2011 > 2012

Leave the old behind…but don’t lose sight of it.

You might need it one day.

Happy New Year!

Newspaper Boys, St. Louis, 1910

Source: Shorpy

 

Quickshots: October

A great example why print still works: The Occupy Wall Street Journal is a 4-page broadsheet that is widely distributed among protesters downtown.

“Forgive an old newspaper hack a moment of sentimentality, but it is somehow reassuring that a newspaper still has traction in an environment preoccupied by social media. It makes sense when you think about it: Newspapers convey a sense of place, of actually being there, that digital media can’t. When is the last time somebody handed you a Web site?” (David Carr, “A Protest’s Ink-Stained Fingers“, New York Times).

 ♦

In “Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?”, Mathew Ingram debates the question that Dave Winer (Scripting) raised in his blog post, where he argued that it is obsolete “because everyone can do it”. Winer writes, “Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this, and it wasn’t that long ago that we depended on journalists for the news. But in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently.”

You should know my point of view by now. And if you agree with the notion that journalism is an old hat, why are you reading this blog? Ingram (and I happen to agree with him) argues that everyone has their own definition what journalism is, “but I think it’s fundamentally about a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things. It’s something like the spirit of scientific inquiry, as Matt Thompson noted recently in a post at the Poynter Institute. It has very little to do with specific tools or specific methods of publishing.”

Yes, anybody can access sources and write. But we still need those of us who can curate the flow of information, put it in historic and political perspective and digest the findings. We are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Journalism, says Ingram, “is a state of mind.” Yes, indeed.

♦

“A new generation of web entrepreneurs has discovered the joys of charging users cold, hard cash. […] If we’re lucky, this trend will save the Internet from one of the most corrosive forces affecting it — the bloodless logic of advertising,” writes Clive Thompson on Online Ads in Wired Magazine. “I predict that in 2050, we’ll look back at the first 20 years of the web and shake our heads. The craptacular design! The hallucinogenic business models! The privacy nightmares! All because entrepreneurs convinced themselves that they couldn’t do what inventors have done for centuries: Charge people a fair price for things they want.”

I agree! Thanks, Clive. But what took you so long to discover this? And do you pay for what you read online?

  ♦

Very sound advice:

“Online publishing has made it deceptively easy to become a publisher. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Back when editors and publishers were gatekeepers, there was someone who was reviewing your writing. Content creation, like any other art form, generally improves with practice. If you haven’t ever written for the web or you’re just a bit rusty, you should consider practicing more in private. Working out your routine in private is far less damaging to your brand than producing sub-par content.” (Buddy Scalera, “Content Strategy Tip: Write Awful Content”) 

♦

World press trends: Newspapers still reach more than internet. “Circulation is like the sun. It continues to rise in the East and decline in the West,” said Christoph Riess, CEO of WAN-IFRA, who presented an annual survey at the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Vienna, Austria. Nicely put.

♦

Paid-For Daily Newspapers Around the World

Quickshots: June

NYTimes’ Bill Keller in “The Twitter Trap“: “… [B]efore we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. [...] I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves. [...] Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud.”

At left, my own rant.

And here is more on Twitter: “Twitter is building a machine to convert 140 characters on Barack Obama, Ashton Kutcher, narcissism, the struggle for human freedom and Starbucks into cash — and quick, before its moment passes. Is this asking too much of even the world’s best technologists?” asks Joe Hagan in New York Magazine under the headline “Tweet Science”.

No, it is not.

♦

This PBS story, “Children and Facebook: The Promise and Pitfalls for Social Media,” reminded me of another quote by Keller: “Last week, my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.”

♦

Bill Moyers on the Daily Show: “I try to figure out the difference between the important and the immediate [...] News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. [...] We amuse ourselves to death.”

♦ 

David Carr of the New York Times says: “I don’t believe in the sort of bifurcation of old and new. The whole ‘we’re old world media, we make phone calls and we put them in the newspaper’ and ‘we’re new media and we grab whatever’s in the ether and put it up.’ There’s been this steady march toward each other and what you’re doing is no different from what I do.” More here.

♦ 

Very interesting article in the NYTimes “In Praise of Not Knowing” (June 18). “It’s fun being In the Know, but once everyone’s in it, there’s nothing to know anymore. [...] I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things. Learning how to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into wonder, is a useful skill.” 

 ♦

There is so much wrong with this blogger’s assumption that journalism is dead and its market value is zero in the digital age, but he argues his point well and that is what good communication is all about. Judge for yourself.

And here is a counter argument in the discussion whether the value of journalism is zero, posted by Newsosaur, a blogger whom I respect a lot: “The Value of Journalism, Sir, Is Not Zero”. 

 ♦

Are the 700 Gannett layoffs “a vote of no confidence in the future of print by America’s largest newspaper company?” According to Poynter, they are indeed. Humph.

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You’ve got to be kidding me: “Women Still Don’t ‘Get’ LinkedIn” (via The Atlantic). Nonsense. According to TechCrunch, “Women rule the Internet. [They're] the routers and amplifiers of the social Web. They are the rocket fuel of e-commerce. If you figure out how to harness the power of female customers, you rock the world.”

Do you have a LinkedIn profile yet? No? Get going. Here’s mine.

The Royal Show

Tina, Tina, you just couldn’t resist, could you? You are trying to revamp Newsweek (see my previous post) and are slowly turning it into a British tabloid, a real royal treat. The latest issue features, who else, Kate the princess-what’s-her-name. And you give that story eight (!) pages, in a world, as you so adequately put it on the cover, which has “gone to hell.”

You managed, after just a few weeks, to turn this venerable news magazine into a skimpier version of Vanity Fair and Talk Magazine combined. And the royal wedding hasn’t even happened yet. God help us at the end of the month, when you will be covering it all. Will you write another royal biography, say, The Kate Chronicles as well?

But maybe your approach will get Newsweek more ad pages. After all, your magazine has lost the most ad pages among the major magazines, and the meager the content, the better the ads.

I, for one, won’t be reading Newsweek any longer: After 15 years, I have grudgingly canceled my subscription. I am reading Time Magazine now. Their latest cover is about the Civil War. Hmm.

Newsweek’s Peppy News Speak

Long before the first issue of Tina Brown’s revamped Newsweek hit newsstands, critics already questioned its future. Regardless, the new editor promised in her inaugural column “to re-create a great institution after its journey through tough times. What a magazine can offer readers is a path to understanding, a filter to sift out what’s important, a pause to learn things that the Web has no time to explain, a tool to go back over the things we think we know but can’t make sense of.”

And?

I don’t want Newsweek stubbornly clinging to its past, but I resent the empty notion that a few new fonts and colors make an old magazine more “hip” and thus more relevant in today’s media quick sand. Don’t insult my intelligence while trying. Print magazines will never compete with interactive media hipness, whatever that means. Why should they? They need to provide the content and context that gets lost in the immediacy of the newsy, noisy Web. In that she’s right. Magazines need to offer enough value that I’ll keep them around for a while, even reread them or use them as a resource. Every article should have a quote to remember and make me think. I don’t believe that is too much to ask, but Ms. Brown doesn’t deliver.

The second issue of this new “filter” has entered the superfluous space of fluffy magazines and is anything but. The readers have not become part of the discourse, nor are their voices heard. I am sure that they are evenly divided between those who like the new look and feel and those who don’t. Brown, however, is not interested in a dialogue with her audience. All three letters and tweets to the editor about the new design that were published in the second issue praise its “oomph,” and its “sharp and engaging” look. How is that, to quote Tina Brown again, “making sense of it all”?

Content

But to be fair, I can’t evaluate the content beyond the two issues that have been published so far (I will revisit the topic here in a few weeks). For now, I will just say this: I was baffled that the first two issues managed to give a combined 5 pages to the Charlie Sheen story (as I am sure Talk Magazine would have eagerly done). Sheen even manages to get his headshot on the cover, a pathetic little thumbnail of a pathetic little man, squeezed to the outer lower edge, right beneath a burning house floating in a sea of debris in Japan. Quite a “path to understanding,” Ms. Brown! Cheers for that! But if this is the extent of your “filter to sift out what’s important,” as you promised, at a time of economic hardship, turmoil in the Middle East and Japan on the brink of nuclear meltdown, I’ll pass. Oh, and we also get introduced to the future British princess or whatever her title will be pouting in her underwear. Awesome.

Design

The magazine looks cheap with an unpleasant ‘70s feel. The headlines state the obvious and could appear in any British tabloid or the New York Post (“Nightmare in Japan”). Its myriad of font types, sizes and weights, and an overall confusing black-red and blue color scheme with tiny visual elements are dizzying. The new section names — NewsBeast (yes, we get the connection), Omnivore, The Big Fat Story, XTRA INSIGHT — come straight out of Highlights for Children. Many of the black & white pictures should have been color, while some color pictures would have been more expressive if left in black & white (including Charlie Sheen and the British royal what-ever-her-name-is in her nickers).

The graphics, logos and headshots that accompany the columns are flimsy, sort of Wall Street Journal-ish but out of ink (or too much of it) and less graceful. Some articles use so many blog heads, subheads, bylines, decks, intros and haphazardly positioned oddly rounded drop caps and horizontal and vertical lines in various thickness (in, you guessed it, red, black and blue) as well as bold lead ins and pull-quotes that I am exhausted before I even get to read the rest of the copy. Oddly enough, there is also a lot of white space in all the wrong places and that is equally distracting. I initially merely skimmed the articles because I was so puzzled by the style elements that were supposed to draw me in. Brown seems to be strongly opposed to “less is more”. Black is her color. Bauhaus be damned (but I doubt that many of her copy editors know what that even is). Whatever! We prefer to be, like, bloody hip.

The problem is not the busy layout; the problem is that the layout is unimaginative and uninteresting; nothing innovative happens here. Nothing like the layout of Wired Magazine that uses every thinkable and unthinkable element of text and graphic style to give each page and section its unique modern feel. But they use old-school elements (think Bauhaus again): geometry, straight clear lines and optical illusions; color schemes that provide depth. Graphics that are sleek. They use the various fonts as artistic tools. With them, more is really more. In comparison, Newsweek’s “hip new look and feel” is overzealous and amateurish. You want peppy? Try again.

Verdict

“Having read the [first] issue front-to-back,” writes Jack Shafer in Slate, “I can report that the gaps remain, the agenda has not shifted, and the crackling, confusing digital dots are still scattered at random on the floor.”

I agree. If Tina Brown’s goal is to reincarnate the serious, in-depth newsmagazine with analysis and good writing, I believe she drives on the wrong side of the road. Most of the content as it stands now could easily find its place on the Daily Beast website or in O Magazine and People. Nothing wrong with that, but don’t pretend to reinvent the newswheel. I expect from an engaging, relevant print newsmagazine to provide me with challenging long-term analysis, investigative reporting, a focus on the bigger picture and an in-depth look at what has disappeared under the screaming fluffy radar of new media. I want brilliant writing, a way with words that sets the bar high for the reader. Long-narratives written by seasoned, sharp writers who bring with them the broadest and widest outlook possible. Writers who have seen the world and can provide context to the news. Writers who challenge me and my views.

None of the content in this magazine comes even close to that yet. For now, it is just one more outlet for an editor with a big ego.

WikiLeaks to Old Media’s Rescue!

The implications for journalism could be immense. After WikiLeaks unveiled yet another batch of secret and not so secret documents — this time revealing the State Department’s pretty tame musings about foreign dignitaries — the public led out a collective cyber-gasp (at left, the cover of the German news-magazine Der Spiegel with its headline “Revealed: How America Sees the World”).

Was this just a tempest in the usually rather tepid teapot or a poisonous arrow in the quiver of new media enthusiasts aimed at top-down journalism? It may have been both.

The fact that we can upload everything, anytime and anywhere onto the web has stark repercussions for all media, old and new: Now, more than ever, we need old-time editors and investigative journalists, who can weed through the vast amount of data and hunt for the relevant among the irrelevant, filter the important scraps from the noise and the fluff. The ability to find any type of data, classified or not, on the internet and to dump every piece of information into cyberspace still doesn’t make it factual. That’s why the New York Times, the only U.S. newspaper, and four other foreign print publications, among them the British Guardian, were given first-access to the more than 250,000 documents, maybe in an attempt to give the data credibility. Not the blogs, or the ever-present Huffington Post, but old-fashioned print media were the first to have a go at the information. How ironic.

The New York Times explained why it decided to publish the secret diplomatic documents (under the headline State’s Secrets), saying that they represent “a mammoth cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the last three years [that] provides an unprecedented look at bargaining by embassies, candid views of foreign leaders and assessments of threats”. The Times also devoted a page on its website to answering readers’ questions about the publication. And it went on:

“The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”

Investigative journalism is back with a vengeance, and sites like WikiLeaks are a new, cheap and increasingly important tool in its tool box. Seems the watchdogs that were asleep at the wheel are barking again. The Genie is out of its classified bottle, and as long as no lives are endangered or people are put at risk, I believe that is a good thing. But what does that mean for the free flow of information?

The limitless dumping of information and data will make old-school journalists and old-time journalism ethics relevant again. We still need someone who is trained to dissect the truth from the lies, the substantiated from the irrelevant. Nothing can stay secret, yes, but at what price? Is info-dumping good for a democracy and a society or could it backfire? Will soon all news stem from hearsay and gossip, from pieces of documents that someone secretly scanned, faxed or uploaded? Someone who may have a hidden agenda? How will that affect the exchange of information in the future and people’s willingness to be named a source or to give an eye-witness account? How do you assess what is true and what is manipulation in this free-for-all? How do you verify sources? And should we care, as long as it is entertaining?

I am all for revealing the truth. But I want to cut through the hype and the sensation and be sure that what I read is authentic. I don’t like to be manipulated. As a journalist, I like to do the editing and fact-checking myself. But others may not be able or willing to do so. Should they be protected from the information overload? By whom? And when does censorship really begin? With a government’s calculated release of data to the press corps — or with an editor’s decision to run a story or not? Too many readers or bloggers still don’t see the difference. Many are indifferent, but established journalists and many bloggers and pundits are not. Let’s use their knowledge and skills and get to the point.

That said, I think the following viewpoint given by Huffington Post contributor Derrick Ashong has merit:

“The saddest thing to me about this latest WikiLeaks disclosure is that it diminishes the value of “whistle-blowing” itself. As I tweeted yesterday “you blow the whistle to spread the truth, not to hear the sound.” By publishing these emails not only has WikiLeaks compromised the privacy of state department officials and the trust within important diplomatic networks, it has also undermined its own credibility as a resource for people who have genuinely important information to share with the global community. There is a distinction between truth tellers and high-tech gossip-peddlers. Unfortunately, it looks like this time WikiLeaks has crossed that line too.”

Good point. I agree. WikiLeaks will have to learn that crying “wolf” each time someone somewhere spills something is getting us nowhere.

In July 2010, when WikiLeaks published classified military data on the Afghanistan war, Mashable.com gathered the opinions of journalists under the headline The WikiLeaks Debate: Journalists Weigh In:

“We need people to leak and people to dig and people to consume and explain, and people who care enough to find the documents and bring them to light,” Mike Sager, a respected writer for Esquire, Rolling Stone and The Washington Post was quoted. “WikiLeaks, like most other Internet “news” organizations, doesn’t provide the perspective and understanding the public actually needs,” according to author and University of Chicago and Northwestern University writer-in-residence Alex Kotlowitz. “We need to be careful that we don’t confuse platform with content,” Kotlowitz said.

A bit condescending, but basically I agree.

Mashable also published another article that same month with a similar topic: Why WikiLeaks and the Mainstream Media Still Need Each Other. The gist:

“These leaks signal a seminal change for investigative journalism. The new collaboration model between prominent publications and WikiLeaks is a tactical marriage. WikiLeaks needs the press so that its leaks can rise to the top of public conversation. The press can use WikiLeaks for its unparalleled scoops. Furthermore, because WikiLeaks isn’t entirely understood or trusted by the public, a partnership with established news sources like The New York Times gives its leaks legitimacy. This “asymmetrical journalism,” as David Carr calls it, is a natural evolution for WikiLeaks. [...] [A]ssuming there is news to be broken — it’s best if WikiLeaks and the press are on good terms.”

The German writer Rudolf Arnheim wrote in the 1930s: “Human beings will come to confuse the world perceived by their senses and the world interpreted by thought. They will believe that seeing is understanding.”

It seems like his predictions were right. WikiLeaks as media’s wake-up call? You bet.

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The Guardian has a very informative infographic, showing where the diplomatic cables were sent from (click picture to enlarge).

Good Old Days?

Here is a video find “How to Be an Old School Journalist.” A real gem from the late 1930s/early 1940s that teaches kids what it’s like to be a journalist. Especially watch minute 5:06 and on. What journalism is like for women. Society pages and balls.

If only they could see us now.

But don’t gloat. We still have a long way to go in print media, especially book publishing: According to She Writes, under the headline “Not A Balanced Breakfast: Gender Stats in Publishing for…2009?” you’ll read this:

“There are more women writing today than ever before, but what kind of recognition are they receiving? Well, not as much as you might think: in terms of prominent book awards and “best of” lists, gender equality hasn’t changed at all.”

Summer Laziness and Mob Mentality

For this one lone August post, I can blame summer laziness, not media fatigue, even though I have many times come close to just giving up on the state of the media and where we’re headed.

My tagline reads “Old Media and New Media Meet”, and that is sometimes hard to come by. Old and new are still behaving like third graders who compare the size of their ice cream cones. It’s not either-or; neither will get far without the other. So, here is a small list of the positive things that each side will bring to the table. Merging these will lead to better communications, no matter the platform.

Old media bring depth, when needed, tight control over the quality of the writing (editors, copy editors, proof readers), sincere fact checking and an army (or what was once an army) of investigative reporters and writers who know their beat, have the right connections and get out there to cover the news. Oh, yes, and they get paid and have the resources to follow their noses. Old media still adhere mostly to the rule that one needs more than one source to get the story right and that you draw a distinctive line between reporting, commentary and advertising. Old media raise issues that readers are not always aware of, or don’t think they need to know but should.

New media bring immediacy, the collaboration of many to a story, the interaction with the readers, the ability to constantly update and supplement a story with new facts, links, info graphics, audio and video. It is a many-to-many approach, and as such rather democratic: no matter where you are and who you are, your voice is part of the whole. You can decide what you want to read and customize your daily media intake. You become the editor.

I, for one, need both, the old and the new.

Many of us in media, however, see only doom and gloom lurking around us. We’ve lost our jobs, our self-esteem and careers, and our work is being taken for granted by young web editors, who crash with their parents but then tell us our hour’s work of writing should be worth less than what they get babysitting their neighbor’s kid to supplement their own meager income. Now, they say, everyone is a journalist, a photographer, an editor and writer, or so it seems. Content should be free, they beam, and they advise us old timers to be happy to get a byline and a thumbs up on Digg.

I want to share with you a moving blog post from the blog Headlines and Deadlines. The writer muses about her “blogging breakdown” amid the state of old media:

“Lately I haven’t had many thoughts about journalism or newspapers, at least not any that would stand sharing. Because recently, Blog, I have found it increasingly hard to negotiate the choppy waters of ‘changing times’; I have, if you like, lost my compass. I have striven to be optimistic about newspapers and the future but sometimes the words rang very hollow indeed.”

I hear you. But no, it’s not all downhill from here. One way or another, people will come to realize that words and content still matter. They will miss getting lost in a story, once they’re left with only snippets of bullet-pointed search-engine-friendly written content; “voices drowning one another out”, as Jaron Lanier wrote in an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “World Wide Mush.” And he continues: “When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don’t get innovation […] creativity and excellence.”

Admit it, new and social media by themselves are not enough to get the whole picture. Surely you’ve come to the same conclusion, when you got lost in a Google search the other day and ended up spending hours on Facebook before you picked up a magazine or a paper.

I believe, we still have a choice: to become a numb collective with a short attention span, that regurgitates what advertisers, public relations people or celebrities want us to talk about. Or we could merge old media’s values with new media’s possibilities and not get lost in the crowd.

Paper Cuts

In case you were wondering and worrying about the fate of U.S. newspapers, keep an eye on this blog: Paper Cuts by Erica Smith, a journalist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  According to Smith’s research, in 2010 alone, almost 1,900 newspaper jobs were eliminated and/or lost to layoffs and buyouts.

The blog monitors recent job cuts and newspaper closings, and you can submit job cuts and newspaper closings that you know of as well. Keep it bookmarked.

The Blog Shaping the Future of the Newspaper, quoted Paper Cuts, saying that since 2008, 166 newspapers in the United States have been shut or stopped publishing a print edition. So far this year, more than 18 newspapers have folded or stopped their print editions. The numbers are based on a report titled “Million Dollar Strategies for Newspapers,” published by the World Association of Newspapers. The losses were mainly caused by a steep decline in ad revenues, fueled by the Great Recession.

According to the German press service, PressText, the US newspaper crisis has cost 35,000 journalists their jobs. German newspapers fare much better, according to PressText: In Germany, newspapers are only up to 50% financed by advertisements and the rest of the revenue comes from subscriptions and newsstand sales.

Seventy percent of adult Germans still read newspapers — far less than among Americans.

Tweeting is for Birds

“Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, ‘tweet’ has not yet achieved the status of standard English,” wrote Phil Corbett, New York Times standards editor, to NYT staffers recently. More than that:

“Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections. [...] “Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”

Now, here’s the fallout from the Times’ new policy and what they’ve come up with to keep “tweet” out of the paper’s esteemed pages. In this article on LeBron James’ decision to move to Miami and the ensuing Twitter buzz, the paper went all out not to use the word “tweet”. It seems, the editors had their Thesaurus handy.

Old media being ridiculous. Pity.

The Glass is Still Half Empty…In New Media

I just came across this picture of the New York Times’ copy editing team hard at work at the paper’s foreign desk, ca. 1942.

Notice the amount of editors working. White men and All the News That’s Fit to Print. Don’t sneer. In that regard, not much has changed, because mostly white men are still deciding what is considered newsworthy to print or broadcast.

But if you take a good look at new media, there, too, the good old times are still with us: Most influential political bloggers are male.

You want to change the media landscape, ditch the old ways, be all new and trendy and interactive and many to many while wagging a finger at mainstream media/old media/dead media? Why not shatter the glass ceiling once and for all in your approach to citizen journalism, counter the indifference toward women writers, put the social in social media and hire female executives while you’re at it.

I am not holding my breath though.

So ladies, take the matter in your own hands. Start writing about hard news. Submit op-eds. Analyze and comment and be heard. And don’t take no for an answer.

The McCormick Foundation New Media Women Entrepreneurs has more facts to consider. Among them:

• Women comprise nearly two-thirds of journalism school students but only make up one-third of the full-time journalism workforce. That proportion has not changed for more than 25 years.

• Only 3 percent of clout positions in mainstream media are held by women.

“What we don’t know – and aim to find out – is how the explosion of new media is changing the news landscape for women,” states the foundation. “In the face of media consolidation and mega-buyouts, the rise of citizen journalism and multimedia reporting, are more women journalists leaving traditional news operations to launch and lead their own news businesses? Is cyberspace a more welcoming place for women journalists? Are women bringing different news judgment as they conceive new Web sites? What do these trends mean for women consumers of news?”

Here’s another disturbing trend:

“Women are used to being paid less, doing more for less. Men want more. And unless you’re on staff, the pay [in new media] is miserable,” writes Luisita Lopez Torregrosa in Politics Daily under the headline Women in New Media: At the Top or in the Trenches? “The highly prized jobs of web developers — the thinkers, the innovators, the ground breakers — are all held by men.” And Torregrosa points to a NYTimes article in the Sunday Magazine a while back that ran several pictures of the people it chose as the 21^st century leaders at The Times: They were all young, all of them new-media whizzes, and all were men.

Indeed, according to another NYTimes article, “Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley” (April 16), according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women account for just 6 percent of the chief executives of the top 100 tech companies, and 22 percent of the software engineers at tech companies over all.

Even The Huffington Post, launched and run by a woman, Arianna Huffington, is not immune. FAIR Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting discovered in a 2008 study that the Huffington Post had far fewer female bloggers than one would think.  FAIR discovered during a 9-week period that only 23 percent of the “13 featured blog posts” on the home page belonged to women.

When I interviewed Arianna Huffington in 2009, she told me, “The caricature that women just want to sit around reading People magazine and watching soap operas is very moldy. And as we move forward, I believe more and more women will challenge our cultural labeling and speak out more.”

Let’s take her by her word and send blog post pitches her way and speak out more.

For more info, visit the Op-Ed Project; get more facts from my post on the glass ceiling in media; read this 2007 study by the National Center for Women & Information Technology; take a look at this listing of Top 100 Female Bloggers; and read The End of Men from the July/August issue of The Atlantic.

If Print Is Dead, Why Quote It Online?

The gist of this entire blog is my belief that old media and new media are neither clashing nor colliding, nor that new media will soon replace print. They need to meet, especially since most of the material found online is still either a rehashing of what’s been published in print, a commentary on something that was first written for print media, or an “online exclusive” by an old school journalist, who has discovered the wide world behind the newsroom, and then, ahem, social media, and now applies long-established, tried and true old media work ethics online. First those old media folks laughed uneasily about Twitter, now they don’t miss a beat with their tweets. And that is as it should be.

But take away print publications entirely — and with it (albeit shrinking budgets) their readiness to uncover and investigate hard news, to dispatch correspondents abroad and to cover the government branches and the judiciary tirelessly — the information out there on the web would be much shallower and much less.

Most of what’s been blogged about is heavily backed up by extensive links to print articles (as it should be). Take those away and you’ll feel a void. Old media help new media generate content. Nothing bad about that.

But don’t argue that print is dead.

“To take an analogy from renewable energy sources vis-a-vis fossil fuels, citizen journalism can only do so much to meet our entire information needs as a free society. Finding the right mix will be the challenge of the next decade,” read a post on the “New Media” Blog under the headline “Breaking News! New Media Depends On Old Media” a while back. And further, “If new media kill vast swathes of old media publications, our society may find itself at least temporarily unable to get the information it needs to make informed decisions. Even if plenty of new media news sites rise in the wake of the defeated publications, it is difficult to see how genuine sources of hard investigative journalism will replace the old paid models.”

A study released in the beginning of the year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, “How News Happens — Still,” offered support for the argument often made by the traditional media “that, so far, most of what digital news outlets offer is repetition and commentary, not new information” (see above graphic). This flow of media sources, the evolution of a news report, how information spreads and who among the media outlets — old and new — set the agenda, can be visualized using Media Cloud, an interactive, user-customizable database launched by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.

The same concept is used by Cornell Universities MemeTracker.

New York Magazine published last October a lengthy article “Where News Comes From — Walking Back a Single Day’s Top Stories” by Jeff VanDam that featured a 4-pages long info graphic (Part I and Part II) with a time line on how seven stories traveled from source to source, from print to web and back again.

Nothing more to add, but this compilation is truly fascinating: According to the Technorati Attention Index, the most frequently used sources for bloggers as well as Google News are mainstream newspapers, and traditional news organizations like the Associated Press, the New York Times (rank 1 last year), The Guardian (2) and the Wall Street Journal(3).

More on the ratings can be found at NewsKnife, a website that rates the top sources for Google News in any given month.

And yet, these sources have been shrinking fast, and one can argue that the web is giving them new life — again, collaboration and not collision (click to enlarge graphic; data from 2008 by mint):

Internet Ad Revenue Grows! Really?

The Wall Street Journal quotes a study  in an article published on June 15 that states flatly, the “Internet is set to overtake newspapers in ad revenue.” Another nail in old media’s coffin?

“The Internet is poised to overtake newspapers as the second-largest U.S. advertising medium by revenue behind television, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010 to 2014. [...] The online ad business, excluding mobile ads, is set to expand to $34.4 billion in 2014 from $24.2 billion in 2009, according to the report. Newspapers, meanwhile, continue to suffer from a decline in advertising revenue. According to numbers released by the Newspaper Association of America earlier this year, print advertising revenue dropped 28.6% in 2009 to $24.82 billion. The PwC report estimates that print advertising in newspapers will hit $22.3 billion by 2014.”

Yet, The Economist recently wrote,

“Between 2004 and 2007, online advertising revenues doubled from $1.5 billion to $3.2 billion, according to The Newspaper Association of America. But in the second quarter of 2008, they began to fall, just as the loss of print and classified advertisements accelerated.” (The Economist, May 16, 2010)

On June 16, The Economist revisited that claim, stating:

“The Newspaper Association of America reports that print and [my emphasis] online advertising has fallen by 35% since the first quarter of 2008. Circulation has dropped alarmingly too. Yet almost all newspapers have survived, albeit with occasional help from the bankruptcy courts.”

Still, print performs much worse when it comes to advertisement, as written in this June 15 blog post by Reflections of a Newsosaur “Make No Mistake: Newspapers Are Still in Trouble“:

“American publishers missed out on the broad advertising recovery that took place in the first three months of this year.[...] The only positive growth posted by newspapers in the first period of 2010 — which also happened to be the first advance in any category in 24 months — was an increase of 4.9% in online advertising. But this pales in comparison to the over-all industry improvement of 7.5% in the same period, suggesting that newspapers are continuing to lose ground in even the vital interactive marketplace.”

I think nobody really knows what’s going on, and publishing a speculative assessment of what’s to come in online media in the next 4 years as PricewaterhouseCoopers has done, seems utterly useless to put it mildly.

Four years is a life time on the web.

Your Brain Online

Long post. But maybe by reading this, you can refute a thesis that the Internet has altered our brains. Maybe. Keep reading, even though there are no bullet points.

A June 11 op-ed by Steven Pinker, “Mind Over Mass Media,” in the New York Times stated the following:

“[...] Knowledge is increasing exponentially [...] Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Then, Nicholas Carr’s published a blog post with his sharp rebuttal of Pinker’s thesis:

“The fact that people who fiddle with cell phones drive poorly shouldn’t make us less concerned about the cognitive effects of media distractions; it should make us more concerned. [...] I have little doubt that Steven Pinker will one day write a cogent, thoughtful, and balanced critique of Internet skepticism. I look forward to reading it.”

Carr, by the way, is the author of The Shallows, which was reviewed in the NYTimes Magazine on June 6 under the headline “Our Cluttered Minds”.
The review ended with these words:

“While Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, The Shallows is most successful when Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. Or maybe even these worries are mistaken; it can be hard to predict the future through the haze of nostalgia. In 1916, T. S. Eliot wrote to a friend about his recent experiments with composing poetry on the typewriter. The machine “makes for lucidity,” he said, “but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.” A few years later, Eliot presented Ezra Pound with a first draft of “The Waste Land.” Some of it had been composed on the typewriter.”

The Times also published an interview with Carr, and Wired Magazine printed in its June issue an excerpt from Carr’s book, introducing the article with these words: “The riot of information from the Internet shatters our focus and rewires our brain.” Carr writes in his book:

“When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain. [...] The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes our attention only to scramble it. [...] The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself — our preferred method of both learning and analysis.”

I mostly agree with Carr. Strictly speaking from personal experience of course, being online and available all the time frequently means many wasted hours — and I exclude working on this blog. The more I read, the less I take in. To quote T.S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

No scientific data to back me up really, but I know best what the Internet has or has not done to my mind. Anyone who has put his/her keys in the freezer because the Blackberry chirped relentlessly must recognize this feeling.

I counter Pinker’s notion that we all are “getting smarter” because of the web — social and world-wide and any other kind — with this quote written in 1930 by Rudolf Arnheim, a German author, art- and film theorist and perceptual psychologist, who wrote about mass media in the early 1930s (pictured): “Human beings will come to confuse the world perceived by their senses and the world interpreted by thought. They will believe that seeing is understanding.”

I think he was on to something.

Already back in January, before the Carr/NYTimes face-off, an article in Newsweek had quoted studies that deflated the idea that the Internet was changing our brain (“Your Brain Online”). The article featured an introduction with an account of what we perceive the Internet to be doing to our brain: “Shortened attention span. Less interest in reflection and introspection. Inability to engage in in-depth thought. Fragmented, distracted thinking.” But it still somehow came to the conclusion that “the ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data.”

In a very, very, very long article in The Atlantic, Carr had asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The short answer should have been “no”. Because stressing that readers skim and not read and that they are too wired to absorb, dismisses the fact that The Atlantic and its readers are living proof that the opposite can be true as well. These people like to read. And they presumably go online as well. It seems on that platform, he was preaching to the wrong crowd.

The effect of the Internet can not be explained in black or white. Still, Carr’s words of caution have merit: “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”

Then again, Arnheim was already prescient enough to know this in 1930.

(You might be interested in checking out this website: EDGE by the Edge Foundation that has many takes by scientists and scholars on the topic and revisits the question annually.)

US Newspapers “Not Dead Yet”

Under the uplifting headline “Not Dead Yet”, the Economist mulled over the pitiful state of the newspaper industry in the United States (June 12, 2010), and provided a pretty gloomy picture, starting with this sentence “Newspaper have cut their way out of crisis. More radical surgery will be needed.”

“Many papers stayed afloat by pushing journalists overboard. The American Society of News Editors reckons that 13,500 newsroom jobs have gone since 2007. [...] Yet these desperate measures have proved the right ones and, sadly for many journalists, they can be pushed further. [...] The whirlwind that swept through newsrooms harmed everybody, but much of the damage has been concentrated in areas where newspapers are least distinctive. Car and film reviewers have gone. So have science and general business reporters. Foreign bureaus have been savagely pruned. Newspapers are less complete as a result. But completeness is no longer a virtue in the newspaper business.”

I suggest a massive intervention on the scale of F.D.R.’s Federal Writers Project, part of the new Deal that helped struggling and unemployed writers (see a poster from that period, ca. 1939). “The Federal Writers Project was a product of one of the most ambitious research and writing undertakings in American History. The project put authors to work preparing state guidebooks, writing historical pamphlets, and recording the points of interest of each state that had decided to partake in the undertaking.” (via asma.org).

A sign in the New York subway “We Need FDR Again” from last year seems to mirror that sentiment. The Federal Trade Commission has published a draft with recommendations on how to rescue the industry, if at all possible, including subsidies and taxes. Its final study will be made public at the end of the year.

But don’t hold your breath yet. According to the New York Times, the F.T.C. is on a “somewhat quixotic journey of trying to identify ways to save journalism as we know it from possible extinction. [...] Critics [to the F.T.C.'s proposals] have taken a free-market approach: let the market, not the government, determine what outlets survive.”

One thing is for sure, according to the Economist (and I tend to agree): “New technologies like Apple’s iPad only [stress that] [t]he mere acquisition of a smooth block of metal and glass does not magically persuade people that they should start paying for news. They will pay for news if they think it has value. Newspapers need to focus relentlessly on that.”

More on that to follow. Stay tuned.

European Newspapers In Much Better Shape

“The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Paris-based group of wealthy free-market democracies, has examined the state of the news business in the 31 O.E.C.D. member states and the kinds of bailouts that are under way or up for discussion. One thing that comes across starkly in the report is just how much worse the newspaper business is faring in the United States than in other O.E.C.D. countries. From 2007 to 2009, industry revenue fell 30 percent in the United States; the second-biggest decline was 21 percent, in Britain. Countries like Germany (down 10 percent), South Korea (down 6 percent), Australia (down 3 percent) and Austria (down a mere 2 percent) fared better. So did France, which posted a decline of 3 percent, though from an already low level.” (via the European Journalism Center)

More on this can be found in this New York Times article “Preserving Journalism, if Not Papers” (June 13, 2010). And read more here on the OECD’s upcoming  government discussion session on the Future of News. Last year’s coverage can be found on the editorsweblog: “Looking at the future of news at the OECD (2009)“

The picture shows how typical  newspaper stands — in the US and in Europe — looked like in 1935. Those days are definitely gone.

Liberty Magazine Revisited

Liberty Magazine (1930s):  Old Media Brought to Life Again.

This is nice! http://libertymagazine.com/

The iPad, A Media Savior?

The iPad has finally arrived! This sleek device with a bright, colorful and vivid display (but an unfortunate name that reminds me of adult diapers), has Apple enthusiasts saluting yet another shiny gadget and the blogosphere and social media buzzing with excitement.

Judging by the reactions of the media, the iPad will save the newspaper and magazine industries from sure demise with one stylish swoop, and with it book publishing and e-book distribution (Hachette, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan already made deals with Apple.)

The British blog FirstPost nicely sums up this mood and warns: “No one is more excited about [the iPad] than publishing and print media companies. To them, the tablet represents a vision of the future that does not involve their extinction. […] The Devil’s bargain is that you have let Steve Jobs be the gatekeeper to your customer and price-fixer of your product.”

Oops.

Newser reports that “unlike Google, Steve Jobs [who, according to the Wall Street Journal, envisions “new money in old media“] sees his mission as helping content providers repackage and sell their wares, rather than giving it away for free.”

Indeed, according to a post on Reflections of a Newsosaur, the new tablets (which the blog refers to as the “Swiss Army knife of media platforms”) have definitely “raised the bar for interactive content delivery. Unfortunately, most media companies already are late in developing editorial and advertising strategies to meet this new challenge.”

The new challenge is to entice users to actually pay for the content they consume. Yet a commenter to Newsosaur’s blog post dismisses this notion and surely represents a majority of readers: “A new uberhyperbolitron [sic] like the iPad won’t make one whit difference for old media. Embedding visual aids with text isn’t going to get somebody to pay for an online ‘newspaper’ when there’s a blogger who’ll gladly do the honor of analyzing news content.” For free, may I add.

That, precisely, is the point. Unless tablets provide a platform to charge consumers for all content, no shiny new device will make old/new media profitable. At least, until readers, who eagerly dished out good money for their gadgets, consider rewarding those who produce the content they so eagerly click through (or copy/paste into their own blogs).

Joshua Benton, writing for NiemanJournalismLab, shares this skepticism. “The iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. I didn’t see anything today that made me change my opinion that device-based dreams of a news deus ex machina are wishful thinking, and that the difficult revenue decisions will have to be made pan-platform.”

Nevertheless, at least three magazine publishers, Hearst, Conde Nast and Time, have already created mock ups of their magazines for the Apple tablet. The New York Times Company is working on a tablet version of its newspaper; others will follow.

But old media turned new via tablets still play an important function: helping consumers wade through, organize and prioritize the vast amount of information available online. We need to come up with a formula that addresses media-flow overload and information fatigue, caused by relentless, feverish “multitasking,” like reading a magazine on the iPad, writing a blog entry or comment on an iMac, texting or watching a YouTube video on the iPhone and listening to iTunes downloads on an iPod. (By the way, “multitasking” in my view is not reading and listening to music simultaneously, but reading and playing an instrument. But that is a separate post.)

Yes, tablets are the future of interactive media consumption. I want one, too. But I hope that the iPad will eventually do for written content what iTunes did for music: ensure that writers and editors will be rewarded for their work. Without us — the “content providers and developers” — even the nicest tablet will one day go dark.

This post also appeared in Aloud, a blog for New York Women in Communications.