Rise of the journalist programmer

Valley Wag has a piece about how more journalists are turning to programming as a way of staying one step ahead of the curve.

Learning to program is yet another way journalists are becoming generalists, more like pamphleteer, typesetter, postmaster and newspaper publisher Ben Franklin and his fellow ink-stained polymaths than highly specialized publishing types like Bob Woodward, Annie Leibovitz or Mario Garcia.

I'd definitely say that's true after more than a year in this program.

Newspapers still generate most news, despite Internet

Our friends at Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 95 percent of stories with "new information" came from traditional media, mostly newspapers.

The study found that most of the newer providers, including online blogs and those that use social media such as Twitter, "did not produce any local content" during the period studied.

In studying six major news "threads," the researchers concluded that "fully 83 percent of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information."

Of the 17 percent that did contain new information, "nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones," the researchers said.

All tangible media is going away — it's just a matter of time

Here's an opinion piece by a Web marketer about how he thinks digital media will replace all existing media. I don't agree with everything he says, but he makes an interesting case.

Things like print newspapers and compact discs were made obsolete years ago. They are living artifacts. Digital is the master copy – we’re only waiting for the divide to bridge. It isn’t really an argument, you either can foresee the future where all information, content and forms of media are semantic, social, malleable, searchable entities or you can’t. It may take time but there is no stopping this path, it’s one of the clearer long-term trends.

AP, Yahoo near deal on content use

Taking a step toward mapping the future of online news, the Associated Press and Yahoo Inc. are closing in on a deal that would impose tighter restrictions and potentially a higher price tag on AP stories distributed on Yahoo's news site, people familiar with the matter said.

Link to Wall Street Journal story.

It will be interesting to see how this deal with Yahoo affects the AP's negotiations with Google.

Politico a $20 million operation

It took Politico two years to become a $20 million operation. Surprisingly, PaidContent attributes much of the success for the political Web site and newspaper to Politico's print product, where advertising revenues considerably outperform online revenues.

User-created ads create rights conundrum

Ad Age had an interesting piece about companies creating ads using content from online users. One example was when an ad agency used photos from Flickr users with Creative Commons licenses but never asked permission, creating a dust-up.

"For commercial use of photos, videos or text, you should cover yourself legally by asking. Not to mention it's polite," said Josh Peters, a social-media consultant who has written about the Toyota misstep. "It's an ethics and courtesy issue. In 30 seconds they could have saved face by asking him ... but they didn't bother."

Using Twitter feeds is another matter, however.

It's legally still a bit of a gray area, but generally when a person puts content out there using the social-media tools where content can be syndicated, they grant the world an implied license, said Evan D. Brown, attorney at Hinshaw & Culbertson.

AP, News Corp bosses tell search engines to pay up

The comments from Tom Curley of The Associated Press and News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch come as the media industry struggles in the Internet age. Many news companies contend that sites such as Google have reaped a fortune from their articles, photos and video without fairly compensating the news organizations producing the material.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley, the AP's chief executive, told a meeting of 300 media leaders in Beijing.

Snapshots of papers that charge for content

PaidContent has an interesting piece that looks at how papers that began charging for online access are fairing. Most of the papers are small dailies and seem to be charging to protect their print edition.

Newspaper: Newport Daily News
City: Newport, R.I.
Circulation: 12,000
Pricing plan: Online-only subscriptions cost $5 a day, $10 a week, $35 a month, or $345 a year. Print and online combo subscriptions cost $11 a month or $100 a year. Obituaries, classifieds, blogs, and a copy of the front page are available for free online.
When pay wall was introduced: June 2009
Results: Publisher Buck Sherman told us that the goal was to “drive people back to the printed paper” and not to bring in online revenue. He says that so far “we have done well,” adding that single-copy sales are up 8 percent. Website traffic is down by about 30 percent since the paper began to charge, according to Compete figures.
Comment: The Daily News model grabbed headlines earlier this year because the paper was charging substantially more for the electronic edition of the paper than the print one. Competition is limited, with the much bigger Providence Journal pulling back on statewide coverage.

The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition)

WaPo reporter Ian Shapira wrote an opinion piece about how Gawker borrowed heavily from his article about a business coach who teaches business leaders how to deal with Millennials in the workplace (she's running a racket, in my opinion, but that's another issue). He said he felt triumphant at first and then his editor told him they ripped off his story. He spent a considerable amount of time and effort reporting the story and a Gawker writer spent an hour or so cutting-and-pasting and re-wording it — generating more than 9,500 page views for Gawker.

I started thinking about all the labor that went into producing my 1,500-word article. The story wasn't Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace. With all the pontificating about the future of newspapers both in the media and in Capitol Hill hearings, I began wondering if most readers know exactly what is required to assemble a feature story for a publication such as The Post. Journalism at a major newspaper is different from what's usually required in the wild and riffy world of the Internet. And that wild world is killing real reporting -- the kind of work practiced not just by newspapers but by nonprofits, some blogs and other news outlets.

Here's Shapira's original story and here's Gawker's post about it. Anyways, something to chew on.

AP Sets Up News Registry To Track And Protect Content Online

PaidContent.org has an item about AP's plan to track its content online.

Following up on its spring promise of an industry initiative to protect news content online, the Associated Press board today approved an ambitious plan to tag and track every piece of text content for the co-op and its members—and eventually photos and video. The news registry will start by tracking AP content and is expected to add AP member content in early 2010. AP will fund it through 2010; it’s then expected to be self sustaining. One feature of the registry, which is being designed to work on payment models ranging from free to pay walls, is a “beacon” that will let the AP know how the content is being used.

Michael Jackson traffic melts entire Internet

Valleywag had an interesting post about Internet traffic spiking because of news about Michael Jackson's death. Some of the figures include:

• CNN's traffic grew fivefold in one hour and the site clocked 20 million pageviews.
• Twitter had its biggest spike in traffic, to 5,000 tweets per second, since Barack Obama's election as president, according to co-founder Biz Stone.
  
• Facebook status updates tripled.
  
• AOL Instant Messenger went down for 40 minutes.
  
• TMZ, which broke the news of Jackson's death, crashed several times amid a surge of traffic.
  
• The LA Times, which got early confirmation of the death, went down, as well.
• For about half an hour, Michael Jackson queries weren't working on Google News.
  
• Wikipedia froze amid an edit war on Jackson's page.

Amazing.

Media columnist rails against HuffPo

Advertising Age's media columnist, Simon Dumenco, takes a shot at the Huffington Post by saying it de-values content and drums up page views by featuring risqué pics of celebs.

What it comes down to is this: What is the Huffington Post, really? It likes to pretend that it's a respectable voice in the mediasphere, but it shamelessly pumps up its traffic by being just as trashy as, say, Maxim. It also likes to masquerade as a forward-thinking, paradigm-shifting journalistic institution, but it pays only a handful of actual journalists, and its idea of "journalism" is often downright parasitic of the work of real journalistic institutions.

Any thoughts?

Why journalists deserve low pay

This opinion piece by media economics professor Robert Picard has been making the rounds. He makes his case in the Christian Science Monitor on why he thinks journalists deserve their low pay.

Today all this value is being severely challenged by technology that is "de-skilling" journalists. It is providing individuals – without the support of a journalistic enterprise – the capabilities to access sources, to search through information and determine its significance, and to convey it effectively.

Shepard Fairey Ripped Off My Picture First

Filmmaker and journalist Ed Nachtrieb posted a piece on Salon's user-generated site, Open Salon, about how artist Shepard Fairy appropriated a picture of Nachtrieb's to create a piece of art. As many of us already know, Fairy is the artist behind the famous Barack Obama "Hope" poster that was based on a photo of Obama taken by the Associated Press. Nachtrieb's photo is of an armed Chinese soldier at the onset of martial law in Beijing 20 years ago. Nachtrieb doesn't address the fair use issue that Fairy is claiming against the AP's lawsuit, but Nachtrieb does say he'd like Fairy to at least credit where he gets the photos used to inspire his art.

Law students teach Scalia about privacy and the Web

Here's a story from the NYT about what a class at Fordham Law School was able to find online about SC Justice Antonin Scalia. Speaking about privacy rights and the Internet at a conference, Scalia was quoted by the AP as saying:

“Every single datum about my life is private? That’s silly.”

The professor saw it as a teaching moment. The class was able to find Scalia's home address and phone number, his wife's e-mail address and what foods and movies he likes. The 15-page dossier they compiled wasn't meant to be made public but the professor spoke about it at a conference and the news was reported online at Above the Law. Scalia's response to Above the Law:

“I stand by my remark at the Institute of American and Talmudic Law conference that it is silly to think that every single datum about my life is private. I was referring, of course, to whether every single datum about my life deserves privacy protection in law.

“It is not a rare phenomenon that what is legal may also be quite irresponsible. That appears in the First Amendment context all the time. What can be said often should not be said. Prof. Reidenberg’s exercise is an example of perfectly legal, abominably poor judgment. Since he was not teaching a course in judgment, I presume he felt no responsibility to display any.”

The American press on suicide watch

Interesting piece by NYT columnist Frank Rich, who brings up a number of things we've discussed in classes about the future of media.

In the Internet era, many sectors of American media have been re-enacting their at first complacent and finally panicked behavior of 60 years ago. Few in the entertainment business saw the digital cancer spreading through their old business models until well after file-sharing, via Napster, had started decimating the music industry. It’s not only journalism that is now struggling to plot a path to survival. But, with all due respect to show business, it’s only journalism that’s essential to a functioning democracy. And it’s not just because — as we keep being tediously reminded — Thomas Jefferson said so.

Community newspapers

Not all is doom and gloom in the media world. Consider this piece by Chris Stadelman, who went from being the managing editor of a daily, and later as a reporter for the AP, to being an owner and operator of the Parsons Advocate in West Virginia:

I had a choice when I left both Charleston and AP, something many mid-career journalists don't have right now. Reading the list of cutbacks on Romenesko every morning reminds me of the old Monty Python scene: "Bring out your dead, bring out your dead."

Community newspapers, especially weeklies in rural markets, are like the defiant character: "I'm not dead yet!" The ad bases are stable, the readers dedicated, the future solid if not spectacular.

'Is there life after newspapers?'

The question was asked in an article in the American Journalism Review. A graphic designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using a variety of sources, counted 15,000-plus job cuts from newspapers in 2008. The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics showed payroll at newspapers decreased by 22,400 from January to October 2008. Scary stuff.

An unscientific poll conducted by the piece's author found:

• Just under 36 percent said they found a new job in less than three months. Add those who say they freelance full time, and the total jumps to 53 percent.
• Less than 10 percent say it took them longer than a year.
• Only a handful – 6 percent – found other newspaper jobs. The rest are doing everything from public relations to teaching to driving a bus and clerking in a liquor store.

The article also includes some personal anecdotes from former journalists after they left newspapers, including some who saw losing their jobs as opportunities.

All-platform journalist

Poynter's Romenesko had a link to a fascinating story by Philadelphia Week about a former Philadelphia Daily News photographer who is basically an all-in-one journalist covering the city on his site. He promotes his work through social-networking sites, but has yet to turn his labor into a money-making enterprise. He writes about his endeavors here. Apparently lots of people are paying attention and viewing MacMillan as an example of the future of journalism.

Regret the Error

Here's a link to Regret the Error's "Best of 2008." If you're unfamiliar with the site, it posts corrections of errors run from media organizations from around the world. The site, often funny, is worth checking out to see how media handles corrections when they get something wrong. Once again, found the link on Poynter's Romenesko column.