Results matching “what does the futur”

Much media coverage has been recently devoted to so-called 'content farms' such as Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com. The goal of these companies is to produce vast amounts of content on topics that readers have been searching for that will attract large numbers of readers, and they have been described at 'robotic' 'sweatshops' or 'factories' that produce work that critics insist is not journalism.

These content networks use an algorithm to study and analyse web searches and behaviour to identify what is popular and what gaps in coverage might exist, and it then commission their networks of freelancers to write on these topics. Demand Media, the most prolific, publishes its content on properties including eHow.com, LIVESTRONG.com and Cracked.com, among others.

Executive VP Steven Kydd described Demand's output as "service journalism, or sidebar content" in a speech at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in April, explaining that it does not hope to compare to serious investigative journalism. Demand Media freelancer Andria Krewson explained on ReadWriteWeb that "The stories are usually how-to pieces, often broken into steps. They're evergreen, designed to be as relevant in a year or two as they are now." She added, "You can tell by the assignment headlines that they're generated from search engine queries, and sometimes those search terms provide some amusement."

Demand Media publishes about 7,000 articles a day, and the company's chief revenue officer Joanne Bradford told AdAge that over 50 million unique visitors per day see Demand content on its top site eHow.com. She insisted that every article is vetted and fact-checked, with 1,000 copy editors. CMO Dave Panos told AdAge that each piece of content is touched by "11 qualified professionals."

As well as filling its own sites with content, Demand Media supplies articles for others, including USA Today's travel section. In April the Travel Tips section of the newspaper's site was launched with about 4,000 items from Demand Media's freelance writers. Demand Media supplies the content and sells keyword advertising, USA Today is selling display ad inventory and the two are splitting the revenue, AdAge reported at the time. USA Today travel journalists still produce more in-depth, expert articles, but these are supplemented by those provided by Demand. The Atlanta Journal Constitution also uses Demand Media, but only for a story a week.

Associated Content, which was acquired in May by Yahoo!, produces around 1,500 pieces of content a day. Articles from AC contributors, including (according to the AC blog) "compelling personal stories and expert insights" are appearing throughout the Yahoo! network of sites.

A less well-known site is Suite101, a publishing platform that manages to product 500 new pieces of content per day on niche topics, focusing on beginners articles on thousands of topics. According to ReadWriteWeb's Richard MacManus, who spoke to Suite101 CEO Peter Berger, it currently has 5,000 active writers and four different language sites, with 24 million unique vistors per month going to the English language site. Berger told ReadWriteWeb that he did not see Suite101 as a competitor to traditional journalism, but rather as competing with "non-fiction publishing." Its articles answer users' questions about practical matters in their lives, rather than providing them with news. 

Giving the audience what it wants, and fast

The existence and swift growth of such sites has provoked much debate about what they mean for the future of journalism. The first issue is that of giving the audience the content that it wants: the Internet has made this far easier to do, but is it something that news organisations should be considering? As Nieman Lab recently pointed out, in any other industry, offering the customer what they wanted this would be an approach that no one would question. But in the news industry, the idea that the editors know best has always prevailed. Providing news is a public service, and only trained professionals are capable of deciding what is most important.

This is undoubtedly a valid principle, and the experience that comes with working in the news industry makes an editor's opinion extremely valuable. However, at news organisations there have always been concessions to giving the audience what they want. For many, that is what sells papers, and editors are fully aware of the necessity to sell papers.

Online it has finally become possible to track what readers actually read. And with news being effectively sold in micro-form, even if not directly, there is clearly an enhanced motivation to give readers what they really want to read. Who knows how many articles a print newspaper buyer reads and how many they discard? Now that it is possible to tell what people are reading, is it surprising that publishers want to give them more of this?

Clearly, just spewing out stories about Lindsey Lohan because they get a lot of hits is not an editorially ethical decision. But as Nieman Lab's Laura McGann points out, what the public wants is not always junk. She highlighted a Pew Research Center study that showed that the public's interest in coverage of the Gulf oil leak remained relatively high even when the amount of coverage dropped significantly in early-mid July. The same study reported that many people believed that news organizations were giving too much coverage to stories about Lindsay Lohan and LeBron James, however. 

It is not just 'content farms' that have come under criticism for looking at what readers want to read. In a recent article about Yahoo's blog 'The Upshot,' the New York Times discussed how the top-down editorial model was being 'inverted,' with reporters looking at search statistics to help decide what to cover. As the NYT noted, the Yahoo blog is focused on news rather than the 'how-to' topics that Demand Media and others specialize in. Editors at the Upshot were clear however that the information from analyzing search data is supplementary and does not "lead Yahoo content."

The shifting relationship between content creation and SEO

A related concern, as recently highlighted by the Financial Times, is that Google's algorithm is beginning to have a significant effect on content that is produced. In the quest to attract large numbers of readers, content-creators are not only looking at what readers want but at what appears high in search engine results.

Obviously news organisations all use search engine optimization to a certain extent, and it makes sense that if you have good content you should make it easily findable by your audience. But ideally content should come first, and SEO after, and the concern is that SEO, in particular how to manipulate the Google algorithm, is being prioritized over the content itself.

Low-paid journalists = low-quality work?

Contributors to 'content farms' are paid a low price for each article, and the companies make it clear that this is not intended to be a full-time job, but something to supplement your income. The pay at Associated Content (for at least some writers) is based on page views - $1.50 for 1000 views - and at Demand Media it is around $15 an article, with copy editors receiving $3.50 per article. Evidently the fact that writers can work from home and in their own time must be taken into account, but this figure is still low.

The idea, as  explained in a Wired article by Daniel Roth in November 2009, is that rather than "trying to raise the market value of online content to match the cost of producing it -- perhaps an impossible proposition -- the secret is to cut costs until they match the market value." CEO Richard Rosenblatt clarified to Jay Rosen that this is part of an attempt to build "a sustainable business model"

The fear, as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington aptly put it, is that "anyone who spends their time and effort on their content is pushed out of business." Journalists will be paid less and less and journalistic quality will be forced down.

Despite staff's insistence that articles are fact-checked and edited, and the fact that writers are required to reference their sources, the general impression is that the quality of content at content farms is low, and the audience doesn't seem to mind that much.

But is this really "the end of hand crafted content," as TechCrunch concludes? Should professional journalists at established media outlets feel threatened by an excess of content on the Internet? Is it actually competing directly with what they do? The majority of content farms' content is not news-related, and those searching for news topics are unlikely to come across it. Everybody in the media industry is aware of the differences between hard news stories and the content farms' how-to pieces, making it doubtful that the latter will devalue the former. A critical eye on such developments is justified and indeed necessary, but how much of the concern is actually rational? Demand and others have found a hole in the market and they are seemingly successfully filling it, and news organisations should probably continue to focus on producing the best content they can.

A year ago, the Ann Arbor News stopped printing and AnnArbor.com took over. Ann Arbor, Michigan was the first American city to lose its only local daily, and at the time it was anticipated that it would be the first of many. A year later this does not seem to have been the case. Senior AnnArbor.com staff, Poynter and the Chicago Tribune took a look at AnnArbor.com's first year.

Going online only in Ann Arbor made sense to parent company Advance Publications because its residents have very high levels of broadband Internet access, as a university town. The site it launched was supposed to look different to other news sites, with a more 'social media' feel.

In a recent article, Michael Arrington, writing for TechCrunch, argues that journalists should openly express their opinions and biases, despite the longstanding idea that journalists should hide their political biases. This argument by Arrington comes on the heels of CNN's firing of Octavia Nasr because of a controversial tweet and the forced resignation of Helen Thomas because of her statements about Israel. "I think journalists have the right to express their opinions on the topics they cover," he writes. "More importantly, I think readers have a right to know what those opinions are."

The founding executive editor of Wired Magazine named it the Shirky Principle when Clay Shirky famously stated that "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."   Shirky is an avante-guarde thespian, a former CTO to numerous web design shops, a consultant to major media companies like News Corporation, Time Warner and Hearst) an NYU professor and renowned technology aficionado who says describes what he does simply as "work on the theory and practice of social media."  In a 5 July interview with The Guardian, Shirky comes out with his strongest arguments to-date opposing the paywall concept, suggesting, in no uncertain terms, that the paywall is immoral, nonviable and fundamentally counter to "the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness."

What is a newsroom? Offices, computer terminals, journalists, talent, an ambition to belong to the "Fourth Estate"? A bit of all of that, but particularly a collective intelligence that manages to produce quality information within a given time frame. This type of intelligence, founded on the gathering together of individual talents at a single location, is confronted today by a three-fold threat:

-    the crisis in the newspaper industry that is leading to job cuts,
-    technology that allows the creation of other forms of collective intelligence, e.g. in networks,
-    readers and users who contest the monopoly of power of the journalists and want to act as players in the information production process.

A certain type of newsroom has existed for the last two hundred years - from the beginning of the 19th century - but this model is dying before our very eyes and we are struggling to envisage what the newsroom in the year 2020 or 2030 will look like. In order to obtain a clearer picture, a distinction must be made between three phases in the design and organisation of newsrooms.

1) The pyramid model

It took Europe more than half a century to develop its newsroom model, from 1785, the founding date of the Daily Universal Register, forerunner of The Times of London, to the widespread availability of the "penny press" with The Daily Telegraph and Courier in 1855. It was during this period that there arose the distinction between the editor and editor-in-chief, the organisation of the newsroom into desks and the introduction of the practice of holding editorial meetings in the morning (to decide the content of the following day's paper) and in the evening (to put together its front page).

The pyramid information model also emerged from this period, with the printers in the basement, the linotype operators and advertising on the ground floor, the desks on the various floors and the management offices at the top. This is how the newsroom of the New York Inquirer was depicted in the Orson Wells film Citizen Kane, and is a good reflection of the power set-up at a classical newspaper: everything begins and ends with the chief editor, there is no other authority and the news production cycle is vertical between the base and the summit.

This model has lasted nearly two hundred years and has been implemented all over the world.

2) The centralised production model

The pyramid model was not contested up to the beginning of this millennium, but it gradually began to disappear with the emergence of a convergent newsroom with responsibility for the Internet as well as new information distribution platforms.

Thus the major buzzword of the new millenium is "convergence." The challenge is to integrate two newsrooms that have little in common: different readers, different working rhythms, different news selection criteria, etc. And the "hub and spokes" model that prevailed at the beginning of the 21st century features, symbolically, the chief editors together in the middle and all the desks arranged on the periphery. Two elements differ radically from the pyramid model: firstly, the idea that all journalists work (officially) for all platforms with a proximity between traditional journalists and new media journalists; secondly, the obligation for the desk heads to "play together" and to work to multiple deadlines throughout the day.

Often in this environment, a centralised and productivist model emerges, as at The Daily Telegraph in 2005. Centralised, as it does not really break with the pyramid model of the 19th century: you find the same desks (foreign politics, social affairs, etc.) and the same philosophy of content production. Productivist, as all integration policies have led to job cuts, from 12 to 20% of the payroll. The unspoken understanding among all newspaper groups is that "modern" equates to "staff reductions." This in itself is not reprehensible, as new content management systems permit significantly increased productivity.

Nevertheless, this model remains ambivalent. On the one hand, it largely resolves the question of integrating two newsrooms and two news production methods. On the other hand, it remains attached to the traditional model of collective intelligence that dictates assembling of hundreds of journalists in one place. It is exactly this "hub and spokes" model that is facing upheaval, making it the last classical one rather than the first of a new generation.

3) The virtual newsroom in 2015

Though we are not there yet, all the technological, human and conceptual elements are in place to create the new form of collective intelligence that will continue to call itself the "newsroom", but will be much more digitally-oriented than today.

Four changes to watch:

A - It will no longer be necessary to assemble the content-generating reporters in a single location, i.e. those who produce the articles, postings, videos, contents. Mobile technologies will allow them to spend nearly 100% of their time in the field and to format and distribute content from their computer or mobile phone. Likewise, consulting with their section heads or the morning conference with their colleagues can be carried out virtually.

The era of the "virtual newsroom" will arrive on the day when the journalist's phone will be his office.

B - The second revolution is already under way. This concerns an end to solely relying on material produced by journalists. Whereas in the past, a good article used to be one written by a member of the editorial team, in the future a good article will be closer to a wiki (collaborative work) because it will integrate elements beyond the work of one journalist: alerts, comments, multimedia elements, etc.

This development will mark the emergence of working in a network together with "readers-content producers". It will empty the newsrooms a bit more because all these casual contributors will obviously not be physically present in the newsroom. But it will be necessary to have a dedicated professional team to carry out fact-checking.

C - Who will be left in the slimmed-down newsroom of 2015? The senior editorial staff of course, but also all those not involved in purely journalistic input. Let us call this new category "dispatching and repackaging journalists" - those responsible for finishing and distributing the information. Such journalists do not generate the information, but they make it available on all the platforms operated by their media group. Their creative input will focus mainly on developing applications for the tablet computers and e-readers that are re-inventing the "daily me" or the personalised newspaper. This category of journalists will represent between one third and half of the editorial staff.

D - The fourth probable development will affect the location of the video studio in the newsroom: today - except at the Financial Times in London - it is situated in a corner and regarded as a nice-to-have, but minor element in the information production process. Tomorrow, the widespread availability of high-speed Internet and smartphones will make it a central and unifying element in a newsroom. Some newspaper organisations will become producers of video material or animated images (Flash) and distance themselves from the production of written material, both for the web and for paper.

In fact, this virtual newsroom exists perhaps already on a small scale, for example at the Huffington Post. This will be the subject of our discussion on 7 October at the 17th World Editors Forum in Hamburg , Germany (see www.wefhamburg2010.com).

GoogleNews, which functions primarily through algorithms, recently ran a test where it used live human editors to collect news stories, reports PaidContent. This marks a big step for GoogleNews, which at its launch in 2002 bragged "this page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors." Google maintains that the test was merely an experiment and that the company does not at the moment plan to make human editors a permanent part of the company. Moreover, "editors picks" comes amidst re-design rumors concerning Google. Yet, PaidContent notes, it is important to remember that 3 years ago Google made another move away from automatic aggregation, which was pulled last summer.

The CEO of AOL recently said that he hopes his company will be the "world's largest producer of high quality content," reports Business Insider. Tim Armstrong, AOL's CEO, reported during an Internet Week panel that he hopes for AOL to hire hundreds more journalists in his pursuit to adapt journalists to changing technologies. He said he wants to fix the "technologically challenged" aspect of journalism where journalists are not included in the latest technological updates. In particular, Armstrong hopes to target content systems in the same way that ads have been targeted. As moderator John Battelle said: "AOL is reengineering journalism using tech, regional community and interest."

In light of Yahoo's recent acquisition of Associated Content, Matt Heist, CEO of High Gear Media, offers advice to how media providers like Associated Content should progress into the future. On the one hand, Heist says, there are "premium content" providers like Yahoo and AOL that provide "high-end sales appeal." On the other, there are "pro-am" media sources, like Associated Content and AOL's Seed, which reap much of their news from non-journalistic sources. Heist believes that media sources like Associated Content have a great deal of promise, but will need to make a few changes in order to fully realize their potential in the future.

In recent news, the Washington Post had decided to expand its local website and rename it PostLocal.com. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, Post Local editor, hopes to "use the expertise of Post reporters to provide readers with credible reporting and up-to-date information that affects their daily lives." To do so, the Post has gathered a group of independent bloggers who will report on local issues. The Post further hopes to engage local interest by offering a print section of their newspaper devoted to local reactions and ideas.

Android phones have outsold the iPhone in the US for the first time in the first quarter of the year, the Guardian and others reported, just as the New York Times released its first Android app. According to market research by the NPD Group, mobile phones using Google's Android operating system are now the second most sold smartphone category, behind the BlackBerry, from Research in Motion.

The research concluded that BlackBerry devices made up 36% of the smartphone market, followed by Android with a 28% share and Apple's iPhone with 21%. Several different phone manufacturers, including HTC, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, have adopted the Android OS. 

Not fifteen years ago, if a news consumer wanted to get in touch with a reporter or the rest of the community concerning an article in the paper, he or she would put pen to paper and send off a letter to the editor's desk.  That letter would be screened by the editor of the newspaper and, most likely, thrown into a trash bin never to find a place on the op-ed page.  But with the advent and increasing popularity of newspaper websites, any person can comment on just about any article, and many can do it with little thought, moderation or the need to identify themselves.

Such unfettered commenting has led to what William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia University's journalism school, called a "brawl."

"A lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl, with most of the participants having blood-alcohol levels of 0.10 or higher," he said to the New York Times.

These threads run hundreds of comments long and often stray off-topic or turn nasty.  Though most comment threads are equipped with the option for users to flag questionable content, as the discussion loses direction, offensive comments can slip through the cracks.  In response to out of control comment threads, newspapers have gone so far as to shut down commenting capacity until they were able to clean up the threads. 

In his Buzz Machine blog, Jeff Jarvis recently discussed the possibility how the production and "culture" of journalism would shift if it were produced in a cloud. Producing news in the "cloud" is based on the idea that journalists can essentially create news without a newsroom, instead relying on the tools available online. Jarvis believes that services like MoveableType/WordPress, Twitter, Flickr, Goolge Docs, etc can be used to produce news cheaply and with greater depth than traditional print journalism.

There is no denying the fact that 2010 was a dicey year for many industries, not least for traditional print media. But if the latest media news from New Zealand is anything to go by, there is good reason for newspapers to keep hope, amidst cries from various directions that print is dead.

Michael Muir, publisher and president of New Zealand's Newspaper Publishers' Association stated that: "Our circulations and readerships are largely stable, advertising is picking up again and we are on the verge of exciting new media developments", leading various media commentators to make the conclusion that print is potentially on the rebound.

Damon Kiesow of Poynter Online recently revealed that a deal has been struck between the Financial Times and the geo-based social networking site Foursquare. The website recently received attention after establishing partnerships with several major newspapers and media outlets.

Hyperlocal news blogs and websites have become an emerging trend and a potential moneymaker for struggling newspapers, but one man in Texas is making hyperlocal print publications profitable.  John P. Garrett, owner and founder of a monthly hyperlocal newspaper with eight local editions in the Austin, Texas area called Community Impact Newspaper, has managed to turn a profit since the foundation of his newspaper and thinks he's found the business plan to make it work.

 "We write a lot about local government, local development, city business," he said to Nieman Journalism Lab's Laura Gannett. "In the greater Austin area, there's probably ten different cities. We're the only news organization that has a reporter at every city council meeting."

With the much-anticipated U.S. launch of the iPad coming this Saturday, media executives everywhere are waiting with bated breath for the verdict: Will the iPad save news media? No one's sure yet, but tech columnists across the web who managed to get their hands on advance releases of Apple's tablet computer gave generally gushing reviews of the innovative product, ensuring that consumers will be lining up on Saturday to snap up the small stock of iPads delivered to Apple stores and Best Buy.

At the time of its release on Saturday, users will be able to access over 1,000 apps made specifically for the iPad, with 60,000 books in Apple's e-book store.  Among those apps are options from numerous newspapers and magazines, all selling their products with a range of payment plans.  

The Financial Times is offering a free trial of its application sponsored by watchmaker Hublot, and Bloomberg News' app will also be free.  Reuters is offering an app which BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin claims is a "free app in which video is, again, a seamless delight."

Sree Sreenivasan, a contributing editor to NYC's local news site, DNAinfo, recently informed readers about the insights he gleaned from a week of vacation in which he involuntarily went without access to any sort of daily print publications. Sreenivasan's recent bout of "withdrawal," as he labeled it, may come as a surprise to some particularly considering his area of expertise.

Not only does Sreenivasan work as DNAinfo's "technology expert" responsible for "explaining trends and demystifying...technology," and in 2009 he was featured in AdAge as among "one of 25 media people to follow on Twitter." One would think such a highly recognized figure in the digital world might have abandoned newspapers the moment news became widely accessible on smart phones?

John Yemma, the editor of The Christian Science Monitor, had some strong words for newspaper websites in an article he wrote for PaidContent: neither paywalls nor multimedia content will save you.

Although Yemma believes that content is king, no news organization has formulated an appropriate response to the problem of losing the value of content on the Internet. Erecting paywalls, like the ones News Corp and the New York Times will in the near future, is just like "sandbagging the tops of levies on the Mississipi," but they are not the answer. Paywalls can't hold the flood back, and the "Internet flood never recedes."

With iPad shipments already en route and plans for Sunday's rollout of the product in high gear, publishers are publicizing their iPad applications at an exponential rate.

Surprisingly, some publications that require subscriptions for their online content will be offering their iPad apps for free during a short trial period.  The Financial Times, known for its lucrative online paywall, is hoping that a three-month free trial period will hook users to its iPad version.

Others have already released plans for subscription-only versions and some, like the iPad edition of the Wall Street Journal, will cost more than their print companion.  The WSJ is charging 67 percent more for the iPad alone than a joint subscription to the online and print version

With much pessimism in journalism, from decreased advertising income and a lack of model for online publishing, the news media is in crisis.

But, does that mean news is over?

Not exactly, according to George Brock, former president of the World Editors Forum, current board member of WEF, and professor and head of Journalism at City University London, who recently gave an inaugural lecture on March 17 at City University on where journalism is right now and where it's heading.

His lecture not only explains what developments have led to the current state of media, but what to do to ensure news media survival "for they are in need of help."

The International Press Association, an organization representing all foreign reporters stationed in Belgium, is hosting a meeting today to discuss employment prospects for journalists reporting in Brussels.

The meeting, entitled "What does the future hold for Brussels-based journalists?" will attempt to address the exodus of much of the European Union press corps over the past five years and the diminishing presence of foreign press in Brussels.  According to a press release, the API "considers an urgent taking stock and a broad debate are imperative."  The group hopes to address three main concerns:

Journalism Online's e-commerce service for publishers, Press+, has begun to release more details about the online payment system that allows publishers to implement a variety of payment methods for their digital content, according to eMedia Vitals.

Gordon Crovitz, a Journalism Online co-founder and a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, spoke to eMedia Vitals about the company's progress and about the online payment form that early adopters are leaning towards: a metered, segmented option.

Journalists should be willing to fight for strong freedom of information and open records laws, said the president of the Associated Press in a speech on Friday.

Speaking at the Kentucky Press Association, AP president Tom Curley stressed the importance of these laws as part of the "journalistic tool kit" to help reporters access information in the public interest.

"It's vital," he said. "A strong FOIA in the hands of strong journalists with strong legal support breaks news."

Editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger ruled out erecting paywalls around The Guardian's website, expressing optimism about the future of the newspaper, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Speaking as part of the Coventry Conversation series, run by the Coventry University journalism department, he said the newspaper had no plans to put up paywalls, as Rupert Murdoch has planned to do for News International titles. "It would be crazy if we were to all jump behind a pay wall and imagine that would solve things," Rusbridger said. He did agree, though, that it was good that journalism was "trying different things".