the country, trying to make sense of where the news business is heading. Except this: She's doing something to help her colleagues along. In her Save The Media blog, she's been presenting a comprehensive course of steps that reporters and editors can take to be sure that their journalism is ready for the post-paper era. Chen isn't wringing her hands; she's pointing the way.

So that's five. The list clearly could be a lot longer. Who did I miss? Who else should more journalists be reading on a daily basis? Add them in the comments.