Sabtu, 18 Februari 2012

Nieman Journalism Lab

Nieman Journalism Lab

St. Louis Beacon test drives iBooks Author with “Meandering Mississippi”

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 10:00 AM PST

It was a little over a month ago when Apple had its big publishing/education announcement and introduced the world to iBooks Author. At the time Josh predicted that the shiny, user-friendly app would make it relatively easy for news organizations to compile their journalism into ebook form.

And now we’ve got some proof. The nonprofit St. Louis Beacon just produced Meandering Mississippi, an ebook that collects its writing, photos, and video on last year’s record floods. Taking your best coverage and converting it into an ebook isn’t new, but the Beacon may be one of the first news organizations to do so using iBooks Author.

The book, now available for 99 cents in iTunes, weaves together a narrative stemming from the Army Corps of Engineers decision to breach the Birds Point levee, flooding more than 100,000 acres of land in an attempt to save the town of Cairo, Ill. Across 54 pages, the Beacon combines the text of its stories with slideshows, audio, interactive graphics, and video interviews to try to enhance the storytelling. “The text carries the basics and the meat of the story, but having all these extra elements to add to the book really make it stand out,” Brent Jones, the Beacon’s display editor, told me.

Jones assembled the book himself and described it as a mostly pain-free process, one he said even editors with little design knowledge could use. He relied heavily on the templates that Apple provides, but he says there’s plenty of flexibility for those with who want it. The workflow will look familiar to anyone with experience with other Apple apps like Keynote or Pages, he said.

Assembling the package was made easier by the fact that most of the flooding package was already assembled for a printed magazine product the site gives to its donors. Jones simply had to go back over the multimedia elements to see which would fit in the story and how they could be best used within the book. He decided to decouple an audio slideshow, for instance, splitting it into a solo slideshow and an audio track to use in a different part of the book.

“It all goes back to the story you’re trying to tell and making sure you’re using the new tool and all the features within that tool to support the story,” Jones said.

Jones said he downloaded the app on the night of the announcement and mocked up two pages of the book for his iPad. The next morning, he took the book into work to show his editors and got the green light. It took Jones about a week to put the book together, mostly working from home. (iBooks Author only runs on Mac OS X Lion, which Beacon computers didn’t have installed — but his personal machine at home did.) But after that things stalled for a bit. It took a little over two weeks for the book to go through Apple’s publishing process, which is known for being slower than, say, Amazon’s for the Kindle. Aside from having to provide the necessary information for payment and other authentication, Jones said he’s not sure why the process took as long as it did.

Still, the Beacon found it to be a relatively quick process that fit in fairly easily to its workflow. The Beacon isn’t placing any expectations on the ebook; it’s using it as a kind of test balloon to see if readers are willing to pay or if they like reading in the tablet format. As a wholly different media from the website, ebooks could offer a lot of opportunity for the type of work the Beacon does, Jones said. They just need to find out if there is an audience for it.

“It’s a good example of what we do — looking more deeply into stories and sticking with stories over a period of time,” Jones said.

The Rendell Inquirer? The specter of the instrumentalization of American news media

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST

The possible sale of the Philadelphia Media Network — publisher of the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com — has sparked a debate over editorial independence. That’s because the potential buyers include powerful local Democrats like former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and the New Jersey power broker George Norcross, along with various local property and business magnates. Journalists working for the company worry that their newsrooms will become subject to the wider political and business interests of the new owners.

The debate raises a larger question: What happens when news organizations become less commercially valuable, but are still perceived as politically powerful?

Columbia’s Michael Schudson has outlined one scenario for the future of the U.S. news business he calls “journalism on a diet with supplements.” The diet is the continued decline of newspapers as their revenues shrink; the supplements are new online ventures of various sorts.

The situation in Philadelphia suggests that another scenario is possible — one where news organizations are kept alive, sustained by new forms of cross-subsidy that gradually pull journalism back towards its origins as, at least in part, an instrument for outside political and business interests.

This is what media and communications scholars call “instrumentalization,” where news organizations are owned and operated by groups less concerned with the day-to-day profitability of an independent outlet than with the influence media afford — the ability to advance various political or business interests. (And often both, for those involved in regulation-sensitive areas like real estate, telecommunications, and various forms of government-related contracting.) News media acquisitions in the U.S. are still mainly seen in a narrow business perspective, explained in terms of their real estate assets or brand value. But one should not forget that controlling a media company also holds out the promise of something more primordial than quarterly profits: power.

Instrumentalization is not something confined to the distant past or to poor countries far away. The first several generations of Chandlers were notorious for using The Los Angeles Times to benefit their real estate speculation. James M. Cox built what is now the Cox Media Group by mixing politics, business, and journalism, in Dayton and elsewhere. Some suggest that Rupert Murdoch continues to bankroll the loss-making New York Post because he can use it to influence politicians who might otherwise interfere with the varied activities of the wider News Corp., as he bankrolls the Times of London.

The intermingling of journalism, politics, and outside business interests is also widespread in much of Southern Europe, where news organizations were never very profitable in their own right. Take France, where some owners are very blunt about how they see their media assets as in part organs for their own opinions. Serge Dassault is not only a billionaire businessman and senator from the UMP (the conservative governing party of President Nicolas Sarkozy) with an old conviction for corruption in the Case Agusta-Dassault. He also runs the Dassault Group, a major conglomerate with diverse interests in, amongst other things, the arms and aerospace industries. The group owns Le Figaro, the best-selling French national daily newspaper (along with other media properties). Senator Dassault is not shy about how he views his papers — according to one report, he has said that his newspapers “must promulgate sound ideas…[and] left-wing ideas are not sound ideas.” In 2004, shortly after Dassault acquired Le Figaro, French media reported that a controversial article concerning the sale of the group’s Rafaele fighter jet was spiked. Independent watchdog groups like Reporters without Frontiers have expressed concern about the consequences of such proprietorship on press freedom in France. Similar issues exist in other Mediterranean countries, as well as across much of Central and Eastern Europe and well beyond that in countries like Brazil and India.

The fundamental fear provoked by the potential takeover in Philadelphia is that we will see in the U.S. a situation familiar around the world — one where journalism is no longer an independent business and profession, but instead an instrument for outside political and commercial interests. Rendell and his associates insist that they are motivated by civic duty more than anything else. But people have their doubts. Buzz Bissinger, a long-time Philadelphia resident and journalist, put it bluntly in an op-ed: “These men want the papers because they crave power and will always crave power.” Bart Blatstein, a Philadelphia developer and owner of the Philly Hometown Media group, seems uncomfortable with the idea that they get it. He is putting together a rival bid, and has said he and his partners are willing to put money behind launching a rival print and digital operation if they do not succeed in acquiring the Philadelphia Media Network.

The risk of running a news organization as the “Rendell Inquirer” (or the “Blatstein Inquirer”) is of course that it will scare away readers and/or advertisers who disagree with the editorial line or prefer what they regard as a more independent outlet. (This was a concern in 2006 when PR man and Republican Party activist Brian Tierney acquired the group from McClatchy.) The opportunity cost of meddling with a news organization to serve one’s other interests was just a lot higher ten or twenty years ago, when most American newspapers had profit margins of 20 percent or more and could be bought and sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. Today, the Project for Excellence in Journalism estimates that the average margin is around 5 percent — closer to what has been the post-war norm in Southern Europe than to the profitable years of metropolitan newspaper monopolies with a license to print money. Tierney paid more than half a billion dollars for Philadelphia Media Holdings (then also including some community weeklies) when he acquired it in 2006. Today, the Philadelphia Media Network is said to be valued between $40 and $100 million.

In cases where even the remaining profit margin looks like it might disappear — where news organizations begin racking up losses year after year and cease to have any real market value — one has to wonder: Do such outlets then survive because proprietors happen to have both a principled commitment to independent journalism and the means to support it, even to the tune of millions of dollars in losses every year? Or are they run by self-interested owners who bankroll these outlets because they think they have an instrumental value beyond their contribution to the bottom line? If the latter is the case, they are no longer running their media properties as an industry but as instruments. This is not a situation in which journalism is simply on a diet and being supplemented by various new ventures. It is a scenario where it is more directly intertwined with outside political and business interests than it has been for years. That happens all over the world, even in developed democracies. The U.S. has been there before — and may end up there again.

This Week in Review: Closing in on News Corp.’s Sun, and a privacy crisis for mobile apps

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST

News Corp.’s problems spread to the Sun: The ongoing phone hacking scandal at News Corp., which took down News of the World last summer, is now threatening to swallow the company’s other British tabloid, The Sun. Five of its top journalists were arrested last weekend as part of an investigation into bribing public officials, which News Corp.’s internal investigation is reported to have determined amounts to more than £10,000 per year, with officials essentially on retainer.

That investigation generated some controversy itself when it handed over details of Sun journalists’ sources to the police, though it said it redacted the information heavily and didn’t pass on documentation of standard journalistic source interaction. Journalists at News Corp.’s three British newspapers — the Sun, the Times, and the Sunday Times — were livid, and prepared for a legal challenge by hiring a top human rights attorney who promptly ripped the decision to hand over sources in a Times column.

Others joined in the criticism: Britain’s National Union of Journalists and the Sun’s competitor, the Daily Mail, blasted News Corp.’s investigative committee, with the latter saying it “should hang its head in shame.” And Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review was concerned about the precedent set by having police riffling through millions of newspaper emails, though he and British j-prof Roy Greenslade defended the police’s stern treatment of Sun journalists in their arrests.

So what does Rupert Murdoch do now? At The Guardian, Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff urged him to give the company “something of a noble death” — sell the Sun, and use the proceeds to establish a trust for The Times and Sunday Times. Ad Age’s Simon Dumenco suggested News Corp. will simply shut the Sun down, saying that like News of the World, it’s been reduced to merely a “repository of evidence that [needs] to be destroyed.” Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici argued that it’s only a matter of time before one of the two happens, especially since dropping its newspapers would help News Corp.’s bottom line.

News Corp. could still be facing plenty of trouble in the U.S., too. The FBI is investigating the company for bribing foreign officials, and the Guardian reported its executives could be prosecuted for being “willfully blind” about their company’s wrongdoing. The company has gathered a massive legal team to fight potential charges. Joe Pompeo of Capital New York didn’t see U.S. charges as likely, but said the multi-front battle News Corp. is fighting is taking a devastating toll on the company as it drags on.

Path, privacy, and reforming tech journalism: What started last week as one tech startup’s privacy faux pas had by this week turned into a full-blown debacle for privacy on mobile devices, when we learned that the address books in smartphones are available for free to developers, often without the owner’s knowledge. Path, the photo-sharing and messaging app, was the first company outed for taking and storing the data after it was discovered last week by developer Arun Thampi.

The company received a wave of criticism and apologized, but soon the names of other companies — big companies — that were doing essentially the same thing trickled out. VentureBeat reported that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Yelp, and Gowalla were doing it, and The Verge also laid out exactly who’s taking address books and how. Twitter owned up to the practice, acknowledging to The Los Angeles Times that it stores email addresses and phone numbers (though not names) for 18 months from the address books of users who turn on the “Find My Friends” feature on its smartphone app.

On Wednesday morning, a U.S. Congressional committee sent a letter to Apple wondering why the company wasn’t doing more to protect its iPhone users’ privacy — and voila! Within minutes, Apple announced it would be doing more to ensure that app developers can’t access users’ address books without their permission (something was already in its developer guidelines). Google announced later that day it would be taking similar measures with its Android platform.

As PandoDaily’s Greg Kumparak wrote, this was a common practice that was simply understood among developers to be just fine, even though it was against Apple’s guidelines. Now that it’s been called out very publicly as not being just fine at all, developers need to figure out where to go from here. Kumparak reminded developers that address book data isn’t theirs to begin with, and Om Malik of GigaOM urged them to consider the moral imperative, rather than just what’s allowed. Developer Matt Gemmell showed how to use app address book data without violating users’ privacy.

A bizarre quasi-journalistic side-story rose out of this issue after The New York Times’ Nick Bilton complained of the alarming obliviousness that Path and Silicon Valley in general show toward the seriousness of user privacy and security. Both Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, former TechCrunch-ers whose CrunchFund invests in Path, ripped Bilton’s post, with Siegler turning it into a diatribe against the vapidity in tech blogging resulting from an out-of-control preoccupation with speed and pageviews.

Of the many responses to Siegler’s piece, Newsweek tech editor Dan Lyons’ was the most severe, as he described TechCrunch and several other tech blogs as a racket to extract “investment” out of venture capitalists in exchange for good press about their startups. (If you want to go all the way down the rabbit hole, you can read Arrington and Siegler’s rebuttals.)

Frederic Lardinois of Silicon Filter said both the pageview-chasing and VC coziness are serious problems within tech journalism, but there are still plenty of tech outfits staying above the fray and doing solid work. And ReadWriteWeb’s Scott Fulton urged tech bloggers to step outside the tech-journalism bubble and refocus on what journalism is: “Journalism is not about being an expert in twenty different things. It’s about being interested in all of them, knowing how to ask questions, and how to elicit information from the answers.”

AP goes on the copyright offensive: Another skirmish in the long war between traditional news organizations and online aggregators began this week, as the AP sued Meltwater News, a Norwegian company that helps businesses track mentions of themselves in media sources through a searchable database. The AP alleges that Meltwater uses its content without paying for licensing fees, allowing it to create a cheaper service that directly takes subscribers from the AP, as an AP attorney told the Guardian. The attorney also told paidContent that the AP hopes that controversial “hot news doctrine,” which gives publishers legal rights over the dissemination of some of the news they break, will be applied to this case.

According to the AP’s article on the suit, the AP is distinguishing between Meltwater and online aggregators because Meltwater charges a fee and keeps a five-year database of AP stories. But GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said this case could still very well apply to online aggregators and represents a “fundamentally futile” approach to online content. The Lab’s Justin Ellis said the key distinction may be a different one: Is Meltwater a search engine or a news-clipping service?

News sites lag in advertising: Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released a study this week that painted a really depressing picture of advertising at top news websites. Among the major findings: In-house ads are the most common kind of ads on news websites, very few news sites do any targeted advertising based on users’ online behavior, and very few do work with any ads other than static banner ads, either.

PaidContent’s Jeff Roberts pointed out that most news orgs are at a major disadvantage when it comes to selling digital ads in that they weren’t raised on it like tech companies have been, and thus need to constantly play catch-up when it comes to strategies and software. And Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici chastised print-based news orgs for using so much of their digital advertising space to promote their print product, saying, “it's hard to see how publishers are ever going to persuade marketers to spend real money on their websites as long as those advertisers can see those publishers treating their own web inventory as next to worthless.”

Reading roundup: A couple of other interesting stories this week, plus some pieces to look at over the weekend:

— It’s been a rough couple of months for PolitiFact. This week, it ruled Sen. Marco Rubio’s statement that a majority of Americans are conservative “mostly true” because a plurality of Americans are conservative. The decision got ripped by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, Politico’s Dylan Byers, the American Journalism Review’s Rem Rieder, and j-prof Jay Rosen. They also fact-checked a statement from “Glee,” which was…odd.

— Another media organization under fire lately has been the Philadelphia Media Network, the parent company of the Inquirer and Daily News. The papers were put on the block a few weeks back, and may be sold to a group led by former Philly mayor and  Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. This week, the company announced layoffs and buyouts, and over the past two weeks, both WHYY and The New York Times have reported that executives have interfered with stories about the sale. Former Daily News reporter Buzz Bissinger lamented the papers’ future.

— A couple of pieces on online content that are a worth a read: Reuters’ Felix Salmon expressed his skepticism about the widespread viability of longform articles online, and here at the Lab, j-prof Dan Kennedy reported on the comment conundrum at Connecticut’s New Haven Independent and why it matter for other news sites.

— Finally, we’re mourning the death of Anthony Shadid, a longtime Middle East reporter for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe who provided truly exceptional journalism from so many of the world’s most important events over the past decade, from the Iraq War to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Arab Spring. Shadid died Thursday in Syria at age 43.

Rupert Murdoch photo by World Economic Forum used under a Creative Commons license.

The Boston Courant: Proud not to have a website until the owner sees “a profitable end game”

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 07:00 AM PST

Eight years ago, David Jacobs, publisher of the weekly Boston Courant, paid a web designer in Ukraine to create a website for his newspaper. On that initial investment, and on subsequent research and development, the Courant spent a total of $50,000. The result is a slick, user-friendly layout.

But no one — save the Courant’s small staff, a few consultants, and me — has ever seen it.

“I won’t launch until I find a viable business model,” Jacobs told me. “We’ve never come close [to launching].”

BostonCourant.com — or whatever the heck Jacobs might call the site, if he ever buys a domain name for it — exists only on Jacobs’ desktop. The paper has no Twitter feed, no YouTube channel, no mobile app. It sort of has a Facebook page, but only because one was autogenerated from the Courant’s Wikipedia page. The Courant doesn’t control it.

But if the oldfangled Courant is doing journalism all wrong, someone forgot to tell its accountant. Circulation is at 40,000 and rising, the newsroom just moved into a swanky downtown office building, and the paper — which already covers four of Boston’s most affluent neighborhoods — is about to add two new full-time reporters to reach more of the city.

“In business, one of my philosophies has been the first pioneer into enemy territory gets all the arrows.”

“We have some major, major expansion plans,” Jacobs said. “One of the primary reasons for it is the fact that we don’t have a website.”

The crux of Jacobs’ argument is this: If the Courant had a website, some segment of its readership would ditch print. The paper wouldn’t lose subscription revenue, since it’s free anyway, but Jacobs strongly believes the digital migration would cripple ad sales. “If I had a website, I don’t know what type of value I could offer my advertisers,” he said.

I summarized Jacobs’ position for Reed Anfinson, the president of the National Newspaper Association. Anfinson said that there are plenty of community newspaper publishers on Jacobs’ side. “The question is what percentage of his income is going to be made off Internet, and what is he going to lose by going to the Internet?” Anfinson said. “And the odds are that he will make very little revenue off the web and lose a lot of print revenue.”

Anfinson, who publishes the Swift County (Minn.) Monitor-News — which has a website; current lead story: “Unusual animal caught in a raccoon trap in Swift County” — said plenty of community newspapers choose not to ride the digital bandwagon. In Anfinson’s Congressional district, for instance, there are a whopping 120 local papers, but only half, he estimates, have websites. Some are too small; others serve rural areas where Internet penetration remains shallow.

But these explanations hardly apply to the Boston Courant.

“How many millionaires do you think are in my primary coverage area?” Jacobs asked me. I hemmed and hawed, then ventured a guess: a couple thousand maybe. “Ten thousand plus!” Jacobs exclaimed. “I have the sort of readership that advertisers kill for.”

Jacobs believes the Courant, whose strength is in real estate and development news, produces unique content readers struggle to find elsewhere. If people can only read his paper in print, that’s what they’ll do, he says — and they’ll pay more attention to ads they see on newsprint than they would to ads on a screen.

Surveying the newspaper landscape, Jacobs can’t believe more of his colleagues haven’t reached the same conclusion. “This is not rocket science! It’s really not!” he said. “I see all of the other newspapers hemorrhaging. I am amazed that some publisher of a daily newspaper online — maybe not a regional one, like The Boston Globe and Boston.com — but some non-regional daily newspaper has not said, ‘Hey, we’re hemorrhaging money because of the web. Our print advertising is going down. We’re going to stop our website. We have the sort of news that no one can get anywhere else. If they want to get it, they’re going to have to read our newspaper, and our print advertisers are going to love us.’…What do you have to lose?”

In a more subdued moment, Jacobs conceded there is something to lose by digital abstinence. Without a website, he said, the Courant misses opportunities to break news between printings. “I was discussing this with one of my reporters yesterday,” Jacobs said. “She really wants to have a website, and I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because we break so many stories before even the dailies know about them, and if we’re the first to post, we get the recognition.’ I understand that, and no one is more competitive than me.

“But look,” he continued, “it’s a question of tradeoffs. My ego and my staff’s ego — which is very important because we’re all in this to be competitive — versus losing money.”

Jacobs chooses money over ego. For a long time, he chose money over journalism. Jacobs held leadership positions at school newspapers from junior high to college, but when he went to Columbia for graduate school, it was for an MBA, not a journalism degree.

“I got sidetracked for most of my life doing international merchant banking,” Jacobs said. “Believe me, I made a lot more money than I’m making now…And then I guess I reached the point in my life where I said, ‘What do I really want to do when I grow up?’ And it was, ‘You know, I’ve always wanted to be a small-town newspaper publisher.’”

Jacobs started publishing the Courant in September 1995 and appears to have found his calling in his second career. But it’s the bottom-line focus developed in his first career that won’t abide a website.

“I love journalism, but I’m also a business man,” Jacobs said, “and I have to stay in business and hopefully not just stay where I am but grow…In business, one of my philosophies has been the first pioneer into enemy territory gets all the arrows. Let someone else pay. I’m not going to experiment unless I see a profitable end game. And the bottom line there is I see no possible way to benefit my print advertisers, who pay my reporters’ salaries and my overhead, by having a website.”

The Courant’s profit margin over the last two years has been “excellent,” Jacobs said, though he declined to quantify his paper’s success. “It’s enough that I’m expanding,” he offered, with a smile. “It’s all being done through retained earnings.”

In Jacobs’ mind, the print-only model ain’t broke, so he ain’t going to fix it. But for all his disparaging comments about digital media — “Right now they’re just toys, and no one knows how to play with them,” he told me — Jacobs is genuinely hopeful that some paper somewhere will develop a digital business strategy that can replicate the financial rewards of print.

“I’m praying that after all the investment, and all of the education at places like Columbia’s j-school, and all of the experiments that are going on at dailies and weeklies, that something’s gonna come of it,” he said. “But God knows what. As soon as we are able to develop a successful business model in-house, or a comparable newspaper comes up with a definite business model, I’ll launch a website within weeks.”

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