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This week, Richard W. Stevenson, political editor and deputy Washington bureau chief for the New York Times, will be answering questions from readers. The Q&A is part of the Time's regular Talk to the Newsroom feature, which most recently hosted NYT managing editor, Susan Edgerley.

Stevenson started off by addressing political bias, blogs and content decisions.

What follows is an edited transcript of Stevenson's thoughts on blogging, politics and the attitude that often accompanies the two.

The Blogs/News Balance

Q. As political editor, does your franchise extend to The Caucus blog and, if so, have you established editorial guidelines for the blog that differ from guidelines for news articles and news analysis? I'm not simply referring to tenor but to subjects blogs may cover while articles and analyses shouldn't. It seems schizoid to have Kit Seelye speculating on Hillary Clinton's emotional state of mind in the blog and then doing straightforward political reporting for the newspaper...

-- Patrick Murphy, Lionville, Pa.

A. Mr. Murphy, you are on to one of the biggest challenges we face, and perhaps the solution to it as well.

Yes, The Caucus, our political blog, is a core element of our election coverage, and is fully integrated into our reporting efforts. Nearly all of our political reporters file regularly to the blog, both breaking news and other pieces that are more analytical or observational. The wonderful thing about blogs is that they are infinitely flexible, and we are always experimenting with how we can do New York Times quality journalism that takes advantage of the Web.

But as your question implies, that can be tricky, because the Web ethos is different from a traditional newsroom ethos.

Consider the Web's key attributes. First is speed, immediacy...When news breaks, we can get it online quickly, giving our users quick access to information.

Second is the ability to link to or package with all kinds of resources, from background to primary source documents to audio and video.

Third, for better or worse, is a bit of attitude - or, in many cases, a lot of attitude. A whole lot.

As we have shifted more of our focus toward the Web, we've done all we can to master and take advantage of the first two attributes, while acknowledging but keeping a wary distance from the third.

We have not relaxed our news standards for the Web. The reporting needs to be solid and as transparent as possible. It needs to be presented clearly and concisely. It needs to be fair.

But within those guidelines, we are changing our journalistic culture to adapt to the reality that the Web is a big part of our future. So sometimes we will post on The Caucus or elsewhere on our Web site a first take on a breaking news story. Then we will update it as more information becomes available.

It's a different way of doing things for those of us who came up in a system that was directed to producing a single and comprehensive version of the news at the end of the day. It can be jarring for some reporters and editors to post breaking news on the Web even though there are lots of questions we know we still need to answer for our readers.

... There's much about blogging culture that can work for us on our terms, starting with encouraging a two-way conversation with readers.

Source: The New York Times

It isn't a secret that the American newspaper industry is experiencing difficult times, as core print revenues and circulation are falling. Many think that online news, which has been accompanied by double-digit online advertising growth in recent years, can make up for the decline in print. But several studies and articles think otherwise.

"The Web audience is growing at a great clip, while print circulation is not. And online revenues are growing faster, too, albeit from a smaller base. If the trend continues, there's little doubt that -- "eventually" -- online becomes the main business," said Bill Keller, the New York Times Executive Editor, in a 2007 interview with IwantMedia.

But as sanguinity faces off with the numbers, perhaps we shouldn't hold our breath for "eventually."

Internet revenue is growing -- in 2003, newspapers collected a mere $1.2 billion from online advertising; last year the figure was nearly $2.7 billion. "We're growing at a double-digit rate," said Randy Bennett, of the Newspaper Association of America.

But there's a problem. Scott Karp, of Publishing 2.0, has dubbed it the "10% problem." Karp explains that looking at New York Times print and web circulation numbers, "What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue -- the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be."

Why, as audiences shift to the web, are advertisers not following?

Although newspaper websites are attracting a lot of visitors, they aren't keeping them there.

According to the American Journalism Review (AJR), the typical visitor to nytimes.com, which attracts over 10 percent of the entire newspaper industry's online traffic, spent an average of just 34 minutes and 53 seconds browsing its extensive editorial and interactive offerings in October. That's 34 minutes and 53 seconds per month - just 68 seconds per day online. By contrast, according to Scarborough Research, print readers report spending 16 minutes a day with their newspapers.

And as small as 68 seconds a day is -- it's actually about three times longer than the average of the next nine largest newspaper sites.

Although a minority of news hounds linger on the sites, Greg Harmon, director of Belden Interactive, estimates that as many as 60 percent of online newspaper visitors are "fly-bys," people who use the site briefly and irregularly. "Everyone has the same problem," explains Jim Brady, editor of washingtonpost.com. The news industry's continuing challenge, Brady says, is to turn "visitors into residents."
 
Thomas E. Patterson, of Harvard University, who has conducted a yearlong study of 160 news sites, also offers an intriguing, if not unsettling, theory: the web is a fundamentally different way of viewing information, and as such, web ads may not be as effective as the traditional kind. "I'm not sure [advertisers] are convinced yet about how terrific a sales tool [a Web display ad] is," said Patterson. "The evidence isn't strong yet that it can drive people into a store the way a full-page newspaper ad can. They're less confident about what they're getting online."
 
To add insult to injury, online newspapers face these challenges in a fiercely competitive new medium. "Unlike the print business, in which newspaper publishers generally enjoy near-monopoly status, the online news world is littered with entrants - from giants like MSNBC.com and AOL.com, to news aggregators like drudgereport.com, to blogs by the millions," writes Paul Farhi of AJR. "This makes it tough for any online ad seller to do what newspaper publishers have done for years - keep raising their ad rates." "Ultimately, it comes down to supply and demand," said Leon Levitt, vice president of digital media for Cox Newspapers. "And there's an awful lot of supply out there."

In the midst of this, the online ad growth is beginning to slow. The confidence-building, double-digit increases are fading fast. In the first quarter of 2007, the newspaper industry saw a 22 percent gain in online revenue - impressive, but less so when seen as the smallest uptick (in percentage terms) since the NAA started keeping records in 2003. In the second quarter, the industry rate slipped yet again, to 19 percent.

And even with these double-digit increases, newspapers' print ads still draw more than 20 times the revenue from online sales, having collected  $46.6 billion in print ads last year.

The New York Times Co., the leading online newspaper company, derives just 11 percent of its revenue from the Web, and it not public how much of that 11% comes from nytimes.com vs. its other digital holdings, such as the popular about.com.

The challenge news sites face now is how to continue to move online, but bring advertisers with them.

It's "in the interest of both newspapers and advertisers to shift content to the Internet," said Philip Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper.

Advertisers can focus their target audiences and can monitor consumers' behavior online, Meyer points out. At the same time, "newspapers can at last grow their businesses without being held back by the variable costs of newsprint, ink and transportation...In the recent past, newspaper owners have preferred to cut fixed costs, like editorial staff, which gives a quick boost to the bottom line but weakens their hold on the audience. Using technology to cut the variable costs is a better strategy even though the payoff takes longer."

Sources: The American Journalism Review, The State of the News Media 2007, Publishing 2.0, The New York Times
 

Jim Roberts, Editor of Digital News at New York Times, USA, spoke about innovations in his newsroom at the second session of the 15th World Editors Forum, part of the 61st World Newspaper Congress.

The integration of print and the New York Times' website has gone far. According to Mr Roberts it's "much more integrated than less at New York Times." Mr Roberts himself came from a background as a journalist at the printed paper and moved onto the website, a situation not uncommon at NY Times.

At an early stage the website was merely a new platform, a way to reach more readers. From about 2003 and on the potential of an integrated newsdesk was truly realised. In the words of Mr Roberts; "A story can be so much richer with multimedia." The adding of blogs, video, audio and illustrated graphics gives news a whole other dimension. Continuous news is another major positive part of the website. The possibility to update, especially foreign news, from minute to minute is changing the entire way news works and how it reaches its readers. What must be emphasized though is that the introduction and growth of website news must not cause a decline of quality when it comes to the presentation of the news story; "Fast is good, but fast with quality is better". At the New York Times, this has been the policy, but recruiting qualified staff is quite difficult. Current journalists have had to learn to also manage the web.

Finding and hiring web journalists in a competetive market is one of the challenges ahead. Discovering and learning what actually works, video, audio etc., is another challenge. Finding what works leads the relationship with readers and users. One thing that has been difficult, according to Roberts, is creating and being the center of a social network. But this will allow the paper to receive immediate feedback from readers who can comment on the good and bad of the Times' coverage. Through this, the paper would be able to "re-direct alot of energy back to the printed paper", said Roberts.

With elite papers, such as the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times cutting staff, the few "No. 2" papers left are struggling to survive.

A No. 2 paper "usually keeps the dominant daily on its toes," writes Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz, by reporting overlooked stories, which are typically more popular in poorer neighborhoods.

The only major cities left with head-to-head competition, excluding those where two papers have the same owner or share business operations with federal approval, are New York, Washington, Chicago, and perhaps Los Angeles, according to Kurtz. The Cincinnati Post is the latest second-place paper to close, when its operations shut down last year.

The Boston Herald's, Boston's No. 2 paper, daily circulation shrunk to 203,000 and on Sunday, it fell to 113,000, in comparison with the Boston Globe's 384,000. The Herald only has 10 city reporters left in addition to those in the feature, business, and sports sections.

"It's almost as if Boston doesn't have a place for its second daily anymore," Boston magazine columnist Joe Keohane wrote, "particularly one that features a constant parade of pervs, solons, swindlers, bums and punks."

Kevin Convey, the Herald's editor says, "The Globe is more likely to write a story about how some government program is going to assist the poor and downtrodden. We're more likely to suggest it's a boondoggle that ought to be bounced off the face of the Earth."

Tabloids are more irreverent and prone to report on big names and scandals (a headline for former governor Mitt Romney's withdrawal from the presidential race was "MITT HAPPENS.") But with blogs unconcerned about newsprint costs, there appears to be little room left for tabloids. And with cities such as Boston becoming more "upscale," it is a question whether tabloids are desired anymore.

"Tabloids in some cases say what other papers only think," says Convey. But, "a lot of people find tabloids to be beneath them. In Boston, where the air is a bit more rarefied and you're closer to Harvard, some people have a problem with tabloids. I think there's a certain nobility in tabloids."

"I don't think it's that Massachusetts has become snootier. The old Herald readers are just leaving the state. The blue-collar exodus has affected the paper," says Herald columnist Howie Carr.

The Herald depends on street sales for three-quarters of its circulation. It shut down its Washington bureau, has old presses that break down, and a 125 person staff that struggles to cover the suburbs or out-of-town reports. Moreover, the Herald plans to outsource its printing and move out of its headquarters into rented space. However, it does not plan on changing its snarky tone.

"I don't think it's time to give up the ghost," Convey says.

The Globe, which won a Pulitzer for arts criticism this month, is not thriving either. The paper, has already cut jobs and accepted buyouts. Its only remaining foreign and domestic correspondents are in Washington.

"We're facing the same challenges everyone else is, trying to figure out what the future of the newspaper is going to look like," says Globe editor Martin Baron. "We have become more local. We have significantly scaled back what we do outside the Boston area. We're realists here. We realize the business is changing."

Source: WashingtonPost.com

On Monday, The Baltimore Sun launched b, a free daily newspaper and website, which targets readers from 18-34, similar to parent Tribune Co.'s RedEye. They had announced developing 'b' in February as a step to broaden the Sun's audience in times of "declining revenue and increased competition," according to the Baltimore Sun website.

The first 40 page issue featured a cover story of reader's photographs shown at sites around the city, and included a section of reader "rants" and opinions. The first issue had 75,000 copies, distributed in 1,000 bright orange boxes in 1,400 drugstores, convenience stores and athletic clubs in metropolitan Baltimore. Also, about 70 volunteer employees handed out "samplers."

"It really is going well," said Timothy J. Thomas, vice president of business development, who expects distribution to grow to 100,000. "They're kind of flying off the shelves."

Steven Duke, associate professor of journalism at Northwestern University, said similar young adult-targeted newspapers, such as RedEye, have succeeded by distributing in places where young readers congregate.

He acknowledged that the economy presents challenges for new publications. For instance, the free daily BostonNOW was just shut down due to economic reasons.

With a staff of about 20, the tabloid newspaper and website has a focus on news, sports, entertainment news, blogs, and listings geared to its readers. A third of its content is planned to be reader-generated material. The tabloid also has content-sharing agreements with local radio stations WTMD-FM and WNST-AM. Online readers will have to opportunity to upload photos and videos.

"This truly is a daily conversation with our target audience," said Brad Howard, b general manager.

Sources: Editor & Publisher, Baltimore Sun

The blog L'Observatoire des Médias posted world maps of attention paid to the media in 164 countries in the world and received links from Gawker and Boing Boing.  The numbers included the blogosphere as a whole and 10 media organizations, including the New York Times and the Economist.

Each country is either stretched or shrunk on the map, depending on its share of media attention. The cartogram to the left is an analysis for the Wall Street Journal, showing a flattened Africa and South America and an augmented Western Europe.


Blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril retrieved the numbers by manually searching the Web sites of 10 news organizations and Google Blog Search for articles containing the names of countries. He also counted and mapped the search results. He expects this process to be automated in a few months, using data scraping, to run more trials.

The numbers ran for each country against a model that Kayser-Bril constructed to approximate that country's importance, including: the country's Human Development Index, area, population, GDP, budget expenditures and number of U.S. soldiers present, accounted for more than half of the variation in countries' media coverage, according to Kayser-Bril. 

There were challenges, for example distinguishing new stories about the African nation of Chad from the rock singer Chad Kroeger. Kayser-Bril instead used capital cities for Chad, Georgia, and Jordan, and then multiplied the results by five (the typical ratio between search-engine hits for a country and for its capital, according to Kayser-Bril.). Another example: Not every article about the U.S. contains the search term  United States."

Kayser-Bril concedes that the algorithm is not very accurate:
- It counts each article equally, no matter the length or prominence.
- Search engines are not reliable. He noticed that "when you do the same search twice, you don't [get] the same numbers."
- The maps can be misleading, because it "makes countries with low population density, such as Mongolia and Canada, appear to be getting short shrift."

Ethan Zuckerman, research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said the work is important for showing how undercovered some countries are: "When you're not paying attention to a country, you don't trade with it; you don't send relief to it; you don't have to intervene in it."

Source: WSJ through Cyberjournalist.net

The George Polk award for legal reporting honored a blogger, Joshua Micah Marshall, editor and publisher of US political blog Talking Points Memo. This is the first time the honor has been given to a blogger.

TPM, a New York City-based blog, features opinion-based, investigative reporting. Marshall considers blogging a new political conversation, and, with his highly-lauded coverage on TPM, consistently challenges doubts that bloggers can’t be journalists.

Marshall won the half-century old, Long Island University issued award for reporting on the controversial and politically motivated dismissals of several US attorneys. His success demonstrates blogging's growing credibility as a cutting-edge vehicle for news reporting.

Source: Journalism.co.uk

While delivering this year's Hugo Young memorial lecture, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times gave a stern warning that the supply of reliable news is severely declining, despite the increase of information on the Web.

At the International Newspaper Marketing Association’s (INMA) first South Asian conference it was discussed that newspapers in India would benefit from a more open exchange of ideas.

New surveys have shown the reliability of blogs challenges that of mainstream media. In early 2007 the search engine Technorati found through user testing that readers are less and less likely to distinguish a blog from other mainstream media sites.

On June 10, Brian Bennett, a sports reporter for The Courier-Journal, was asked to leave the stadium and had his press credential removed for posting blog updates to the paper’s website during a University of Louisville-Oklahoma baseball game.  National Collegiate Athlete Association (NCAA) officials cited their policy prohibiting live Internet updates during championship games as reason for ejecting Bennett.

The Knight Foundation handed out over $11 million to programmers, journalists, and bloggers in its first Knight News Challenge, which awarded participants for their ideas about how to use digital media to foster local communities and the development of these ideas.

A new book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy by Andrew Keen challenges blogs, citizen journalism and social networking sites, saying that they destroy culture and create “digital narcissism.”