The Pulitzer Prize for Journalism doesn’t help newspaper solve their primary problem, reaching and information their readership, argues Jeff Jarvis.
And in other news, CBS News is going out of business. CBS appears to be interested in outsourcing its news to CNN.
Jay Rosen weighs in on newspapers in a brave new world at the Britannica Blog.
One weakness of the old subsidy system was that it hid the true cost of serious journalism from the people who benefit. Instead of finding new ways to hide the cost, a wiser course might be to increase the number of people who understand that serious reporting is a public good, who have a grasp of the economics. In other words, public opinion might have to come to the rescue.
Frank Wilson is contributing to a Britannica Blog forum this week called “Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?)” You can see the titles of upcoming articles on the main page. Today, Nicholas Carr writes:
So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.
Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”
The answer may turn out to be equally simple: We don’t.
Clay Shirky replies (in a way) by saying newspapers must experiment. Shirky’s thinking seems in line with what usability expert Jakob Nielsen has said for a long time, that pay-by-click advertising doesn’t work well and can’t continue to fund websites. In this article from August 2007, he refers to studies showing again that web readers ignore web banners, and even when they look at them, they rarely remember company names or info. “Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad,” he says, so funding an online newspaper through web advertising won’t work in the long run, even if it pulls in some money now.
So the call for new business models for newspapers is the right call, but what will the answer be? I’m not a businessman, so I doubt I can help, but I will shoot the hip. News orgs. need loyalty networking.
As James Levy says in a Britannica comment: “The experimentation you propose needs to get to the core of what journalism needs right now: transparency and trust. There is no longer any scarcity of information, so journalists should be disclosing everything, archiving everything. And that’s what will make them professional.” That’s right. Take your newspapers online by building trust, honesty, and depth. Aren’t the news magazines doing this already? How successful are they?
Some are worried that the blogosphere will simply promote the lower common denominator to the exclusion of serious journalism or commentary. Alisa Harris quotes Eric Alterman saying, “And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.”
Commenter Bob Buckles notes, “When a cow is milked, the cream rises to the top. So to, the best of internet ‘journalism’ will be the stuff that is aid attention to, unlike the professional ‘journalism’ of Dan Rather.” Naturally.
Silicon Alley Insider point to a survey that says Nearly 73% of respondents sometimes or always use blogs in their research. From the report:
Seventy percent of respondents say public opinion of journalists has gotten worse during the past five years, and 52% believe the general public has a “somewhat negative” opinion of journalists.
Nearly 73% of respondents sometimes or always use blogs in their research. The most often cited reason for using blogs was “to measure sentiment.”
Frank links to a review of News stories that set gold standard for journalism. It’s a book on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. I wonder if will read like last month’s fish wrap.
As I re-read Andrew Klavan/Keith Peterson’s books starring newspaperman John Wells (see yesterday’s review), I couldn’t help (though heaven knows I tried) thinking back to my own short, undistinguished career as a small town radio news reporter.
When I consider that time, I find incomprehensible that I could have actually believed that I (that is, me, this guy writing what you’re reading now) might possibly, under any circumstances, be able to do the job of a news reporter. Going out and speaking to strangers. Asking them questions. Pressing them when they’re reluctant to answer. I actually had the idea that I could learn to do those things.
Well, I was young then. All my life I’d heard people saying, “I used to be pretty shy, but I learned how to just get up and talk to people, and I found out there was nothing to be afraid of.” I figured I’d be the same, with time.
But enough of that. Enough to note that I tried it, long, long since, in the early 1980s.
And for some reason, reading about reporter John Wells and his dangerous life as a reporter reminded me of old Carl (not his real name), the guy who taught me the ropes at the radio station.
I don’t know why I’m disguising his name. I’d say the chances that he’s still alive are about the same as the chance that a top-flight literary agent is reading this right now and getting ready to e-mail me, offering me representation.
Because like John Wells, Carl was a degenerative (Not degenerate. There’s a difference). He smoked constantly, drank heavily and was in terrible physical condition (John Wells in the books was much the same, though thinner). When Carl showed me the job routine, it proved to consist of reading the morning paper, driving downtown, talking to a guy at the police station, and then adjourning to a local bar for refreshments.
Carl was not a motivated guy.
And then I remembered something I’d forgotten about Carl. Carl had odd fingers.
His fingers weren’t straight. They were crooked. They kind of zigzagged as your gaze followed them from knuckles to fingertips. They looked very odd when he typed.
His fingers looked, in fact, as if somebody had put his hand in a desk drawer one day, and then slammed the drawer shut. Like in The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
And it occurred to me, I wonder if Carl got those fingers on the job.
Maybe once he’d been a hotshot, dynamic young reporter, out to break big stories and pull the curtain away from crime and corruption.
Maybe he made the wrong people mad. And maybe they taught him a lesson about going along and getting along, through introducing him to a desk drawer.
Maybe that’s what made him the sad case he was when I got to know him.
I have no way of knowing.
But it makes a story.
“Britain’s defense chief decided Friday to immediately pull Prince Harry out of Afghanistan after news of his deployment was leaked on the U.S. Web site the Drudge Report,” according to this morning’s AP report.
The ministry asked the media not to speculate on Harry’s location — or how and when he would return — until he was back in Britain. . . . The ministry deplored the leak by “elements of the foreign media.”
The ministry knew this was a problem, so they had plans for keeping Harry safe. But if you were a newsman with a strong website or paper like The Drudge Report, would you report the prince’s secret location? Do the people have a right to know something like this?
Roger Kimball asks why anyone believes the NY Times about anything. He quotes fellow blogger Bob Owens to summarize:
[T]he bizarre emphasis of the New York Times upon veteran violence without the provision of context can be understood by remembering that Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, once said during the Vietnam War that if a North Vietnamese soldier ran into an American soldier, he’d rather see the American soldier shot.
The NY Times has taken flak for hiring Bill Kristol as a regular op-ed columnist from readers and its own editor. Now, Gaius points to criticism from The Times of London. “Excuse me, but what on earth is going on?” Times’ op-ed editor Daniel Finkelstein asks. “[C]onsidering that Kristol represents a large strand of American opinion (even if it is a smaller strand of NYT reader opinion) it is entirely unremarkable that his columns should be commissioned.”