Is the Indy a little nearer to closing?

The latest news from the offices of Independent News and Media is that it is in danger of breaching its banking covenants by mid May.

This PA statement on the Indy's web site says that

The owner of the Independent and Independent on Sunday warned today of "significant doubt" over whether the entire company can continue as a going concern.
Independent News and Media (INM), which owns more than 200 newspaper and magazine titles across the world, said it has failed to reach agreement with bondholders over renegotiating a €200m (£179.6m) bond, due to mature on 18 May.

Roy Greenslade doubts whether bondholders would take the company to the brink

Doubtless, the banks and bondholders have been making those calculations based on the value of INM's current assets and that may well be why they have been playing hardball with the company's board. Can they hope to get their money back from such a declining set of assets?

Nevertheless these are dark days for the Indy and events over the next few weeks will be watched with very close scrutiny

The net comes alive

An article in the New Scientist suggests that th einternet could become self aware i a decade.(Ht-Tim Difford)

According to o Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium,

consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain's processes get the most resources. "Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control... than a jump to a wholly different level,"

therefore it is quite feasible that

this turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

There are so many ready to die-Jeff Jarvis on magazines

We have been led to believe that the magazine sector with its unique selling points may have been more immune to the rampaging changes going on in the newspaper world.

Well think again if Jeff Jarviss has anything to do with it.

Reflecting on the closure of portfolio magazine,he writes that

We’ll see magazines fold and it’s going to be a lot riskier to start new ones to replace them — riskier because, just as on TV and in movies and music, it’s harder to create a blockbuster and consumer magazines depend on the blockbuster economy. Magazines don’t make money until they hit magic numbers of circulation (which comes only after renewals reduce marketing costs) and advertising (which is sold at heavy premiums and that market is bound to suffer both in a recession and against unlimited competition from online).

and he continues

there are so many ready to die. Who needs newsmagazines? Business magazines are suffering the tragic irony of being at the same time more necessary and less supportable because of the financial crisis. Men’s magazines have been folding. Entertainment magazines are dicey. Trade magazines are dropping. And the list goes on and on.

Press Complaints v Ad Complaints

Over at Martin Moore's blog there is a good analysis of why it appears that advertisers get more complaints than the press get at 463 per cent more to be exact.

Matthew Cain who is leading the work of the independent press review group seems baffled as to the reasons why.

1.the differential has always been there

2.It’s not because there are more adverts

3.It’s not because the ASA spends more on advertising

4.It’s not because there are more grounds for complaint for an advert

5.It's not that we get more upset about advertising

6.Our tolerance threshold of advertising does not appear to be significantly lower than our tolerance of the press.

Online future but opportunities for print

A new survey out in America seems to confirm the trend for online.

Editor and Publisher reports that

The time spent reading newspapers online has increased greatly while the pace of online readership has accelerated,

The findings come from a study by the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School for Communications.

The study found that

1.readers on average read online newspapers for an average of 53 minutes per week

2.22 per cent of people had stopped taking out subscriptions for printed newspapers or magazines.

However the report is not all gloom for the printed word.

Centre Director Jeffrey I Cole said that the digital platform allows newspapers to compete for the first time in 60 years with television and radio in the business of breaking news

Is the media over hyping the swine flu pandemic?

Well according to Diane Francis over at the Huffington Post

Facts are that if there's a flu pandemic it's in the United States, not Mexico. Some 36,000 Americans died of influenza-induced illness in the last few years or 99 per day which happens to be four times' the current death rate in Mexico.

and she adds that

Despite these insignficant figures, the media at first billed this as a pandemic, then downgraded to an epidemic. Soon it will be an outbreak, but, frankly, it should be a media scandal.
Part of the reason is that the real news -- the economic meltdown and attempts to right the world's listing ship -- is not telegenic. If the G20 leaders wore face masks or balaclavas every day, like the street protesters, they would be dominating TV coverage. If Iraq hadn't dragged on so long, and wasn't so expensive to cover for the dying television networks, it would dominate.

Over at Editor and Publisher they also have some thoughts on the matter.

Health journalism veterans and experts warn that too much negative coverage can stir panic, but advise reporters and editors to stick to basic facts and advice from the best experts.

and they quote Al Tompkins, a top instructor at the Poynter Institute who says that

"Myth-busting is an important piece of it. Be careful that speed doesn't lead to inaccuracy. Be cautious."

Looking at the front pages of both the Sun and the Express this morning on this side of the Atlantic it is also important to remember some other words of advice

Tompkins points to the extended photos of people wearing surgical masks, which he contends are found to provide little protection. He says they also paint an image of real danger to readers and viewers. "There are opportunities here to learn how your community works and how it responds to this."

The information junkie will always go online

Mark Glaser throws a shot across the bows of some of the new media commentators who forecast the death of print and the move to online.

He writes at Media shift that

most of the public discourse tends to be dominated by information junkies and there is little doubt that if you're an information junkie, the web is the way to go. But the reality is that info-junkies are only a small tribe. They consume the news at a prodigious rate and the web is the fastest way to satisfy their appetite. Thus, they're also the most vocal tribe -- so it's easy to get the impression that theirs is the most widely held conclusion. But if you listen to some of the discourse, it soon becomes apparent that it's only one way to look at it.

Reflections on the rise of mobile

Mindy McAdams in a really good piece reflects on the continued move to mobile and what this may been to journalism.

She asks

1.If someone has all the videos and quality radio news she could ever find time to listen to (or watch) right in her pocket, how can anything even remotely like the newspaper compete with that? The newspaper as it was, in the heyday of the 30 percent profit margins, had something for everyone. Now the Internet-enabled phone provides that

2.Will the traditional print news organization come up with programming, instead of random and disconnected stories? I don’t mean it has to be audio and video, but it would be something with an identity, like a show or a series

3.Breaking news is a commodity — you’ll never pay the bills with that. Hard news is not always breaking news, but how should it be packaged or bundled — to adapt to the phone? This would not be headlines. I’m thinking it might be driven by still photos, maybe sort of like the Daylife covers, but more photojournalistic.

A bill of rights for social media

Over at the Blue Skunk blog they have set up a bill of rights for members of personal networks.

1. I have the right not to be social 24/7 - either online or in person.

2. I have the right to time for reflection and responsibility for doing so.

3. I have the right to use only the tools that suit my learning style.

4. I have the right to stop using a tool when it is no longer useful.

5. I have the right to not be on the cutting edge all the time or feel I need to always know all there is to know.

6. I have the right to choose those with whom I learn in my personal learning network and responsibility to learn from those with whom I don't always agree.

7. I have the right and responsibility to disagree and the responsibility to do it professionally.

8. I have the responsibility to become familiar with a tool before sharing it with others.

9. I have the responsibility to share my knowledge with others in my network.

10. I have the right and responsibility to not let online activities keep me from my friends, my family, my workplace, or my community.

Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

The Indy is for sale.......again

The lastest claim being in the Times this morning.

According to the report by Dan Sabbagh

Independent News & Media is looking for investors who might be willing to buy The Independent outright or to take a controlling stake. A merger with another London daily is also considered an option.

and has

asked Nicholas Shott, a media banker at Lazard, to drum up interest, although work remains at an early stage

Pick up the phone

Student journalists seem reluctant to use the phone prefering the keyboard.

Tim Luckhurst writes at his centre for journalism that (ht-Judith Townend

An important message has emerged from my recent discussions with Kent Messenger Group editors, news editors and reporters. Centre for Journalism students are wonderful and very talented. The KM Group is delighted to have you, but there is always room for improvement and in this case it involves use of the telephone.

It is,I hasten to add not just journalism students but people in general.Email and social network personal messaging has taken the fear factor out of personal contact.People know longer have to justify their action,instead they can hide behind the keyboard.

I'm not a luddite,technology has a massive part to play in our new media society but let it never take the place of personal contact either by phone or face to face.

Why advertiser are only interested in half of You Tube

More than half the users of sites such as You Tube are considered too poor to be of interest to potential advertisers.

Owen Thomas explores the economics of the global village over at Gawker and says that

The real problem is that it's not worth it for companies to build datacenters close to their overseas users — so they leave them with balky videos and slow-loading photographs. MySpace is even trialing a low-bandwidth version of its profile pages in India.

However according to Owen the real irony is

The same financiers who are balking at paying for third-worlders' bandwidth bills encouraged this international growth. News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch famously pushed Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's recently fired CEO, to expand the site to 15 countries a year after buying it. Venture capitalists encouraged startups to grow all over the world, lest overseas copycats get entrenched in their home markets.

Circulation plummets across the Atlantic

There was more evidence of the decline of newspapers across the Atlantic yesterday.

The Audit bureau released six month figures which editor and publisher says

for 395 newspapers reporting this spring, daily circulation fell 7% to 34,439,713 copies, compared with the same March period in 2008. On Sunday, for 557 newspapers, circulation was down 5.3% to 42,082,707.

For the top 25 newspapers in the United States,all saw falling circulations apart from the WSJ.the declines ranged from 20.6 percent for The New York Post, to a slight 0.4 percent drop for The Chicago Sun-Times.

Overall,circulation was down 7 per cent.

Some much for convergence in Manchester

So we all thought that the cuts at the Manchester Evening news last month were in part at least to protect its new media interests and Channel M.

No so as we discovered late yesterday,management at the group have discussed making 41 redundancies out of 74 staff.

Press Gazette reports that

Channel M chief executive Mark Dodson read out a statement to staff this afternoon which revealed that due to the economic downturn the station could not exist in its current form and jobs would have to be cut across the board.

It's live broadcast will now be restricted to just three hours a day.

Perhaps we should look to re employ a town crier?

An African voice telling an Africa story

A new voice for Africa Ht-Charlie Beckett has launched.

A24 Media promises

Africa’s first online delivery site for material from journalists, African broadcasters and NGO’s from around the Continent. A24 Media’s business model ensures that all contributors receive a wide and previously unknown exposure to their content, thereby generating sustainable and generous revenues from the sale of their stories on a 60:40 basis in favour of the contributor. Most importantly, the contributor will continue to OWN the copyright of the original footage.

Here we go again

Has the Twitter rocket reached escape velocity, or will its Internet competitors bring it back down to earth? asks John Battelle

I've seen inflections like this before, with AOL in the early 90s, with Netscape and then Yahoo in the mid 90s, with Google seven years ago, with Facebook four years ago....and here we go again.

Digital clutter

Nicholas Carr writes that Tim Bray, the software writer is

looking forward to the fast-approaching day when he'll be able to get rid of his many books, leaving his walls even emptier. Their contents, too, will be digitized, turned into files that can be displayed on a handy e-book reader like Amazon's Kindle.

He writes: "I’ve long felt a conscious glow when surrounded by book-lined walls; for many years my vision of ideal peace included them, along with a comfy chair and music in the air. But as I age I’ve started to feel increasingly crowded by possessions in general and media artifacts in particular." Physical books, he says, "are toast," and that's "a good thing."

However all he will be doing is replacing one clutter with another

When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.

Ht-Andrew Sullivan

Al Jazeera critical of media coverage of Gaza

Journalism.co.uk hosted an online interview with Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin at the end of last week and was rather critical of the Western Media's coverage of the conflict in Palestine.

"The western media has failed tremendously in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accurately and contextually.

adding that

"They would not tolerate what has continued for decades and now what is happening in Gaza. I am extremely frustrated by how Gaza and the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict is portrayed, in the western world particularly,"

Sherine Tadros went further and said that

"I think it comes down to finance and editorial judgement," Tadros said. "Unless there is a military operation - i.e a sexy picture - editors won't spend on deploying teams to cover humanitarian tragedies.

The power of old media is waning. But it is still the only way for making a star.

We are hearing a lot about how the power of You Tube and the Web has got Susan Boyle inot the position where she has seemingly taken over on both sides of the Atlantic.

Is this the power of the Web?

Not necessarily says Chris Dillow writing at his Stumbling and Mumbling Blog

Ms Boyle has become an overnight star in the US - something not achieved by many British singers even with huge record company backing. It’s tempting to say this shows the power of the web; that Youtube clip has gone viral.
But in another sense, it shows the impotence of the web. The web did sweet FA to bring Susan Boyle to initial public attention. Instead, she got her break through very old media - a TV talent show. and adds that

the power of old media is waning. But it is still the only way for making a star.

How the media changed its perception on the war on terror

Seven or eight years ago, the prevalent story was that evil religious fanatics were bent on destroying our democratic societies and killing as many innocent civilians as possible. Today, the war on terror is frequently depicted in the media as an unjust and ill-executed war that has undermined the freedoms and values it was supposed to uphold.

writes Sally Neighbour in the Australian

It is a good article and well worth a read looking at the use of the media by both the terrorists and the West and according to Sally

Al-Qa'ida has made "the media battle" a key front in its war, a strategy that helps explain why the jihadist movement continues to flourish. Yet intelligence and security agencies engaged in the so-called war on terror have been slow to seize this imperative, choosing instead to remain in the shadows, avoiding the vigorous media and public debate about terrorism and how it should be combated. Their reluctance has allowed the jihadists to gain the upper hand in the crucial battle for hearts and minds.

Ht-Normblog

Janet Street Porter tries to prove her critics wrong

It is the 1,000 Independent on Sunday today and former editors reflect on their appointment.

This from the most famous of them Janet Street Porter

My appointment in June 1999 caused great anxiety among the chattering classes – I can't imagine why. Kelvin MacKenzie said I couldn't edit a bus ticket, exactly the kind of pathetic putdown I'd expect from his track record on The Sun. I was hardly a newcomer: having started my journalistic career as a columnist on the Mail in 1969, I'd spent 10 years as a TV executive at the BBC, running 35 series with a multimillion-pound budget. I'd regularly presented political programmes as well as running live, news-based output, but reading critics such as Roy Greenslade, you'd think that the Indy's bosses had lost their marbles, and handed the paper to an airhead who'd be putting frocks and froth on the front page.

BBC team covering the Indian elections

via Sans Serif-

As they say

Nobody can accuse BBC of parachute journalism

Cockburn looks back at the Iraq war

There is a good piece in the Indy this morning by Orwell winner Patrick Cockburn on the reporting of the Iraq war by journalists.

Could somebody outside Iraq reading the newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio have got a real understanding of what was happening in the country? Was the news reporting better than it had been in Vietnam to which it is often compared?

he asks and he makes the point that

The most frustrating moment for me and many other reporters came as the war escalated in 2004. It soon became clear that the US-led occupation forces controlled only islands of territory and their military position was deteriorating. But George Bush and Tony Blair were able to maintain that the war was confined to only four out of 18 provinces of Iraq and the extent of the violence was being exaggerated by the media. This was quite untrue, but journalists could not disprove it because if we ventured into these supposedly pacific provinces we stood a good chance of being kidnapped or decapitated.

Is financial journalism failing again

Not only did financial journalism fail in the run up to the current crisis but it appears that it is still failing now.

That is what the FT's Lex thinks anyway

Flickers of hope – such as a rise in German business confidence – are treated sceptically, winning less airplay than grim news such as the rise in Spanish unemployment to 17 per cent. Columnist Luke Johnson claims that print journalists can’t see beyond their own internet-ravaged industry

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Journalism is no different to any other industry.Whether it is converting metal into product or adding service in a hotel it is all about adding value if you want to make money


Every day, with everything they do, the key question for journalists and news organizations in these tight - that is, more efficient - times must be: Are you adding value? And if you’re not, why are you doing whatever you’re doing? writes Jeff Jarvis over at his Buzz Machine blog

and he adds

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

I totally agree with his words

The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality. My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

An internet addiction

I confess that I spent time on the internet and worry that I should be finding something more useful.

Then I realise that I haven't got as much of a problem as this fellow spotted by Andrew Sullivan

Over the course of several months beginning October 2008 to April 2009 I've spent some of my spare time between commercial projects searching Google Maps hoping to discover land formations or buildings resembling letter forms. These are the results of my findings limited within the state of Victoria, Australia.

Why Grade is steeping down

For a good analysis of the reasons behind Michael Grade stepping down as Cheif Exec at ITV read Robert Peston's blog

The reason is that the commercial broadcaster faces three significant strategic decisions - and ITV's board sensibly concluded that it would be inappropriate for those decisions to be taken by Grade more-or-less alone and then bequeathed to a new chief executive.
Better to appoint a successor, before the end of this year, to set the direction of the business which he or she would then have to travel.

Interestingly Peston spoke to Grade earlier today and he told him that

market conditions were tougher than they've ever been since ITV was founded more than 50 years ago. Which is particularly galling for him, in view of progress in improving programmes, reaching more viewers and in removing shackles imposed by regulators.

Tomorrow's chip wrappers

A term often applied to the Daily paper's life although it has been a long time since fish and chips were wrapped in newspaper.

Anyway this post from the Long Now Foundation launches what it calls the Long News story

Each weekday, The New York Times prints around 125 news stories. That’s just one newspaper; add in all other newspapers, plus television, radio, and the internet, and it’s clear thousands upon thousands of news stories are generated every day.
But how many of these stories will make a difference next year? A decade from now? A century? Ten thousand years?

British papers better placed to survive?

There is an interesting take on the crisis in newspapers from Peter Kirwan in the Uk's Wired magazine (ht-Martin Stabe)who had gathered at the now not so wake for Press Gazette.

He writes that

many of our wilder ideas about what’s happening to British journalism have emerged, by osmosis, from the US.

but the market there is so much different

Following the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 which effectively allowed a near monopoly for papers in the cities

“no paper in a one-paper city, however bad the product or however inept the management, could avoid gushing profits.”

Thus when the web came along these organisations were always going to be harder hit as their monopoly position was challenged by the new technologies.

In contrast Britain's

regional chains have spent the last six months watching their print-based ad revenues melting into thin air. Their business models remain highly dependent on print-based classified advertising, but the recession will teach butchers, hairdressers and candlestick-makers to exploit the web.

but papers have embraced the web a lot quicker than their American counterparts.

But,warns Peter there are two reasons to be less than optimistic

1.The collapse in print ad revenues has been worryingly swift and deep. Most of the industry is budgeting for a recovery in late 2009, or early 2010. If that recovery doesn’t materialise, US-style corporate collapses will become a possibility within the regional press.

2.The next stage of digital evolution is going to be costly for newspapers. If online display is to return to its old growth path, the benefits of running campaigns need to be demonstrated convincingly to advertisers.

Boost for the online Express and Star

Some good news for the local press and for my team.

Internet traffic at Wolverhampton's Express and Star has seen a big rise following Wolves' promotion last Saturday to the Premier League.

According to the paper

the website www.expressandstar.com received more than 600,000 page views – a record since the website was relaunched almost three years ago.
Internet editor Tim Walters said: “The website chronicles a great day for Wolves fans and we are amazed by the huge interest in it.
“The traffic on the website was enormous yesterday and today the levels of interest are being maintained.

Ht-Journalism.co.uk

No longer constrained

I spoke in front of some of the applicant day hopefuls at Uclan yesterday.

These are the people that have been given places on the journalism course next September.

There was of course some gloom about the current industry.But I made the point about what an exciting time this also is for journalists.

The main advantage in my eyes is the ease of publication.Blogging tools mean now that you don't have to wait for an editor to come on your side.Just get writing.

I have just read this piece from Timothy McSweeney who looks at this new age. via Jeff Jarvis

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade

.

Front page of the day.

Around all the doom and gloom the Sun reminds us

A future world lacking foreign reporters

If only a tiny fraction of the Western media ruckus of recent weeks could be dedicated to Somalia itself, then international political attention might start focusing on the roots of the problem.

writes Andrew Stroehlein at Reuters AlertNet.

Another case of the Western media's turning their backs on a problem.

An issue that comes up often on these pages.Andrew also cites the situation in Sri Lanka and says that they

show us what it's like when Western news organisations -- for whatever reason -- do not have long-serving correspondents on the ground: when they have no eyes and ears following the situation directly, understanding the complexities and able to report more deeply than "hero saved" or simply ignore it all together.

Press Gazette to live again

It appears then that Press Gazette will fight another day.

Reports of its demise after Wilmington announced it was closing the magazine were premature.

Mike Danson saviour of the New Statesman has stepped in with the Progressive media group.

You can read the full statement here at Press Gazette's blog

Nine of the Easter plotters not charged but where is the coverage

Strange how all the coverage over the so called Easter bomb plot has not really be replicated as nine of the remaining eleven are not to be charged but deported.

Craig Murray is not happy with the BBC coverage earlier this morning

At 07.00 this morning, BBC News gave a mention of less than ten seconds to the release from anti-terror questioning of the nine men they still called "terror suspects". This was followed immediately by a non-news piece on the testing of barriers to protect us from car bombs, which gave the BBC the excuse to show two bomb explosions at 07.03, right at the front of the news. That will take people's minds off the fact the terror plot was a fabrication, and get them good and scared again!

To be fair to the Beeb there was a much longer piece on the Today programme at 8.00

Is tracking the budget live the right thing to do

No doubt many people will ne tracking and reporting on the budget through social media,blogging etc today.

Maybe though the words of Charlie Beckett over at Polis should be noted

I won’t try to track the ‘drama’ of today as it happens. I will perhaps watch some summaries and cast around the better financial websites (tips anyone?) but really I will wait until the statistical dust has settled and then attempt to plough through the better weekend analyses. Oddly, on a major news day like today, it makes sense to wait before you can come to any kind of understanding.

Brevity’s the soul of wit

Over at the New York Times Maureen Dowd interviews the founders of Twitter Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.

Asked whether they knew they were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls,the pair deny that they designed the tool for that purpose.

They maintain the twitter has enhanced civilisation and that Shakespeare would have used the product

Brevity’s the soul of wit,

Advertising and profits tumble at NYT

Profits down sharply at the New York Times in the first quarter as advertising revenue plummets 28 per cent and forecasts that revenues will continue to fall in the second quarter.

Times Co. Chief Executive Officer Janet Robinson said in the statement that “The challenges we face intensified in the first quarter,in time, however, we believe that the economy will grow and the advertising market will improve.”

The group has already embarked on a cost cutting and asset selling exercise and is currently negotiating further cuts in both jobs and pay with the unions.

The results come as the paper won five Pulitzers last night and the irony of the two events will not be lost on those whose support quality journalism.

Henry to twitter

King Henry 8th is about to start twittering from beyond the grave.

According to Digital bulletin,

Followers of the king will be able to read about events -- from when he learned of the death of his father on April 22, to his coronation at Westminster Abbey on June 24 -- exactly half a millennium after they happened.
The stunt is designed to mirror the way celebrities and public figures, such as Barack Obama, have used Twitter to communicate to the masses.

Ht-Daljit Bhurji

Pulitzer shuns online as the NYT takes 5

It was the first year that the Pulitzer Prize took online entries.

However last night's awards went entirely to the "old media,"with the New York Times getting five awards for investigative, breaking news and international reporting, feature photography and criticism.

You can see the full list of awards HERE

There were 65 entries from the online world.However it appears that 21 were rejected as they were said not to have original content.

Editor and Publisher gives what it calls the inside story on the awards

Bowing to the inevitable

Maybe after all the arguments about the future of newspapers and the media this comment by really sums it all up.

Writing on the Guardian's comment is free site he says

I fear that in pointing out the obvious, I'm only convincing myself there's no future for the metropolitan newspaper as we've come to know it, either in print or online.
That great industrial-age amalgamation of international, national and local news, sports, comics, concert reviews, obituaries, crossword puzzle and advertisements is finally giving way to something else

A frightening vision of the future-you will never be alone with a book

comes from the Wall Street Journal's Steven Johnson who looks at the consequences of the E book in this great article.

an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Why you may ask-well

1.one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

2.Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

Time to move to America

Via Jeff Jarvis

The WSJ reports that there are now in America

almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders.

I would be interested in seeing the comparable figues in the UK.

In the USA

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work ,and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

Obama goes shirtless

Hats off to the Washingtonian magazine which has put a shirtless Barack Obama on its front cover for its May issue




Ht-Huffington Post

Steps in going online exclusive

Some great tips about switching from print to online are contained in this post over at Smashing magazine (ht-Andy Dickinson)

This is the short list of things to consider for the detail follow the link

1.Choose the format-There are three basic formats for digital publication

2.Design considerations-including typography,use of images,

3.Distribution such as RSS feeds,emails and subscribers.

4.Generating revenues

“an audience that has assets, not allowances"

For decades, older consumers were largely shunned by marketers because they were deemed less wealthy, less likely to try new products and less willing to change brands. Campaigns directed at them were described dismissively as made for the “Geritol generation.” As much as older consumers were to be shunned, young consumers — ages 18 to 34, or 18 to 49 — were desired for what were deemed their free-spending ways, eagerness to sample new products and brand-switching proclivities. The idea that they were starting in life with a proverbial blank slate of marketing wants and needs was catnip to product peddlers.

The New York Times reckons that the tide is changing and the reasons are two fold.

Firstly the recession as this age group simply has more spendng power and secondly simple demographics that this sector has the ascendancy in numbers.

This will have consequencies for media advertising.The so called boomers are “an audience that has assets, not allowances" according to Henry Schleiff, president and chief executive at Hallmark Channels,

Dizzy on the failure of the fourth estate in Parliament

Dizzy thinks writes a damning critique of the Parliamentary lobby system which he believes is producing failures in the process of the fourth estate.

Asked by a Whitehall editor of one of the nationals why he as a blogger he manages to get and sustain scoops he replied

He asked me how I did it. H ow I managed to get original stories that his paper and other papers and broadcasters then picked up on ran with - a mainstream media hit as it were. When I told him that I read through the information published by Parliament daily each morning; scanned the departmental websites for freedom of information request responses; sent sporadic FoI's into departments asking questions that might elicit interesting answers and wrote my own little programmes that could pattern match other available information online, he was taken aback.

Can Facebook take over from the newspaper?

I didn't need the Boston Globe anymore. Or the White County News. My friends were editing all the news I needed. No, not editing. Curating.

writes Susie at Museum Audience Insight (ht-Sarah Hartley)

But Susie beleives the answer to the question is no but

the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is adults over 35. Facebook may or may not have legs, but if Facebook fails, something new, and probably even more comprehensive, will undoubtedly take its place. The trick is keeping up and utilizing these tools to reach your audiences (and potential audiences) more effectively, where they already look for information, and in a way that builds relevance in their lives.

Why bloggers shouldn't get paid for editorial

Staying on the blogging theme,Andy Sernovitz looks at the growing trend of selling editorial on your blog and concludes

There's no reason to go here. It only takes one missed disclosure statement to ruin your reputation forever. Feel free to take advertising, but when you sell your editorial, you are forever tainted.

Blogging is dead-long live blogging

More from Andrew Keen in the Indy this morning.

Last week Web 2.0 was said to be dead,this morning it is blogging.

He writes that

in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services such as Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.

He may though have a point.There are many people whose blogging output has fallen since the advent of the twitter phenonoma.

Keen quotes the words of Hermione Way, the London-based founder of Newspepper.com and the presenter of Techfluff.tv who said that "Blogging as we know it is dead,"

But the important as Keen maintains is blogging as we know it.However the open-source foundations of platforms such as Wordpress means that blogging will survive as a as a real-time social media personal portal.

A broadband license-he's nicked my idea

What do people think of Peter Preston's idea in the Observer this morning?

He proposes that there should be a broadband license to fund journalism.

When I read this,I thought that gosh he has pinched my idea.

This was one of the ideas that came out of the "radio show" that we put together at Uclan last month on the theme of who will pay for journalism.

My view was that one of the few organisations to have made monety out of Web 2.0 are the internet providers.So why should they not pay for the capacity that they use.

Preston doesn't agree necessarily that the providers should pay.Instead he says

If you have a broadband link - the fundamental enabler - you pay for it with a licence fee. Your internet provider already debits directly away: add a modest extra sum - perhaps £1 a week - to that deduction as the cost of public service information on the net. Much of the BBC's own £145m web budget would then come from this pot. The providers take a share for collection and for investing in super-fast broadband. Then the £500m or more that's left goes to help pay for the most threatened public service: the news.

Study suggests online only

A study by London's City University suggests that if newspapers go to an online only model it will adversely effect profitability.(via Journalism.co.uk)

The case study is built on the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat which took the decision to go digital only and discovered

a 22 per cent drop in unique users and 11 per cent fall in page impressions.

along with

The title's revenue has decreased by 75 per cent over the same period, because of the loss of print advertising,

Want to charge for content-is it in the public interest

According to Peter Scheer,media compnaies that are considering charging for content may need to consult a lawyer.

Writing at the Huffington Post he says that

Information wants to be free, but the creators of information also need to eat. Which of these interests ultimately prevails, although partly a business issue, depends fundamentally on legal considerations. To charge for access to editorial content, the owner has to have the legal right to prevent competitors from offering it (or as much of it as customers are willing to pay for) for free. And thanks to the vagaries of intellectual property law, the boundaries of this "right" are, at best, unclear.

The answer centres around what he defines as fair use.This he explains is

a doctrine of copyright law that basically blesses (what otherwise would be infringing) uses of a copyrighted work when the uses are both insubstantial and deemed to be in the public interest

Newsqust launches new hyperlocal sites

Nerwquest has announced plans to widen its hyperlocal community news sections across a range of its titles in the West Midlands.(ht-Jon Slattery)

The first local modules are 24 linked through the Kidderminster Shuttle and will be followed by six other titles in the Stourbridge News, Halesowen News, Dudley News, Bromsgrove Advertiser, Redditch Advertiser, and Droitwich Advertiser, in the coming months.

You can view the site here

Keen on web,twitter and models

Andrew Keen,always a man to court controversy is at it again.

Interviewed by Tech Crunch he says and I quote

“Web 2.0 is fucked! Web 2.0 doesn’t work - it doesn’t generate revenue.

He makes the point often heard that although the net has made self expression and self publication easy and cheap it is not commercially viable.

And he takes a passing swipe at twitter which he calls the

“nail in the coffin of Web 2.0″

Steve Richards on blogs-they follow the fashion

The creator of the Guido Fawkes website, Paul Staines, is in my view one of the most influential figures in the British media. One day this week I heard five items on the Today programme that followed up his stories or his observations. Politicians have not learnt how to cope with an individual who has as much impact as entire newspapers. He is one of the reasons why Derek Draper, the recipient of McBride's emails, felt the need for a left of centre equivalent.

Steve Richards in the Independent this morning displays the power of political bloggers

Yet he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other.He says that Guido has an easy job he follows the fashion

The easiest column to write is an attack on Brown. You are part of the pack, safely protected by hundreds of other articles and blogs all making the same points and you know you will be showered with praise for your boldness. If anyone writes a defence they will be slaughtered for being tame.

Libel battle of the century?

So we could be up for one of the court battles of the century if Michael Grade and Greg Dyke end up in the libel courts.

It has been confirmed this afternoon that the chairman of ITV is taking the former Beeb DG to court over a section of an article that he wrote in the Times over the circumstances of Grade's departure from the BBC governors to join ITV back in 2006.

Iraqi press under attack

The Iraqi Press is coming under considerable pressure from the iraqi government according to reports in the New York Times

.

local journalists have been put on notice that their organizations could be shut down for misquoting officials, while the Iraqi government accused the news media of deliberately seeking to promote sectarian strife.

reports the paper.

This is not the first time that the media have come under attack as the report points out that

In 2004, the interim government in Iraq banned Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s leading satellite news channel, on grounds of sympathizing with insurgents, and successive governments have extended the ban. An Iraqi television channel, Al Zawra, was permanently closed in 2005 after it broadcast videos of insurgent attacks on American troops.

2008 was the internet election

The power of politics and the internet on the other side of the pond.

Pew reports that

"The 2008 election was the first in which more than half the voting-age population used the internet for political purposes,

1. Going online for news about politics or the campaign. Fully 60% of internet users did this in 2008.

2. Communicating with others about politics using the internet. Some 38% of internet users talked about politics online with others over the course of the campaign.

3 Sharing or receiving campaign information using specific tools, such as email, instant messaging, text messages or Twitter. Fully 59% of internet users used one or more of these tools to send or receive political messages

It would be interesting to see how these figures would look on this side of the pond.I doubt very much whether

a) we would have these figures available and

b) whether the online political activity would be nearly as big

Sports magazine goes under

The demise of another magazine is reported in the FT this morning.

Sports magazine,a free weekly ceased publication after the collapse of Sport Media & Strategie, its French parent.

Sport operated in the men’s lifestyle market and from an advertising perspective competed with FHM, Men’s Health and GQ, which are published by Bauer Media, Natmag and Condé Nast respectively.

A buyer has been sought for the British edition and 24 jobs are currently under threat

BBC Trust have made a mistake over Bowen

The front page of the Independent picks up on the report of the BBC trust yesterday that the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, had breached guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.

The paper reports that

Bowen was censured for a piece which he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline "Six days that changed the Middle East", attempting to give context to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysing the events of the 1967 Six Day War. The Middle East editor referred to "Zionism's innate instinct to push out the frontier". He wrote that Israel showed a "defiance of everyone's interpretation of international law except its own" and that its generals felt that they were dealing with "unfinished business", left over from the 1948 War of Independence.

I have much sympathy with Bowen.Reporting on the Middle East is a minefield,a complicated melting pot of rival histories.Bowen does the job well and it appears that his crime is to apportion more of the blame onto Israel.

The corporation has already announced that it will be taking no cation against the senior reporter.

I agree with Robert Fisk who says that

The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.

Bowen simply made the mistake of rubbing up Israel with his version of events,events that most impartial commentators would say were correcr.

Hillsborough-a tragedy that changed football

As Andy Burnham found out at Anfield this afternoon,there is still much hurt and grief over the events that took place at Hillsborough twenty years ago today.

I remember it well,listening to the events unfolding on what must have been Radio 2 whilst in the car.

I can't remember where I was going and what I was doing but the tragedy of the afternoon was to change football for ever.

I had fallen out of love with the game prior to those events.Attending football games had become akin to entering a war zone,the fun had simply gone.Society was changing and football hadn't kept up.

The Taylor report which followed the tragedy brought in the all seater stadium,the end of fences and barriers.It made the game or at least attending it more enjoyable.

Success on the field in Italia 90,the creation of the premier league and increased money coming into the game saw its rejuvenation.It has never looked back.

Yet those deaths of 96 people on that sunny afternoon were a high price to pay for change.

It has been a travesty that even today nobody has yet been brought to account.The action of chief Inspector Duckenfield who froze and gave the order to open the gates.

Supporters being pushed back in the stand by police who misunderstood what was happening.

Missing video tape and evidence that some of the dying were still alive 45 minutes after the incident.

The fact that South Yorkshire police still defend their actions to this day

Advantages of the printed word

Digital will never replace the printed word because newspapers " do the job we want them to do giving us access to news and journalism superbly."

That is according to Brian McNair writing at Allmediascotland.

newspapers are extraordinarily user-friendly as a content medium, portable when you’re on the move, easily manipulable as you trawl from one item or section to another, accessible without batteries or adaptors or headphones or all the other paraphernalia of the digital gizmo, and disposable when you’re done reading. The newspaper is a 400-year old technology, but PCs, e-books and the rest have a way to go before they can match its versatility.

Ht-Jon Slattery

Were journos to blame for Smeargate?

The keys to the system are held by journalists. It is only through the collusion of journalists that underhand and anonymous attacks on political colleagues can have any effect.

writes Alice Miles in what is surely a controversial piece in the Times this morning.

For Alice the keys mentioned were the fact that concerning Damien McBride and his smear campaign,those keys were

We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it – and we did nothing to stop it.

Time then to do away with the lobby system then

The problem for journalism in a nutshell

The premise of the effort to save newspapers is that journalism provides a public function that needs to be preserved. "Good" journalism is a public good because it creates value far beyond the revenue stream it generates. The benefit to society is supposed to be its function as a watchdog on both the public and private sectors -- disciplining waste, fraud and abuse -- and as a source of information for the public about important issues of public policy. Because it is a public good, commercial markets tend to under-produce it, so it needs non-market support. In the United States the mass media has long been subsidized, starting with low postal rates to support print media in the 19th century and running through free exclusive licenses to use the public airwaves to broadcast radio and TV in the 20th century.

writes Mark Cooper in his piece the Future of journalism is not in the past.

Foe Mark the future is digital and therefore attempts to save the print model are in his words "dubious at best."

Social media enters the corporate and consumer worlds

Social media is starting to cross into the corporate world in ways that may benefit the consumer and the employee.

Over the weekend at a Dominos pizza outlet in North Carolina,employees who decided to post You Tube videos of things they do to your pizza cost them their jobs after repulsed viewers managed to track their location down.

Internet book retailer Amazon also saw the power of the social networks when it came under attack ffrom twitterers,facebook users and blogs over its decision to remove gay and lesbian-themed books by James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Jeanette Winterson.

There is an interesting post from Daniel Dworkin over at the Huffington Post who writes that

For years, forward thinking business leaders have espoused the virtues of involving employees in decision-making as a means of driving engagement. Give them a voice, the mantra goes. Don't talk at them; facilitate a meaningful dialogue. Then along comes social media (content created by the people, for the people) to share ideas, build communities, and influence one another's actions.

The problem though now is how to best use this technology as Dworkin himself writes

How do we manage the user-generated content (UGC) of independent thinking employees? How do we effectively respond to their questions and suggestions? What if we don't have the resources, budget, or leadership alignment to act on their ideas?

The launch of Journalism online

“We have formed Journalism Online, because we think this is a special moment in time when there is an urgent need for a business model that allows quality journalism to be the beneficiary of the Internet’s efficient delivery mechanism rather than its victim,”

The words of co-founder Steven Brill who adds that

We believe we have developed a strategy and a set of services that will establish that model by restoring a stream of circulation revenue to supplement advertising revenue, while taking advantage of the savings to be gained from producing and delivering content electronically.”

The enterprise will offer four key services to publishers

1.

a password-protected website with one easy-to-use account through which consumers will be able to purchase annual or monthly subscriptions, day passes, and single articles from multiple publishers.

2.that it will

aggressively market all-inclusive annual or monthly subscriptions for those consumers who want to pay one fee to access all of the JOI-member publishers’ content. Revenues will be shared among publishers.

3.

to negotiate wholesale licensing and royalty fees with intermediaries such as search engines and other websites that currently base much of their business models on referrals of readers to the original content on newspaper, magazine and online news websites.

4.

it will provide reports to member publishers on which strategies and tactics are achieving the best results in building circulation revenue while maintaining the traffic necessary to support advertising revenue.

You can read the full press release HERE

The minefield of comparing print and online hits

There is an interesting analysis of the methods of comparing Print and online page impressions by Dan Thorton( Ht-Martin Belam)

comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

He argues that

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That is people visiting through RSS,aggregation etc and therefore according to Dan

the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Media moguls—journalism moguls,need two sets of skills.

They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger. They also have to forge, through creativity, cunning, and force, a set of arrangements with customers, competitors, governments, advertisers, production facilities, and distribution networks which can generate a lot of money.

So writes Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker

HT-Neil McIntosh

Time to face the real world

It is coming to that time when the real world taps one on the shoulder as three years at journalism school is rapidly ending.

Having seen the news at first hand from writing this blog,it is not going to be the best time to be trying to enter the profession but I take heart from this posting over at journalism.co.uk by Michael Haddon who is a postgraduate student of Newspaper Journalism at City University London.

We all have to take a realistic - but not pessimistic - assessment of the way things stand. I’m sure that many young graduates will give up and get out of the game, but I love journalism too much to do that. Thoughts of walking into one of the best graduate schemes are gone and the aim must be making sure we are best placed for that elusive job which should eventually show up. I plan to continue blogging, interacting using Twitter and revitalising that LinkedIn presence where a personal profile might be able to help career ambitions.

I agree with Michael's analysis.It is not going to be a question of walking into graduate jobs,it is going to be a process of networking,probaly internships and hopefully some freelancing.

I am alos working on a project myself of which more soon but for those that are getting disheartened,my advice is to stand back and take a realistic look at the prospects.

Most importantly don't throw away the skills you have learnt in the previous years

Media crisis in Fiji

A new government order in Fiji has resulted in blank newspages and blank screens.

The “public emergency regulations", will be in place for 30 days, and prohibit the broadcast or publishing or any material that “may give rise to disorder” or could create “a breach of the peace, or promote disaffection or public alarm, or undermine the Government and the State of Fiji.”

It has all arisen from a consititutional crisis which began on April 8th which has resulted in the country having three different governments.

The country's Court of Appeal ruled that the interim government of Commodore Frank Bainimarama was illegal.

Friday saw officers from the Ministry of Information and the Police Media Unit placed in the country's newspaper, radio and TV newsrooms.In response sections of Fiji's media have launched a self-imposed news blackout and are boycotting political stories, with newspapers yesterday bland in their design and reports.

The traditional media fights back over Smeargate

So according Janet Daley,Smeargate is not proof of the ascendancy of the blogosphere over the newspapers.

Writing on the Telegraph blog

simply offered his material to the newspapers in the sweet old fashioned way as recipients of leaks have been doing for generations.

And Stephen Pollard in the Times this morning writes that

It's important, however, to keep blogs in context. Those who dismiss them as an irrelevance to real politics, like those bloggers who dismiss the mainstream media as archaic, are equally wrong. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people still get their news from traditional media, whether it is newspapers or broadcasters.

adding that

In the end, the difference between quality newspapers and even serious blogs is that your default reaction to a newspaper piece should be that it is true, whereas your default reaction to a blog post should be that it might be true, but it might equally well be a pack of lies."

1918 lessons and what not to learn about it

There is a great post in Slate magazine by Jack Shafer(ht-Adrian Monck)in which the writer looks back to 1918 when there was another crisis in the newspaper industry.

In his much remarked-on obituary for the dead dailies in the January 1918 Atlantic Monthly, Oswald Garrison Villard described the passing of these papers in language that could have been lifted from the recent eulogies for the shuttered Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Villard, editor and publisher of The Nation, called the Boston Journal's demise a "tragedy of journalism"—one that could potentially slay democracy, too, because multiple news sources were required to present "both sides of every issue" to the citizenry.

Then it was as today a profitabilty issue with owners unwilling to sustain losses but these were caused

not by vanity purchases by outsiders but poorly timed investments by newspaper insiders

It used to be says Shafer

that no price was too high if it laid claim to the dominant daily in a market.

Marriott chain cuts back on newspapers

Another blow to the US newspaper industry is reported in the FT this morning.

Guests at Marriott International’s US hotels will no longer stumble over the familiar copy of USA Today as they leave their rooms, after falling demand prompted the group to announce changes to its free newspaper delivery system.

The report says that it could mean a cut of 18m newspapers a year and the chain puts it down to people checking the news on laptops and smartphones

People need to persevere with journalism degrees

only a liar without a conscience can pretend that many of them will succeed.

Tim Luckhurst writes in the Indy this morning on the continuing rise in students wanting to learn journalism at college.

But they must persevere as

society has never had more urgent need of reporters with advanced academic, professional and technical skills. Serious journalism is the lifeblood of democracy. It keeps powerful institutions under pressure to be honest and informs popular choice on crucial issues.

Magazine subscriptions-set too low?

An interesting perspective on the price of magazines in the New York Times this morning

Fifty-eight cents

writes Stephanie Clifford

For that, you could get one-eighth of a Starbucks latte.
It is also what subscribers paid, on average, for each issue of Time magazine last year. This is the Time magazine that sends foreign correspondents into Zimbabwe, assigns photographers to capture the war in Afghanistan, and fact-checks and edits every word before issues are printed. And that is before its costs for ink, paper and postage.

It is an defining analogy because it shows just how little we value the instrinic cost of information.

Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy.

But with advertsing revenues dropping like a stone,magazines need to consider whethedr price elasticity will allow price hikes.

Magzine strategy has been cut prices=increased sunscriptions which means more certain revenue streams.

The question is how much if at all can prices rise without losing subscribers to close the gap made by adverising revenue?

Ponsford on PG's demise

Editor or should I say former editor of the Press Gazette Dominic Ponsford writes in this morning's Media Guardian.

Media doomsayers will see the demise of Press Gazette (if this is the end and no last-minute buyer comes forward) as the death of the canary in the coal mine as far as the news industry is concerned. If journalism, of all professions, can't support its own trade magazine and site - what chance does the rest of the industry have?

The magazines demise he says is

another chapter in an unfolding national tragedy, as long-established news organisations go to the wall. It matters, just as the closures and mass lay-offs at dozens of regional newspapers matter, because of the stories that will no longer get told.

Has the McBride affair changed the course of political blogging

Initially dismissed as irrelevent bickering on the blogosphere by the Labour Party,the Damien McBride resignation shows how political blogging in the UK is now approaching the heights of the power it has across the Atlantic.

The spat between Guido Fawkes,Damien McBride and Derek Draper has come to dominate the news over this Easter weekend.

Ok,it may be partly that this is a slow news few days.Guido has admitted that he deliberately timed the release of the emails to coincide with this weekend.

However this is not the first time that this particular blogger has made the political headlines.Remember the Peter Hain resignation.

Whilst the blogging giants have not yet approached the levels of their American counterparts such as Drudge and the Huffington Post,they have shown that they can now wield influence.

As it stands this weekend,Labour's foray into the blogosphere is in tatters.It is uncertain whether Derek Draper will survive and there are questions over the position of its Digital guru Tom Watson.

The indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable-will You Tube survive?

Apparently You Tube is doomed.

Benjamin Wayne writing at the Silicon Valley insider believes that it

has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth.

The buisness model he argues that would see more and better rates for online advertising is flawed whereas

the videos YouTube is already monetizing represent the best content available, with diminishing returns as they reach deeper and deeper into a repository rife with copyright violation, the indecent, the uninteresting, and the unwatchable

And this is the main problem summed up

far more user-generated content than professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of delivering that library will continue to grow.

Internet bad for the media says poll

A poll conducted by The Atlantic and National Journal has found that amongst the American news media , nearly two-thirds say the Internet is hurting journalism more than it is helping.

Here is one comment

“The Internet has some plusses: It has widened the circle of those participating in the national debate. But it has mortally wounded the financial structure of the news business so that the cost of doing challenging, independent reporting has become all but prohibitive all over the world. It has blurred the line between opinion and fact and created a dynamic in which extreme thought flourishes while balanced judgment is imperiled.”

The poll

asked 43 media insiders whether, on balance, journalism has been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption online. Sixty-five percent said journalism has been hurt more, while 34 percent said it has been helped more.

Front page of the day

Haven't done one for a bit but this takes some beating as the Sun reports on the resignation of Bob Quick

The who will pay for what debate and ought we to find out

Run of the mill junk is a worthless commodity. High quality journalism is scarce and will be more so in the future, and that’s when everyone who loves great journalism will begin to pay.

Leonard Witt is convinced that people will pay for high quality journalism

Kevin Anderson has read his post and says

Increasingly I’m of the belief that the newspaper industry is relying far too much on its values in its estimates of what readers value enough to pay for. We need some solid facts and figures on what people will pay for. I might be hoping for concrete data that just doesn’t exist right now, but I think we as journalists have to move from asserting what people should pay for and do a little reporting and research to find out what people will pay for and the types of services that might be able to subsidise professional journalism.

Images from L'Aquila

There have been countless images from the tragedy of the Italian earthquake but maybe this which featured as the Daily Dish's image of the day sums it up

Pluto, as the plaque on his neck says, looks for his owner through the streets following a violent earthquake two days ago in the Abruzzo capital L'Aquila on April 8, 2009. Hopes faded Wednesday of finding more survivors from the worst earthquake in Italy in 30 years as the death toll climbed to 260 and the country prepared to bury the victims. By Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images.

Twitter from Cairo

Another example of the uses of twitter comes from Global Voices online.

Here a Palestinian mother is stranded at Cairo International airport

Good on you Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis has been doing some thinking on his Buzz Machine blog recently.

Firstly his post The speech the NAA should hear seems to have hit the nail right on the head

You blew it.
You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of - as you call them, Mr. Murdoch - net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.

Then in an angry but constructive response to the AP threats he says that

The problem today is that aggregators favor freshness, but the latest story in a topical cluster is often the 87th rewrite of the news and it’s usually from the Associated Press, which cuts off links and credit to the original journalism (for all its bluster, the AP is actually the biggest problem newspapers have online, but more on that in a minute).

Internet Tv to replace the traditional form by 2010

Over at Cross the Breeze they are predicting that Internet based Television will soon be overtaking the traditional form of TV as early as 2010 across Europe.

You can read a PDF of their full report but essentially the change is due to the explosion in broadband and wi fi access

Broadband has changed everything. And it’s not speed of access that has made the biggest impact, its having a direct connection that is always on. This has changed the internet experience dramatically. It’s no longer a disruptive experience where people have their PC in the backroom of the house and where they use a dial-up connection a couple times a day to do some specific tasks. Now, the PC has moved to centre stage in the kitchen or living room where it does not interfere in the family conversation or TV viewing but is integrated into everything we do.”

More on the demise of PG

There is much more on the demise of Press Gazette today.

Neil Thakery former publisher sums it up quite well

It was never an easy title to get right. It’s readers were passionate about it, but unwilling to pay for it. Recruitment, which hadbeen the bread and butter of the magazine all but dried up with the regional newspaper groups operating an effective boycott in favour of their jointly owned Hold the Front Page website. The press awards were a cauldron of ego, hatred, boorishness, controversy, boycotts, politics and occasionally a celebration of the best in journalism.

Jon Slattery believes that it should exist if only on the web

We can't let some small time publisher like Wilmington kill it off.
We are in a different era from print magazines. All we need is access to the web, to tap into the independent spirit of Press Gazette and connect with journalists across the country.
We won't make any money but we won't lose a lot either. What we will have is an independent voice. That's priceless in a way a magazine company and its bean counters will never understand.

If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars.

I have only just caught up with Michael Kinsley's piece in the Washington Post.

What it does is efdfectively demolish the argument that state subsidy is the way to save the ailing newspaper industry

Few industries in this country have been as coddled as newspapers. The government doesn't actually write them checks, as it does to farmers and now to banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers. But politicians routinely pay court to local newspapers the way other industries pay court to politicians.

But maybe this is the quote that seals it

If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news.

AP is strategically flawed says Paul Bradshaw

For a great synopsis of the arguments over AP's announcement that it will be declaring war on what is sees as illegal content,take a look at Paul Bradshaw's blog

The tanks are massing at the borders. The officers are drawing up “rules of engagement”. Soldiers are “rattling their sabres”. When times are hard, empires go to war. And so in the coming months we can expect to see “the web’s news cop” The Associated Press ignore the lessons of history and declare war against their perceived enemies.

he writes whilst pointing out that it is so strategically flawed.

AP are relatively unusual in that they are a news organisation which does actually make money from content.
The AP’s member organisations, however, make money primarily from advertising. To sell advertising you need an audience, and to get an audience you need a distribution strategy.
Pursuing your distributors for alleged copyright infringement is not a distribution strategy.
It also contributes nothing new to any business model for news online.

2008 in Littlejohn speak

Angry Mob have analysed Richard Littlejohn's columns in 2008 and come up with a table of subjects most frequently mentioned.

Muslim/s 70
Elf 'n' safety 51
Gay 39
Call Me Dave 34
Diversity 31
You couldn't make it up 30
Yuman rites 28
Terrorist/s 25
Guardianistas 21
Illegal immigrants 17
Mind how you go 16
Speed cameras 15
Elf 'n' safety nazis 11
Com-pen-say-shun* 9
Multiculturalism 6
Aids 6
Traffic Taliban 5
Fascist Left 5
Eco-loonies 5
Liberal 'media' 2

The final demise of Press Gazette

There is little that hasn't been written already over the appaarent demise of Press Gazette which was announced yesterday by Wilmington

Instead let me direct you to three postings.

1.John Slattery who has been filling in their recently covering for paternity leave

2.Dave Lee who did some work experience there

3.Kristine Lowe who reflects on why the model failed

Why print may still lead the way in community journalism

Some interesting thoughts on community journalism from Newspaper project.org

Speculation about the Internet replacing community newspapers is counter-intuitive. What are you going to do when you want to know what’s on sale this week at the Piggly Wiggly? Send out a Twitter message for Ricky McLeod? Google chicken quarters in Sumter? People who are engaged in a community read a local paper, and advertisers know this. You ignore the workings of your community at your own peril. Free speech and taxpayer representation are the most basic aspects of a democracy, and good community newspaper journalism is at the core of it all.

They make a good point.Often people wanting community information are of the generation that will prefer the older methods of communication.

However community is about everyone in that community,so methods of communicating to the younger generations must not be neglected .

A strong message against paid content?

A report in this morning's FT suggests that people would be happy to watch promotions on the net if it meant they could watch content for free.

The paper reports that

About 60 per cent of people polled by KPMG, the professional services group, said they would rather watch advertising on the internet in return for free content, rather than pay for it. Only 16 per cent of consumers said they would rather pay for content and avoid ads.

and adds that

The figures send a strong message to companies that advertising, rather than subscription-based business models, are likely to work for internet and mobile content businesses in the UK.

Stephen Glover ways into the Nick Cohen debate

Writing in his Independent column this morning he suggests that

Nick Cohen should take Peter Oborne and Peter Hitchens out for a drink, and apologise for maligning them; that journalists should not sign letters to newspapers which might possibly be construed as an attempt to have another journalist sacked, and that, whether we agree with him or not, we should all defend Mr Cohen's right to continue to have his say.

Higher speeds needed as internet use changes

Changing uses for the internet by the younger generation will see further pressure to increase net connection speeds.

According to Mike Roberts of Informa Telecoms and Media, (via the Economist)there have been two developments that have contributed to these changes.

1.Apple's I phone and

2.the surprising popularity of plug-in cellular modems for laptops and the like. It appears that many people prefer to pay for seamless internet access rather than use the free public Wi-Fi services in coffee shops and libraries, which come with the hassle of having to log on.

The consequence being that

Such convenience-seeking subscribers have boosted the profits of mobile-phone companies.