Newspaper Watch: The Who’ll Shoot J.R. Edition

 Posted by on 4 December 2009  Modern Life
Dec 042009
 

Dallas_Morning_News_logo

The Dallas Morning News is a broadsheet daily — the lone major newspaper of the metro Dallas, Texas, area. I’m sure it has a long tradition of editorial independence and high ethical standards in newsgathering. According to its Wikipedia page, it has won eight Pulitzers.

Now though, in kind of an upset, and in a reversal of years of North American news heritage, the foxes are being given the keys to the henhouse. As reported by the Dallas Observer (a local weekly) news blog:

As of yesterday, some section editors at all of the company’s papers, including The News, will now report directly to [a] team of sales managers, now referred to as general managers. In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo’s products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo’s products, which is a radical departure from the way newspapers have been run since, oh, forever.

The publisher of the Dallas News, of course, defends the change:

I come from the advertising side of the media business. I started off in ad sales. The editor of this paper reports to me, and the business side reports to me. Just becaue a business person has an editorial person reporting to him or her doesn’t mean our content is now for sale or that the salespeople, the business people, the publisher will dictate to the newsroom what content they choose to publish or not. I have never gone to Bob Mong and said, “You have to do the following for business reasons.” Never done it, never would do it. The integrity of the process is absolutely fundamental to your business and our business. The moment they think our information is for sale, we’re out of business.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t find the fact that he comes from the advertising side of the media business to reassuring. But he’s got it dead to rights when he says that readers won’t trust a product they think can be bought and sold.

Final JFK autograph — signed on the Dallas paper the day he died — sold at auction

 Posted by on 10 November 2009  Vintage/Retro
Nov 102009
 

lf

The day he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy encountered a hotel maid who asked him to sign the morning paper, which featured a picture and article about his Texas visit. Hours later, he was dead.

Just a couple of days ago, that final autograph was sold at auction for nearly $40,000. The paper cost a nickel.

If you can’t watch the video below, you should be able to watch it on the auction website, here.

Newspaper watch: A disgruntled copyeditor strikes back at a layoff notice

 Posted by on 8 November 2009  Modern Life
Nov 082009
 

2009starmemo

(click for full-size)

The Toronto Star announced earlier this month that it would probably be laying off some in-house staff and outsourcing their jobs. At least one copy-editor has taken the official publisher’s announcement and decided to make a case for his or her skills.

As a journalist who works as a copy-editor one day a week, I am in awe of the the anonymous editor’s chops. If I laid down that level of editing on any story, well, first I’d never have time to get through a single page of layout, but second, I’d probably make some enemies in the reportorial staff.

As an intro-to-journalism professor, I know that copy editors perform an essential function at any newspaper. I teach my students that accuracy is critical to good journalism. But accuracy doesn’t just mean getting your facts straight — it also means telling the story correctly, in a clear, concise fashion. If you mess up basic grammar, or use lousy language, you lose credibility with readers.

In a world where old-media newspapers are searching for their place, beset on all sides by blogs and the like, I suggest that they should hold themselves to a higher level. Newspapers have a trusted reputation that even the best blogs can’t touch. But part of that comes from their commitment to standards — to Getting it Right. Copyeditors are a required link in that chain.

(From the Torontoist, via BoingBoing)

I’ll bet this would save journalism

 Posted by on 21 October 2009  Modern Life, Vintage/Retro
Oct 212009
 

I just love Maureen Dowd’s latest column. I’m a sucker for tales of journalism’s “glory days” when it was soaked in as much booze as ink. And she starts the column out with a killer anecdote:

Ben Hecht describes his years as a cub reporter at The Chicago Daily Journal starting in 1910. It was a time when reporters were still “exotic adults,” he writes, and journalism was considered by many as “a catch basin for hooligans, bar flies and minor swindlers.”

The first thing Hecht did was get his girlfriend, who was “in harlot servitude” when they met, hired as the “first girl reporter” at the paper for $12 a week by pretending she was a … niece of Edith Wharton [That was before she was caught "selling her services" in the newsroom.] ….

The next thing Hecht did was plot with his colleague Charles MacArthur — they would later write “The Front Page” — to revive a hanged criminal with a shot of adrenaline and then charge newspaper editors around the country $50 each for the “exclusive” on the “Walking Corpse.”

Anyway, writes Dowd, maybe newsrooms need a little of the old vice to survive in trying times. And maybe it’s not just about adding a little glamour to a business that’s been corporatized within an inch of its life. Maybe newspapers can harness their cash registers to a little vice.

I was actually going to blog about Mark Zuckerman’s proposal, in Forbes, to legalize sports betting on newspaper websites, but Dowd tracks down some interesting people to give it more contest:

Nick Pileggi, who wrote the books and screenplays for “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” sees no downside. “It would be a wonderful, huge blow against organized crime because the money would be taken out of what the mob gets,” he said. “And every state has a lottery so nobody from the state is going to stand up and say ‘We’re against gambling.’ ”

He said that if newspapers would stop being so stuffy, they could set up A.T.M.-style machines in lobbies and at newsstands and “take over a business that the mob now does illegally worth $20 to $40 billion a year.”

Of course, being Maureen Dowd, she ends the column with a reductio ad absurdum, but it doesn’t have to be that absurd, really. Newspapers already offer a games page — crosswords and Sudoku are probably one of the most popular parts of the paper. And newspapers have long histories of reader contests, some with big prizes. Why not charge readers for some of those contests — and why not let them win some money, if they happen to be really good at some of the games of skill or chance.

Other ways that I see where vice could be harnessed to save newspapers include printing the paper on smokeable hemp or that old standby, Page Three girls.

Nick Pileggi, who wrote the books and screenplays for “Goodfellas” and “Casino,” sees no downside. “It would be a wonderful, huge blow against organized crime because the money would be taken out of what the mob gets,” he said. “And every state has a lottery so nobody from the state is going to stand up and say ‘We’re against gambling.’ ”

He said that if newspapers would stop being so stuffy, they could set up A.T.M.-style machines in lobbies and at newsstands and “take over a business that the mob now does illegally worth $20 to $40 billion a year.”

Konami code: The gift that keeps on giving

 Posted by on 16 October 2009  Modern Life
Oct 162009
 

CONTRA

I’ll bet this is the kind of Easter Egg that only takes someone a few minutes of fun to program in, but it’s also the kind of little extra tidbit that makes me think, ‘Hey, there’s someone here who cares about the user experience, and likes to have fun.’

Also, it’s a little something that reveals a non-corporate — a human — side to a big company.

What am I talking about? Try this:

Go to the Globe and Mail’s site: www.globeandmail.com

Click on the background with the mouse.

Slowly, type in the Konami code (Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A)

After you click ‘ok’ to the pop-up, hit Shift + Spacebar.

In the console, type “contra”.

hit Shift + Spacebar again to close the console.

Awesomeness.

The Konami code, in case you didn’t know, is famous.

Also, if you enter it on Facebook (followed by ‘Enter’) then you get a wild, difficult to see through, lens flare effect on your screen.

(Sent in by Colin. w00t!!)

Newspaper life watch: What happens after a newspaper folds?

 Posted by on 13 October 2009  Modern Life
Oct 132009
 

The collapse of the Rocky Mountain News hit a lot of journalists hard — there was a shudder throughout the industry that was one part “there but for the grace of God” and another part “who’s next?”

I even blogged about it here. Then, a little while later, I blogged about the up-and-coming “IWantMyRocky” site, a clearinghouse for newly-unemployed Rocky Mountain News journalists, where they were actually doing some pro-bono online-only journalism, and kinda, sorta hoping to make a go of it.

The posting at I Want My Rocky has slowed markedly, especially since more than six months has now passed, and I’m sure many of the unemployed are moving on to other, paying gigs.

One of those was profiled in the New York Times — M.E. Michael Sprengelmeyer has bought a small community weekly in New Mexico and seems to be turning it into a real beast. (Don’t miss the tale of how he now owns Jack Abramoff’s suits). But is small-town community journalism the way to go?  From the article:

People around town say they have noticed the difference. The greatest compliment may have been paid by Roberto Martin Marquez, editor of the Santa Rosa News, who wrote in his paper that “M. E. is making me a better newspaper man.”

Sales of The Communicator are up, in part because of eight sidewalk boxes that Mr. Sprengelmeyer bought from The Rocky and posted around Santa Rosa. He will not say how much money the paper makes, but says it is more than enough to support him, and he has visions of expanding to two days a week.

“If a house burns down, everybody here knows it, saw it, knew the people, probably hugged them, but they still want to read about it in a paper that comes out four days later,” he said.

The experience has made him an evangelist for small-town papers, which he says offer a hidden opportunity for unemployed journalists.

Interesting … however, the sentence continues:

… a hidden opportunity for unemployed journalists, but he acknowledges it isn’t for everybody. He works to the brink of exhaustion, fueling late-night production sessions with nicotine and caffeinated energy drinks. After a few hours’ sleep, he makes a three-hour, round-trip drive to pick up his press run in Clovis, where the paper is printed.“I couldn’t do this if I had a family,” he said. “But it feels like it matters, and I’m having fun.”

And there’s the rub — he’s working himself to the bone, out of sheer dedication to the craft. But this isn’t a sustainable model for journalism, I’m afraid.

More lessons from the closure of the Rocky Mountain News were presented a couple of weeks ago, in a talk that the former editor, president and publisher gave to Google. Here’s a video of the talk:

It’s a half-hour long, and I haven’t yet had the time to watch it all, but there’s a brief summary on TechDirt:

He basically goes over the last decade and a half or so of mistakes that the Rocky Mountain News made in terms of trying to figure out the online business. The key takeaways aren’t that surprising if you’re a regular reader around here. The company kept defining itself as a newspaper company, not a news organization (or, better yet, a community builder). Everything it did was based on how it would impact the paper edition. The focus was not on competing with web properties and services, but on the other major newspaper in town, the Denver Post. Things got so bad that when the Columbine Massacre happened, the newsroom refused to give any news to the web people, because they were afraid that the Denver Post would “steal” it.

It seems like pretty much everything was based on looking backwards, not forward. There was little effort to figure out how to better enable a community, or any recognition that the community of people who read the paper were the organizations true main asset.

I have a lot of sympathy for the people who are trying to run newspapers these days. They have to keep this gigantic legacy business of “print” going — with all its associated costs — and also startup a new online division, with all-new associated costs.

There weren’t too many horse-and-buggy manufacturers who transitioned into making cars, although a lot of them tried. It took a new generation, with a new outlook to come in and sweep away all the old ways of doing business.

I know that there are a lot of smart people doing their best to juggle two competing instincts — web and print. But I worry that the internal dynamics of such a juggling act will just tear news organizations apart, like they did the Rocky Mountain News.

Back when journalism was all about the drunks

 Posted by on 7 October 2009  Vintage/Retro
Oct 072009
 

This is the same guy who was talking about how the tape recorder killed journalism, but in this video he’s reminiscing about the alcoholic days of writing and journalism. I often joke that I got into journalism because I thought I could drink at the office — boy, have those days changed.

Anyway, I guess I’m glad that I’m not passing out on my typewriter during shift.

Newspaper watch: How the tape recorder killed journalism

 Posted by on 4 October 2009  Modern Life
Oct 042009
 

Gay Talese asserts a controversial point here, and I’m not sure that I completely agree with him. Sure, the tape recorder changed journalism — and it may have completely eliminated the style of profile writing that he was doing — but I don’t think it “killed” journalism.

Of course, we get people saying that the Internet is going to kill journalism all the time, these days, and I think they are just as mistaken. Journalism is going to change, sure, but I doubt it’s going to die.

You could draw a comparison to painting and photography. You might say that photography killed painting, but that’s obviously not true. Certainly, painting lives on, as a hobby as an as art. But just as certainly, most people turn to photographs for their picture-taking needs, not to painters.

But I would argue the proper way to look at it is photography supplanting painting as a mechanism for capturing and reproducing images.

Similarly, journalism didn’t die with the tape recorder and it will survive the Internet. But it will be irrevocably changed by new technology, and people will continue to assert that the Internet killed newspapers, while missing the point.

Photographs are both better and worse than paintings, depending on what characteristics you value most. News in the Internet age is similarly better and worse than the languorously crafted profiles cited by Talese.

For the uninitiated, Gay Talese is famous. A founder of New Journalism, he wrote what is often cited as the “best magazine profile ever” — a 1966 Esquire article called “Frank Sinatra Had A Cold”, which managed to be a great profile without ever talking to the man himself. Talese discusses some of the process of writing that article in the video above.

Headline schadenfreude

 Posted by on 1 September 2009  Modern Life, NSFW
Sep 012009
 

There but for the grace of God go I — and everyone else who works in newspaper layout and design.

Here’s what the Daily Express sent out in its first edition:

Daily-Express-Ant-and-Dec-003

It was a story about two ITV presenters, and it was laid out across the centre spread, which means that the story and the headline went across the fold in the middle of the paper.

Apparently somebody didn’t like the word “finally” — either they didn’t like it going across the fold, or there were too many similar-sounding headlines elsewhere in the edition.

So they changed it to this:

Daily-Express-Ant-and-Dec-002

However, technically, this page is actually two pages. The two pages are sent to the press individually, and lined up seamlessly side-by-side for printing.

Unfortunately, when the pages were changed, only the left-hand one was sent — smushing the changed version up against the original version. The result was stellar in its awfullness:

Daily-Express-Ant-and-Dec-001

The subhead makes it.

(via The Guardian, which posted this about its competitor with admirably restrained glee. I think people in glass houses, etc. etc.)

Find the vanished ‘Wired’ author, win $5,000 — good idea for newspapers, too

 Posted by on 17 August 2009  Modern Life, Vintage/Retro
Aug 172009
 

wiredvanish

Wired author Evan Ratliff is, as they say, “on the lam.” He has vanished himself:

Starting August 15, I will try to stay hidden for 30 days. Not even my closest friends or my editors will know where I am. I’ll remain in the US and will be online regularly. I will continue to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll make cell phone calls. I’ll generally stay in the kind of social environment I like to live in (no hiding in a cabin in Montana), and I’ll keep track of my pursuers, searching constantly for news about myself.

There are a couple of caveats (don’t contact his family, don’t physically harm him, etc.) but mostly it sounds like a fun stunt. After all, it’s a pretty common fantasy to just disappear, move, start over … perhaps by faking your own death, as seen in the lengthy feature Ratliff wrote about the subject in Wired:

Perhaps the most infamous recent faked death attempt, that of Indiana money manager Marcus Schrenker, involved a plan equally daring and bizarre. Accused of financial mismanagement, Schrenker, an amateur pilot, climbed into his Piper single-engine and set a flight plan for Destin, Florida. Flying over northern Alabama at 24,000 feet, he made a sequence of increasingly desperate radio calls to the nearest control tower, announcing that he had run into turbulence; that his “windshield was spider-cracking”; that the shattered glass had cut his neck; that he was “bleeding profusely” and “graying out.” He then pointed the autopilot toward the Gulf of Mexico and bailed out with a parachute over Harpersville, Alabama. After landing, he made his way to a motorcycle he had stashed at a local self-storage unit.

Unfortunately for Schrenker, when two Navy F-15 pilots caught up with the still-airborne Piper, they noted that the plane was in fine shape — except for the open pilot’s side door and empty cockpit.

When I read about Ratliff going on the lam — and basically crowdsourcing any attempt to find him by publicizing it in the magazine, I immediately remembered the start of the Graham Greene novel “Brighton Rock.” In it, a character named Hale is employed by a British newspaper to wander around seaside resort towns, hiding business cards that are worth ten shillings if people return them to the paper. And, if they’re the first to stop and challenge him (his location, schedule and description, including his distinctive hat, are published daily in the paper) they’re entitled to the big prize of ten guineas.

It’s based on a real circulation promotion done by British newspapers for years, known as Lobby Lud, after the first one, or Chalkie White, after a recent one.

They work in a similar way to the hunt for Evan Ratliff: find him before Sept. 15, take his picture, and say the password: “Fluke”. You’ll get a code-word in response that you can email to his editor in exchange for the prize and an interview with the magazine.

Sounds like a blast!

And, honestly, sounds like a circulation promotion that newspapers could revive, especially here in North America. Why not send a reporter to a different place every, say, Saturday? Posing as a tourist, they could get plenty of info about a small town or neighbourhood — certainly enough to write a feature-style piece on it. Quotes over the phone and photos can be obtained later in the week. The piece can run in the next Saturday’s paper, along with info about that day’s targeted location.

Newspaper watch: Why start charging for content now? You haven’t in 180 years.

 Posted by on 6 August 2009  Modern Life
Aug 062009
 

It’s something that I was taught in introductory journalism, lo these many years ago: the cost of a newspaper subscription barely — if that — covered the costs of raw paper and delivery. The actual work of producing the news was subsidized entirely by the advertising contained within.

Heck, I should have known that as a newsboy. I used to deliver the very same newspaper that I now work at, and I used to collect subscription monies from the people I delivered to, too. It wasn’t a king’s ransom, not by any means, not even for a 12-year-old, and while I didn’t keep even 50% of the money I collected, if I had stopped to think about it, even the efforts of a hundred paper carriers couldn’t have kept a newspaper afloat.

Nope, it was advertising all the way. Subscription costs do nothing but cover the cost of delivery.

By the way, that’s a model dictated by the laws of economics. As explained in a post over at News Futurist:

Newspapers: 180 Years of Not Charging For Content

As news now moves online, the same rule of economics apply: The price of a product in a competitive market falls to the marginal cost of creating and delivering one more unit.

For printed newspapers, the marginal cost was a little more paper and ink, maybe an extra block on the delivery route. Subscription fees never accounted for the fixed costs of producing the content: the building, staff, printing press, etc. That share of costs has long been paid by advertising and diluted by economies of scale.

The same economic forces apply online. And because the marginal cost of bits is nearly zero, the appropriate price becomes too small to bother tracking. Free is the result.

This would seem to make it very hard for newspaper who are hoping that they can set up a paywall of sorts, and perhaps all of their competitors will do the same thing, and everyone will rake in the money from readers who are desperate for their news.

Unfortunately, as the history lesson at News Futurist makes clear, that’s exactly what newspapers tried to do in the early 19th century. But, as public literacy arose in the 1830s, so did the “penny press.”

And any newspaper that tried to erect a paywall would just find itself undercut by competitors.

It’s an interesting argument, and backed up by tested economic thought. But there’s one workaround:

This is not to say some news providers couldn’t get away with charging online; but to do so they would have to have content so valuable and unique that they don’t face the competitive forces that pull prices down to the marginal cost of ~zero. And even if you find a specific niche and premium content you can charge for, you’re likely to face free competition once the word gets out.

So, what would those unique content models be? Everyone points to the Wall Street Journal as a successful subscription-based newspaper website, and that’s because they have a specific business-oriented audience and they have a product that’s so better than the competition that it’s worth paying for.

How could ordinary newspapers pull of a similar feat? I’m not sure I know, but there’s an intriguing idea in a blog at the Harvard Business site — Umair Haque says that “newspapers” should evolve into “nichepapers”:

A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry’s nose. Nichepapers, as the name implies, own the microniche. (Here’s a nice, timely discussion of Nichepapers by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.)

Nichepapers are different because they have built a profound mastery of a tightly defined domain — finance, politics, even entertainment — and offer audiences deep, unwavering knowledge of it.

The post itself is a little over-the-top, but if you drill down to it, he’s not offering much actually new. What he’s saying makes sense. That is, offer a blend of solid information and interesting analysis. And focus on your strengths. Too many newspapers, these days, still offer pages of national and international news that’s at least a day old by the time it’s read. Too few readers care — they learned it all last night on the TV news.

Beat reporters, at one time, offered exactly the sort of “owned niche” that Haque is arguing for. I think he’s going to far in telling newspapers that they have to be the Huffington Post or Perex Hilton (two of his examples of “nichepapers). Newspapers have everything they need, they just need to bring it to bear better.

Oh, and here’s another thought — people who get involved in niche productions invariably care, and they make their readers care. Readers who care might be motivated to buy a subscription, even, if it’s modeled on “supporting the work that you care about.” That’s (partly) how NPR works. And it would definitely get around the free content model.

Newspaper life watch — afternoon edition

 Posted by on 30 July 2009  Modern Life
Jul 302009
 

A new commuter paper in Toronto looks to stand out from the crowd by focusing on the afternoon commute, not the morning one. It’s a blast from the past for a newspaper. Years ago, many cities had both a morning paper and an afternoon one — eventually, most PM editions folded, leaving the early-morning thump of a newspaper on a porch the only one.

But why? In a lot of ways, an afternoon newspaper makes sense: you can get at least some of that days’ news in; you can print it during the day rather than paying pressmen an overnight rate; and there’s a little bit more flexibility with delivery — get it to the house after people leave for work, and it sits there for eight hours, yellowing in the sun. Get it there half an hour after they get home, and they can still pick it out of the mailbox after supper.

There’s also the competitiveness aspect of it. We live in a world where news is almost instantaneous on the Internet. When people read their news online, and then go home and read yesterday’s news in the paper, the paper looks even more stodgy than before. And when the paper does scoop something, it’s pretty easy for the morning news radio and TV shows to read it out on the air — hours before anyone else sees it in the paper. An afternoon paper would make that a lot tougher.

So why might it not work? One of the people heading up a morning commuter paper, Metro, says that the company has considered it, but it doesn’t work in practice:

the global daily giant has examined the possibility of an afternoon edition but has dismissed it due to several roadblocks, including how to transport the newspapers through heavy traffic. Metro has launched afternoon editions in Stockholm and Copenhagen, only to see them fold.

“It lasted just for a few months because we simply were unable to get advertisers to move to an afternoon format,” Mr. McDonald said. “That was an absolute killer.”

Advertisers and heavy traffic, eh? Seems manageable.

Newspaper life watch: Graphic design is the “killer app” for print

 Posted by on 19 June 2009  Modern Life
Jun 192009
 

Farhad Manjoo, a tech writer for Slate (he was poached from Wired last year, if you want some cred) loves the Amazon Kindle. In fact, as a tech writer, he loves all things tech-y. He’s an unabashed cheerleader for a lot of things that are shiny and new, and while I don’t always agree with him on everything, he gets his hands on a lot of gear that I don’t, and I trust him to be thorough in his reviews, and diligent in his reporting about them.

As I said, he loves the Kindle. But he now says that he doesn’t think it’ll replace newspapers. At least, not yet. The reason he gives is graphic design:

Every newspaper you’ve ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day’s stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions—they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. You can pick up any page of the paper and—just by reading headlines, subheads, and photo captions—quickly get the gist of several news items. Even when you do choose to read a story, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Since it takes no time to switch from one story to another, you can read just a few paragraphs and then go on to something else.

The Kindle, he notes, reverses that in some ways. Because each headline is exactly the same size and weight, there are no clues as to which is most important (many news websites are like this, though some generally put more important stories at the top, or they have at best three difference sizes of headlines). There is also a small delay when loading a story on the Kindle. It’s just long enough, he says, to not want to do it too often. So, you “stick with it until the end. You trade breadth for depth: In 30 minutes of reading the Kindle, you get further into a lot fewer stories.”

The future of newspapers: Online comics edition

 Posted by on 8 May 2009  Modern Life
May 082009
 

20090420

My friend Chris Noto turned me on to this online comic, Least I Could Do — featuring a real jerk as the main character. But it’s funny. Anyway, the most-recent story arc features that main character, Rayne, being hired to save a newspaper. Well, actually, he’s hired because they need an asshole (their word) at the bargaining table.

Hilarity ensues.

But it’s also got some interesting things to say about newspapers and where they may go. Check it out! (Don’t forget to skip ahead past the full-page ads for “Least I Could Do: Beginnings”)

The story arc starts here, but my favourite strip was this one (click on it for full-size):

20090428

Thanks, Noto!

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