A few takeaway points from the New York Times Company’s results yesterday:
On Sunday the Edinburgh International Science Festival event ‘Journalism in the Digital Age: Trends, Tools and Technologies’ posed the question: Can journalism survive in the digital era?
There to address the issue were a panel of speakers from the worlds of journalism, academia and public relations, each of whom gave a five minute presentation followed by a brief Q&A.
Sarah Hartley, who oversees the Guardian’s new Beat Bloggers initiative, pointed out that people are “no longer happy to passively receive” information. She suggested that news organisations now have to accept that it is “the end of us and them”, and factor in audience interaction as an integral part of their workload. She also pointed out that creating web-specific content is essential rather than merely recycling print content on the web.
Kate Smith, media lecturer at Edinburgh’s Napier University spoke on the role of educational institutions in helping trainee journalists prepare for the future media environment and suggested that the basic principles and values of journalism should still be emphasised. Video games and PR expert Brian Baglow, who gave a presentation on citizen journalism, echoed her sentiment, assuring journalists that they had “skills and understanding that most bloggers don’t” and were still needed for their “expert investigation and analysis”.
Iain Hepburn, digital editor at the Scottish Daily Record & Sunday Mail shared his love of podcasting, praising the “intimacy” of audio and the “visceral appeal” of video. Hepburn went on to claim that affordable, easy to use products like Flip cameras were allowing journalists to make “documentary quality” films without any prior expertise, and described how a smartphone can now be used to cover events where previously several pieces of kit would have been necessary.
Finally, Martin Belam, information architect for Guardian.co.uk, took us through a potted history of journalism, beginning with the very early years, when “storytelling was concentrated in the hands of some monks”, to today’s world where even local newspapers such as The Belfast Telegraph can reach a global audience. He also spoke about the increasing demands on journalists for real-time coverage, the effect of social media/online pressure groups on news, and the potential of the semantic web.
It wasn’t until the Q&A session that the thorny issue of the industry’s financial future was raised, with one journalist in the audience asking: “How are we going to get paid? Mercedes don’t give away cars, but you are all giving away content everyday online.”
The panel had no concrete answers, but Rupert Murdoch’s new paywall model and Jeff Jarvis’ arguments in favour of a link economy were given serious consideration.
There was also some hope that a proven willingness to pay for mobile apps could lead to more substantial subscription based models for e-readers such as the iPad.
Milo McLaughlin is a freelance multimedia journalist specialising in arts and technology. He blogs at milomclaughlin.co.uk.
Engadget takes a look at news and magazine applications developed for the iPad now that the device has gone on sale in the US. Le Monde, the New York Times, the Associated Press and Reuters’ apps are all reviewed.
paidContent:UK looks at plans from two UK publishers readying their iPad editions ahead of the device’s US launch this weekend.
Digital editions provider Exact Editions is involved with The Spectator’s iPad launch, which will adopt a freemium model, Exact’s co-founder told pC:UK.
Elsewhere the Financial Times is preparing a sponsored FT iPad app. Launch sponsor Hublot will subsidise a two-month free access period. After this, the app will revert to the same model as the FT’s iPhone app, which is feel to download, but charges for access to more than 10 articles.
The Wall Street Journal have announced that they will charge $17.99 for their iPad edition. As reported by FishbowlNY, a subscription to both the online and print version of the Journal costs $2.69 a week, or roughly $10.76 a month. And yet, the paper wants to hike that cost up 67 per cent for a subscription to the iPad edition alone.
The move raises questions about the comparable value of print and digital editions. More specifically, of print, online, and what we might call enhanced digital editions, like those being designed for the iPad format.
Given that online news content is largely free (although the Journal’s is not), but print news content is largely charged for, we might automatically value digital editions less, and assume that they will cost less. In announcing that its much-publicised iPad edition will probably be cheaper than its print magazine, Wired magazine has followed this way of thinking.
But does the potential of the iPad to offer an enhanced experience of multimedia content, interactivity and social sharing, not to mention the device’s status as a groundbreaking way of delivering news, in turn offer publishers an opportunity to value it higher than the print product? Or, in the case of the Journal, a subscription to both print and online?
image by curious lee
Starting today, the editor’s blog will feature an afternoon roundup of all things media from over the pond. From the hugely important to the very inconsequential, check in for a choice of America’s journalistic goings on.
paidContent 2010
The issue of paid content was high on the agenda at the end of last week with the paidContent 2010 conference in New York. In attendance were big names from the New York Times: Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher; Janet Robinson, president and CEO; and Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations, who were interviewed at length by ContentNext’s Staci D. Kramer on “metered news and more”.
According to the paidContent coverage, “while they were willing to buy lunch, they weren’t ready to feed the appetite for detail about plans for NYTimes.com to go metered in 2011”.
And the full conference coverage from the paidContent site here
“Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?”
image courtesy of Stephen Cummings
Presumably, ways of making newspaper journalism pay were also high on the agenda over in Minneapolis at the end of last week, where the Star Tribune announced that five voluntary redundancies would be offered to reporters and editors. “Does the bleeding ever stop at 425 Portland?” asks MinnPost.
Pessimistic stories of this kind, including this one, continue to be thoughtfully aggregated by blogger and pessimist extraorinaire Fading To Black. Not featured on this chronicle of US newspaper decline was the story that down in South Florida, rather than asking him if he’d like to pack his things, the Sun Sentinel handed production maintenance manager Bob Simons a $25,000 spot bonus and a Caribbean holiday. Simons’ suggestion of a different supplier for equipment apparently saved the paper $1 million.
A very different staff memo here
AP underperforms on non-profit content distribution
An interesting story from the Nieman Jounalism Lab reports on the outcome of Associated Press’ decision to distribute content from America’s top four non-profit news outlets: ProPublica, Centre for Public Integrity, Centre for Investigative Reporting, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
The six-month project was launched back in June 2009 at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Baltimore, “with great fanfare” according to Bill Buzenberg, executive director of Centre for Public Integrity.
It seems however that the scheme hasn’t been successful so far, with admissions from both the AP and the non-profit directors that very little content has made it into print. A poor distribution model is to blame apparently, with new non-profit content not being sufficiently flagged.
“They haven’t done the technical backup work to really make it work,” said Buzenburg. “They haven’t made it a priority.”
However, hope remains for the project from both sides. Buzenburg added: “This is a good idea. I’d like it to work […] The potential of this remains.”
“It’s early yet – we’re only six months into it,” said John Raess, AP’s San Francisco bureau chief.
“We want our celebrities to show a little leg”
image courtesy of Jim Epler
Much of the weekend’s media coverage in the US was given over to Tiger Wood’s much-publicised public apology on Friday morning. Mediabistro nailed the best format for coverage by inviting readers to pen Haikus for the Mediabistro facebook page. Submissions include this clear frontrunner from Pamela Ross:
“Questions? Don’t go there.
My Thanksgiving meal was ruined.
Thanks. Now. Watch this swing.”
With more syllables at his disposal, David Carr of The New York Times’ Media & Advertising pages goes into a little more detail, considering the relationship between celebrity sportsmen and the media:
Athletes and actors would like for us to focus on the work, while reporters know that their editors and audience want more, because while the work is visible, we want our celebrities to show a little leg.
But once this bit of leg, so strictly concealed by Woods for so long, has been shown, why are the media who feed on it so relentlessly owed some sort of apology?
Those of us who have had some experience with human frailties all know why Tiger Woods did what he did last Friday, which was to get in a room with people he had hurt or embarrassed to say he was “deeply sorry” for what he had done. That part made sense, the beginning of a process of amends.
I just don’t know what the rest of us were doing there.
A sentiment echoed this side of the pond by Charlie Brooker today in the Guardian.
There are those that must hope that, now this enigmatic character has addressed his hushed audience, and delivered his much anticpated talk, that the hype, rumour, pontificating, and endless media coverage will die away.
Apple wields knife over TV show prices
It is fair to say that at least a few people thought exactly the same thing about Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad. But the so-called saviour of the newspapers is back in the media spotlight this week with news that Apple are considering halving the current price of television shows on iTunes from $1.99 to 0.99 cents. Media commentators have hailed the iTunes store’s 125 million registered customers as a potential liferaft for sinking newspaper publishers, and major networks may be wary of waving a pin anywhere near that customer base by rejecting the move, instead gambling on even a small percentage increase in those paying for TV offsetting the significant price drop.
image courtesy of curiouslee
Meanwhile, Adobe and Conde Nast have jumped right aboard the good ship iPad, unveiling “a new digital magazine experience based on WIRED magazine” at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California.
The Church of Scientology vs. the St. Petersburg Times, Round 1
And finally, from Howard Kurtz’s Media Notes at the Washington Post, the improbable story that the Church of Scientology, in a tit-for-tat response to investigations by the St. Petersburg Times of Tampa Bay, has organised some investigative journalism of its own.
image courtesy of Ben Sutherland
The church has officially hired three ‘veteran reporters’ – a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors – to look in detail at the newspapers’ conduct. Steve Weinberg, the former IRE executive, who was paid $5,000 to edit the study, says that the agreement stipulates the church publish the study in full or not at all.
Weinberg claims that in spite the study being bankrolled by the church, it will be objective. Neil Brown, executive editor of the St. Petersburg Times, thinks otherwise:
“I ultimately couldn’t take this request very seriously because it’s a study bought and paid for by the Church of Scientology.”
Brown seems to feel a bit hard done by in this instance:
“I counted up something like six or seven journalists the church has hired to look into the St. Petersburg Times. I’ve just got two looking into the Church of Scientology,” he complained.
No fair.
Techology magazine Wired is set to release a digital edition for the iPad by summer. Editor-in-chief Chris Anderson announced the planned launch on Friday at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference (TED) in Long Beach, California. The first iPads are scheduled to go on sale in March.
In a report of the conference on Wired.com, Anderson said: “We have lots of questions about our future. The good news is I think we found part of the answer (…)We think this is a game changer.”
Condé Nast, publisher of Wired announced last year that it would have a digital version of Wired available before the iPad was even official. For the last six months, Wired creative director Scott Dadich has worked with Jeremy Clark from Adobe to design the Wired iPad version.
The conference attendees were given a demonstration by Clark on a supersized iPad using content from the March edition of Wired.
According to Wired coverage, Anderson believes that the iPad “allows periodicals for the first time to do digital content with all of the same values and artistic range that are the hallmark of print magazines”.
Readers would be able to drag left and right to navigate articles; once choosing an article, they would navigate up and down to scroll through the story. By turning the device horizontally the user will also benefit from the rotating display system to view a double-page spread. The device will also have opportunities for interactive advertising.
Anderson did not mention how much the digital edition would cost.
The hype surrounding Apple’s new touch-screen mini-computer, predictably, is huge. Just like film studios, book and textbook publishers, news producers are hoping the iPad can boost the online, mobile content marketplace.
Here’s a “source”, who purports to have worked with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, telling the Wall Street Journal exactly what it wants to hear:
Mr. Jobs is “supportive of the old guard, and [he] looks to help them by giving them new forms of distribution”.
One publishing CEO was even moved to write poetry about it (via Moconews.net) and Apple fanboys and news executives will no doubt be glued to their screens when Jobs takes the stage at around 6pm (GMT) tonight to announce the details.
But when the hype dies down, will the journalism business really be in better shape? These people have taken a welcome dose of reality juice:
Much is made of iTunes and its successful monetisation of mobile applications and music – the Financial Times is even planning to imitate (via PCUK) its “pay-per-view” micropayments model, although FT.com told Journalism.co.uk last week that paid-for day passes would come first.
The model is attractive: there are more than 100 million iTunes accounts with users’ credit cards pre-loaded and ready to go. A new shiny, powerful device – somewhere between an e-reader and a netbook – could just persuade people to buy the news subscriptions the New York Times and Rupert Murdoch so desperately want to sell them.
But Apple’s new device is just another distribution platform for words, pictures, videos and data, just like PCs, mobiles and print. Recreating a print experience on another device is not going to solve the economic crisis news finds itself in: Google will still be more efficient at selling advertising and will still point readers to free content.
The future of news is about distributing content as widely as possible and monetising not just content but relationships. Devices will be a big part of that, but they’re not the answer.
Photo credit: Mike McCaffery, from Flickr, via a Creative Commons licence.
UPDATE: This post was amended to reflect the announcement of the name of the device, iPad.
Patrick Smith is a freelance journalist and event organiser, and formerly a correspondent for paidContent:UK and Press Gazette. He blogs at psmithjournalist.com and is @psmith on twitter.
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