thoughtsignals

New owners of newspapers — folks like Sam Zell, who made his fortune in real estate — are now saying the outlook for the papers they bought is worse than they expected.

David Carr writes:

These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves.

A lot of these deals were done in the last two years, when the economy was still good despite the troubles in the newspaper biz. With the economy headed downhill, the systemic problems with newspapers will get amplified.

However, what continues to be missing from this whole discussion about the business of newspapers is the lack of innovation in newspaper business models (not in newsrooms, which have been trying new things like crazy the last few years).

Chris O’Brien, who has worked for newspapers as a business reporter for years, gets it right:

I see tremendous energy going in to breaking new ground in gathering news, telling stories, and creating community. What I don’t see is an equivalent amount of innovation occurring around the business models that will support journalism going forward. What I tend to see, over and over, is people experimenting wildly on the content side, and then falling back on the same old business model: Selling ads.

This model is dying.

I don’t know that I agree that selling ads, per se, is a dying business model. It’s what Google is based on after all (however, unlike newspapers, Google has produced a number of innovations in advertising). But basically, that’s right. There is lots of experimentation going on in the nation’s shrinking newsrooms, not so much in the other departments.

This is like something straight out of a William Gibson novel:

Yes, I blog from a sailboat and cruise the azure waters of the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Mexico. “Call me Slogger,” to borrow from the opening line of that saga of the sea, Moby Dick.

But whales are not my game. I chase lesser creatures. Specifically the men, women and issues involved in the $3 billion California state stem-cell agency — the world’s largest single source of funding for human embryonic-stem-cell research.

David Jensen, a former newspaper reporter and editor and political PR guy blogs from his sailboat off the coast of Mexico. This Wired first-person piece is mostly about the struggle to find Internet access while living on a sailboat. But the fact that he writes mostly about stem cell research and policy makes it all the more remarkable. Ten years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible.

How the world is changing.

Startup newspaper BostonNOW is printing excerpts from local bloggers in its print edition.

John Wilpers, editor in chief of BostonNow, a free weekday daily introduced last month, said he wanted to fill the paper with items that local bloggers submitted to the BostonNow Web site.

Last week, editors began culling posts and running excerpts next to articles from reporters and newswires. The blog items, which appear in gray boxes, are still relatively few, but Mr. Wilpers said he thought the feature would grow.

Mr. Wilpers, who previously edited two other free commuter newspapers, Metro Boston and The Washington Examiner, said he wanted to address what he believed was the news industry’s biggest problem: an inability to connect with the communities it covers.

I expect there will be a certain amount of moaning that this is another sign of the end of newspapers (no, their declining circulation, readership and ad revenue would be the sign of that). However, I also expect that we’ll see a lot more of that. Other newspapers are already doing this in one form or another, and many papers are printing excerpts from their own bloggers in the print edition (a sure sign that momentum has shifted from print to the Web).

Newspapers have a long history of printing things that aren’t really news — comics, recipes, letters to the editor, horoscopes, etc. This isn’t that new. But it is a good idea.

Link.

Brock Meeks writes:

This process of side-stepping MSM I like to call “hacking the media.” It is surprising easy and you have all the tools right at your fingertips. You don’t need a journalism degree; you don’t need a press pass; you don’t need to have the power of a big news organization behind you. You need a curious mind, the desire to get answers and the simple ability to open your mouth and ask a question.

This sounds good, but … here’s what really happens. Guy’s sitting on a beach with a laptop. Guy sees some photos on Flickr. Guy emails MSNBC, which then does a story. This is not “hacking” the media, and it’s certainly not sidestepping the mainstream media.

Give credit to the guy who took the photos originally, who perhaps was engaged in some citizen journalism. And give credit to Meeks for emailing his former colleagues at MSNBC about a good story. But this is not “hacking” the media, this is just tipping the media off, which people have been doing since long before the Internet was ever conceived.

Citizen journalism is real, but this isn’t the best example. I will give Meeks credit for identifying one important thing, though: news value.

How do you recognize a story? It’s anything that makes you double-clutch during your day; something that causes you to mentally backspace. If that happens, it’s probably a story.

Yep, it probably is. And worth pursuing, even if you’re not in the MSM. Link.

Greg Lindsay interviewed four magazine writers about the nuts and bolts of organizing and writing long stories. I very, very rarely write at the lengths he’s concerned with, but when I have I’ve always struggled with the process of organizing all that material.

Every journalist working above the metaphorical tree line of 2,500 words or so — where it’s hard to catch your breath and where telling the story demands scenes, dialogue, judicious compression, and philosophical expansiveness — must inevitably cross the chasm positioned squarely between reporting and writing. This is the point where everything that has been seen, heard, taped, and scrawled into notebooks must be reloaded into memory, weeks — even months — after the moments in question… and this critical point in the process is almost never discussed among journalists.

One tip I’m surprised wasn’t here: Write as you report — snippets of the story, different potential ledes, etc.

Link.

One of the Poynter Institute’s Naughton Fellows, Pat Walters, is blogging “48 Tips in 48 Hours” from the National Writers Workshop in Hartford, Conn. I went to one of these workshops years ago in Charlotte, and it was quite good. Pat has nine tips up so far.

Link.

p.s. Hey Poynter Institute — where’s the RSS feed?

N&O Editor Melanie Sill outlines the difference between what her paper is reporting on the Duke lacrosse case compared to at least some of what has appeared on blogs before the N&O reported it.

We heard all kinds of rumors and tips, but we don’t publish unattributed rumor and we almost never quote unidentified sources. Much of this gossip went right up on blog posts, but we used such leads and rumors as initial information that had to be fleshed out on the record or through independent verification.

She does a nice job calmly laying out the difference between what the N&O is doing in the name of traditional journalism compared to what some bloggers have done. And I think she manages to avoid re-opening the whole “blogging vs. journalism” hobgoblin.

Also, she notes that Roy Cooper has (apparently) refused interview requests from N.C. media but jumped at a chance to go on 60 Minutes.

Cooper is North Carolina’s attorney general and has a responsibility to speak to the local community, including reporters who work to inform people here. It’s ironic that after condemning Mike Nifong’s play-to-the-cameras actions, Cooper gave exclusive access to a national television program.

Link.

Almost as soon as N.C. Attorney General Roy Cooper announced that he was dropping all charges against the former Duke lacrosse players, the News & Observer had a promo up announcing a five-part series on the case beginning Saturday. The screenshot below is from this morning.

Mainly, this demonstrates that most people, including reporters, involved in the case were expecting it to be dropped. And it suggests, at least to me, that the N&O has been working on a big project about the case in anticipation of it being dropped. I imagine they have most of the stories written and ready to go.

Underneath all the very real concern about the future of daily newspapers and other “mainstream” media are questions about what will happen to the expensive, time-consuming journalism such organizations have traditionally done. Washington Post media writer Howie Kurtz raises the issue:

Newspapers and networks face the same dilemma: too many people doing other things with their time, from Web-surfing to podcast listening, or simply losing interest in news altogether. Some of these customers are consuming the companies’ wares online, which is great for exposure but doesn’t produce the revenue needed to support long-form reporting. If this erosion continues, it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians.

Link.

There’s also an online discussion where Kurtz and some of his readers get into it a little more.

Geneva Overholser says it’s time for people to stop fretting about the future of journalism and start doing something about it.

What could be worse than having journalism on iPods?  How about NOT having it there? Take a cruise through some of the Web sites that, say, give ethnic news a well-deserved wider hearing. Or that enable people to search crime news by type, time and location. Or that pay the sort of loving attention to what’s going on in a particular neighborhood that only an old-fashioned weekly once knew how to do. How wondrously they put us to shame, all of us with our endless reasons why we can’t possibly fit something in our newspaper or newscast.

There is a great deal of fretting these days in newsrooms about the future of journalism. Overholser is right, of course, that we need to do better. But I think her call for action on the part of other stakeholders — corporate shareholders, for example — is a little naive.

One of the new things that we need to invent for journalism is a new business model. Some day online advertising may provide enough revenues to support robust investigative journalism (or, maybe not, for reasons I won’t go into here). But in any case, the money’s not there yet. And that’s got to be a part of this new future — not just more and better journalism, but a business model that doesn’t rely on the near monopoly power that sustained so many news organizations for so many decades.

Link.