Results matching “dan gillmor why”

Blogs of the past were considered a tool for amateurs and were casually dismissed by the media industry.  Today, everything has changed;  blogging has significantly altered the landscape of the news industry.  According to the survey, blogs have become a "global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream".

An astounding 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs.  They have become a vital part of reporting, "The lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site become less clear."

The shift in the attitude towards blogging has been explored in the first part of an annual report published by Technorati, entitled, "State of the Blogosphere."  Part I, "Who are the Bloggers?" attempts to unearth and analyze the trends and themes of blogging and bloggers.

Mark Potts, author of the Recovering Journalist blog, recently wrote about the ten changes he thinks newspapers need to make to thrive. What follows is an edited transcript of his post:

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product.
Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. ... And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

2. Local, local, LOCAL!
There are a zillion places to get national and international news, in real time. But newspapers are virtually the only source of truly local news. ... Local news is the last unique franchise that newspapers own, and too many newspapers don't seem to understand this. ... (Why do you think local community newspapers are thriving when big metro dailies are shedding circulation?)

3. If it's widely available elsewhere, don't waste time re-creating it.
Does every newspaper really need its own movie critic? A TV critic? ... Book reviews? Stories from Washington that the AP already has? ... the answer is unequivocably no. Those resources are just wastd.

4. Zero-base the news operation.
Pretend you're starting from scratch. Look at everything that's in the paper and ask tough questions about whether it's still necessary in an age when readers have multiple sources of news and information.

5. Get the readers involved.
As Dan Gillmor has elegantly argued, the audience knows more than news people do. Much more. Tap that knowledge by encouraging reader participation in as many ways as possible: contributing news and information about their communities, sending in photos and videos, commenting on everything. This can't be a token effort, and you absolutely cannot be scared or controlling about it: let the readers get involved at every opportunity. It will greatly improve the product and increase readership.

6. Lose the editorial page.
Unsigned editorials are a relic of a bygone era when newspaper barons exerted power in their community... Here's a thought: Replace it with reader opinions!

7. Expand the advertising base.
In any market, there are thousands of small advertisers that would never consider advertising in the big local newspaper. It's too expensive and covers too broad an area. But those advertisers want to reach the same people the newspaper does. Find a way to make this happen: more focused zoning, cheaper ads, ad rep pay structures that encourage selling to smaller advertisers. This is another area where community papers are running rings around big dailies.

8. Rethink the classifieds.
Craigslist, Monster.com and countless other news competitors have decimated the newspaper classifieds business. ... Anybody who's used craigslist knows how much more effective it is than paid newspaper classifieds. Look hard at your classifieds ... Yes, that may include shifting most of the classifieds online and giving them away for free, in order to keep the critical mass of classifieds that makes them useful.

9. Find new ways to serve advertisers.
What newspapers offer advertisers--display ads, classifieds--really hasn't changed much in a century. Look for ways to change that. Get into the Yellow Pages directory business online. Aggressively offer contextual advertising. Use idle newspaper delivery resources to help local businesses with their delivery needs. Use subscription lists to help businesses find customer leads. Explore interactive advertising forms that go way beyond boring banner ads. Offer data services to help businesses manage their inventories or sell things online. It's not enough to simply sell space in the paper or on the Web site. Help advertisers make their businesses more successful.

10. Take chances. Innovate. Be fearless about trying things--and killing things.
...A wise editor once said to me, there's virtually no history of research and development in the newspaper business, which is odd considering that covering the news is a daily act of research and development. Let's face it: The single biggest innovation in print newspaper journalism in the past decade or so is...Sudoku. Newspapers can and must do better than that to survive.

Source: Recovering Journalist

Google News cannot be compared to other news sites like Yahoo News or CNN.com, according to PaidContent.org.

Google News gathers content with the help of computers who scan news on the Web and does not contain any ads. Meanwhile, other news sites like CNN.com create licensed material that passes through editors.

Google News groups articles by subject and ranks article by importance based on factors like  authority of publisher or placement of article in site. NYT writes that Google "packages the results as a set of links, sending readers to the sites where the articles appear."

According to the New York Times, Google executives claim that traffic is not the primary aim but that Google News "helps the company produce better search results and helps users find news sources that they might not know about otherwise."

According to the NYT, the growth rate of Google News is only 10 %, compared to MSNBC.com's 42 %, which got the site 10.4 million in traffic.

Dan Gillmor, who is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Arizona State University School of Journalism, said that he is surprised "how little" Google News "evolved, at least on the surface", NYT wrote.

Marissa Meyer, vice president for Google search and user experience, said that Google News is one of "the most innovative" Google features and that its users actively employ the  Google search engine  and other services, NYT wrote.

She also mentioned that news results do emerge on the main Google search page, alongside adverts.  According to Meyer, "it directly feeds the main business."

Google News is sometimes seen as a competitor to other news providers, even if it brings traffic to the news site. Industry executives, according to NYT, think that because Google News links to a remote article, the readers are not likely to stay on the news site.

According to Braig Moffett, a Sanford C; Bernstein & Copany analyst, the Internet "made it possible to aggregate news cheaply". Consequently, news providers stopped charging for content. "Google may be doing more to accelerate this trend than anyone, but they are not doing it out of malice,"  Moffett said.

Tribune Co. owner Samuel Zell accused Google of stealing news stories for their own gains. In Europe, Belgian prosecutors said that Google News had "violated copyright laws" without asking for permission to link to the articles, NYT reported.

Google said that the company wishes "to help, not hurt, journalism", NYT wrote. Its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that the company has "a huge moral imperative" to aid news outlets in becoming more "successful online", NYT wrote.

Last year, several features were added, such as different country and language versions of Google News. The number of "duplicate articles" is being reduced, as "authoritative" and "original" news stories are being displayed, according to NYT.

There is also the chance to personalize Google News, by focusing on local news and mapping the news event sites on Google Earth. Users can also post comments and search quotes.

Different sides to the same story are being provided by the news search engine, helping to make people "wake up and think," said Krishna Bharat, the research scientist behind Google News. "That's what makes people news junkies," she added.

NYT wrote that even if there have been some innovations, Google News "still lacks many of the flashier features that have attracted users to more conventional news sites, including interactive graphics and video."

Analysts have begun to question automated products and their limitations. Mark Glaser, PBS MediaShift editor said, "there is only so far you can go with an algorithm" because , "in the long run, people want a human touch."

Source: PaidContent.org, New York Times

See Also:

8 efficient and visual ways to present your online news
How to maximize your site's visiility in Google search ranking

The Editors Weblog is running a series of exclusive interviews about the future of journalism with top editors at leading newspapers around the world. Here is the latest installment with  Emily Bell, Editor-in-Chief of guardian.co.uk in the UK.

View all the interviews in this series here. (including The New York Times, Financial Times, Fairfax Media...)


Questions: "News, journalism, newspapers: same past, different futures?"

- How long do you think you will define your company as a newspaper company or a print company?

We're not doing that already. We changed our names last year from Guardian Newspapers Limited to Guardian News and Media, so we're moving away from defining ourselves as a newspaper company.
But we are still news. We are news-oriented, we are a news media company.

- At this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, a panel of futurists claimed that print newspapers wouldn't exist by 2014. To what extent do you agree with this?

I 100% disagree with that statement. 2014 is so close, of course there will still be print newspapers; it is ridiculous to suggest that. Will there be fewer print newspapers in 2014 in certain parts of Western Europe, the US, etc? Yes, most definitely.

But clearly the futurists in Davos haven't looked at newspaper markets in emerging economies like India, etc. where print products are proliferating. They are increasing faster, in basic circulation and number of titles, than they are declining in markets with more mature print readerships. It's a sweeping and very narrow generalization, which is wrong.

We will definitely have a printed product in 2014. If you said 2024 or 2034, who knows, I would say that's far too far away to guess, and it's possible not. Don't forget Arthur Sulzberger said: "I can conceive of a time when we will no longer produce the print paper." Whether he retracted it or not, it's clearly crossed his mind.

Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief here, said he could foresee a time when we will be mainly a digital company and that we don't have a printed product. He actually said that the last printed presses that we bought would be the last ones that would ever be bought.

- In journalism's multi-centennial history, do you view the emergence of digital journalism as part of the continuity, or as a complete breakaway with previous forms of journalism?

It's a complete break. Not so much what happened with the advent of the Internet, but much more what's happened with various programming protocols since, what you would know as Web 2.0, which is the ability to allow the uploading of information by the local generation.

Flickr, blogs, etc. have completely changed the game, because it means all matter of information is exposed and is available to be manipulated, uploaded, reported on, etc. by a whole set of people who are no longer in control of a distribution bottleneck. Actually, what we were doing ten years ago was exploiting a Web publishing bottleneck, which was that we had the money to have the server space, the rack space, the designers - anybody can do that now.

That's completely different, it's not just another slight development of an existing cycle.

- Do you believe in the increasingly active role of the user in the news process, and is it a threat or an opportunity for professional journalists?

Yes, the participation of users in news is inevitable. It is growing and is welcomed. It is a massive opportunity for professional journalists to enhance what they do. The closer you are, the more authentic you are, and the more knowledgeable you can be, then the more purchase you have with the community that will come to you, tell you things and point to your work in certain areas.
I think if you don't have that, in the future as a journalist, you probably don't have much of a future.

'Threat' is a good thing. It's not so much a threat. Now you've got the news event itself, and an immediate set of breaking news competitors like wire services, the BBC, or SkyNews in the UK.
There's another band of capability roundup, people who are actually experts in the kind of events that are happening and who bring knowledge and insight and can communicate near the professionals - the professionals' job is (still) to communicate the stories and make them relevant and understandable. I don't think that's going away.

But what's happening is that there are now other people who can answer who might not be professional journalists - they might be professionals working in the world that you're writing about. It's Dan Gillmor's phrase, "There's always someone better placed in the story than yourself."
If I'm a media journalist writing about what's going on at the BBC... somebody who's inside the BBC, who's not part of their press operations, could be writing with more authenticity, because I can only ever have the view of the outsider.

However, the person who's inside the BBC might not really have the requisites and right perspective to be able to draw the conclusions that perhaps an outsider might have. So I think there's some kind of a blend of insights and knowledge which skillful and professional journalists ought to be able to meld together.

The threat is journalists not being good enough at that. I think it's entirely healthy that there are specialist bloggers who are pushing journalists to be better at what they do.

- Do you consider the Golden Age of investigative journalism is already past, or just beginning?

I think it's going through a difficult transitory period. The funding now available for people to concentrate for long periods of time on single subject stories, which may or may not come to fruition, has been greatly undermined by the restructuring of professional media.

When I see institutes in the US that are funded specially for investigative journalism, those things are slightly depressing. The idea that news media can't sustain expensive investigative journalism is disappointing.

But it's not all over, there's a vacuum at the moment around serious disclosure. There are not as many (investigative) stories gaining traction, but I think in the future the tools are all there. One of the things that electronic media does is make it harder to hold onto an exclusive, because bits and pieces of the story tend to emerge from all sorts of different sources (ie: the Enron story initially broken by a Time journalist).

Once bits of the story were out there, it gathers momentum much quicker than it used to. So the value of the investigative story, as in keeping it as a brand-defining element, becomes harder and therefore a lot of businesses tend to say, "It's hard for us to keep control of the story, it's even more expensive to dig out, therefore why don't we step down our investment in it."

But there are organizations like ourselves and others such as The New York Times that are absolutely committed to making sure that doesn't happen.

View the other interviews in the Future of Journalism series here.

Source: Emily Bell, editor-in-chief, guardian.co.uk

Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post examines Faye Anderson, a prominent citizen journalist, in order to examine citizen journalism, what exactly it is, the credibility issue, and where citizen journalism stands in the future.

The Society of Newspaper Designs and IFRA recently organized three days of citizen journalism workshops in Kuala Lumpur, with participants arriving from across Central and Southeast Asia.  Speakers, including Steve Yelvington, Robb Montgomery, and Kevin Anderson highlighted the growing trend of citizen media and its potential for improving mainstream media.

“Journalists and traditional news organizations need to recognise that they don’t know everything,” said Dan Gillmor, a citizen journalism “guru”, speaking at the New Media Knowledge conference in London on Wednesday; the point made by Gillmor being that news sites have to become comfortable with sending their readers to other sources. 

As newspapers battle with falling print circulation and ad revenues, Boston Globe reporter Dan Kennedy says that the solution for the Globe and others could be in finding a new business model to escape the profit demands of Wall Street – perhaps going non-profit.

At the 6th annual Ifra International Newsroom Summit, representatives from two of 2006’s most closely watched news organizations presented the conference with the trials and tribulations of their respective newsroom integration processes. Will Lewis gave the anxious audience a peek into the Daily Telegraph’s new newsroom and Michael Maness from Gannett detailed his organization’s dive into hyper-local "Information Centers."

The Knight Citizen News Network (KCNN) launched today. It is a free web portal designed to help citizens and journalists learn how to create and operate community news websites.

In the Newsroom Barometer, three questions revolved around editors’ views about the new challenges and opportunities for newspapers that have emerged with new forms of journalism, such as free papers, citizen journalism and online news. Far from resenting these forms, senior news executives embraced them.

The Politico is the new, multimedia, Capitol Hill, political news title. The Editors Weblog spoke to executive editor Jim Vandehei. He describes Politico’s multi-platform structure, and how it could be a working model for newspapers in the future, which he foresees as being both niche and expertise-backed.

Editor & Publisher’s Steve Outing collected a series of opinions from newspaper industry specialists, trying to figure out theoretically and practically where newspapers are going, and how to get there.