The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has received a $230,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to investigate why magazine websites are struggling to grow online traffic and audiences.
In a frank article about the paper’s future, the owners of US independent newspaper the Berkeley Daily Planet admit they don’t have a solution for plugging the revenue gap in their ailing ad-supported business model.
Enter the Fund for Local Reporting, which is asking for donations large and small to keep the Planet running.
“As we explained in a recent editorial, paying salaries and benefits just for the reporters and editors who cover local news adds up to at least $250,000 a year. That doesn’t include production, rent, printing, distribution, sales etc,” reads the online payment form.
The O’Malleys, the paper’s owners, are also exploring developing the fund into a tax-exempt, not-for-profit organisation. Indeed, they’ve been toying with lots of ideas – part of a ‘reality check’, the editor says – including voluntary subscriptions and migrating to the web [All ideas mooted in today’s #cfund debate]. They might not know what the solution is, and this might be a last roll of the dice, but they’re certainly going for it with all they’ve got.
Obama digital campaign ‘guru,’ Thomas Gensemer, has attracted a fair bit of attention with his arrival in London – check out the Guardian G2 feature and this article at TimesOnline, for example. A Guardian video can be watched here at this link.
Gensemer, whose company Blue State Digital built the Obama website and managed the online campaign, was also speaking at City University on Tuesday evening: at an event entitled ‘Obama’s (not so) Secret Weapon: the role of the internet in the 2008 US Presidential Election’.
His talk officially launched the journalism school’s new MA in Political Campaigning and Reporting. A video of the event can be watched here.
Etan Smallman was at the event, and shares his report with us here:
Plain old-fashioned email is the key tool for successful political campaigning in the digital age, the mastermind behind the Obama digital campaign, Thomas Gensemer, told an audience at City University this week.
Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, who built the highly acclaimed online operation, dismissed the impact of social networking in favour of ‘the simplicity of email’.
The message is ‘use tools, not gimmicks’, Gensemer said. “For all the talk of social networking, blogs, and mobile applications, email is still the ‘killer app’. Our email list of 13.5 million individual email subscribers was the backbone of the campaign,” he added.
“This is not a story about technology; this is not a story about Facebook or Twitter. This is about dynamic, personalised, two-way relationship via email,” he said. Gensemer said that more than a billion emails were sent out to over 13.5 million email subscribers throughout Obama’s presidential campaign. It resulted in my.barackobama.com raising half a billion dollars in donations.
The mainstream media is ‘still included in the cycle’, Gensemer said. “It is often that you’re bypassing them to get to the audience, and then encouraging the media to tell the story to the audience. You’re inverting the relationship a little bit. They don’t serve as the filter any more – when you have the engaged constituency online, you go directly to them.”
Gensemer, who previously worked in the UK on Ken Livingstone’s unsuccessful London mayoral campaign, is currently expanding his operation to the UK political arena by opening an office in London.
Some organisations still believe their audience isn’t online, he said. “It’s no longer the case in the ‘first world’. Even people over 70 – the ‘silver surfers’ – they’re out there. They’re willing to do something for you. They just need to be asked. This isn’t just about college kids. This isn’t just about bloggers in Westminster.”
“It is not about magical technology,’ he said, arguing that the key components to successful online campaigning are transparency and authenticity: “You can’t fake it,” he added.
“Do you really believe that the average MP is Twittering?” he asked. “Do you believe that Barack Obama Twitters? I’ll tell you, he doesn’t.”
New social media crazes like Twitter ‘tend to distract,’ Gensemer said.
“It tends to be from shiny object, to shiny object, to shiny object. For organisations that need to invest in deep personal relationships with a variety of people, just doing that sort of scattergun approach is dizzying.
“It burns through political capital pretty quickly because it doesn’t really talk to the people it’s trying to talk to,” he said.
“The lesson of the Obama campaign is to use tools to facilitate a message – don’t use gimmicks. None of this would have happened [just] because somebody was Twittering.”
Reed Elsevier, parent company of Reed Business Information (RBI), is close to completing a deal that would grant a three-year extension of $2 billion of loan debt.
Publish2 – the link-sharing website exclusively for journalists – is running a promotion to reward members who invite other journalists to join the site.
The prizes include a $25 gift card redeemable for training at Mediabistro.com and a prize draw to win a MacBook Pro and a trip to the Mediabistro Circus conference in New York City.
Members can opt for a choice of three gift cards for the first 10 journalists who register with the website by March 31 following their recommendation. All journalists who get a recommendation to register will be entered for the prize draw.
Publish2 launched publicly last October and allows users to share website links on Twitter and delicious.
For some Friday fun, how’s about NYTimes wallpaper at $1,000 a roll?
Artist A.J. Bocchino has created the design using Times headlines from 1990-2005.
“I collect headlines from the New York Times and use them as data for systems that generate complex networks and forms. The headlines are organized chronologically and color-coded according to subject. Global, national, and local events generate a continuous stream of news from which color patterns emerge,” says Bocchino in the description of the work at WallpaperLab.
Money will support six centres for editing excellence, business reporting training centre and 70 journalism training internships.
Last week saw co-founder Katie Lee aka ‘ShinyKatie’ leave Shiny Media, a departure she announced on Twitter.
As TechCrunch reported, only one of the three original staff members is left, Chris Price. Shiny Media first launched in 2003, with its site TechDigest and then rapidly expanded and in 2007 received $4.5 million VC funding from Brightstation. By 2008 they had six main Shiny categories which split into different sites – 30 in total.
Things didn’t look so bleak for Lee in September last year when Lee discussed her plans for redesign with Journalism.co.uk. But even without Lee, Shiny is still going ahead with plans. This week saw the launch of TechDigest’s new look – with a ‘new user friendly format’, Chris Price told Journalism.co.uk.
Last Friday, was Lee’s last day as ShinyKatie. She spoke to Journalism.co.uk about Shiny and her plans for the future.
What is the situation for the company now? It seems the 30 blog titles are being maintained, but is this realistic?
[KL] “Many of the sites in our network are key to the deal we have with Glam, and they certainly won’t be closing. In terms of other sites, all I know is that traffic is Shiny Media’s biggest success story and Chris and his team will be working hard to make sure sites aren’t shut down unless they absolutely have to be.”
How do you feel about it? Did things get resolved amicably? Or will you be speaking out like [other co-founder] Ashley Norris?
“Obviously I’m absolutely gutted not to be working with such a talented, brilliant and (most importantly) funny editorial team. I have no plans on ‘speaking out because’ my team left behind in Shiny Media deserve to do well, deserve my respect and deserve the chance to continue doing their job without hindrance from me.
“It’s important to say that Ashley wasn’t in our office working full time for a very long time before that article was written. In fact, while he was working as a freelancer up until it was announced he’d left, we hadn’t seen in him in the office for months and as far as most of the staff were concerned, he hadn’t been a part of Shiny for some considerable time. I think the impression was that he’d been CEO up until it was announced he’d left, but that isn’t the case.”
It’s obviously sad to read about the plight an independent venture that seemed to be going so well: looking back can you see where some things went wrong?
“It’s still a successful network with some good advertising deals in place – such as the Vodafone Live Guy campaign we recently worked on, and a brilliant partnership with the Gadget Show Live.
“In terms of where we went wrong, we’ve certainly made some pretty big mistakes over the years, but with no model to follow over here, I think Shiny is still a pretty impressive success story. I wish we’d sorted out the commercial side of the business from the beginning rather than relying on advertising agencies to sell what are very bespoke advertising campaigns, but we finally have a sales team in house and they’re already making great strides forward.”
You’re still a shareholder – do you still have hope the company can turn things around?
“I certainly do still hope the company can turn things around, yes! I love Shiny Media, love the sites, and love the people that work there. It’s really important to me that the sites keep going. Shiny Shiny was my site that I started when I was 25, and the thought of it not existing anymore is something I can’t ever imagine. I know that Gemma feels the same about the fashion sites, especially Catwalk Queen. And if there was no TV Scoop I wouldn’t be able to geekout on Being Human reviews and the like!”
What are your plans now?
“I’ve got some ideas that have been bubbling away quietly in the back of my mind for some time now. I’m going to take a bit of time to work out which to focus on and where to take it and while I’m doing that I’ll keep myself ticking over with a bit of freelance consultancy and some journalism. I won’t be looking for venture capital funding – I’m more interested in starting small, keeping things simple and satisfying a few creative urges along the way. One idea in particular I’ve been dying to work on for a while now, so I’ve got plenty to think about!”
With 20 million monthly unique visitors, the New York Times could make $240 million from charging these users just $1.00 a month on average, according to Poynter’s calculations.
“Beyond being a gamble worth taking because of the potentially significant payoff, there is no realistic alternative to charging for quality content that anyone has presented,” says Steve Brill, who goes on to set out his plan for getting off ‘the free-content treadmill’.
The last remaining co-founder of Shiny Media, Chris Price, spoke to paidContent:UK, following the announcement that Katie Lee would be taking redundancy from the company.
“When it got $4.5 million VC funding from Brightstation in January 2007, [Shiny] had decided to employ writers on staff but, faced with the economic climate, it will now shift to more of a freelance arrangement over time. The company has 30 active blogs; none is scheduled for immediate closure…” paidContent:UK reports.