Results matching “out of the collaps”

Difficult times present many challenges, but they also offer many opportunities. L'Université d'Eté will give you the chance to learn and benefit from the worldwide experience of WAN-IFRA.

The Summer University will be 5 to 7 July at the Unisys International Management Centre.  Participation is limited.

All information at : www.wan-ifra.org/summeruniversity2010

The 8.8 earthquake that ravaged central Chile on February 27 has also wreaked havoc on the newspapers that operate in the region. While some continued to print with borrowed electric generators and improvised newsrooms, some were forced to halt publishing for a number of days. Most of the local newspapers websites' in the most affected areas were down in the aftermath of the quake. But, even though the worst seems to be over for this battered nation's newspapers, damage to the country's largest paper factories could become a big problem for not only Chilean but also other south American newspapers.

As aftershocks still rattled central Chile, the Editors Weblog spoke to the General Manager of the Asociación Nacional de la Prensa of Chile, Ignacio Muñoz, about how the earthquake has affected Chilean newspapers and how they have coped with the difficulties of reporting under extraordinary circumstances.

Conflicting reports came out of San Francisco over the weekend regarding the future of the Bay Area News Project, the non-profit local news station housed in the city's public broadcasting network KQED and bankrolled by Warren Hellman.

According to B-Net, the much reported multi-media deal combining the reporting expertise of UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the radio and television capabilities of KQED finally collapsed after negotiations stalled. B-Net's David Weir alleged that infighting over resources and leadership at KQED and the GSJ's lack of clout in San Francisco made an already complicated merger just too difficult - leading Hellman to withdraw his $5 million contribution.

However, Neil Henry, Dean of the GSJ, was quick to refute those reports: "The Bay Area News Project is alive and well and ready to start business. The first board meeting will be conducted next week. We have secured an outstanding CEO and an extraordinary editor in chief whose names will be announced later this month. The only change since our announcement in September is that KQED will not play a role as a founding partner, but we look forward to its active participation."

As the latest news from Tuesday's earthquake outside of Port-au-Price trickles in to the mainland, newspapers have faced many of the same logistical challenges as rescue crews as they struggle to cover the scale of destruction wreaked on this poverty-stricken Caribbean nation.

With only one foreign correspondent based in Haiti, Jonathan M. Katz of the AP, many major newspapers like the Wall Street Journal struggled initially to get their journalists on the ground. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake had destroyed what little infrastructure Haiti already had, razing government buildings, hospitals, and homes. Telecommunications and power lines have been unreliable if present at all.

The East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Arizona, which has previously announced it would shut down on 31 December, has received a letter of intent to purchase the troubled paper from a Tuscon newspaper publisher.

The Valley Tribune's parent company Freedom Communications said earlier this month that the paper has been up for sale for a considerable amount of time, yet received no promising bids and announced it would begin taking steps toward closure.

Oakland Local is one of many non-profit community news websites currently springing up across the globe as the need for quality local news coverage becomes more obvious. The recession has seen the local news industry suffer staggering financial blows and several news organisations, small and large, have had to heavily cut back on resources or close altogether.

The situation has caused many to express concerns about the dangers of not having a local media watchdog to keep those in power in check: "It makes me worry about all of those public authorities and courts which will in future operate without any kind of systematic public scrutiny. I don't think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting," Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger has said.

The guardian.co.uk is calling for local bloggers in Leeds to apply for a freelance position to help to cover news in the area, reports Mercedes Bunz in The Digital Content Blog. "Guardian Local is a small-scale experimental approach to local newsgathering. We are focusing on three politically engaged cities and we expect to launch in early 2010," said Emily Bell, the director of digital development at Guardian News & Media.

The news project will initially launch in three cities, Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, and expand if successful. The job description states: "The successful candidate will be a confident blogger, know their yelps from their tweets, have a passion for local news and understand how to build relationships with the local community." Whilst a journalism qualification is desired, it is not required and direction and support will be received from the project's editor at the Guardian's London headquarters.

Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said: "While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I've been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground."

Turkey's largest media company Dogan Yayin launched a court challenge yesterday to a demand by tax authorities for a guarantee for the $3.3 billion fine the group is facing, which was then rejected, according to Today's Zaman. The tax authorities are asking for the full value of the fine as collateral while the group makes an appeal in court. The company was ordered to pay $2.53 billion in early September for back-taxes and fines, a total which has since increased.

Dogan Yayin owns two out of the three top-selling newspapers in Turkey, Milliyet and Hurriyet, and two of the four most-watched television stations. 

The Guardian reported that its editor Alan Rusbridger has thrown his support behind a plan to give public funding to the Press Association, Britain's national press agency. The funding would allow the PA to carry out public service reporting, providing news from public authorities and courts to compensate for the reduction in coverage of such local institutions by local and regional papers.

Rusbridger was speaking at a seminar on the future of journalism at the Media Standards Trust in London. He expressed concern at the gradual disappearance of local journalism, according to the Guardian. "It makes me worry about all of those public authorities and courts which will in future operate without any kind of systematic public scrutiny. I don't think our legislators have begun to wake up to this imminent problem as we face the collapse of the infrastructure of local news in the press and broadcasting," he said.

As newspapers continue to shutdown, some journalists have managed to stay upbeat during these tough times.

In an extensive article published by the American Journalism Review, journalist Beth Macy describes how her fellow journalists manage to keep good spirits despite the challenging nature of the current economy. Macy, a reporter for the state of Virginia's Roanoke Times since 1989 specializing in matters that concern the 'real-life struggles of ordinary people', still gets "excited" when covering a good story, "even as [journalism] threatens to bail on me."

Despite the government subsidisation that they have received, Cyril Blanc of the Guardian thinks that French newspapers are still in trouble. Blanc writes that the problems of the US industry look particularly gloomy from France, as "the French regard the NYT and papers like the Los Angeles Times as the perfect incarnation of what their own papers should be." So, it is with great irony that he quotes former Le Monde director Alain Minc, who has previously said that French newspapers should become more like the NYT but writes in his new book that "this very same paper will be bought out by Google for a symbolic dollar by 2011".

Criticising the French for ignoring online successes such as Rue89, whilst subsidising the struggling newspapers, Blanc believes that "a more creative approach is needed".  He cites other examples that the French media could learn from, such as the Huffington Post. Blanc believes that Sarkozy's tax exemptions and advertising boost for newspapers "could only have the effect of postponing their collapse", whilst the "more dramatic move to give every 18-year-old in the country a one-year subscription to a daily paper... is perhaps the only measure that might have a longer term effect".

Prosecutors following through on the government's promise to crack down on journalists threatening "information attacks" on the economy have received criticism from the editor of an Internet news portal.

Aksana Panova, editor of www.ura.ru, accused Russian authorities of "censoring bad news about the financial crisis" after she was brought in for questioning about her sources, calling the government interference a "throwback to the Soviet Union."

The media stands accused of failing to foresee the global financial crisis, of a lack of understanding of the issues, and even of having a hand in the problems we now face. The Editors Weblog has been following the debate, beginning with an interview with the Managing Editor of the Financial Times, Daniel Bogler, who highlighted the problem of the media "fanning the flames" of the crisis. Is the media responsible, or are these accusations merely a knee-jerk reaction?

Danny Schechter is a respected investigative journalist and the author of Plunder, a searing indictment of the modern banking system, the role of government in finance, and the greed-is-good mentality. Schechter's book was published one week before the collapse of Lehman Brothers on the 1st of September, and it examines the very problems that were about to unfold. The Editors Weblog spoke to Schechter about the media's failure, the ethics of advertising, responsible journalism, and the cult of the CEO.

Two key failures

Schechter believes that there were two key areas where the media failed. He says that there was little or no examination into the new breed of exotic financial products that caused many of the problems, such as CDO's, and that the media ignored the warnings from community housing organisations of the predatory lending practises in some of America's poorest communities. "This was a big media failure, we were not warned about it" says Schechter. If Schechter's assertion is correct, why did the media fail to fulfil its role? Newspapers, and the media in general, are supposed to be the fourth estate, a watchdog for citizens. Is it a lack of knowledge on the workings of high finance or has the media lost its way and become part of the problem?

Why did the media fail in its early warning role?

Schechter believes that the media failed in its role because of vested interests. He points out that one of the key sources of revenue for newspapers is real estate advertising in weekend supplements and classifieds, as well as advertisements for credit card and refinancing companies. As a result, he argues there is a connection between the real estate and newspaper industry, their future and success are intertwined. Schechter says, "The newspaper industry is the marketing arm of the real estate industry. In some cities you actually had newspapers getting a piece of the action of sales through the ads that they generated. So they were actually part of the corruption of this whole relationship. So of course there was little real scrutiny about what was actually happening in the neighbourhoods where houses were flipping, where people who couldn't afford to buy houses were buying them with bogus mortgages. Newspapers were making money on the sales of these homes."

Schechter argues that after the dot.com bubble burst back in 2000, all the advertisements from these new emerging businesses stopped, so the $3 billion in lost advertising revenue for the media industry had to be found somewhere. Schechter puts forth that credit card companies and refinancing firms stepped into the gap. He points out that the majority of people do not automatically spend money that they don't have, but it was marketed to them through the media in advertising and life-style supplements. Most of the money that the media makes in advertising is in the last quarter in the run up to Christmas, newspapers run articles on the best presents to buy, and so forth, all of it driving a concept of "buy and shop" which "stimulates consumption." Schechter says, "for me, on the consumer front newspaper's are a marketing instrument and on the investment front it's a confidence building instrument. The media was part of this whole sales machine, and it happened at the same time that newspapers were cutting back on investigative reporting, and ironically expanding business news targeted at the business world; not at the general public, not on the economy and how it affects you and me."

Has financial journalism lost its teeth?

Another criticism levelled at business reporters is that they are too close to Wall Street and the City, and have too much respect for the institutions they are supposed to be examining. John Friedman of MarketWatch was at the press conference announcing the Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch and wrote, "the media were so polite and deferential to the two CEOs; they behaved as if the press conference were a victory lap for the financial services industry." Schechter believes that "business men are seen as heroes" and it's all part of the "cult of masters of the universe"; he cites the endless sycophantic articles about Bill Gates of MicroSoft and Richard Branson of Virgin. He argues that there is a kind of "cultural embedding, as financial journalists cover business, they become part of the scene, they identify with the players, go to the parties, they are increasingly in a world of fewer and fewer people that is cut off from the mainstream of American life." He believes that many financial journalists want to be like these Masters of the Universe that they write about every day.

Schechter also says that there is no real pressure at the top of media organisations to thoroughly investigate these companies. Thee reason being that they would be investigating their advertisers. As a result, there is no impetus behind financial reporting, no push for the truth and the heart of the story, not enough cynicism.

Furthermore, with the advent of multi-platform publishing and shrinking newsrooms, journalists are frequently, "fireman, going from one fire to the next. When you are doing that, there is very little time for reflective analytical reporting."

Where is the counter-narrative?

During an interview recently on the Editors Weblog, the FT's Managing Editor Daniel Bogler said, "It's unfortunate that the financial literacy and understanding of how things work in the City and of basic accounting and so on, is actually very thin in financial journalism." Schechter agrees with Bogler's point saying, "You have people who are not really very well educated covering these issues. Hence they go to a briefing and a company gives them a story, and they don't really have a counter-narrative."

Reviewing his argument, Schechter's assessment of the media is damning indeed; but it is not unilateral. Schechter points out that many newspapers and bloggers are asking the right questions and searching for the truth in this financial crisis. He cites the UK's Telegraph and Guardian newspapers, saying they "have been way ahead. I find the coverage of the British media better, and increasingly much more critical of what is happening."
 
Omission and Commission

Looking back over the rapid collapse of the world's financial markets, and the uncertainty ahead, Schechter says it is, "a financial system failure, a regulatory failure and a media failure. Everyone is willing to talk about the first two, but they are not willing to discuss the last one. We are all in this. It's a media failure of omission and commission."
 

"Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," said Peter Osnos, Senior Fellow for the Media at The Century Foundation, after a $125 million payout for publishers and authors who sued the major search engine for rights to digitize copyrighted books.

Despite the "myriad" of issues left to be resolved for the publishing industry, the event has called into question the use of news on search engines.

In recent weeks Turkey's government and the country's largest independent media group, Dogan Holding, have been in the midst of a fierce battle over media coverage of a high-profile corruption case taking place in a German court.

Dogan Holding operates in TV, radio broadcasting, print and online media.  Dogan publishes seven newspapers including Hurriyet, Milliyet, Radikal, Posta, Fanatik, Referans and Turkish Daily News.     

The Dogan family holds the presidency of the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association, Tusaid.  For the last six years Tusaid has provided much needed support, international and domestic legitimacy Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP).  However, over the past few months, their relationship has begun to sour.

Trouble began when Erdogan, criticized Dogan's ongoing coverage of corruption allegations surrounding him and his party, the AKP.  A German court is currently investigating the corruption charges and according to Newsweek, "alleges that an AKP-appointed bureaucrat, whose job is to monitor the Turkish media, illegally transferred money collected by a German-based Turkish Islamist charity (Lighthouse) to Turkey, and used it for private gain and political activity."  

Erdogan has accused Dogan of "media terror" for covering the case.

On Thursday, September 18, Erdogan urged AKP party members to boycott newspapers owned by Dogan Media Group.

The Editors Weblog spoke to Sabah ombudsman, columnist, and vice president of the ONO (Organization of News Ombudsmen), Yavuz Baydar, about the current crisis and what his opinions are on the future of the Turkish media.

The Los Angeles Times' website drew 115 million page views in June, just short of its all-time traffic record of 120 million PV set in May.

A quick glance at the list of most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia features in June gives a good idea of readers' favorite topics of interest - namely a push towards celebrity news and away from global issues and traditionally important topics such as the general elections. The lists also show that, despite newspapers' widespread emphasis on blogs and videos, these platforms still account for a minimal share of total traffic.

Furthermore, these lists provide some indications about how reader interests may vary from one platform to the other (news, blogs, videos, picture galleries).

If one supposes that latimes.com readership isn't too significantly different from average online newspaper readership, then these numbers hint toward which formats work best for different topics (Skip to 'Insights' for a brief summary).

Text - Top articles:

1. Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images (Scott Glover)
2. Mega-mansions are L.A.'s really big show (Jessica Garrison)
3. Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush (John Horn)
4. Fourth day of triple digits sends crowds to L.A. pools, beaches  (Tami Abdollah)
5. Packing in public: Gun owners tired of hiding their weapons embrace 'open carry' (Nicholas Riccardi)
6. Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil (Martin Zimmerman)
7. Judge orders TMZ to remove sex tape of actor Verne Troyer (Harriet Ryan)
8. Lakers have a collapse for the ages (Mike Bresnahan)
9. Offshore oil drilling opponents are rethinking (Richard Simon and Bob Drogin)
10. Obama leads in battle for Latino vote (Peter Wallsten)


The first thing that strikes us when looking at the list is how few stories relate to 'global' issues or to the general elections in the US: ranked 6 is a column about rising oil prices and the only story directly related to the elections is ranked 10. The majority of stories have mostly local relevance about Los Angeles.

(Only) one of the top 10 stories concerns sports - a usually strong section for most newspaper websites although June isn't the biggest season for sports in the US - and the Lakers' basketball team's demise in the championship finals.

The top three stories (and 7) revolve, more or less closely, around issues of sex and the cult of celebrities and entertainment. Number 3 is a story about the making-of Oliver Stone's latest movie about President George W. Bush. Granted, considering Los Angeles' prime location in the movie and celebrity industry, it isn't particularly surprising that many latimes.com readers are going for those stories.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that readers of latimes.com news articles prefer 'softer' content compared to readers of other online newspapers. In fact, this distribution is probably representative of a move towards celebrity news by mainstream media and the audience in general.

Limitations: This is a very cursive overview of readers' favorite topics for news stories only looking at the top 10. A more in-depth study would possibly show that while a few select individual stories about sex and celebrities receive many hits, the sections for 'hard' news (World, Business, National) on the whole generate substantially more traffic than Entertainment.

Top blogs:

1. Top of the Ticket  -- 1,743,178 PV
2. The Dish Rag  -- 1,437,462 PV
3. L.A. Land --  652,605 PV
4. Lakers Blog      
5. Show Tracker                
6. L.A. Now         
7. Technology Blog (first month out, and in the top ten)       
8. Gold Derby      
9. Web Scout      
10. Countdown to Crawford (launched June 17)


Now a look at the top-10 list of blogs gives a more intricate perspective: compared to news stories, the blog format seems to draw more readers to 'serious' topics such as politics and the general elections.

The political blog Top of the Ticket is in the lead, and Countdown to Crawford (a blog that covers the final steps of the elections) has made it to the list although it was only launched in mid-June. Ranked 6, L.A. Now covers general news about California.

It may seem counter-intuitive that readers prefer the blog format, usually associated with a more conversational tone and less formality, to read stories about politics. On the other hand, this preference could also be explained by the fact that those readers precisely prefer a format open to opinion and debate to read about those topics. Since blogs typically allow for more author disclosure, they can also be seen as a more transparent medium.

The last two blogs revolve around technology and developments in the digital landscape, a thematic that was absent from the Top 10 news stories.

Limitations: Again, this is hardly a scientific procedure, and the top 10 blogs on latimes.com account for less than 5% of total page views on the site. To put this in further perspective, five of the ten blogs relate to 'softer' content - three revolve around celebrities and the movie industry - one is about the Lakers and number 3 is a blog about real estate (note the parallel with the news story about mansions ranking 2).

Furthermore, The Dish Rag, ranked 2, is edging close to Top of the Ticket, so that in reality the number of users consulting LA Times blogs for soft and hard news is probably equivalent.

Pictures - Top photo galleries:

1.  Celebrity and sports collide in L.A.
2.  Universal Studios fire
3.  Celebrities' real names revealed (Denise Martin and Stephanie Lysaght)
4.  Hollywood hunks before they were hot (Elizabeth Snead)
5.  Celebrities by The Times
6.  Celebrity shots
7.  Midwest flooding
8.  Top 9 cars women buy more than men
9.  Hollywood's unwedded bliss list (Elizabeth Snead)
10. R-rated firsts (Susan King)

Unsurprisingly, the list of most popular photo galleries is also dominated by celebrities, even more so than for news stories or blogs (seven out of ten).

Of the three remaining picture galleries, two are big general news stories with obviously strong visual content: ranked 2 is the Universal Studios fire and ranked 7 is a gallery about floods in the Midwest.

Video - Top videos:

1. Dogs orphaned in China's quake find a home - 132,239 streams - AP
2. LAPD goes green: Maya Sanchez reports - 112,375 streams - KTLA
3. Tsvangirai on Mugabe - AP
4. Local update: Moe the chimp escapes cage -  KTLA
5. Amanda Beard heads to Omaha for her fourth Olympic swim - LAT
6. 17-year-old decapitated by Six Flags ride - AP
7. Australia marks Iraq withdraw with parade - AP
8. Evening update: USC student sentenced to time served in baby's death - KTLA
9. Fires grip parts of California - AP
10. Bush pleased with war spending bill - AP

The top-10 list for videos also delivers its share of lessons. First of all, despite newspapers' wild rush to boost video content, videos generate a limited amount of traffic compared to most text stories.

Many of the videos in the list are 'soft', but don't relate to entertainment especially. Instead, they are often emotionally-driven (dogs orphaned in China, 17-year old girl decapitated at a fair park). A lot of these popular videos are visual anecdotes with a potential for virality (Moe the chimp escapes cage).

'Hard' news, ie. a Congress debate about legislation or a business acquisition, does not typically constitute a popular pick for videos, as it is often poor visually.

The majority of successful video content is syndicated, generally provided by the Associated Press (only one of the top 10 videos was produced by the LA Times). Considering the average PVs for videos, and although CPMs for video ads are usually higher than for regular PVs, it is still often (too) costly for newspapers to produce their own quality videos.

Insights

In short, here are some of the insights brought by latimes.com's Top-10 lists:

- The Los Angeles Times has strongly emphasized 'soft' news, which is becoming increasingly popular among regular news stories.
- On the other hand, its blogs seem to attract many viewers interested by politics - although half of the blogs in the list deal with lighter content.
- The blog format is also popular when they deal with technological issues.
- To an extent, it could be inferred that the latimes.com is fulfilling its role as a newspaper by focusing on 'local' stories: Hollywood, celebrities and the entertainment industry being part of that local context.
- The photo galleries are overwhelmingly dominated by pictures of celebrities. The only two 'hard' news stories are obviously visual: a fire and floods.
- Video content must also be visually rich, but the most popular videos are those that are emotionally-driven and potentially viral (ie: humorous anecdotes, shocking stories).

The purpose of this piece was simply to make some observations as to the types of topics preferred by online users, depending on the format they were published in. The goal wasn't to quaintly warn editors against the risks of chasing eyeballs at the expense of news judgment.

However, these Top-10 lists are clearly representative of the trend, adopted both by editors and by the audience, towards more celebrity-type news, or 'soft' news in general. In January and April, when the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times announced that they were beefing up coverage of Britney Spears, at the same time as newsrooms across the nation couldn't afford the expenses of covering the elections, many newspaper editors were outraged by this rush towards more catchy, entertainment-driven, stories.

According to others, celebrity is a cultural currency that fulfils a role in the press. But at what cost?

The Tribune Co. will be redesigning their newspapers. In his Newsosaur blog, Alan Mutter wrote that "the combination of abrupt and unconventional change" might scare away some readers.

The Orlando Sentinel is the first of the newspapers to be modified. A blogger identified as a Los Angeles Times staffer has posted online the new design of the Orlando Sentinel (left).

The radical redesign is just what Tribune intends. Said Randy Michaels, chief operating officer for the Tribune Co.: "We are going to roll out a different look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research - charts, graphs, maps, lists." On June 22, the Sentinel will adopt the new look and the rest of the papers will follow towards the end of September.

Mutter cited the Chicago Daily News incident that happened over 30 years ago, when the newspaper attempted to revamp itself and wound up collapsing. According to him, this is even more likely today, since "modern consumers have even more alternatives to newspapers today than they did back then."

"Newspapers need to profoundly change," said Mutter, and it "would be wrong to stubbornly resist progress for the sake of resisting change."

"But changes in products as personal and familiar as a newspaper should be undertaken slowly, cautiously, incrementally and thoughtfully," he said.

Source: Newsosaur blog through Poynter Romenesko

The Chi-Town Daily News, a two-year-old nonprofit online newspaper, has been having success with its incorporation of citizen journalism in its news process, which highlights the potential benefits of citizen journalism for newsrooms with few resources.

A few months ago, construction workers had been injured in a building collapse, but the Daily News neither had a helicopter, nor a cops reporter, nor staff reporters to go to the scene.

Instead, they had a network of three dozen citizen journalists throughout the city, and thanks to Highrise, a software that lists their addresses and interests, the Daily News found a citizen journalist who lived near the building collapse and could cover the story.

The Daily News' experiment with citizen journalism began in March 2007, when they won a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant to build a local citizen journalism network that could be replicated in other U.S. cities.

The paper hired a community organizer, initially thinking it would get most of its contributors to sign up and local community events, through street-level interaction. But this didn't prove very effective.

So The Daily News recruited its citizen journalists online, through Craigslist bulletin boards and networking through Facebook and Myspace. Information about the Daily News' free monthly journalism skills workshops was posted on going.com and upcoming.org.

Up to this day, the paper has recruited 36 citizen journalists. The Daily News' CitJ network, still undergoing development, will eventually include at least one volunteer journalist in each of Chicago's 77 neighborhoods, who will be recruited and trained by the Daily News so that their articles will "meet traditional standards of accuracy, newsworthiness and fairness," said Geoff Dougherty, Editor of The Daily News. As of now, some of their most read articles are ones written by citizen journalists.

The paper is in the process of upgrading its content management system to allow editors to send writers text messages about breaking news.

Source: Poynter Online

"How could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin?" Paul Gillin asks on his blog Newspaper Death Watch - which vies, perhaps hastily, for the death of the newspaper industry. According to him, in the post-Watergate era, US newspapers excessively focused on chasing Pulitzer prizes, thus diminishing their much-needed local coverage.

Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger's 2007 farewell piece puts the start of the decline in the post-Watergate period when journalists began to revel in excess, refusing to travel any other way beside first-class, and according to Gillin, "Steiger's piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises."

Eric Alterman's recent article in The New Yorker adds that papers lost their focus on local journalism and their readers during post-Watergate as well. Papers edged towards increased impartiality, and the scramble to win Pulitzers to duplicate the Washington Post's Watergate success cost newspapers millions of dollars on large Washington bureaus and overseas correspondents.

Another trend that began in the 1970's was the rise of the "insider journalist." In Gillin's view, reporters became celebrities with access to powerful people, who learned "to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well."

According to Gillin, newspapers didn't make any changes because they had healthy and predictable profit margins, and their investors were happy. However, most big companies, according to Gillin, "often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under."

Gillin's concludes that "it's too late for the newspaper industry to save itself."  He forsees massive consolidations, more layoffs and the emergence  a new form journalism which uses blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, and search engines.

But although the newspaper industry may have been slow to transition to embrace new media formats, it is actively doing so now, through blogs, social networks, multimedia projects and the inclusion of readers in the news process. Up to them to prove Gillin wrong.

Source: Newspaper Death Watch through Journerdism

David Dunkley Gyimah, an integrated multimedia video journalist, senior university lecturer and council member of the UK's broadcast-academic standards for universities and broadcasters, the Broadcast Journalism Training Council, talks about why journalism training is more important than ever today.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently gone through restructuring that would, amongst other things put print and digital operations on the same level. Publisher John C. Mellott talked with Julia M. Klein of Columbia Journalism Review about the changes.

A new book entitled "-30- The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper," by editor Charles Madigan and others, draws a grim picture of the state of US newspapers today, but also identifies some potential solutions.