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The Future of Journalism Online
twitter writes "The slide in newspaper subscriptions continues for obvious reasons: convenience, variety, depth, cost and user control are all in favor of pull media. The BBC is wondering what this will ultimately mean for journalism. One interesting issue is brought up: 'papers like France's Libération [have] traditionally shunned advertising it deemed politically compromising and relied on its cover price for its income.' Even they see that internet distribution is the answer, but the BBC worries about the details."
From the article: "The International Herald Tribune now sees itself as a media organisation rather than just a paper; their website features video stories and has taken the step of charging for premium content. 'Good journalism costs money and so we are trying to see what we can do to make sure we can continue to grow and support the business,' said Meredith Artley, director of digital development at the International Herald Tribune. "
The traditional mainstream media is essentially a monolithic workflow stack for reporting information that depends on scale for advertising revenue. The Internet doesn't change the basic structure of the operation - or its incentives. In contrast, the future of journalism online is like to be distributed, more like honey from a beehive. In this spirit, we released our platform to the open source community this past week. There is much work to do. We're like a tenth of a nanosecond past the big bang of online journalism.
Hasn't this has been on the horizon since NBC started broadcasting in color? This is the slowest death of a particular medium since radio was supposedly doomed.
I think some people like to read something they can fold, is light and cheap. (Eco-/.er's: I'm thinking recycled paper) and best of all, doesn't need to be charged or plugged in.
Nope, didn't read tfa.
Blogosphere is known and acknowledged to present specific points of view. Newspapers have lost a lot of trust with readership because they have chosen to present the news that they want - rather than just reporting the facts. The blogosphere has rattled their cage considerably with all its opinions, and newspapers feel that they have to responds in kind.
When sources used are questionable (unnamed or fictitious), corrections don't occur on bad facts, people start to question the value of newspapers. The on-line versions are going to have to compete in the 24x7 world, and actually improve their standards of reporting if they want to compete with the blogosphere.
jerry
"Software is the difference between hardware and reality"
undermining perfectly legitimate global media corporations and denying shareholders their money. sent in the swat teams!
/.) with a pinch of salt.
there will always be a market for the cheap shoddy sensationalist celeb obsessed claptrap you get in tabloids because 90% of the population are morons.
everybody else can think for themselves and can make do with reading news agregation sites (like
Screw the broadsheets anyway, they've been nosediving downhill like all media outlets. I bought 'the independent' for the 1st time in ages whilst waiting for my aunt at her hospital appointment, it had a 2 page spread on "i'm a celebrity, get me out of here". threw it in the bin. ffs if a significant percentage of the readership is interesting in that pile of drivel then the rest of the paper must be aimed at the mentally subnormal too.
...is right here at /.
But I would be thrilled if I could simply plug my newspaper into my computer every morning, grab the newest issue, and read it on the train, at lunch, when I'm waiting for meetings to start, in class when I'm doing that instead of working, generally when I have a moment. That's the promise of digital paper, and I really hope the news paper guys pick up on it as fast as they can.
I believe (as in a hope or aspiration which I have not verified with evidence or research) that there is still a market for the thoughtful and thorough reporting one recieves from a newspaper which cannot be found on the evening news shows. There is a cultural advantadge in sharing root sources of information which we can all reference, rather than squabling over which version of the news is more Republican or Democrat leaning - this is the traditional role of the newspaper. "Did you see the front page today?" "I know, person Y did X." Check CNN, FOX, and ABC news, they almost never focus on the same stories.. and even when they do, the treatment is often so different that you wouldn't recognize one from the other. For example, as I write this, Fox is pushing the death of James Kim, CNN is running a Pinnochet story, and ABC.. well they're confusedly running a rolling banner which includes everything from Pinnochet to Anna Nicole's baby, with no mention of mr Kim. So, where is the common social icon, the idea we take away together of what happened today that mattered? That's important.. that's what a strong and vibrant local newspaper gives to a community, around which a sense of unity can gather. This kind of seperate news for seperate audiences approaches we have now leads to division and a lack of focus in the social conciousness.
At least that's this hack's opinnion.
-GiH
I'd definitely subscribe to a newspaper...if it were possible for me to subscribe to one. I live approximately halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in a 300-unit apartment complex. I've tried to subscribe to both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, but neither offers delivery in my area. In one of the most connected areas of the country, I find it hard to believe that I can't pay someone to toss a newspaper tossed on my front stoop, but that's the truth.
You don't need to. It's no different from the thousand other stories just like this.
And the answer hasn't changed yet. The newspapers are losing their readers because the newspapers are abandoning their readers. Real journalism is dying at the newspapers. It's dying on the television news programs. The only show that still has some in depth and insightful research is The Daily Show. How pathetic is that?
This isn't about getting on the web with video clips.
This is about digging for the facts and presenting them in context. If you have to offend some government official, so be it. We'll respect you more for that than if you just regurgitate their press releases. The concept of being paid for "work" involves you doing some actual "work". When some part time policy hobbyist knows more than your political reporters, you have a problem.
They're all online media companies now. And this is where they fail: not asking their own journalists, rather than the sales department, about what they should do in the midst of declining sales, stodgy offerings, and peek-a-boo online subcriptions. The guys out in the trenches get it, it's the exec on the golf course that are having trouble making shots while eyes become increasingly glued to monitors, mobile PDAs, and other life in the post-paper era.
The IHT is that silly paper at the conceirge desk at the hotel in Singapore, the airline lounge, and other places abroad. If you look at their advertisers, you can tell their audience. Apparently, execs now get their news-- real news-- from places like RSS and Atom feeds. Fancy that.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
what costs is cronyism, nepotism and patronism
corporations don't care
I for one welcome our Ad-Infested Journalist Overlords.
I could, easily, read my chosen paper online, but I choose not to. The typography is better and easier on my eyes. The viewing area is bigger, and can fit more information in it without having to scroll down (reading from paper feels far more natural than reading from a screen). It's more convenient (I can read a paper on my couch, in the canteen at work, in bed, on the can, just about anywhere really...). Papers aren't going to die any time soon.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Who cares? Print journalism is bunk because of television. There's no award for "best investigative sentence" - which is what modern newspapers have been reduced to, with a very, very few exceptions (IHT and The Economist).
Modern print journalism, like television, is a source of disinformation.
Disinformation is information which leads you to *think* you are informed but actually leads you away from being *truly informed*.
News is defined as *functional information*. Almost everything in a newspaper is NOT news. It fills up your time, fills up your brain, and leads you to think you're being informed when actually you're being filled up with irrelevent, contextless, useless knowledge.
Most of the major issues in our lives are not news-worthy - in the sense of being *newspaper* news worthy; and those which are *cannot* be dealt with in the space and attention span commanded by a newspaper column. The very attempt to do so entirely distorts the reality of the problem and this itself is part of the disinformation.
We need to loose television. We won't, and that's why we're screwed.
That's possible. But they also have people like Judith Miller working for them.
Sorry, I'll take The Daily Show over her "reporting" any day.
The progressive killing off of traditional print publishing by e-publishing is true and here to stay in all fields. Hre is a review of how strong this trend is in medical e-publishing where free open source e-text is replacing traditional medical journals. The same is happening for fiction. read more here at : http://docinthemachine.com/2006/12/05/is-paper-med ical-publishing-dead/
More people use a notebook for reading news in anyplace or they cellphone and not those wear concepts of e-papers...
That makes media focus in the internet market, just as Google does focusing in the mobile market[Spanish]
ghostbar page.
Articles like this one miss two of the key factors driving (IMHO) the drop in subscriptions: the loss of competition in many markets, and a significant drop in quality. In my town (Rochester, NY), we used to have at least two major newspapers. This dropped to one Gannett-owned newspaper, and the quality of the product has been in a continuous death-spiral ever since. The most visible aspect of this has been a reduction in the size of the paper ("Hey, instead of competing with the new online media on content, let's shrink the physical size of our product, concomitantly shrink the actual content, and rely almost entirely on AP stories!"). Give me quality content in a non-microprint form that beats (or uniquely supplements) what I can get online, and I'll buy the paper.
The mainstream media has an agenda. Go to those MSM websites where they allow "discussion" comments (notice how few actually do) at the end of their articles. You will notice that comments must be approved by an editor before they get posted. They don't trust the people to moderate their own discussions. WHY IS THAT? Now people have a genuine alternative to funding the vanguards of political correctness... at least until it becomes illegal to post any wrongthink on the net. Then the MSM will have a renaissance.
And I've looked at the IHT at my hotel room desk, and had RSS feeds that had already scrolled past every single major piece in the IHT. It was neither newsworthy, nor bereft of US propaganda. It seemed constantly sanitized, trying to put on some weird patina of neutrality.
You're obviously a fan and not eager to look at it critically. It's moldy by the time it reaches a hotel in say, Singapore, and worse, smells of Lysol.
I otherwise respect the NYT, and the WSJ, despite them both having very different egos to protect. The NYT has done an iffy job of web adaptation, and the WSJ survives based on greed/need, not journalism. Those that weild by ink by the barrel had advertisers that paid for that ink. The WSJ is infinitely more reflective of that, and the NYT is somewhat distracted by guilt. The IHT needs to have adapted a decade ago. But in this world of instant reinvention, there's a strange chance that they might succeed where others have misstepped. I doubt this, however. Print journalism is reeling and starting to sing swan songs because they're clueless. As long as they listen to their sales departments and not their readers, they'll die horrid little deaths.
Fie.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
My newspaper subscription is ending, and I've decided not to resubscribe, in large part because of the subscription cost. My paper costs $180 for the year. I decided that if I want print versions of news, I can subscribe to Time or Newsweek for a fraction of the cost. No, it's not daily, but I think it's often more insightful.
Have you ever read a political blog? They spend half their time shouting that the mainstream media is biased and ineffective, and the other half quoting MSM articles that happen to flatter their preconceptions. ...There is very little "news" that percolates from the blogosphere, compared to traditional, full-time, employed journalists.
Well, that's what the journalist's job is ... but they get tipped by your neighbor and critiqued by the blogs. Not even Clark Kent could see everything. It takes a whistle blower to out a scandal. All the gumshoe can do is some crude fact checking before passing the story on. If there's an advertiser conflict of interest, even that might not happen. If it does happen, there are thousands of people who know what they are talking about, ready to share their opinion. You might not be able to tell the difference but neither can the average gumshoe and that does not make the good opinions any less of a new resource.
Those resources are getting better too. As more people catch the news as it happens, you will see more of that first hand footage. There are also lots of good new news sites that are hiring full time journalists as well as taking whatever comes their way.
An interesting and good political blog comes from none other than RMS. I don't think he's ever found anything useful on MSNBC.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yet time and time again, when stories are posted that link to MSNBC stories that agree with your POV you've had no problem whatsoever descending on the article and absolutely agreeing with the theme at hand.
It all depends what you call a real news source. They're all at it! The BBC reads off AP and Reuters all day long. Some 'news' items start as press releases. Governments feed media agencies stories. It's a really complex web which often just comes down to 'trusting' or 'belief'. This is what the internet has shown me anyway.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
This article is saying nothing new. Nothing that hasn't been said since the early '00s
I would venture to say that the gossip tabloids, both British and American, have been largely unaffected by the Internet.
I am coming to the conclusion that digital content /really/ /is/ going to be valued as "free" in the very near future.
We see with things like YouTube that there are millions and millions of people willing to create and produce video content for free. Most of it might not be as polished as "professional" journalism, but evidently the masses don't care.
I read today on NPR about a company that is doing something similar with T-shirts (threadless.com) (have not checked the URL). People submit t-shirt ideas, which get voted on by the community, and the top-voted ones are made and put up for sale. Now in this case the winning submitters get paid a couple of thousand dollars, but once again, you have a situation where thousands of people are creating and submitting content for the community for free.
With millions of monkeys on the internet, there are always going to be a handful willing to write up some Shakespear for free.
This means it's going to be harder and harder to find a handful of monkeys people are willing to pay to read.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
When it comes to news, the paper variety wins out every time. They're the only ones who'll reprint the press releases to masquarade as an article. No web site can be bothered to do it. Nor can anyone be bothered to spend their own time and money collating information that some BBC journo will do for them.
When it comes to opinions, I still to on-line. The traditionally corporations lose too much by voicing an opinion that disagrees with their sponsors. And the BBC are the _worst_ offender here, despite being paid with public money. Not one of their articles about copyright or civil liberties offers a few against the copyright extension etc.
The AP gets caught falsify sources and admits they have "talking points".
Reuters gets caught photoshopping (cut-n-paste, clone tool, etc.) photos.
It has been shown that most of the reporting about Katrina was false.
Really why trust them?
from: http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/revisi ting_less.html
posted Nov 15, 2005
Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap
The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable. This correction was made at the time of the original post-SW] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.
First some history:
During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.
It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.
This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. [The military may have recognized this, but there has been precious little evidence that the Bush Administration has caught on to this aspect of the Information War.] The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.
We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When the Iraqis vote on their Constitution, with significant voting from the Sunni areas, the MSM will not be able to disguise the fact. [Though they "buried the lead" and the story as quickly as pos