Dan Gillmor on J-schools

Posted on February 8, 2010 by jestevens

Check out this post from Dan Gillmor, on the future of journalism education. He provides a great list of suggestions, and every J-school in the country would serve their students well by adopting the list. There’s something that he didn’t mention, though: How do you move a faculty entrenched in legacy media to change to adopt a modern approach?

Academia has four significant characteristics that bode against any journalism school that has been around for more than 5 years adopting Gillmor’s suggestions:

– Tenure, a valuable protection for academic freedom, has been used by many journalism faculty to erect barriers against embracing change.

– A dean manages tenured faculty members, but s/he’s not really their boss — they can, do and have dug their heels in, even though it obviously slows their schools from adapting to the tremendous changes that are occurring in journalism.

– Most J-schools, especially those that are tax-supported, operate with a business model that isolates them from the market forces that are changing journalism.

– Most J-school faculty come from legacy media and have little experience in niche news development or in entrepreneurial journalism, the two largest trends in journalism today.

One solution: Every J-school faculty member is given a 6-month sabbatical to work in a niche news organization — site or network — that is NOT part of a legacy news organization. That would give faculty much of the experience and insight they need to understand what changes need to be made and why they need to be made quickly.

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Yikes.

Posted on January 12, 2010 by jestevens

The other words I was starting to put in this headline: unrepresentative, half the story, less than half the story, and the whole story of Baltimore. How can I begin to characterize the research done by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as reported in the LATimes article “Most original new reporting comes from traditional sources, study finds”?

PEJ, a nonpartisan project funded by the Pew Research Center, studied news reporting from 53 sources for three days in Baltimore, and followed six key stories for a week, in an effort to understand how the “ecosystem” of news operates in an age when new media is expanding and older outlets are losing resources.

Do this same research in West Seattle, and you’d find, well, a different story. Do this same research in Montclair, N.J., home of Baristanet, and the results might also be different.  And what about topic-based reporting. Isn’t The Body doing a better job on AIDS reporting than any newspaper? Isn’t Kaiser Health News doing a better job of health reporting than any daily?

There are quite a few headlines proclaiming that real news comes from newspapers as a result of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism study, “How News Happens: The Study of the News Ecosystem of One American City”. The study’s worth reading — it’s very interesting. I think the researchers answered the first question in this graph in their introduction extremely well:

How, in other words, does the modern news “ecosystem” of a large American city work? And if newspapers were to die—to the extent that we can infer from the current landscape—what would that imply for what citizens would know and not know about where they live?

But I don’t think that this research can answer the second. Yet. The system’s in too much flux to come to any conclusion. Perhaps a better research area to study might be the communities that Patch.com has expanded into. As NYC and NJ metros have been shrinking, vacuums have been created that offer opportunities that organizations like Patch and others are filling.

I also think that until the transition settles out that there will be a tendency toward better local coverage and worse coverage of health, science, environmental, state government, entertainment, transportation, and justice, as the metros have been laying off their specialty reporters. However, I’m betting that topic-based regional niche news sites will eventually take up the slack and do a better job than the metros did, just because jurnos and the community can do more in the Web medium.

What would I do if I were the Project’s researchers? Pick a geographic area that does have strong local sites doing original reporting that are within the reach of a metro daily and take snapshots over the next three years. That might get at the whole story and point out holes that need to be filled.

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Clone John Paton!

Posted on January 12, 2010 by jestevens

Jeff Jarvis did a fabulous interview with John Paton, who’s the new CEO of the Journal Register Company, which publishes 19 daily newspapers and more than 100 weeklies. Paton led ImpreMedia from legacy newspaper company to digital news company. Here’s a tease:

The result was in less than two years we went from 9 products on two platforms (print and crappy publications sites full of shovelware) to nearly 100 products on 7 platforms – with about 45% less costs.

It sounds as if he wants to use the same strategy for the Journal Register’s newspapers. This guy’s definitely worth watching. There he is in this thumbnail, named Editor & Publisher’s Publisher of the Year for 2009….just before E&P died.

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10 things every jurno should know

Posted on January 5, 2010 by jestevens

John Thompson at Journalism.co.uk says jurnos need to know these 10 things. He’s hit it RIGHT on the head. The only two things I’d add:

Context — with links, resources, etc…..a matrix for your news/info….nothing stands alone. He gets close to that with point No. 3:

3. You are a curator. Like it or not, part of your role will eventually be to aggregate content (but not indiscriminately). You will need to gather, interpret and archive material from around the web using tools like Publish2, Delicious and StumbleUpon. As Publish2 puts it: “Help your readers get news from social media. More signal. Less noise.”

The other thing that jurnos should know is that they need to be solution-oriented — that doesn’t mean the jurno provides a solution to a problem, it means that the jurno doesn’t mention a problem without pointing out what’s being done about it, or how some other people in a different community solved it.

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This says it all

Posted on December 31, 2009 by jestevens

Silicon Alley Insider’s chart of the day.

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Explaining targeted ads

Posted on December 31, 2009 by jestevens

One of my favorite columnists is Steve Smith, who shares duties on MediaPost’s Behavioral Insider with Laurie Sullivan. Today, Smith provided some great clarity about targeted advertising, also known as digital ad targeting. It’s important for jurnos to wrap their heads around this, because it’s a useful technology, if not abused. (Oh how often have we hudroids said that about so many new technologies, including nuclear.) In Take Two Targeted Ads and Call Me In the Morning, Steve says:

How do you explain the technology behind digital ad targeting quickly and fairly enough so the consumer can make an informed choice about opting in or out, sharing their surfing history, etc.? Whatever regulatory or legislative measures come down the pike related to digital advertising in the next year, the industry still needs to find ways of translating a dark targeting art perfected by engineering dweebs into concepts and language that my 78-year-old dad can understand without reaching for his pistol.

It’s worth following the progress of behavioral marketing developments — and Behavioral Insider is a good place to start. (Dear FTC: I received no remuneration or gifts for this plug. And I’ve neither met, nor had communication with Smith or Sullivan.)

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2009’s Media about Media

Posted on December 31, 2009 by jestevens

A blizzard heading your way? Want to snug down with some good reading & viewing about changes and opinions about changes in medialand, Webworld, cyberverse, the digital ocean we hudroids live in? Check out John Bracken’s 2009’s Most Influential Media about Media. This list is LONG, and he put it together last week after asking his community for suggestions. LOTs of good stuff there, from Clay Shirky to Seth Godin to a fabulous Jay Smooth on Michael Jackson….which, if you didn’t know, was THE big media event of 2009. Yesterday, he posted My 2009 Most Influential Media. I’ll be going through it. There’s more snow coming.

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Newspapers need to grok online advertising, too

Posted on December 30, 2009 by jestevens

Newspapers’ Online Strategies Failed in 2009 — in yesterday’s MediaDailyNews, Eric Sass pointed out that newspapers’ online revenues have been falling along with their print revenues. The reasons, he says, are that online revenues were concentrated in online classifieds, and those never became independent from print classifieds. As print continued to plummet, they took online revenues along. Also, newspapers haven’t grokked search and display. Here’s a chart he picked up from NAA and IAB.

I’d add that newspapers also don’t understand that it’s rapidly becoming a niche news world, and have completely missed the boat on focusing their efforts on developing niche news sites. The mile-wide, inch-deep approach, i.e., news for a general audience doesn’t work anymore. But if newspapers shake off their ties to print, call themselves news organizations, and do develop niche news sites (which means developing community and walking away from the we-talk-you-listen old-style journalism), they’ll need to modernize their ad departments, too, and learn how to sell online as successful niche news sites have been doing for years.

They could learn from Federated Media, Netshelter.net, ESPN, Gawker Media, etc. (for a long list of niche news sites, check out the Jurnos wiki) and repeat their mantra:

Sell community, not content.

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Jurnos at work – fun, meaningful, busy busy busy

Posted on October 15, 2009 by jestevens

This wonderful post from Nieman Labs last month chronicles the hectic lives of AnnArborChronicle.com’s editor and publisher, and offers a 10-point overview of their working lives.

It doesn’t seem as if they have a non-working life. Which is why I hope these local niche news sites form networks someday to share news, information and advertising resources.

Here are points 5, 6, and 7. Check out the post for the rest of the story.

5. Google News Alerts every morning. Has any other service been adopted by every newsroom in the country with so Picture 9little fanfare? The Chronicle is no exception; each morning, Morgan selects a handful of items from her 12 news alerts for phrases like “university of michigan” and “washtenaw county” for two news-from-out-of-town aggregators.

6. More than 20 public meetings a month. No, Mr. Simon, most local-news blogs don’t staff zoning hearings. But many do, and the Chronicle is one. When they launched, Morgan and Askins built their monthly schedule around a list of meetings the Ann Arbor News wasn’t covering. Today, exhaustive summaries of Ann Arbor’s Public Market Advisory Commission, Public Art Commission and Downtown Development Authority meetings are the Chronicle’s bread and butter, filling almost half its editorial time.

7. Two sets of eyes on every full story. A 5,000-word meeting story might take six hours to write and two to edit, Morgan said.

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Another example of poor reporting

Posted on October 9, 2009 by jestevens

You know, I really try to focus on solutions, leaning forward into journalism’s transition, maybe even contributing to it a tiny bit. And then I see another example of poor reporting from a traditional media journalist covering emerging journalism. This week’s bad boy is Newsweek, which did another pat-the-poor-little-hyperlocal-blog-on-the-head-and-say-there-there article.

Check out this sentence, which appeared early in the article:Picture 5

Thousands of hyperlocal sites have now sprouted nationwide. But the model has yet to produce a seminal success story—and in fact there have been significant failures, including LoudonExtra, which shuttered last month.

And then several paragraphs later, this:

Web-news guru Jeff Jarvis, director of the interactive-journalism program at the City University of New York, has done an extensive study of hyper-local economics, and he’s optimistic. “The most startling and hopeful number I have found is this: some hyper-local bloggers, serving markets of about 50,000, are bringing in up to $200,000 a year in advertising,” he says.

Didja think to ask Jeff to identify the successful hyper-local bloggers?

And, one more thing while I’m on this rant, hyper-local is the most stupid term I’ve heard in a long time. I admit that I was guilty of using it for a while. Then, I put my thinking cap on and realized that journalists were using the term to describe people — often journalists — who were covering communities of 30,000 or 50,000. Ho. That’s a good-sized small town. Most of those small towns have honest-to-god newspapers. Do you call the reporters at those small dailies and weeklies hyper-local journalists? No, you call them journalists.

So, Johnnie L. Roberts and the folks at Newsweek who further poo-poohed the emergence of the new type of journalism by giving the headline PeytonPlace.com to the article, you blew it! You missed the real story! Check out WestSeattleBlog.com, QuincyNews.org, Baristanet.com, the new KansasCityKansan.com, and dozens of other local Web-based news organizations that are making it. And while you’re at it, check out the hundreds of topic-based niche news sites that are employing thousands of jurnos, and are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars.

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