Results matching “us the dying ne”

The New York Times was the Daily Show's latest victim.  Jason Jones took a tour around the NYT's offices to understand, "why the last of a dying breed prefer aged news to real news".   

The skit tried to paint the NYT as a 'creaky old rag'- the old school news provision of stories printed the day after the events happen, pitiful revenues due to declining circulation and advertisement revenues, now redundant in the face of rapid fire, twenty-four-seven online news services and competing classified websites.

Whilst newspapers worry about falling circulation and cable news network viewers are dropping like flies, National Public Radio (NPR) is doing just fine. NPR's has retained its dazzling ratings and has not seen its 'listenership' decrease. In fact, NPR has been able to keep the number of listeners on the rise every year for the past nine years. This past March, NPR revealed that it had an astounding 23.6 million listeners tuning in every week by the end of 2008.

So, what is so special about NPR that makes it seemingly immune to the financial crisis that has caused some newspapers to file for bankruptcy or disappear all together? In an article written by Josh Catone for Mashable.com, a social media website guide, Catone says NPR has "a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape."

The British based newspaper The Guardian is being sued by the Iraqi national intelligence, the paper reported today.  The intelligence service (INIS) has accused the Guardian of defamation over a story published last April, which suggested that Nouri al-Maliki's government was becoming increasingly autocratic.

The article was written by correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, and was based upon interviews with three anonymous members of the INIS, who maintained that certain factors in Maliki's regime were akin to those of a dictatorship.

Last Monday, a little over halfway into the 62nd Annual Cannes Film Festival, The American Pavilion hosted a panel discussion entitled "It's a Mad, New Media World." The six panelists in attendance were John Horn of The Los Angeles Times, James Rocchi of MSN Movies, Anne Thompson of ThompsonOnHollywood, Karina Longworth of SpoutBlog, and Sharon Waxman of The Wrap. Eugene Hernandez from IndieWIRE acted as the mediator.
 
The subject under discussion was the state of new media and its consequences for print media. Horn from the LA Times boldly asserts his opinion that trade magazines will solely and can only exist online by the end of this year. He sounds astonished when pondering how trade magazines can stay afloat as a print platform. Hernandez declared Horn to be the most powerful journalist on the panel. Hernandez credits Horn with this distinction thanks to the idea that newspapers like the LA Times, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal represent a brand.

London Mayor, Boris Johnson, has publicly criticised the press for its coverage of the G20 summit earlier this month, the Guardian has reported. Speaking to Jon Gaunt on Sun Talk radio, Johnson expressed concern over sections of the media which had "engaged in a very unbalanced orgy of cop bashing."

Many of the country's national newspapers and related websites have dedicated a significant amount of print and digital space to reporting police manhandling of newspaper vendor, Ian Tomlinson, who died after an unexpected encounter with the police. Since a Guardian video emerged demonstrating what appear to be unprovoked officers shoving Tomlinson on the ground, the story has dominated headlines, with the Metropolitan Police on the receiving end of harsh criticism.

Last week, gay publication Genre magazine closed after more than 15 years as a monthly lifestyle magazine. Queerty recently published an article about what direction "gay media" is going in. There is a tone of concern as many gay publications closed within the last year and continue to face financial problems.

Other papers that have closed are The New England Blade and Windy City Times. Some of them have reduced staff and cut back on publication frequency. The Advocate is shifting from twice a month to once a month. 

Citizen journalism continues to pop up in different places around the Internet; websites like the BBC World Service "Your Story" project, Spot.Us and blogging in general have all contributed to the fast growth of the concept. Recently Daniel Victor, a reporter with The Patriot-News in Pennsylvania, has turned to his readers for story ideas, reported Journalism.co.uk.

The project is called Central PA NewsVote and is similar to Spot.Us in that citizens are invited to pitch story ideas online. Readers can post their ideas on the blog, which will later be voted on and ranked. Predictably, the story with the most votes is the one that runs.

In response to Hearst Corporation's threats to sell the San Francisco Chronicle, House Speaker and San Francisco representative Nancy Pelosi urged the U.S. Justice Department to consider changing media ownership and anti-trust rules to save the newspaper. She has also arranged a hearing for the House Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy on the survival of newspapers.

Since Hearst announced its intention in February to sell the Chronicle unless it could make cost reductions, the company has been negotiating cutbacks with unions. The California Media Workers Guild, the Chronicle's largest union, has already made concessions, including laying off 150 employees, and Hearst continues negotiations with labor union the Teamsters. Hearst has not yet reached a decision to sell, but under present antitrust definitions, it will be difficult for Hearst to sell the paper to its prospective buyer MediaNews, which owns almost every daily newspaper in the Bay Area.

It has been nearly three weeks since the last ever edition of the Rocky Mountain News, and yesterday came the announcement that former staff are set to launch an online news publication on May 4th - provided they get 50,000 subscriptions before April 23rd. InDenverTimes.com is backed by three local entrepreneurs, Brad Gray, Kevin Preblud and Benjamin Ray. The three would give no details on how much they have invested in the venture, although Ray explained that the majority of the budget would be used on the staff, which will consist of 30 former News writers, editors and a cartoonist.

In Denver Times co-founder Preblud believes that "Great journalism can still be good business," and despite the three backers explaining that they had not considered buying the news, they said that they couldn't imagine the newspaper dying completely. Currently, many of the future In Denver Times employees are contributing to I Want My Rocky, which was started by Rocky staff members after Scripps announced its intention to sell the publication in December. Steve Foster, one of the I Want My Rocky contributors, and co-founder of Inside the Rockies will run the site. The news came on the same day that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer finally confirmed its online-only future, and joins a wealth of other online start-up ventures following newspaper job cuts and closures.

Source: Associated Press

At the Emerging Technologies conference this week, Nick Bilton, New York Times design integration editor and user interface specialist, spoke about the Times' latest projects and technological innovations. Though the publication continues efforts to preserve its printed paper despite financial troubles, the R&D lab also works to launch the Times into the forefront of digital journalism. Digital Media reporter Daniel Terdiman describes the new technologies mentioned by Bilton, some of which are only in the beginning stages of research but others that could be implemented in the near future.

This week in the Christian Science Monitor Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history and education at New York University, proposes a remedy for the "demise" of the newspaper. Because of declining circulation and advertising revenues, Zimmerman says that gathering news has become too expensive, forcing newspapers to make staff cuts and leading to "less real reporting." As a solution, he suggests that university professors take over newspaper reporting free of charge.

Hearkening back to a hundred years ago when leading social science and humanities academics wrote for the popular press, Zimmerman maintains that professors should, once again, share their expertise with the layperson to save the newspaper. Most professors are not paid for their work in academic journals now, he asserts, and if research universities would provide incentives, many professors would consider writing for free. Though many do not have experience in journalistic writing, they will learn, he maintains, because professors "have a lot to teach, too, about nearly every subject that a paper might cover."

With many of the world's newspapers faced with plummeting circulation figures, the industry in Japan is somewhat of an anomaly.  The five big national dailies have only seen their readership slip by 3.2% in the past decade, a stark contrast to the parallel figure in the US, which sits at 15%.  Currently, it is thought that the high population of elderly people in Japan is keeping the readership figures up.

However, Japanese newspapers are not taking this situation for granted. "I am in a dying industry," said Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper.  "Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly."  Whilst elsewhere the survival of print seems very much focused on the innovation of individual publications, in Japan three of the big dailies are members of the Nikkei-Asahi-Yomiuri Internet Business Partnership, and have teamed up to create an iPhone application.  It is interesting to speculate on where the UK and US newspapers would be now, had they had the opportunity to create such alliances before crisis hit.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Extraordinarily successful Twitter feed The Media is Dying now has a rival: Media is Thriving, created by marketing agency The Barbarian Group, based in New York. The new feed offers quick, positive updates about developments in the industry, in contrast to The Media is Dying, which as the name suggests, charts job cuts, closures and financial losses.

The Media is Dying had 10,838 followers at the time of publication, suggesting that people enjoy hearing its negative updates. It also has an element of mystery to it as the actual creators of the feed have kept their identities secret. It has become a generally reputable source, though recently received a lot of attention for incorrectly reporting that Fox News was cancelling its "Red Eye" slot.

Since the creation of Media is Thriving on January 28, just over 803 people have chosen to follow it, so there must be many out there who want to hear the good news as well. Another positive voice for the industry was created yesterday by a group of newspaper executives: the Newspaper Project, which aims to fight back against the popular belief that newspapers are in crisis and are no longer necessary. And even The Media is Dying has stepped away from its entirely negative stance and created a new feed, The Media is Hiring, to help laid off employees find new work.

Source: New York Times

There is no such thing as a free meal. Or is there?

Media pundits around the world have been discussing the idea for newspapers to go completely digital. Newspapers are having to restructure newsrooms and traditional ideas to adapt to digital times, in an attempt to stay in the race as well as survive the economic crisis. In the face of all this, does charging for news online make sense? Can newspapers survive by putting all their content on the web and making people pay for it? Garry Storch, editor and administrator of ourblook.com believes so.

The media trend of the moment is undoubtedly Twitter.  Praised for its ability to break news first (the Hudson plane crash for example), and for it's on the ground reporting (take the Gaza conflict), Twitter is increasingly being valued as a genuine news source.  

'The Media Is Dying' Twitter feed started as a small private thread by an anonymous PR employee to keep track of industry news.  But the success of the feed was such that it is now a public feed with an extra seven industry volunteers keeping it up to date.

But what happens when Twitter gets it wrong?  The Media Is Dying reported last Thursday that Fox News would be cancelling 'Red Eye', which is their late night comedy/news slot.  Fox News denied the story, and said that Red Eye is not going anywhere.

Taking on Independent columnist Johann Hari, Media Guardian's Roy Greenslade finds that the "newspapers-versus-bloggers argument is entirely false," and that there is a future for the industry with the involvement of citizen journalists.

Hari uses the financial state of the industry, following the bankruptcy of the Tribune Co. and the arrival of the Internet, to form a new paradox: "more people are reading quality newspapers than ever before," he writes, and yet, "newspapers are dying."  The reason for this is, Hari says, because "we don't just want it all, we want it free."

There will be an "aching hole where newsgathering used to be," Hari writes, because the leftover sources of news--online sources, such as bloggers--don't have the resources necessary to "make sense of the world."

Greenslade disputes the "us versus them" attitude that many professional journalists take toward bloggers and other citizen journalists.  The future of journalism, Greenslade writes, lies in "participation" between the professionals and citizens.

Traditional newspaper owners are "clinging desperately to an outmoded model," and journalists are following suit, Greenslade writes.  The future of news organizations will be "very different," but there need not be a "hole" if traditional sources fail.  

"We should be finding ways to fill it," Greenslade concludes, building business models to provide resources for the future.

Source: Media Guardian

Following the trend of blog series from Media Bistro, Gawker and the Poynter Institute which provide an overview of goings-on in the media industry, Journalism.co.uk is launching a web page that aggregates articles, videos and images tracking job cuts across the industry.

The New York Times is also reporting a Twitter feed, The Media Is Dying, which documents "media hirings and firings in one-sentence bursts of text," verifying most posts and labeling others as "rumors."

The Journalism.co.uk page uses Dipity to plot journalism job losses since April 2008, "across all media and around the world," and invites updates and commentary from users.  Updates are posted on Twitter via the RSS feed.

The page was launched following a Deloitte report on the bleak outlook for newspapers, which predicts that one out every 10 publications will reduce print frequency, go entirely online or shut down in 2009.

Source:  Journalism.co.uk, EJC and New York Times

Media analyst Lauren Rich Fine believes that newspapers can avoid "dying a painful death" by liquidating their assets and being reclassified as not-for-profits.

According to Fine, even though "converting to a not-for-profit won't improve the financials, it would allow the paper to ask for philanthropic support, not unlike public radio or television stations." 

Journalist Michael Smerconish describes the shortage of hard news and investigative journalism as leaving the always-expanding number of news outlets, from 24-hour cable networks and blogs, "scrambling for anything they can parrot to a hungry audience."

According to the Washington Post the Japanese newspaper industry is doing well for now, but doomed in the future because of its aging population and the fact that Japan's youth do not read newspapers.  In addition, Japan's population is declining; in 50 years the government estimates that Japan will have one-third the population of its 127 million today.

Although the end of newspapers in Japan is in sight, Japan's newspapers are doing very well despite all odds.  They have avoided large-scale layoffs and have retained readership figures. 

FollowTheMedia.com's Philip Stone suggests that it media outlets may benefit from holding back web content either by waiting until after it is published or broadcast in traditional media or making people pay for "the really 'good' stuff". In response, The Guardian's Roy Greenslade thinks that Stone has "fallen into the that trap of seeing journalism only in business terms", assuming that unless news get advertising revenue and make a profit, there is no "commercial sense" to diffuse them.

 

Eric Beecher, former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, says that Australian politicians have to support the idea that journalism may be vital to a democracy, while pointing out that quality journalism risks dying out.

"We can cherrypick. We can do the commentary and a little bit of investigative journalism and that kind of thing, but I can't see a business model for independent journalism funding hundreds of journalists to do the bigger things that you have to do to fulfil the democratic mission," said Beecher.

According to The Australian, Fairfax Media's recent decision to cut 5% or 550 workers from papers like The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age may "blow a hole" in Australia's traditional quality media that new online media like blog sites would not be able to fill since the number of staff employed at such outlets may be about 10 times smaller than at traditional ones.

Beecher thinks that Fairfax is sending a message that its duty is to shareholders and "not to maintaining quality journalism and its place as the fourth estate".

Rupert Murdoch's News Limited remains as the "sole" commercial source of serious journalism, The Australian writes. The future holds "celebrity-driven pap" as paper and magazine content, for which advertisers are moving to the Internet, according to Beecher.

Source: The Australian

In his Digital Deliverance blog, Vin Crosbie outlines his arguments, predicting that numerous US newspapers would go out of business in the future because print is dying, with regional papers folding in first, and that the industry will go through a "gray age."

Advertisers aren't the "primary customers" of papers. Readers are the "root of the business", because readers appeal to advertisers who will in turn bring profits to newspapers.

Crosbie mentions that the declining newspaper industry isn't cyclical. The situation might not necessarily get better in the future, The Guardian blogger Roy Greenslade points out.

Britain's newspaper industry may reach the same tumultuous state as in the US, according to Greenslade.

Source: Guardian.co.uk

In a memo to his staff Mike Leary, Philadelphia Inquirer's managing editor, announced that the paper would now publish "signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews" online only after they have been published in print, but that the paper wouldn't stop publishing immediate breaking news online.

Bloggers may be the ones who have to adapt the most to the new policy, since they may work on content that may "end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first", according to the memo.

"What's long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print)," said Steve Outing in his blog, after calling the new policy "backward".

In his BuzzMachine blog, Jeff Jarvis criticized the editor's memo, saying that "even the slowest" in the "dying" newspaper industry would not do something like this.

"They know that the Internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future," said Jarvis.

On the other hand, citizen journalist Bill Dennis said, "By offering for free what their would-be competitors would have to offer for a fee, newspapers' free Web sites are an anti-competitive act."

Source: Poynter Romenesko, BuzzMachine, SteveOuting.com

"All the talk about 'saving newspapers' is focused on finding new business models to keep doing what they've always done," writes blogger Scott Karp. "Which is like GM looking for a new business model to sell the kinds of cars they made in the 50s and 60s. What the newspaper industry, if it is to survive as such, must find is a radical new value proposition for news -- something so audacious, so self-evidently valuable that, if they can find a way to deliver it, would lead to the rebirth of newspaper journalism."

And that, the premise that journalism needs a fundamentally new model, means betting the farm, innovating - not to try to be the competition, but to be something not yet imagined by the competition, and in the process, perhaps learning from another "dying" industry.    

"Jonathan Rausch's piece on GM's last ditch effort to transform itself by producing the world's first mainstream electric car (after it failed to do so in the 90s)," writes Karp. "Is a tale of do or die innovation that everyone in the newspaper industry -- and media generally -- must read."
 
General Motors, after languishing for years in Toyota's shadow, following the mishandling of the EV1, and repeated cases of over-promising and under-delivering, needed not to create their own Prius, but get out of the catch-up game and write the rules to a new game.

"When one of the world's mightiest corporations throws everything it's got at a project, and when it shreds its rule book in the process, the results are likely to be impressive," writes Rausch.

Karp argues the journalism industry should be asking these same questions, "How can newspaper companies surpass the competition? How can they be better than Google?... and then pursuing bold answers... Newspapers need to stop trying to save the old business or searching amorphously for new business models and instead figure out what needs are going unmet in the market for news -- and then be first in the market to deliver breakthrough solutions."

Perhaps the "GM lesson" is to not fear ourselves and the capabilities within our industry, but also not fear the competition. Innovate, and do so openly.
   
If they fail, they will fail publicly, painfully so, but it is only in letting go that fear of failure, that they allow themselves grow beyond the industry they were, into the industry they will become.

Source: Publishing 2.0