When enough is enough

If you haven't read Emily Bell's thought provoking article in Media Guardia this morning then do.

We were taught just over three years ago that onlien gave the opportunity for the journalist to expand on quantity,delve into greater detail and focus on important issues.

Yet according to Ms Bell that is no longer the case

in a digital world, and one where the cost of journalism is not falling as quickly as the revenues that support it, the opportunity arises to rethink what is "enough" in terms of good reporting, or commentary.

We are she adds

in the unmade world of digital news and comment and analysis, we find ourselves, like the music industry, creating to a format that is much more appropriate for another era, because we are hardwired to do so.

Yet as Emily says whilst breaking news is well suited to the tweet format and analysis is well suited to the expanded online version,it is the 400-word article that is most under pressure.

Newspapers were complacent says Buffett

According to Warren Buffett,the newspaper industry has only itself to blame for its current problems.

Talking to Editor and Publisher,the business guru said

"It is so easy when you've got a wonderful business," Buffett told E&P during a recent interview. "Complacency is pretty easy and it is why they weren't looking over their shoulder at what was happening."

adding that

"When the Internet came along, you gave away your product for free and charged for it in another place [print]," he says. "I'm not positive what you would have done differently, but not figuring out some kind of business model was a mistake."

Some green shoots in the European Digital Journalism survey

Maybe one of the surprising things to have come out of the European Journalism survey is the feeling that journalism has improved in the internet age.

350 journalists across Europe were interviewed to determine what impact the advent of the Internet and widely-available broadband had had on the world of journalism.

The same poll was taken a year ago and whilst the survey not unexpectedly shows a worry about the general economic climate,there are some indicators of a positive future.

A third of respondents thought that the traditional media channel in which they worked could well be taken off the market whilst this had already happened to a fifth of the respondents.However digital media was seen as being a way of keeping the channel alive in some form.

The survey also showed the dramatic impact of twitter on the market with many organisations seeing its potential as an appetiser for information,especially those based in the UK.

More and more original content seems to be ending up on the web,although the web has created in a lot of people's minds more work with the same resources.40 per cent of respondents thought that the internet had increased their workload.

Surprisingly with the industry in deep recession,job satisfaction is higher with nearly half of the respondents reporting that the quality of journalism had improved in the last couple of years and over 80 per cent are happier or as happy with their jobs.

The main differences from 12 months ago is most certainly the recession and the falls in advertising streams which has intensified the pressure on journalists to perform and becoming more reliant on outputs from third sources such as PR agencies for content

Branding for journalists

Tips for the new breed of online journalist come from Adam Westbrook who kicks off a series of 6 blog postings by reminding us of Andrew Neil's comments from back in 2006

The journalist of the future…will have more than one employer and become a brand in his own right” he wrote. With full time jobs in well staffed newsrooms becoming more sparse, but opportunities outside traditional/mainstream journalism becoming more plenty, this prediction is coming true. So, what can you do to boost your brand?

So to boost your brand you must

1. try and own your domain name (www.yourname.com or www.yourname.net or www.yourname.co.uk).

2.define your own niche-you need to be able to give someone the elevator pitch about yourself too. A niche will give you a vital advantage over general-news journalists.

3.have a great website and blog

4.have a fresh CV and showreel

5.spread yourself across as many social networks as possible but make sure that the message is consistent

6.promote yourself at networking events, conferences and other shindigs.

I look forward to Adam's next installment

We are all online journalists now

I was asked to talk about ‘online journalism’, but in a sense, I think there is now no other kind of journalism. By that I mean that anyone practicising journalism anywhere in the world is, in some sense, now conditioned by digital technologies and the Internet. We are all infected, as it were, by conditions or concepts such as citizen journalism, satellite transmission, search, infotainment and hypertextuality

.

This is the opening of Charlie Beckett's speech to the 50th anniversary conference of the Korean Society for Journalism and Communication Studies

Beckett,the Director of Polis who continues to say that

We are a moment of profound change for the news media that raises transformational questions about the ethics, politics and economics of journalism. And journalism itself is a key to answering broader societal and global questions.

I interviewed Charlie a few months ago for a UCLAN project.He is tremendously enthusiastic about journalism and although recognising that the profession faces immense problems he is optimistic of its future.

In this speech he reflects on how the new media can bring hope to areas of the world that were denied access to mainstream information.

Kibere,the world’s biggest slum,on the outskirts of Nairobi where people

have now found a voice through SMS. Through cheap mobile phone texting, its 500,000 people can begin a conversation with the volunteer journalists of a new community radio station Pamoja FM.

The online revolution has created many negatives in journalism,this is happily one of the positives

More debate on the future of newspapers

There are a couple of good articles appearing this morning.

Nik Hewitt writing at Online Journalism news asks whether newspapers can still win the digital game and quotes that a friend of his

made a comment last week: "The midweek Man City v Aalborg match went to penalties, so the paper couldn't print the score. I didn't know who'd won. What's the point?"

Newspapers he believes still can compete but makes the following points

1.We need to stop trying to sell papers through the internet for starters. Offering partial content and driving users to our print product is just alienating them

and instead

2.Digital is where we should be driving traffic, where we can provide the excellent journalistic content we have in abundance to a targeted online audience. Engaging them in debate. Allowing free commentary and inviting opinion. Giving the visitor a sense of ownership in our established and trusted local brands. Giving them resources and information they need to take their community forward.

Meanwhile Stephen Moss at the Guardian asks whether the regional paper is doomed

local and regional papers are caught in a perfect storm (national titles are having a hard time, too, but that's for another day). The local readership is ageing; high streets are losing their shops; the three key regional advertising markets - property, cars and jobs - have dropped dramatically.

Getting past the headline-the role of news aggregators in the business model

There is an interesting piece by Michael Learmonth and Nat Ives over at Newspaper Project.

It focuses on the aggregation of news concept and what it does to business models.

many sites aggregating other people's content can't deliver that much traffic, and some don't even try. What's more, a vast swath of readers couldn't care less about anything deeper than a headline, which is a problem for the nation's beleaguered journalistic institutions as they try to find a sustainable model for newsgathering on the web.

I particularly liked the comments of Jane Seagrave, senior VP-global product development at the Associated Press,who said

There are a lot of people who never want to know more than 'Six Killed in Iraq,so that the money spent -- to put reporters in place, to guarantee their security, in many cases to compensate their widows and orphans when they're killed in action -- is not offset by any actual income from the work."

If this is the case in our information savvy world,it could spell massive problems for journalism.What Jane is saying is that people no longer have a need for the detail.

Mail on the attack over Facebookism

I see that Birmingham University's development of an MA in social media has come under attcak from the Daily Mail.

Senior lecturer in Digital media at the University Paul Bradshaw launched a discussion over its core contents last week and described it as a way to save journalism

graduates should not be going into the industry at entry level (after all, who is recruiting these days?), but at a more senior, strategic level - or, equally likely, to establish startups themselves. I’m hoping these are the people who are going to save journalism.

The Mail no doubt in its Little Englander guise sees it as an MA in facebook and have even got a quote from a disenchanted student who says

It's of no interest to me whatsoever. Virtually all of the content of this course is so basic it can be self-taught.
'In fact most people know all this stuff already. I think it's a complete waste of university resources.'

Another vision of regional coverage

A rather worrying interviewe given to journalism.co.uk by former Northcliffe digital multimedia specialist Nick Hewitt who is pessimistic about the regional and local newspaper industry

Two quotes struck me.Firstly his vision of local publishing

It wouldn't surprise me if within the next three years at least 50 per cent of local titles are just printed in one large area, with an insert put into them that tries to make them as local as possible,"

and secondly on advertising

Newspaper advertising has never been particularly effective Gone are the days where we say we don't know what's happening with it and people will spend the money on it."

But he says

the effectiveness of online advertising is equally worrying: "We know now, because we can measure it digitally, and quite frankly, it's very very poor.

Has Emily Bell got it spot on

From her Guardian column this morning

Perhaps the biggest mistake of the past 10 years has been the idea that digitisation is an invitation to do more, when it is in fact an opportunity to do less, but better

Agree?

Online advertising srt to grow 10% this year

Accordin to research firm Forrester,Europena online advertining is set to grow by 10 per cent this year.(via Paid Content)

Sounds good doesn'i until you recall that back in 2007,the figure was put nearer 30%.

The executive summary says the following

Search will fare best as interactive marketers focus on highly accountable direct response advertising, while display advertising will be hardest hit in this recession just as it was in 2002. Rich media and video advertising will grow to account for 59% of European online display ad spending in 2013 as marketers of all types embrace richer creative formats to improve the performance of their display ads. To prosper during the downturn, interactive marketers should look for value in highly targeted display ads and seek opportunity in the improved performance of contextual ad networks like Google's AdSense.

It's not the model,it's the journalists

I was impressed with Steve Yelvington when he appeared online at a UCLAN journalism forum last year and am also impressed by his words when he responds to Jeff Jarvis's comments that newspapers cannot replace print revenue when they go online.



Once again he says



I'm concerned that journalists just don't understand their role in creating or solving the underlying problem.



Interestingly he believes that

It’s primarily a failure to attract and retain a commercially relevant audience
that’s breaking the newspaper business model.

The 20th century content model isn’t working any more, regardless of
whether it’s in print or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex by a modified
laser beam.

and he says

If I were looking for good news, I’d be looking at the transition that many
companies are making from single-product strategy to a portfolio/aggregation
strategy. I’d be looking at the newspapers that are beginning to figure out
behavioral targeting in a network context. I’d be looking for new newsrooms that
are beginning to really grasp the breadth of their roles outside the simple 24×7
breaking-news concept.

Decisions to be taken if going down the route of a web only strategy

By closely monitoring properties with diminishing returns, publishers can evaluate and even try multiple turn-around strategies for maintaining the print product against attempting the migration to a 100% Web-based business. It's important to choose the leap to the Web instead of it being the only option.

Prescott Shribles looks at the criteria that should be considered when deciding whether to take that decision to publish online only.

He lists four

1.Content management-

the editorial team will need to become experts at writing for the Web, search engine optimization, Web traffic analysis, and community building. It's not just about writing articles we think people will like.

2.the change in workflow patterns-

The transition from a "close"-based workflow to dynamic publishing model has implications for editorial, marketing, and sales. Many will struggle with how to create deadlines without the print product.

3.sales strategy-

Focus on charging premiums for targeting and segmentation. Don't chase the buzz of the next cool thing (social networks, vertical search, video). You can create a product that happens to be on that list, but make sure it has real value behind it.

4.the timeframe-Give your team time to acquire the skills it needs before pushing the web-only red button.

The biggest day so far for online media

I think that it is going to be a day dominated by the American elections and the way that the media are covering it.

Over at the Online Journalism blog,Paul Bradshaw has a guest writer who says

I don’t think we ever had a live event on the web that will get so much live coverage. This means incredible amounts of information will be published over all kind of services and social networks. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wordpress, Blogger and many more

Wilbert Baan looks at using web services that have programmable interfaces and is using the twitter database to track voting intentions in the States.

Dave Lee has done a superb job in creating an online watchers guide which I for one will be using

The good and the badof online polititians

Laura Oliver at Online journalism news reports that

London mayoral candidates are using the web to bypass the mainstream media and answer questions put to them directly by the electorate.

and adds that

Crowdsourcing debate website Yoosk is running an online hustings, gathering questions to put to several of the candidates running in next month's election.
Readers submit questions for their specified candidates, other users then vote on the questions they want the candidates to answer

Of course there is a problem with this sort of interactivity.The Sun are running a question and answer session online with Boris Johnson and this was his answer to a qusetion about the smoking ban

What is the point of having local democracy if we don't leave decisions like this to a local level?
If I had my way, we would have an online referendum in London about whether to give boroughs back the power to give discretion over smoking to pubs and clubs

For the record his comments were quickly covered over by his minders as personal only and not part of Tory policy

Paul Bradshaw on magazines defence to the web

Paul Bradshaw has posted an interesting piece on the effects of the web on the magazine industry.

Whilst noting that as with other print medium's they have suffered,it seffect has not been so detrimental to the magazine business and has subsequently respondec in diffeent ways

One being

The web allows magazines to cover news online on an ongoing basis - something they were unable to do particularly well in print due to long lead-in times between copy deadlines and printing, and the fact that most magazines were on the shelves for a full four weeks.

He notes that

Magazines have not suffered as much as newspapers - on the whole - because they are not ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’

.

Of cause on ething that the web cannot insulate the sector from is the economy and it is magazines that will suffer as consumer spendiong falls,being seen in some areas as a luxury purchase.

ABCE's show that there is an alternate market for online news

Yesterday's ABCe's contained some suprises perhaps none more so that the Mail's website rising up the hits chart and getting close to the Guardian site.

If this illustrates anything it is something that a lot of rush to new media forgets.It is not just the young that should be embraced.The older generation and obviously readers of the Mail ,and a lesser extent the Telegraph,do use the net,they have a lot of spending power and a lot more time on their hands than many of the younger generation.

The Mail saw its unique user numbers up by a staggering 164% year on year and 31% up on the previous month.

Yes we can all point to the death of Heath Ledger which sent people to the Sun's website but the Mail's success story shows that there is a market for a different sort of content.

Is it a good idea to teach Dreamweaver?

Another interesting topic in the blogosphere is the debate over Dreamweaver's role in student journalism.Given that I have just started getting to grips with the software,I was very interested to read Dave Lee's thoughts on the matter

He argues that

as print journalists, need to know about the printing presses is that they exist and they work. It would be a waste of time to think otherwise.
So why don’t we take the same approach to learning online journalism?
If you’re an online journalism student and find yourself aimlessly clicking away at Dreamweaver and wondering “What’s the point?”, you’re not alone. There are hundreds of us.

and was

astonished to find I was “studying” online journalism using software that was out of date before I’d even started my A-Levels

I am no technophobe Dave,and the arguments about whether it's up to date,whether it is used or not is neither here nor there.What I am interested in is being able to write a professional journalism piece that can be easily read online and acquiring the tools to do that.

My online tutor Andy Dickinson refered to the debate as being rather along the lines of the straw when I asked for his comments on Friday after reading Dave's article.He replies to Dave,

I’m not defending Dreamweaver (or attacking it) it is what it is – a tool. Just like a CMS is a tool

.

Over at Mindy McAdams' blog,she takes the view that

I’m a firm believer that a couple of weeks spent on HTML and CSS will come in handy somewhere down the road for many journalism students who go on to a career in journalism. But Dreamweaver? If you’re teaching a Web design course, it will be useful after the drills in HTML and CSS, but not before. If it’s not a full-semester class about Web design, though, I don’t see a need for Dreamweaver

.

So as journalism student which is the right way to go.I think that I agree with Andy in that yes you are not going to find its use in future employment but it is a tool for an initial learning in training for web journalism.

Update

Ian Douglas writing on the Telegraph's technology blog agrees with Dave

no major news website uses Dreamweaver, a fine but limited web design tool, to make their live pages. If it's used for anything at all, it's to create page templates that will be re-created within a content management system that handles the great databases of articles we all compete to deliver.

adding

As the tools become easier to use (the 'complicated' acronyms are easier to learn about than shorthand, and considerably more useful), the closer to the sharp end of publishing the reporters will come. The bloggers already know that and look on with bemusement when they see the number of 'web-bods' between writing and sending live

Getting there but someway to go for local papers

Over at Journalism Uk, Paul Bradshaw writes that"'Local online news is changing, but not fast enough'

Paul asks

as internet start-ups invade their markets with lower costs and a native understanding of new media, are local newspapers moving fast enough?

He cites that for the local papers,video has been the most significant change,clumsy and ameatur at first,with investment and training it has impproved greatly.Podcats are falling out of favour and are being replaced by online audio interviews

But Paul's biggest critisism

For most journalists the internet still represents an extension of the library and news wires - a place to browse for information on a story or track down sources - and then leave. That's Web 1.0 thinking.
Local journalism is supposed to be all about community, but local journalists' relationships with communities online are for the most part non-existent, or one-way. How many local journalists have blog patches that they regularly track and engage with?

and reminds us of some basic online factors

Online you get back what you give out. By contributing to the blogosphere, to Flickr and YouTube and Facebook, journalists will generate contacts, leads, contributors and readers. That's Web 2.0 thinking and it's begging to be explored

.

Tips for online publishing

The best online newswriting differs from print newswriting; and journalism students can, and should, learn those differences.

Those are the words of Robert Niles writing on the online journalism review

Whilst the author accepts that much writing online is simply transposition of the print version,Robert believes that the web gives 4 unique opportunities.These are blogs,wikis,discussion boards and feed writing.

He suggests that students:

first focus on single task unknown to print journalists: search engine optimization

The art of writing headlines that will get picked up in a search engine request.Have a read of the article