Mediabistro carries a memo from the Huffington Post calling on its blogging contributors to ‘think local’ as it prepares to launch a local edition for Los Angeles.
The site has already expanded to cover Chicago and Denver, but, as mediabistro points out, the memo states: “‘As always, there are no deadlines or quotas.’ Or money”
Mediabistro.com reports on the launch of a new spin-off site for Gawker – a video website, Gawker.TV, manned by around 16 interns working under a video editor.
Videos are a big traffic driver for Gawker and founder Nick Denton has admitted that selling ads will be easier on a site with a less specific focus, according to Mediabistro.
MagCulture has shared the below animation from the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), which has produced a list of twenty ‘tweetable truths’ about magazines.
Agree or disagree?
The Chicago Tribune and Tribune Co.’s other US newspaper titles will run a week-long experiment starting from next Monday by using as little Associated Press (AP) content as possible.
The trial is part of review into costs and follows the Tribune’s warning to the agency last year that it might drop the service.
Last year a group of newspapers in Ohio forged an alliance (the Ohio News Organisation or OHNO) to share their top stories in a move against AP copy.
Last week Journalism.co.uk attended the INMA and Online Publishers Association (OPA) Europe’s annual conference Outlook 2010 – the event focused on innovation, transformation and making money for media businesses. Follow our coverage at this link.
Former ContentNext research director and media analyst Lauren Rich Fine opened her conference presentation with a potentially ‘heretical’ question: “Is it possible that there’s too much news?”
Fine’s overview of the state of the media industry (focusing on the US market) and her ideas for a more collaborative, cooperative future can be listened to in full below:
Here are some key quotes:
On content:
On the newspaper industry:
On advertising:
Foundations, universities and other third-party organisations must play an increasing role in maintaining public affairs news coverage in the US – as part of their commitment to ‘a continuous public good’, a new report into the future of US journalism has suggested.
The US-focused study looks at the future of ‘accountability journalism’, in particular in an age of declining fortunes for newspapers, who traditionally carried out this role.
The Columbia Journalism School report, written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr and j-school professor Michael Schudson, makes proposals for changes to US tax codes, including recognising news orgs committed to reporting on public affairs as non-profit entities, entitling them to tax-deductible donations.
Collaboration – between journalists, foundations and other stakeholders – will be increasingly important for producing news in the public interest, the report suggests – many such partnerships are already being formed, it observed.
“The report does not envision newspapers disappearing, but it also does not regard restoring newspaper staffs to their former size as possible. It looks forward to a new, mostly digital, era of news production, in which newspapers will continue to have a leading role, but as part of a much larger cast of featured players,” explained Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann in a statement.
“It may not be essential to save or promote any particular news medium, including printed newspapers. What is paramount is preserving independent, original, credible reporting, whether or not it is popular or profitable, and regardless of the medium in which it appears,” add Downie and Schudson in the report.
An increasing number of online journalism initiatives suggested to the report authors that a mixture of for-profit, low-profit and non-profit news sources could be developed to support public affairs journalism.
An edited version of the report is available on the Columbia Journalism School website, while reaction and some criticisms can be found on the Columbia Journalism Review site.
A local TV station in the US has spotted a gap in the market following cutbacks at local newspapers in its area – WNEM-TV in Michigan is offering two-minute, on-air and online (on ObitMichigan.com) obituaries for $100.
The station has aired more than 700 since it started doing so in August. According to its general sales manager, Jeff Guilbert, the new revenue stream could become the station’s largest on-air client within two years.
Blog search engine Technorati started publication of its annual State of the Blogosphere report yesterday – a survey of 2,828 bloggers in the US.
Section 1, ‘Who are the Bloggers?’, provides some new figures on who runs blogs, including the following from the respondents:
The report will be published in five sections – one on each working day this week.
This year the study also looked at monetisation, Twitter and microblogging and bloggers’ impact on US and world events.
BNOnews has a letter from New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announcing that 100 newsroom positions will be cut at the title by the end of the year.
In the letter Keller says voluntary buyouts will be offered before any lay-offs are made.
The editor also points out that pay cuts, budget cuts and redundancies in other departments have been made to protect the newsroom from this eventuality so far.
“I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not in some ways diminish our journalism, or that they will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we’ve been looking hard at ways to minimise the impact – in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won’t promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organisation on earth,” he writes.
Four laid-off journalists have been recruited by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) as part of the industry publication’s new Encore Fellowship initiative to give redundant journalists more job opportunities.
According to the CJR, the journalists will work for CJR for nine months and receive support on using their experience in the future. Their work will be featured in both the magazine and the website, from late October.
The Encore initiative has been developed by Civic Ventures, a partner of the project. The Poynter Institute have also partnered CJR for this scheme and will provide educational opportunities tailored to the new journalists’ needs.
The Encore journalists were chosen from journalists who, because of the industry’s economic condition, have left jobs as senior reporters. Encore has received a grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies and hopes that new donors will help an expanded program to launch for 2010.