ESPN wants rights for 2014, 2016 Olympics, would kill tape delay

PaidContent outlines ESPN’s plan to show the Olympics sans delay. I agree with ESPN. I found the tape-delay jarring.

As a disclaimer, I haven’t watched television with any sort of consistency since I was in middle school. So I’ve become accustomed to enjoying access to information as it becomes available, and I found NBC’s tape delay a bit of a surprise.

Give Newspapers a chance

A cool article on the opportunity that (still) exists for newspapers to cash in on local advertising.

Icky Flash Microsite

No, this probably won’t be a recurring feature.

No, I’m not sorry I’m sending you here.

Basically, journos get a lot of flack for losing touch with their audience, yet here’s an example of a marketer doing just that. Who wants to sit through this thing?

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Google sponsors Blogger Tent at Democratic and Republic National Conventions

For $100 you can have access to an exclusive tent for bloggers at the Democratic and Republican national conventions - complete with Googleplex-style goodies and granola. For all the hoopla about Google as a media company, how new media alters the journalistic landscape, etc., I kept wondering the same question: what news comes out of a convention anyway? After the running mate is announced, it’s a lot of rah-rah and pats on the back, right? (The above link to the WSJ article buries this point at the bottom.)

Emmis cuts 4.6 percent of workforce

I love print. Always have. It’s how I learned how to read. But I have to ask. Is this a healthy “leaning” of artificially large newsroom staffs? Before I draw harsh criticism from print-age journos, I’m speaking purely of the business model. Will newspapers hit an equilibrium where they narrow in scope and turn a profit? Furthermore, from Gannett…

Gannett blogger laments thinning newsroom staffs

Former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins provides a former where anonymous Gannett employees, past and present, can keep up to date on the latest dismal news from the colossal newspaper chain.

Tribune layoffs hit minorities disproportionately harder

According to a report by Richard Prince at his Journal-isms blog, the most recent round of cutoffs at the Chicago Tribune, Tribune Co.’s flagship brand, were disproportionately minority reporters. Ray Quintanilla told Prince that of the more than 80 people let go, after you factor in 30 voluntary exit, the list is heavily minority, and “looks bad.” To play my own devil’s advocate, this, if true, is anything but healthy for journalism.

And finally, a bit of good news…Idaho Falls drops AP contract in 2010

This I applaud for its boldness. Publisher of the Idaho Falls Post Register Roger Plothow stated in a letter:

I’ll put my cards on the table — I’m not sure how we’re going to pull this off. While the AP’s value to us has been severely diminished over the years, it still does provide a handful of services that we haven’t been able to find elsewhere — yet. I’m betting, however, that it’s only a matter of time. More likely, we’ll use that time to become essentially 100 percent local, which is probably where we’re headed eventually anyway.

Bravo. That’ll be one to keep tabs on.

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The World Association of Newspapers (WAN) published a list of 66 trends which, according to newspaper executives across the globe, are affecting them and their business models. The whole list is worth downloading, but one I found particularly interesting was the following:

Newspaper companies are becoming “just another media player”
The newspaper industry can no longer perceive itself as exclusive or unique to other market players.

Wow. Should the newspaper industry ever have perceived itself as unique or exclusive? As a consumer of news, I think that attitude can often lead to a feeling of estrangement from a local news source. Newspapers, as a part of the fourth estate, undoubtedly perform a valuable service to their communities, but they are still part of the community.

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I recently saw a job posting on JournalismJobs.com for a full-time editor to commission and copy edit articles for LifeWire, an online content startup from the New York Times Co. that creates “on-demand lifestyle content” for top Web publishers.

A quick Google News search shows that, although their own page isn’t live yet, LifeWire has ran stories in CNN’s living, and travel sections for the past month or so.

I looked for some more information on LifeWire, but hadn’t read much about it. Any leads?

And P.S., doesn’t the site look awfully “Drupally”?

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As part of an independent study I’m doing on online communities with another Medill student, I moderated three focus groups yesterday looking at why and how students used social media. Once we got beyond Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, one student brought up an interesting site I’d heard of, but must admit I’ve never checked out: Ravelry - a knit and crochet community.

The student explained that before she discovered Ravelry, she would spend a lot of time trying to find free patterns online. Now, she can log in to Ravelry and trade patterns within the community easily.

The future of online communities…?

Her insights helped highlight some of different motivations people have for joining and contributing to online communities. People overwhelmingly have the same responses for joining Facebook and MySpace: my friends are there, I want to find old friends or it helps me keep in touch. Topically oriented communities offer something entirely different.

I’m sure other examples of topically oriented, niche sites abound. The only one I’m personally familiar with is TripConnect, to which I contributed reviews.

Magazines and newspapers

At first glance, it seems that Facebook accomplishes what local newspapers once accomplished, although in a more extensive and personalized way, whereas topically oriented online communities are more analogous to magazines.

What’s your take? Are there any vibrant online communities that particularly impress you? Or any old media companies doing anything particularly interesting in this arena?

This is a thread I’ll hopefully develop more fully in the future.

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Timothy McNulty at the Chicago Tribune wrote a great article yesterday on journalistic objectivity.

Objectivity is an oft-debated topic amongst journalists. To what extent is it possible? Where are the lines drawn? Has it diminished in the age of cable TV’s talking heads and the numerous opining bloggers? Or, as McNulty says, does objectivity get reduced to neutrality? “On the one hand this” and “on the other hand this,” without any attempt to truly seek the truth?

One thing that interests me is the potential of objectivity on a macro level - especially given the democratizing potential and decentralized nature of the Web.

(more…)

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Medill Dean John Lavine told a group of Medill graduates today, “we are aggressively looking at a set of new clients” for their graduate run Medill News Service.

As we at Medill here have started turning more towards multimedia journalism, the clients who subscribe to our graduate-run wire service haven’t been able to support some of the Flash-based video pieces we’ve produced for our Web site Medill Reports.

The Medill News Service, a wire service run by graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism has provided local coverage on Chicago politics, business, legal affairs, etc. for area publications since 1995. Basically, Medill graduate students report in Chicago, and Chicago-area publications who can’t afford the reporting pay for the stories. (Clients include the Daily Herald, the Daily Southtown, the Northwest Indiana Times, the Chicago Defender, among others.) The Medill News Service also runs a Washington Bureau. Washington clients include the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and the Greeley Tribune in Colorado.
(more…)

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Check out this post here for a detailed timeline of the debacle.

Basically, a writer/blogger for the IndyStar.com wrote up some harsh criticism of a “city-county council president” near Indianapolis. What’s really interesting is that the writer/blogger revised his story a number of times. Apparently, he watered it down a little each time, before an editor at the newspaper read the post and took it down. Here’s the formal mea culpa.

What’s interesting, however, is that in the timeline mentioned above, an Indy blogger (on stAllio!s way) searched through the Google cache to find previous versions of the post, chronicling the “timeline of a slur.”

The whole situation is unfortunate, to say the least. But it brings an interesting point about blogging and the Web. Whereas it’s become popular to think of blogging and the internet as a wild, no-holds-barred, “anything goes” medium.

I’ve just never bought that.

People, and especially journalists, are still accountable for what they say or write, regardless of the medium. The ability to reach a global audience with no barrier to entry changes the way we communicate, sure. But I suspect that norms and mores surrounding that way of communication will evolve. And once that happens, we’ll look back on that perspective of the Web as a safe place for over-the-top commentary and editorial as pretty naive.

Update: It looks like some of the pages are even gone now from Google’s cache. The blogger is now linking to .jpgs he’s made of the original post

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Nearly 4 in 5 adults are touched by the “footprint” of newspapers, according to a report issued by the Newspaper Association of America, using data from Scarborough.

The report (PDF here) emphasizes a few key points:

• Newspapers and newspaper Web sites (the newspaper footprint) reach 77% of adults in a given week.
• The newspaper footprint reaches 65% of young adults (18-24) in a given week.
• In a given week, the newspaper footprint reaches 66% of adults who have been in their home less than a year.
• The newspaper footprint reaches 76% of food shoppers with long recipts($150+) in a given week.
• The newspaper footprint reaches 81% of consumers planning to spend $35,000+ on a new vehicle in the next 12 months.
• The newspaper footprint reaches 82% of adults who have made any Internet purchase in the last 12 months.

In the market for a new car…

I find the statistic on vehicles interesting. Here at Medill, where our Integrated Marketing Communications department harps on targeted, relevant advertising, we often discuss the inefficiency of car and real estate advertising in newspapers.

Traditionally, newspapers provided the only blanket coverage of a particularly geographic area. On the other hand, however, not many people are in the market for a car or a home at any given time.

On its face, that statistic affirms the traditional wisdom: if you want to reach someone in the market for a car, the newspaper will probably achieve that for you. On the other hand, you’ll be reaching a whole lot of people not in the market for a car. Not terribly efficient. And this report doesn’t seem to speak to that concern.

What happens when that number slips to 70 percent, then 60 percent? Of the population of people in the market for a car in the next 12 months, I wonder how many of them can be reached through ads on Cars.com?

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A big move for an old magazine
An editor over at U.S. Catholic, where I worked this past summer, informed me that the Christian Century, a Christian magazine with more than one hundred years of history opened up its site to independent bloggers. (Founded in 1884, it was renamed the Christian Century in anticipation of the 20th century!)

First off, I wanted to point it out and give kudos to the staff over at Christian Century for making the move.

Secondly, apparently the way it all started was one writer, Real Live Preacher, taking it upon himself to come up with the idea and recruit all bloggers to make it happen. This fact illustrates an important facet of opening up your site, or your platform as a more traditional or mainstream news and information site. The mantra, “if you build it, they will come” just doesn’t work.

There needs to be someone, whether it is a writer on staff or a community outreach coordinator or advocate, reaching out to bloggers to convince them to contribute. They can write anywhere. You have to convince them it is better to do so on your site.

Or you may have to do more…
This past spring I worked with a dozen other graduate students in the spring on the Medill Media Management project. In the course of our research into hyperlocal community news sites, we spoke with some editors at the Rocky Mountain News. When they launched YourHub, a community news site reliant heavily on user generated content, they stressed the importance of soliciting content from the community. Actively. One editor told us that if you have to go door to door and explain to people what a blog is and how it works, then that’s what it takes.

Now not all of us have the resources of the Rocky Mountain News, but to be in conversation with the community (or audience, or readership, or viewership, or whatever), you need to truly be in conversation with the community.

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