The Future of New(s)

Goodbye Radio's Local Monopoly

2012-01-09T21:17:00.003-05:00

NPR posted a video this evening of host Audio Cornish driving a Ford around town listening to audio from the NPR iPhone app. run through the car's dashboard using voice commands.

With a few well chosen words she can select live radio from any NPR station in the country which is in the app. She can also select any archived audio that's available in the app.

When these dashboards become commonplace in our vehicles, the local control of the audio on the radio in your vehicle will be over. Instead of radio stations competing with any other radio station within range of an FM radio signal, companies that produce live and archived audio will be competing with any company that can can stream audio through a mobile device.

This will scare some and fill others with excitement at the opportunities technology offers.

The next question is: how do I make my friends' suggestions in social media influence what's avialable in the dashboard?

Let the best audio win!

An Earthquake for News

2011-08-24T07:16:00.002-04:00

Yesterday's East Coast earthquake was a perfect example of how the order of news has changed for breaking news stories. We've all been aware of this change for years, but yesterday you could actually see it play out over a period of just a few minutes.

Sequence of the order of news in yesterday's tremor:

News happens - in this case, our buildings wobble.
Twitter, social media and email light up - there's a massive instant discussion about what happened.
News organizations try to catch up and explain what people are already talking about.

This is the reality of news today. Items two and three in the order of news have changed places.

The old order of news put reporting ahead of discussion - like this:

News happens.
Reporters cover the story and put it in the newspaper the next day.
People read the paper and discuss the stories in work breaks and at dinner. They make calls and write letters about the stories they read in the newspaper.

Another interesting aspect of yesterday's news coverage was the early appearance of old news.

People felt the tremor, tweeted and then searched, for example "earthquake Massachusetts". Since in the few seconds since the quake no reporter had written anything longer than a tweet, search engines, which were fairly instant in finding new stories, also had some old stories high in the search returns.

What does this all mean for news? It means that the discussion generates the news in big news stories, and it means any journalist who isn't watching the discussion of the beats he's covering will be left behind when news breaks.

Better To End The Hour With Twitter

2011-05-20T07:34:00.001-04:00

Thought for the day - leave mission creep tasks, like e-mail and social, to the end of the hour...

Time management is one of the topics I always cover when I'm encouraging staff to get started on Twitter.

As a rule to get people engaged in social media I suggest they have to check in frequently, but also that they must be disciplined about getting out before too long.

My worry is that staff will get into Twitter, drop into its endless world of intirguing links, and then not reappear back at their daily routine for hours. I warn them "don't go down a rabbit hole!" By which I mean don't get lost in Twitter and suddenly find you've missed all your deadlines for the day.

How many times have you heard people complain that Twitter takes too much time and they're giving up? That's an outcome to be conscientiously avoided.

So I suggest they check Twitter every two hours, and work on it for ten minutes. I suggest they set their stopwatch when they start and be disciplined about getting out after ten minutes.

But a better solution, and one that I'm going to start suggesting is using negative time. That is, using the spare time created by finishing one task early and before starting your next appointment.

For example, I schedule appointments at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. I finish my 9 a.m. appointment at 9.45 and use the remaining 15 minutes for social media updates and e-mail.

Result: less mission creep, shorter meetings, greater incentive to get stuff finished early, and more social media engagement for the station.

Making Most Popular Even More Popular

2011-05-15T19:19:00.002-04:00

Each week I look at the most popular stories WBUR has produced in the week. This week I wondered if I could use Storify to make them even more popular.

Here's what I did:

a) I went through the top stories of the week for all the shows produced at the station. I collected the top ten.

b) I then went and found the most interesting tweets I could find about those stories. It was a great experience to go through the tweets about the shows. Some I'd seen during the week, some I hadn't. Some were very funny, some were poignant; all were interesting to review.

(This step wasn't as easy as it might have been. Some of the tweets were beyond the reach of the week of tweets in Twitter's search, and by extension Storify's search too. As a quick work around for this I used Google to search for terms and I narrowed the search with site:twitter.com. This got me what I wanted, but there must be a better way to do this. Please comment below if you have a better idea.)

c) I built a Storify page of links to the most popular shows and the tweets about them.

d) To complete the circle I tweeted thanks to the Tweeple whose tweets I'd put in the Storify.

In review I'd say this was a fun experiment to carry out. I could have done a better job of putting the Storify page together. Perhaps stacking the links at the top, or writing a clearer explanation of what the page is about.

I'd be a very grateful for any thoughts you might have on this. How do you think I could have done a better job?

Social Stories That Right Themselves

2011-04-03T18:41:00.003-04:00

We've all heard the complaints from newsrooms and editors that you can't trust Twitter. It's too fast, it publishes factoids that aren't right: it can't be trusted.

But two stories this week appear to show that stories emerging through social media actually follow a similar track to stories making their way though a newsroom.

In the middle of the week the "RIP Jackie Chan" rumor was quickly righted by Jackie Chan's own Facebook page. Even TheeAdamSandler, an Adam Sandler parody account on Twitter, perhaps somewhat ironically pulled out the all the stops to end that nonsense. The hoax died fast enough not to make it into the mainstream news in the U.S., but left security pundits wondering where it came from.

Later in the week NPR's Andy Carvin rebuilt the thread of a story that social media found, misinterpreted and then corrected, all in a very short time. The story concerned the origin of some munitions found in Libya. It began with a photo of a mortar round on a Facebook page. There was a star on the mortar round which, Carvin writes, led to a claim that the mortar round had been made in Israel. But, after some back and forth, it turned out the star indicated the type of round - a flare. Carvin tells the whole story here.

Social media is a source, and it's as likely to be wrong as any other source. But in addition to that, social media behaves like any other organization looking for an answer. In that sense it behaves like a newsroom, positing a hypothesis and then backing it with information until it begins to look something like a fact we can all agree on.

In a newsroom a reporter comes across a piece of information. It's something he heard at a meeting, something he saw in the street or maybe a story sent to him in an e-mail. It has some interesting detail in it. If it looks interesting he investigates. Some stories turn out to be true and have value. Some don't.

The difference between the newroom story and what happens in the world of social media is that the investigation is done in public by anyone who wants to join in. It's a process that's untidy and out of control. But it's like a ship in a storm. It will either sink or bob upright in the end.

Twitter Stats From Twitter

2010-11-19T08:22:00.006-05:00

Mashable reports that Twitter will soon release its stats package to all of us who are so self-obsessed that we not only tweet, we also want to know what happened when we tweeted.

Apparently a few people are already testing the product, so hopefully the rest of us will soon be able to see graphs of our tweets, mentions, our follows and unfollows, and the success of individual tweets over time.

From the screenshot the stats package looks very useful. It has the additional benefit of maintaining a positive attitude. Within "All" of our precious 140 character utterances, tweets are either "Best" or "Good". What a relief that there are no "Bad", "Worst" or "Fail" tweets.

These stats are bound to draw some attention away from the other stats we're looking at. For non-commercial twitterati they also imply a concern with marketing that is different from an older way of communicating.

Obviously if you're using Twitter for business you need to know what the return is for the work done. But if you're "just saying" something to your friends, why would it be important to know how many people are listening?

And there's no measure for "Kind", "Helpful" and "Genuine" tweets, or on the downside "Self-Serving", "Just Plain Mean" or "Shameless Marketing" tweets. Those important values you still have to estimate by yourself.

Some stories about social stats:

Understanding Engagement

2010-11-18T20:36:00.002-05:00

Philly.com has a very detailed process for measuring engagement, outlined in this article from the Nieman Journalism Lab. They study a significant amount of data, run it through a complicated equation and end up with an engagement number. Anyone with the resources to do that, would do it. But who's got the time to do that? In the same article a St. Petersburg Times executive says they couldn't sustain the reporting and tracking required to produce this sort of data.

If St. Pete can't do it, how much less so your average public radio station or small publication?

Smaller organizations can only deal with low cost, manageable amounts of data. That data and the time spent looking at it needs to produce clear results that show what changes will improve the work.

Low cost tools that deliver actionable data. What are the steps that will get you there?

1. Define what you consider to be a successful measure of engagement (or anything else).
2. Focus on an easily measurable, clearly meaningful statistic.
3. Change behavior and see if the needle moves they way you want it to.

Posts on engagement:

Facebook Lists

2010-09-17T07:32:00.010-04:00

Whenever I mention Facebook lists people look at me with that what-is-he-talking-about? frown. Some suggest I mean Twitter lists. I don't. I mean Facebook lists. Facebook lists are a powerful tool, but they are apparently little used.

This is important because the ability to send comments to a limited list is what separates
Facebook from Twitter. It means Twitter is about broadcasting and Facebook is about narrowcasting.

On Twitter everything you tweet goes to everyone following you. Broadcasting.

On Facebook you can send comments to everyone. But you can also segment your friends into lists and send specific messages to specific lists. Narrowcasting.

Once you've made a list you can share a comment, or any item, with only that list. No one else will see it. You can share something with one list, or many lists. Or you can share something with everyone but exclude one list.

Say one of my Facebook lists is for gardeners. I send my latest thoughts on the intricacies vegetable production just to that list, knowing that others won't be interested.

This is a powerful tool that reflects our real lives. We don't go around saying everything to everyone. We say the right things to the right people.

Using lists in Facebook you can have a thought about your job and just send it to your "Business" list. It's aunt Sally's birthday: just send it to the "Family" list.

(Parents take note: if you think you're monitoring your kids' activity in Facebook by having a Facebook account, you're wrong. Your kids are smart enough to make a list that doesn't have your name on it to use when they're writing something they think you might not approve of.)

Lists are useful for reading too. (This is the same function Twitter has in its lists.) When you click your carefully generated "Family" list in your main navigation you see a newsfeed made up of comments just from those family members you put on the list.

So if you don't have a lot of time for Facebook today, you can quickly narrow what you're reading down to just the lists of people you really want to read about.

If you didn't put all your friends into neat lists when you first accepted their friend requests, or if you want to do some list building or list weeding, the quickest way to edit your friends and lists is to go to Accounts > Edit Friends, and then click All Connections on the Edit Friends page.

That gives you all your friends, and you can run through them in a quiet moment and do some list management.

The ability to narrowcast is what makes Facebook different, at least for now. So don't miss out.

More information about Facebook lists:
- Facebook FAQ: What are Friend Lists, and how do I create them?
- Mashable: HOW TO: Create Friend Lists on Facebook

The Publisher Audience

2010-04-25T07:33:00.007-04:00

For years I've been meaning to write this post, but it seemed so obvious that I kept neglecting to write this thought down.

I am the publisher. You are the publisher. Anyone with a screen is the publisher.

That changes everything. It moves institutions that are publishers on paper or on the air one step further away from the audience. It means newspapers and broadcasters have to find ways to market their wares to the new publishers.

Let me say that again with a little more detail.

In the old days newspapers and broadcasters made selections from a wide range of competing news producers (AP, Reuters, staff, freelancers, etc.) and decided which of those sources would be published on any given day. The newspaper editor decided what would go into the paper, where each story would appear on each page, and therefore what the audience would read.

The person who buys paper as a vehicle for news has the decisions about what appears on that paper made for him by the editor.

But when people started buying screens instead of newspapers that changed. The decisions about what appears on the screen are no longer made by the newspaper publisher or the broadcaster.

The person who buys a screen, not matter what size, as a vehicle for news, also decides what news will appear on the screen. The screen owner has become the publisher. The people who used to be called the audience have become the publishers.

Each day each member of the new publisher/audience produces a single, individual, unique publication for one person: themselves. That publication includes some e-mail, some news, some productivity applications, some video, some blogs, some comments, perhaps an e-book, some more e-mail and so on.

The power that newspapers and broadcasters used to have to decide what the audience would read, hear and see, is gone. That means the old idea that newspapers and broadcasters are the gatekeepers, is also gone.

The institution that used to be the publisher or broadcaster has become just another news producer which has to try to get the new publisher/audience's attention, in competition with the same organizations that used to compete for its attention.

The old publishers have moved back a level. The new publisher is the audience.

The implications of the audience being the publisher are huge and a little obvious, but deserve a separate post. Coming soon...

And of course the newspapers, broadcasters and booksellers are trying to get their hegemony back by producing tethered devices and apps. But that too is another story.

In the browser based world we mostly inhabit the publisher audience is still enjoying the fruits of the screen revolution.

Engagement and Convergence

2010-04-03T09:28:00.005-04:00

The tablet should be a device that does everything. I've said this before on these pages. But now I suppose I have to admit, on the day of the launch of the Apple iPad, that tablets are here, and they're also getting there.

"There" is a place where convergence happens and engagement results. And we're not there because convergence presents problems for media and device producers.

Convergence for media producers:

Convergence is something that happens at the device level. So: I can surf the Web on my kids' Playstation. Or I can do anything I like on my iPhone, or my HP Linux Mini. That's convergence.

Media producers don't understand this. They think convergence happens at the level of their sites and apps. If the New York Times adds video to its Web site, is that convergence? No, it isn't.

Convergence means the people who used to call themselves, for example, radio producers, get their audio, video and text to seamlessly join the flow of content that runs across a consumer's device. (Remembering the consumer is the publisher, not the old media company.)

Old media companies have yet to get beyond their own properties. They are still thinking about their Web sites and their apps. They are still too attached to old media models to understand what convergence is. They are in a condition of unenlightened ignorance. (Apologies for this generalization. I know there are enlightened old media staff out there. But ask yourself; isn't that right?)

Old media producers need to jump out of bed this morning, the morning of the launch of the iPad, and shout out into the street "convergence doesn't happen on my Web site, it happens on the device." The sound of enlightenment.

Convergence for device producers:

The trouble is convergence is perhaps harder to achieve on the device and anyone anticipated.

It's harder because of the variety of standards involved and harder because of competition between devices.

So there are now a number of electronic books and pad-like devices, but some don't play audio or video, others are tethered or they're just plain slow.

And now there's the iPad, which hits the streets today but which apparently only runs one app at a time, like its older, smaller cousin, the iPhone. So when I listen to a radio station on the station's app I immobilize the device. That's not convergence. And it's not engagement.

Engagement is the ultimate goal, and the place where convergence happens, the device, is the place where engagement happens. That's because the device is the point of physical engagement.

But media producers, and now device producers both want to restrict or control what the publisher, that is the user, wants to publish on his/her device.

That limits convergence and engagement. We're not "there" yet.

Platforms and Tollbooths

2010-01-04T13:07:00.009-05:00

Everything in the media world seems to be in flux as we move into 2010.

News organizations don't know how or where they should be delivering news. Cable companies face a significant challenge from the Internet. Users are trying to decided where they want their media to appear. On their phone, on a TV, in an e-book?

I want everything on every tool. Why not? My iPhone gives me a lot on a single small screen. Photos, news, video, books, podcasts and even phone calls.

But users can't have that because the companies that own the means of communication don't want them to have that. They want tethered tools. Amazon only wants the Kindle to buy from the Amazon store. Ditto for the iPhone and the Nook.

Daniel Lyons in Newsweek says he only keeps paying his cable bill out of force of habit. That's what's keeping old media organizations in business. But as 2010 gets under way all that ground seems to be beginning to shift dramatically. Well, that's my feeling.

The Times reports there's a tablet from Apple on the horizon. Perhaps due for unveiling on Jan. 26. Google's phone is here and will attempt to break into what has been an iPhone business.

It's a struggle of platforms, channels and tools, and it could be a turbulent and exciting year.

Views of News

2009-10-27T07:07:00.004-04:00

What do people in social networks want? According to this article by Chris Crum the biggest slice of them are looking for news.

So if news organizations are looking for a new audience, Twitter wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Tablets Still Not Here

2009-09-26T10:50:00.018-04:00

I'm still waiting for this hole in the market to fill in. It's the tablet hole. The space for a viewer/reader/player about the size of a novel. It's easy to type on, it runs apps like an iPhone and everybody's going to love it. But it's not here yet.

Apple's iPhone, let's be frank, isn't that wonderful a piece of technology. It's a beautiful piece of sculpture: nice to look at and hold, and it's just the right weight. But now that I've had mine for a year it has such a lag in its response time that it's actually somewhat entertaining. You type, then sit back and after what seems like seconds you watch the keyboard apparently hitting keys of its own accord. Like one of those old pianos that plays itself, the keys moving in that wonderful ghostly way.

One impact the iPhone has had on me (and I'm sure I'm not alone) is that I now find myself touching screens everywhere and expecting them to do something. Of course by and large they don't, which is disappointing. David Pogue had an article in the Times this week about screens that play images and music, but aren't touch sensitive. He points out that one of the screens he reviews looks as if it was originally designed to be touch sensitive. But it isn't. Either the market won't bear the cost, or the technology won't bear the burden.

Manufacturers of tablet sized computers still seem to be stuck with the choice between power and portability. So you have a rash of e-readers that aim to trickle out their power over a long time, and so have slow two-tone screens that can't be asked to do very much.

Add to that the absence of a standardized platform for e-books and you've created an unmanageable mess of choices for users.

Somewhere on the heels of the Kindle and Sony's e-reader, you'll soon have Plastic Logic's business e-reader (see demo): a reader that's aimed at people who like to print out documents before they read them. This may sound a little bizarre as a business proposition, but the reader does have a touch sensitive (if rather slow) screen. This alone puts it ahead of other readers. But how will people with Kindle accounts use it?

These are murky waters, but they are turbulent with activity and they will clear one day. I hope it's one day soon.

Ancient Wisdom

2009-09-18T07:53:00.006-04:00

Sorting through my desk I came across two articles from Fast Company, published in September 2003. They both seemed as relevant today as they did then.

The first was Contempt of Consumer: It's a Real Crime, by Seth Godin. He remembers the days of the Fuller Brush Man who knew how to treat customers with respect. Godin goes on to berate modern marketing tactics that attempt to force products on people who don't want them. "Instead of spamming the globe, market to people who want to hear from you."

The second was Becoming a Soft-Side Accountant, by Marshall Goldsmith. He argues that time measuring the soft-side values in the workplace is well spent. Such as "how often we're rude to people, how often we're polite, how often we ask for input rather than shut people out" and so on. He talks about measuring his own time spent with his children. It's an interesting article because it raises bigger questions about the importance of measuring, and knowing what you are measuring and why. Respecting customers and reading that in the numbers.

Fast Company must have liked these two articles about respect too, as the magazine republished them in 2007. No harm in revisiting ancient wisdom.

Barn Door View

2009-06-19T05:53:00.017-04:00

The question of the moment is how to get people to pay for news. But everyone in the news business is looking at this from the barn door. The horse is out in the field, happily eating the grass, and we're leaning in the large airy doorway looking out and talking about ways to make this thing work.

There are still some people talking about getting the horse back in the barn. But the general conclusion is that the ways that will work leave the horse in the field. And the freemium idea, as described on Techcrunch by Erick Schonfeld, or Doc Searl's Emancipay, is the idea that seems to have caught the most attention.

The idea has been around for centuries, but it suits an environment where mass production and delivery cost are cheap. Think of your own use of a tool like the iPhone. When you first get one you swear you'll only use the free apps. But once you've got into the idea of using them you start buying. The same with software, or cloud applications like Flickr or Wordpress. If you like them, before you know it, you're paying for them.

Going back to the barn analogy for media: Forget all the trouble of making hay and hauling it into the barn for the horse. Grow the grass, let the horse eat it in the field and come into the barn of his own accord.

The barn still has value, because the horse likes to be there. You keep a bucket of oats for him to eat in the barn and focus on keeping the grass growing in the field and it'll be a healthy happy horse that walks into the barn, making it all worthwhile.

Ten barn door articles:

- Saving the Globe from a World of Hurt, by Doc Searls.
- Still at Newspapers I.x, also by Doc Searls.
- Chris Anderson talking about his book "The Future of a Radical Price."
- Freemium model for newspapers and other survival ideas, by Don Dodge.
- Jeff Jarvis, talking for 23 minutes: $10. Jeff writing 70,000 words: $13 by Josh Benton.
- Radio: The End is Near – Unless you heed Bob Garfield, by Mark Ramsey.
- Five tips on charging for content from Alan Murray of WSJ.com, by Zachary Seward.
- Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet, By Claire Cain Miller.
- 25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers, by Tom Foremski
- Out of Print, by Eric Alterman

Reinventing Radio

2009-06-11T22:22:00.020-04:00

Steve Outing says he's pessimistic about newspapers, and that their CEOs haven't demonstrated the ability to save them.

He then writes a list of things that newspapers could do to confront the issues they currently face. Of course many of these items are equally true for all media. Such as "transform the company to digital first," allowing readers to support newsgathering, or Jarvis' mantra (here, in this post from two years ago): do your best and link to the rest.

Outing also suggests that newspapers create a membership model and accept that the Web is about free.

These last two sound a little like Public Radio's business plan: create something good then ask supporters to pay for it. (Disclosure: I work in public radio at WBUR in Boston. So I know this unlikely but successful business model well.)

Radio is perhaps lucky that it is forced to recognize that radio and the Web are two separate and distinct marketplaces with different value propositions, an observation that may have been lost on newspapers.

In the first radio finds itself with a value proposition that still works. That is: I'm in my car, I need to be entertained by something that doesn't require my hands or eyes to make it work. Equally: I'm cleaning the house, a task that requires my hands and eyes but not my concentration; I need something to occupy my mind. Radio is the solution for the many situations like these you find yourself in each day.

Staying alive in this marketplace is all about adopting new technologies. That's because any tool you can use like a radio, can replace a radio. That could be a computer, a smart phone or a Web audio player. These are eroding traditional radio's marketplace and offer a better product, because they're attached to the Internet and so can play audio from anywhere.

In addition to that, listeners who want to spend a little time figuring out how to create playlists from different sources and play audio when they want it, are changing the radio marketplace, slowly but inexorably.

So the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition is still valid but the marketplace is changing. It's changing because the tools that put the audio into that space are changing. Public Radio has changed with them by producing some of the most popular news and information podcasts in iTunes. But listening to podcasts has a high threshold of entry for the listener. You've got to really want to do it, to do it. Something simpler, like Stitcher, will come along, and radio stations have to be there when it arrives.

The Web is a different marketplace, a fact that newspapers might have missed because their stories, already in text, move so easily onto the Web. But news and information radio stations aren't fooled by this, because news and information radio clearly doesn't lend itself to the Web. It doesn't work, because it breaks the "hands and eyes occupied, brain not so" value proposition. If you're surfing the Web your mind is occupied. You can't concentrate on a Web story and a radio story at the same time.

So if news and information radio stations are to succeed on the Web, reinventing themselves is not an option, it's a requirement for success.

Current reported recently on Public Radio's advances into Web content, looking at The Argo Project, a public radio project that aims to produce Web content in verticals, led by NPR's head of digital media Kinsey Wilson.

"We’re beginning to see the reinvention of newsgathering and delivery at the local level," acknowledges Wilson in the article. The Argo Project responds to that not by producing the broad coverage you hear of the radio, but by selecting narrow verticals and providing narrowly focus in-depth coverage of those issues, establishing Public Radio as something more than audio.

Over the years newspapers have failed in attempts to produce radio stations, and it's hard to imagine there haven't been radio stations that have failed in newspaper projects. Projects like these die because they are trying to move what they do in one medium directly into another. They are not reinventing themselves.

Public Radio seems to be showing that it has the will to reinvent itself. Let's hope the old unlikely business model will provide the money, as Outing suggests it might.

Fixing Systems

2009-06-08T13:23:00.006-04:00

Everyone fixes systems as part of their daily lives. It's what we do. A part of the human condition. But fixing other people's systems is a much harder thing to do, because they think they've already fixed their systems. Getting grandpa to put the dishes in the dishwasher in a new way. For some reason these things become intensely personal and create family arguments and resentments.

In business people who fix systems get nicknames like "the iron lady." That's because another part of the human condition is that people don't like change. But systems must be fixed and improved. Every day.

Fastcompany last August published an article on Fixing Washington D.C.'s School System. It follows Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of D.C. Public Schools and offers some timely reminders about managing underperforming systems.

According to the article she has her ideas written out clearly for everyone to see, she loves data, she hates inefficiency, she wants simple evidence of better performance, and above all she takes risks and decisive action.

In difficult times decisive and often painful action is difficult to take. For news organizations it's hard to imagine there's every been a time when it was more important to take decisive action.

Those who take action and succeed will be remembered. Those who take action and fail will be reviled by some and respected by others for having tried. Those who try to keep things going as they are will be forgotten.

Two Months Notice for Globe

2009-05-04T06:50:00.011-04:00

With the Boston Globe in negotiations to save the paper over the weekend, The Washington Post reports on Monday "the Times Co. said that it will file today a required 60-day notice of the planned shutdown" of the Globe. The article notes that the move could be a negotiating ploy, but adds that the Times is also under pressure: "It recently mortgaged its new Manhattan headquarters, borrowed $250 million from a Mexican billionaire at 14 percent interest, laid off 100 newsroom staffers and cut salaries by 5 percent."

(UPDATE: WBUR reports that later in the day the Globe released a statement saying that having "reached agreement with six of the seven unions" involved, the paper would not be "making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.")

Given that and the reported $85 million the Globe is expected to lose this year, it seems remarkable that the paper could survive even if it does extract $20 million in cuts from the staff.

The Globe reports more hopefully "Globe negotiations continue" and the Times sits on the fence with "At Deadline, No Deal Yet on Boston Globe’s Future".

Sree Sreenivasan tweets "AM STUNNED: Howard Kurtz reports NYT preparing to shut down Boston Globe. Was a possibility, of course, but still..." and links to the Post story, amid a flurry of Boston Globe activity on Twitter.

The Chicago Tribune (four paragraphs), the Los Angeles Times and the Philly.com (the story doesn't appear to have made it into the Inquirer) run stories from the Associated Press, which must make Bostonians wonder when this story will create the sort of national outcry that last year's collapse of the Tribune brought about.

Reinvention Means Real Change

2009-05-03T21:17:00.006-04:00

Every manager in every news organization would do well to read Josh Benton's thoughts on what it means to reinvent yourself as an organization.

Everyone knows this has to be done, he says, but reinvention means a whole lot more than laying off staff and cutting your budget.

Then look at the Nieman's list of the top fifteen newspaper Web sites in 2008 and ask yourself: a) how many of these institutions have appeared in the news recently for being in financial trouble, and b) how many of these organizations are doing anything more than moving deck chairs around on the Titanic.

The answers are not encouraging.

Journalism Schools

2009-04-21T07:25:00.003-04:00

Brian Stelter writes in the New York Times on the changes in attitudes and course work at journalism schools in the United States as they come to terms with a changing media environment, and realize that they should be leading the change, not following it.

Paper Cuts

2009-04-13T13:56:00.009-04:00

Erica Smith, a "journalist, a designer, a novice programmer" at the St Louis Dispatch runs Paper Cuts, a site that lists the total number of newspaper jobs lost each year for the past three years, with a map showing where the jobs where lost.

Look above the map on the right and you'll see a drop down menu that allows you to go back through to 2007. You'll also find a map of newspapers that have closed. You can toggle the years on and off at the bottom left of the map.

Which raises the question constantly on the lips of news consumers these days: What happens in a town where the newspapers fold? A New York Times article, News Without Newspapers, asks that question, and looks at hyperlocal blogs' ability to replace traditional news institutions.

These blogs and database scouring sites face the same financial issues the old news organizations face: a lack of money. And being hyperlocal their intent, in a sense, is to reduce potential audience size. So you might say we're talking about scaling down revenue in a business that is already broke, which doesn't seem to promise a bright future.

Elsewhere in the paper the Times looks at its own paper the Boston Globe, which has thinned its staff several times but still faces the threat of closure.

Appreciating Appreciation

2009-04-09T06:55:00.007-04:00

This article, The Problem with Problems in BusinessWeek caught my attention. It makes the case that an alternative to "deficit thinking" is "appreciative inquiry".

That is to say, if you always look at the glass as half empty, you'll forget that it's also half full. And it's the half full side that's going to carry you forwards.

Of course looking at the news business in the United States the glass is looking a lot less than half full. But there's still something in there, and we should be careful not to cut whatever little we have in the glass in an attempt to save the news. If there's nothing left in the glass, there'll be nothing to save.

The Future of Radio

2009-03-22T11:45:00.009-04:00

NPR's David Folkenflik did a piece last week called "Newspapers Wade Into An Online-Only Future".

He tells the now familiar story of how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, its presses no longer rolling, hopes to find a future for a dramatically reduced staff in an online-only news production called Seattlepi.com.

Seattlepi faces the same problems that all old media organizations face. They are trying to understand where they fit in this world where readers seem less inclinded to read newspapers. Instead, it appears, they make daily news mashups in real time from whatever catches their eye in the stream of news that makes its way across their computer screens.

Suggesting that the question facing all but the largest news producers is not "what should I do with my Web site?" (they've put plenty of time into that already,) but "what makes me stand out in that stream?"

In Folkenflik's piece he quotes Hearst Newspapers President Steve Swartz saying "Very few people come to our Web site and try to re-create the experience of reading a newspaper." This may seem a little obvious, but it's worth repeating. You read a paper cover to cover because that's what you have in your hands. But when your read an article online, you have the whole world at your fingertips.

Broadcasting is different. Absorbing a story works very differently if you're listening. Radio is a linear presentation, you have to listen to the end if you want to hear the end of the story. You can't skip or skim as you do when you're reading.

Radio fills a genuine need because there are a lot of things people do in life that don't require a lot of brain power, but use a lot of time. Like driving, and cleaning the house. Painting, gardening, carpentry, construction, and so on. Almost anything, except those things that require a lot of brain power. Like reading and writing.

If you want to listen to a story carefully, you have to stop reading or listening to anything else. Ironically, as I listened to Folkenflik's story on my computer I found my eyes wandering around the screen looking for something to do. It was an exercise of restraint to back away from my computer and focus on listening to the story.

But while focused listening may raise some issues, using your computer to generate background audio is in significant demand. Looking at some radio station Web statistics the other day it was clear that unlike Swartz's readers, a lot of people do want to use their computers to re-create a radio listening experience. They go to the "listen" page and switch on the stream. They are turning their computers into radios and then, I assume, getting on with their jobs as they listen.

So background listening maintains the advantage it has over print when you're on your computer just as it does when you're driving. It's hands free. Set it going and do something else online that isn't using your full attention.

Which seems to suggest that radio station should keep the live streams going and make appointment listening as portable as possible.

Related Stories
- Letter from Ann Arbor News Publisher Laurel Champion
- Will NPR Save the News?

The Internet Changes Reporters' Work

2009-03-17T06:42:00.011-04:00

The Internet has changed a reporter's life in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. Older reporters often celebrate the changes, remembering how it used to take fifteen minutes to upload a single black and white picture to a single destination using a wire machine.

That's not including the time it took to develop the film, print picture, type up a caption and paste it, with glue, on the front of the picture and attach the still damp paper to the drum of the wire machine.

We had no email. No cell phones. No personal organizers, or PDAs. To send a story to a single newspaper you had to unscrew the wires from the wall of the hotel you were in and crocodile clip your 300 baud modem into the telephone system. Then you made a single, two copper wire connection to a single destination to upload your story. If you wanted to upload a story to more than one newspaper, you had to repeat the process for each paper.

Reporters today have a different set of issues to deal with. Filing a story or a picture couldn't be easier. But the fact that your editors can contact you all the time and that your readers include the people you're reporting on, who can contact you immediately they read the story, raises some new challenges to getting the job done as Anand Giridharadas reports in the New York Times.

As if to prove the point, one of Giridharadas' readers in Singapore comments on the writer's Facebook group:

"The reported-on know what we're saying and now they can retort. They can blog about our work; post it admiringly or disparagingly on Facebook; find our e-mail addresses with a few keystrokes; comment on our Web sites to point out mistakes. "

Too many semi-colons, Mr Giridharadas, I'd have simplified the sentence. ;-)

In his article Giridharadas points out that international stories are closely watched in the countries the New York Times is covering, which has the benefit of holding reporters to a higher standard, with local bloggers becoming self appointed fact checkers, or verifyers, of every story.

At the same time the wealth of information on the internet and the flood of email and tweets raises the volume of work a reporter has to do. And the loss of a certain anonymity for a reporter traveling in a distant land must make gathering information harder.

But in the midst of the collapse of newpapers in the United States it's helpful to remember how much a reporter's job has changed since the days of unscrewing sockets in hotel walls.

Newspapers in Disturbia

2009-03-12T07:08:00.008-04:00

A story in the New York Times today lists newspapers that have folded or are in bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Poynter reports that more than half of Americans polled wouldn't care if newspapers disappeared.