Nieman Journalism Lab |
| Posted: 25 Apr 2013 10:06 AM PDT
Editor’s note: There’s a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media — but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers? Our friends at Journalist’s Resource, that’s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Roughly once a month, JR managing editor John Wihbey will sum up for us what’s new and fresh. This month’s edition of What’s New In Digital Scholarship rounds up the findings of eight reports and studies that touch on many of the major themes scholars are exploring: how the media business can survive financially and maintain editorial integrity; how standards are shifting with respect to the use of non-professional sources for news; and how newsrooms are still feeling their way toward best practices in an online world that has different cultural expectations. And there’s some fresh data about how Americans are engaging with political news on social media. Also featured here are studies that relate to some technical issues — Internet surveillance and the mobile “revolution” in the developing world — that are of general concern to global media. “Responsibilities of the state: Rethinking the case and possibilities for public support of journalism”: Study from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, published in First Monday. By Daniel Kreiss and Mike Ananny. The authors take a nuanced look at the history of indirect government supports that have allowed the press to flourish in past eras and imagine new ways that the state can help a media industry now going through disruptive change. “Given the state’s continued role in realizing and fostering the public sphere,” the authors write, “it is time to move beyond the debate of whether the state should subsidize the press to consider how we can better design supportive policies appropriate for the digital age.” They argue that the state can and should play a role in supporting journalism, while at the same time preserving editorial independence and journalism’s “watchdog” role. The scholars propose: making more information and data available for the press, in effect providing a “subsidy” by furnishing more material to report and add value to; redoubling support for public broadcasting; helping more nonprofit news organizations such as ProPublica come into being through tax and regulatory policies; and funding more internships and training experiences for young journalists. Interestingly, they also float the idea of rebooting normal copyright procedures in order to help the press: “One idea is to provide financial compensation to journalists and news outlets that allow others in the public sphere to access, use, and remix it as they wish. For example, if the intent of copyright is ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,’ we should reverse its specific mechanism of granting creators exclusive rights to control the use, dissemination, and derivations of their work and provide fiscal incentives instead for journalism that is produced for the public domain.” “Normalizing the hyperlink: How bloggers, professional journalists, and institutions shape linking values”: Study from University of Texas at Austin, published in Digital Journalism. By Mark Coddington. How did it come to be proper “etiquette” to provide an outbound link to an external source when referencing other online media? And why do we now basically accept this as a best practice? This study looks at how such norms developed; it is based on 21 in-depth interviews in 2011 with political bloggers affiliated with traditional news organizations and non-traditional outlets. The practice, it seems, is rooted not only in notions of “courtesy” but in ideas that links build and strengthen communal ties and establish credibility, according to the study’s sources. Still, within news organizations, content management systems have sometimes made the practice difficult, and journalists and bloggers are not always sure there are institutional guidelines and best practices for linking within their own media outlets, it turns out. Of course, there is the issue of ensuring maximum time-on-site, but philosophies and values are now changing: “Several journalists described a cultural resistance to linking in newsrooms in past years built around a desire to keep readers within the organization’s website. But all of them also said that deep-seated resistance to linking had begun to fall away, largely because of two factors: the infusion of the Web’s cultural values…and a concerted effort by particular editors to institutionalize linking by incorporating it into the workflow of writing for the Web.” At root, it’s a story of how digital norms have changed newsrooms: “In the case of linking, professional journalism has shown a real willingness to adopt and absorb Web-based cultural values, using links as tools for transparency and networked connection.” “When Retweets Attack: Are Twitter Users Liable for Republishing the Defamatory Tweets of Others?”: Paper from Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University, published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. By Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart. The paper reviews various legal precedents and laws such as the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA) and extends their implications to the microblogging platform Twitter. The author concludes firmly that “it could not be more clear that the ‘naked retweet’ — that is, pushing the ‘Retweet’ button to circulate somebody else’s tweet to one’s own followers … would not trigger republisher liability for defamation.” Previous court rulings on aspects of the CDA suggest the law “protects social media users when they share defamatory information with others.” However, there is also the issue of modifying retweets or providing additional commentary on the original tweet. Here there is some legal gray area. It may be the case that “retweets with added content would be protected as long as the republisher does not add new content that is independently defamatory,” but there is a 2008 Ninth Circuit decision, in the Roommates.com case, that could open the door to a libel prosecution in certain situations. Twitter users should be aware that a “hat tip” (h/t) technique, when “preceded by the Twitter user’s own thoughts, comments, or assertions, is less likely to be granted immunity under” the CDA. Much of this comes down to whether a court would consider a given Twitter user a true “content provider” or merely a “user,” though that distinction has yet to be fully developed in legal theory and case law. “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age”: Report from Pew Internet & American Life Project. By Aaron Smith. Based on a survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted in mid-2012, Pew finds that engagement with social networking sites has nearly doubled over the past four years among those who are already online (33 percent in 2008, 69 percent in 2012.) Many more people say they posted links to political news on social sites: 17 percent of all adults in 2012, compared to just 3 percent in 2008. And among online adults in 2012, 28 percent reported posting political stories or articles on social networking sites, compared to 11 percent among that population in 2008. The data generally show an income gap, with higher-income persons reporting higher levels of engagement with and on social media. Partisan affiliation did not strongly predict levels of online political engagement in most cases, though liberals were more slightly more likely to report social networking site usage and engagement with issues because of social media chatter. The report has a range of useful data for anyone interested in how Americans engage in politics. “Societal and Ideological Impacts of Deep Packet Inspection Internet Surveillance”: Paper from University of Westminster’s Communication and Media Research Institute, published in Information, Communication & Society. By Christian Fuchs. Surveying the practices of various European technology security firms as well as information from a variety of research papers and interest groups, the author takes a broad look at the practices of observation and analysis of content data passing through the tubes and nodes of the Internet (called Deep Packet Inspection, or DPI.) Of course, this is being carried out in an increasingly security-conscious era in which private firms are empowered to perform some state-security functions, the paper notes. There is a certain potential creepiness that is spelled out by the author — the idea that there may be DPI “function creep,” as more and more entities want to conduct this type of surveillance. Issues of net neutrality, political repression, overly intrusive advertising, and file-sharing are discussed. The technological possibilities are only increasing, the author asserts: “The security-industrial complex on the one hand wants to make a business out of developing military and surveillance technologies and on the other hand advances the large-scale application of surveillance technologies and the belief in managing crime, terrorism and crises by technological means. DPI Internet surveillance is part of this political economic complex that combines profit interests, a culture of fear and security concerns, and surveillance technologies.” The author advocates that, in order to combat these Big Brother-oriented dangers, a “paradigm shift is needed from the conservative ideology of crime and terror and the fetishism of crime fighting by technology towards a realist view of crime that focuses on causes that are grounded in society and the lived realities of humans and power structures…” “Journalism in the age of global media: The evolving practices of foreign correspondents in London”: Study from the University of Salford, published in Journalism. By Cristina Archetti. The author conducted interviews with 25 journalists from outlets around the globe who are based in Britain. She compares her data to that of the last substantial study of London-based foreign correspondents, which took place 1978-81. Many correspondents now are younger and operate without an office; many are “one-man bands” — they operate without news organization peers in-country; and most do not report having stable contracts with a single news outlet. As you would expect, technology has changed this game to some extent: “All correspondents mention that the development of communication technologies makes their work easier, even if it is problematic to sift through the information tide to check its accuracy.” Although the article doesn’t dispute the fact that there are challenges and likely a thinning of the ranks, the role of the foreign correspondent remains a relatively more creative one, as reporters still must find distinctive story angles that connect with their home country audiences and can’t do mere lazy “churnalism”: “While all journalists need information to feed into their reports, the interviews suggest that there is possibly a high degree of reinterpretation of the material journalists get from their sources. This happens to a greater extent than in domestic journalism and is related to the very nature of the foreign correspondent’s assignment.” “Amateur sources breaking the news, metasources authorizing the news of Gaddafi’s death: New patterns of journalistic information gathering and dissemination in the digital age”: Study from the University of Copenhagen, published in Digital Journalism. By Nete Nørgaard Kristensen and Mette Mortensen. Distinctive perhaps for its coining the term “metasourcing” — the new role of confirmation that mainstream media often play in the social media sphere — the paper examines the interplay of elite and non-elite sources during the Libyan conflict, using Gaddafi’s death as a case study. The researchers sample Danish media following these breaking events. The authors describe what is by now a familiar set of dynamics: “Firstly, information comes from a variety of non-institutionalized source (amateurs/participants/ eyewitnesses), who more or less become the reporters of the event, while the institutionalized media, to some extent, are relegated to disseminating this multitude of visual fragments and bits of information rather than synthesize it into a coherent narrative. Secondly, speed appears at times to come before verification, and as a response to the constant flow of incoming unconfirmed information, various and even contradictory versions of an event are reported.” The study then attempts to provide a new vocabulary for all of this: “Elite sources and self-referential media positioned in a new role as metasources use their authority, expertise and experience to comment on the validity of the non-conventional sources, and put them into political and social perspective. While amateur sources bring authenticity, immediacy and proximity to war reporting by documenting events as they unfold, metasources are used as sources-on-other-sources.” “Mobile Leapfrogging and Digital Divide Policy”: Report by Fordham University, Michigan State, and the University of Toronto, published by the New America Foundation. By Philip Napoli and Jonathan Obar. This research highlights the developing world’s patterns of Internet access and examines the tradeoffs in them. The report notes that “most research on mobile Internet access and usage to date has lacked comparative analyses of any type in which the characteristics or usage patterns of mobile platforms are assessed relative to PC-based platforms.” The scholars comprehensively survey relevant studies to provide a critical framework for evaluating the mobile “revolution” globally. They note that mobile devices are simply not able to store or process as much data as PCs, and this has a variety of consequences: “Mobile-ready Web sites often represent streamlined or watered down versions of the standard Web site. Thus, mobile users often find themselves with access to less information and less functionality than PC-based users when forced to rely on mobile-tailored Web sites.” Further, because mobile devices are typically a much less open platform for Internet access — they often create a “walled garden” environment of apps and design a more constrained experience — the “opportunities, therefore, for mobile users to tap into the full economic potential of the Internet are much more limited. Consider, for instance, the dramatic entrepreneurial opportunities that have been facilitated by PC-based Internet access to develop and launch new online applications, platforms, and services that simply cannot be approximated if a user is limited to access via a mobile device.” The report’s authors say they are hoping to “inject into the policy conversation a more thorough understanding of how effective such efforts can really be in terms of providing mobile users with the same kind of opportunities to access, produce, and disseminate information as PC users; and to raise a note of caution about the implications of abandoning efforts to promote PC diffusion in light of the potential for mobile leapfrogging. It is important to recognize the potentially significant compromises and shortcomings that come from a policy approach to the digital divide that emphasizes mobile access and largely abandons any emphasis on PC-based access, particularly in light of the fundamental requirement for technology leapfrogging discussed at the outset — that the leapfrogging technology be clearly superior to available alternatives.” Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The newsonomics of the Koch Brothers and the sales of U.S.’ top metros Posted: 25 Apr 2013 07:54 AM PDT
It almost makes wary Tribune watchers pine for Rupert Murdoch. In what is shaping up to be the biggest sale of metro U.S. newspapers in history, with six of the top 50 newspapers about to change hands, a new player is finally increasing public awareness of what’s coming. It’s been a torturous process to watch, as all of these top nameplate papers — the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Hartford Courant and The Boston Globe — have been pulled on and off and back on the market, in the case of the Globe, or subject to four years of bankruptcy limbo in the case of the others, all Tribune Company titles (“The agony of Tribune’s metro newspapers”). If public attention to the meaning of the ownership transfer has waxed and waned over the months, one piece of news has now galvanized it. Credit the Koch brothers. First reported by Hillel Aron of L.A. Weekly, who has doggedly covered the Times sale, and then expanded upon by both Reuters and The New York Times, it’s now clear that the Koch brothers are interested in — and maybe now the Tribune Company’s lead choice to buy — some of most well known papers in the country. That’s the Koch brothers of political fame or infamy, depending on which way your Tea Party leanings lean. (Good CBS News tour of their lightning rod impact on American politics.) The fourth and fifth wealthiest Americans ($31 billion each) according to Forbes, Charles and David Koch are credited with nurturing the Tea Party movement from grassroots to barn-burning. They bankrolled much of the movement, with contributions in the tens of millions of dollars. The Kochs’ twin aims of both political influence and business gain — their advocacy against regulation in general and climate change legislation specifically fits neatly with the oil and gas interests that built their fortune — make their candidacy noteworthy. It’s a business/political mix that’s also taken root in San Diego’s newspaper ownership, and one that threatens to become a new model for press ownership. (More on the San Diego experience below.) How did we get here? How did we get to a place where a half dozen of the top newspaper nameplates in America could fall into overtly political hands? What does it tell us about the reshaping of the U.S. daily landscape? How might the Koch brothers’ ownership fare, a lesson applied here that may both confirm worst fears and offer counterintuitive lessons about the nature of local press power in 2013? Finally, what are the newsonomics of the Tribune sale, as its new board ponders its options? Sales of newspaper properties long used a common script. If someone wanted out, they priced their paper and called up the usual suspects, almost all of whom were already owners of newspaper companies. It was a fraternity: first, families selling to other families, then public and private newspaper companies selling to other public and private newspaper companies. Newspapering from the 1980s on was a greatly profitable trade, and if you knew how to “operate” — how to keep train on the track — buying more newspaper properties just meant more profits. Then digital disruption and the Great Recession hit. Too much debt, much of it the result of buying other newspapers at what turned out to be the top of the market, forced 14 bankruptcies of newspaper companies. Nobody in the business wanted to buy more properties; besides, they no longer had capital to spend. Emerging out of all the bankruptcies: new financial owners. Some of the financial owners — banks and private equity — became owners as bankrupted debt was turned to equity; others bought into the industry cheap, post-bankruptcy. In the Tribune’s case, Sam Zell’s one-year-ownership and four-year-bankruptcy resulted in the new (newest?) Tribune finally emerging in January as company majority owned by Oaktree Capital Management, Angelo, Gordon & Co., and JPMorgan Chase. The Koch potential brings us hard against the reality of what a U.S. metro daily is really worth these days, and what value it has to its community. The financial value is clear. It’s a small multiple (3-4x) of Tribune papers’ annual earnings, plus whatever premium the buyers can drive from competitive bidding. Figure $550-800 million for all eight papers. It’s the non-financial value that’s intriguing. I’m thinking about the agenda-setting, what-we-think-of-ourselves value of a daily newspaper. Newspapers have always been both centers of and reflections of their communities. A few journalistic watchdogs have sounded alarms about the Kochs, but there’s been no wider outcry. It’s America, with freedom of the press a right for all. Or, as A.J. Liebling famously observed, “anyone who owns one.” And that’s the odd thing here: Make all the arguments you want about how the Internet has liberated free expression from the Big Iron of the printing press. These points have been pressed by everyone from Jeff Jarvis to FCC commisioners arguing that the cross-ownership (TV and newspaper) rules are outmoded by the ability of anyone to publish. In the age of monopoly newspapers, even in their reduced state, most dailies still have a major impact on the heart and soul of their regions, even as mismanagement further diminishes that impact in some cities. For the Kochs, clearly, the would-be newspaper acquisition isn’t a financial investment; it’s an deeper opening into the body politic of major U.S. cities. Why would the Kochs possibly become the Tribune board’s lead buyer? In a word, simplicity. The board has made it known that it prefers a single buyer of all eight properties. It’s much messier to do three or five or eight separate deals. The timeline would be longer; the separate transaction costs greater. Find a buyer who is willing to buy all the properties, and Tribune can go on its merry way wholly becoming a TV and entertainment company. If that buyer wants to unload some of the properties immediately — as McClatchy did when it swallowed Knight Ridder’s 30 dailies in 2006 — or down the road, so be it. While there are groups of local buyers clamoring for individual Tribune papers (most notably the Beutner/Broad/Burkle group in L.A.), a single sale would preclude such deal-making. The likeliest buyers of all eight: the Kochs and then — maybe — Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Aaron Kushner’s 2100 Trust, which bought the Orange County Register and has kicked the wobbly tires of The Boston Globe. The Kochs’ interest, and Tribune’s reciprocated murmurs of affection, force a reappraisal of the potential of Rupert Murdoch’s as lead buyer in the Tribune transaction. Owner of the largest newspaper company on the planet, he’s been assailed for the broad abuses of Hackgate and for bending his papers to his will. But he’s a businessman and a newspaperman. He did not, as feared, turn The Wall Street Journal into a Fox News-like attack dog. Rather, he invested in the paper when most of his peers were cutting back. He knows the difference between his own political and business interests and what makes publishing a newspaper successful, and, as in the case of the Journal and The Times of London, has opted more for the latter. In that regard, Murdoch emerges as the relative friendly in this auction. In fact, you couldn’t ask for a better scenario for Rupert: serving as the white knight saving the Times and Tribune from the clutches of those far right-wingers! (Indeed, Rupert’s preparation for taking on the headaches of Tribune is literally mind-boggling. That’s right: He recently tweeted his embrace of Transcendental Meditation. After all, he’s just an (older) child of the 1960s.) In a single-sale scenario, the Los Angeles Times is the biggest prize, with the Chicago Tribune more appealing to some than others. The smallest papers, in Allentown and Newport News, will be offered up to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Media, while Baltimore, Hartford, and two Florida papers may fall into a new limbo. Tribune’s new board members, L.A.- and entertainment-experience-heavy, represent the financial interests of their financial owners, bound to do their fiduciary duty in maximizing the value of any assets sold. That’s what boards do. But big deals often take into account factors other than absolute top dollar. Will community gain or loss be a part of the board’s thinking? Will the 100-year-old public service traditions of these papers play any part in their decision? We’ve got to wonder what those board members — all smart, successful, sophisticated people — want to read themselves. How would they feel waking up to the news, print or digital or whatever, that was a version of what Doug Manchester’s crew has done in San Diego?
Ah, Papa Doug and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Local developer Doug Manchester bought the Union-Tribune from the turnaround equity company Platinum Equity, which it bought at for a fire-sale price from the Copley family. San Diego is our best cautionary example about what Koch ownership of the Los Angeles Times may mean. We can do more than imagine a partisan ownership of the L.A. Times and other Tribune papers; California’s second-largest city provides an 18-month lab on what it looks like. Scott Lewis, CEO of eight-year-old online news startup Voice of San Diego, offers a nuanced view. “On a day-in, day-out basis, daily news coverage is the same — some better, some worse.” Lewis, whose site has consistently done the best coverage of the U-T’s many travails, credits editor Jeff Light for even keeping the paper on a relatively even keel, despite the pro-development passion of its owner and the front-page editorials (three in the recent mayor’s race, alone) that make major waves. He notes how the new owners have invested in a much-needed site redesign and made an investment in a 24-hour cable news station, U-T TV. There’s still investigative reporting, even if it’s overly oriented toward the uncovering of government waste. But that doesn’t mean traditional journalistic lines aren’t being crossed. Take U-T TV, for instance. As the service launched, the paper greeted it with a special section, seemingly editorial and written as news, touting “a new frontier in news.” That’s just one example of many, of how the paper has tried use its influence to support Manchester’s political beliefs and his own business interests, well-covered in this Media Matters rundown. Last fall, the U-T bought Lee’s North County Times, its main competitor, and largely shut it down. “The second newspaper in San Diego County is just gone,” says Lewis. Significantly, Manchester’s mayoral candidate lost. How is the community of San Diego responding? Circulation is off in mid-single digits — about average for other metros. “There’s quite a bit of blowback,” says Lewis. “People are dismissive of the U-T. ‘That’s just Manchester,’ they say. “I think I’ve seen the humbling of Papa Doug,” he says. “CEO John Lynch thought he could tell people, ‘This is how it is going to be.’ They are humbled in what they can achieve. It’s a lesson in how newspapers are not that powerful anymore. It’s like a journalist who writes a front-page story and thinks the world is going to change, and nothing happens. We all go through that.” The TV station foray is an expensive and ambitious investment, says Lewis, and “doesn’t appear to have any influence” — now just starting to earn measurable ratings against the TV incumbents. Manchester, ironically, has also said he’d like to buy the L.A. Times and maybe other Tribune assets. The notion of a southern California alliance between the Kochs and Manchester would appear to be a natural one, politically and geographically, should the Kochs win the Times — although Manchester has denied any working relationship. If Papa Doug’s impact on San Diego has been mixed, we’ve got to wonder how the Kochs buying Tribune papers would go. It’s hard to imagine the Kochs respecting the traditional division between news reporting and the opinion pages. They’re using to having their way — a way paved by wealth — but the San Diego experience shows how that can be problematic. There are always those pesky journalists and paying readers that may get in the way. With all the nameplate and civic value of these newspapers, any new owners will a profound choice in front of them. They inherit the gales of fundamental newspaper change. They inherit newspapers that diminished in newsroom capacity, in circulation reach, and in ad revenues. (A new data point there: The New York Times Co.’s drop of 13.3 percent in print ad revenue, reported in today’s quarterly numbers.) The Tribune papers have suffered more than the average daily for two reasons. First, six of the eight are metros, and metros have seen the deepest revenue declines and newsroom cuts. Second, the mess that Sam Zell’s five-year odyssey hath wrought is incalculable. Despite the sometimes heroic efforts of the surviving top managers and rank and file throughout the company, the Zell hell further damaged the papers’ ability to meet the digital future. Some are near hollowed-out and will be a tougher to rebuild. So, here we are, on the brink of that biggest metro sale-a-thon in U.S. history. At this point, it looks like the Tribune and Boston Globe sales offer two alternative paths forward. The New York Times Company plans to wrap up its options for selling the Boston Globe soon. So far, its focus is on two buyers, both the kinds of wealthy, civic-minded buyers who appear to be on the outside looking in on the Tribune sale. It’s in the Tribune story that we best see the sorry journey of part of the American daily industry. First we saw that rupture of the Old Boys Club, that fraternity that kept newspaper properties within a tight knot of traditionalists, for all the good and bad that meant. Then we saw the rupture of the business model, as the advertising that fueled the industry was cut in half over the last seven years. Then we saw an uneven rupture of public service, as newsroom cutbacks — cutting more than 15,000 jobs — have meant far less community service over a decade. Now we may be seeing the rupture of public trust. If the Tribune board places its supposed fiduciary responsibility above that trust, a new line will have been crossed. It’s one thing to see it crossed in San Diego; it’s another if the dots on the map light up from Hartford to L.A., as well. Photo by jpellgen used under a Creative Commons license. |
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