Rabu, 21 Desember 2011

Political Impasse in Papua New Guinea Appears to End

The New York Times
My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada
December 21, 2011 1:55 AM
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World / Asia Pacific: Political Impasse in Papua New Guinea Appears to End
By MATT SIEGEL
Papua New Guinea's governor general threw his weight behind
the government of Peter O'Neill on Tuesday, ending a
standoff that left the nation with dueling governments.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/world/asia/political-impasse-in-papua-new-guinea-appears-to-end.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

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For journalism’s future, the killer app is credibility


Nieman Journalism Lab


Posted: 20 Dec 2011 08:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is multimedia journalist Robert Hernandez, aka WebJournalist, currently an assistant professor at USC Annenberg.
Granted, this will make for a weak lede, but allow me to start this piece with a disclosure: I, like many of you, am not a fan of prediction posts.
Typically, they aren’t based on anything real and are often used to make grand statements we all roll our eyes at… and don’t get me started on how often they’re wrong.
That aside, here’s another piece to roll your eyes at.
But here’s a tweak, this is not really a prediction… this is, to be honest, more of a hopeful wish.
Okay, ready? Here goes.
We know that Content is King. There is no doubting this concept. If you don’t have ‘it,’ no one is going to engage with you.
We know that Distribution is Queen. In this modern age, what’s the point of having ‘it’ if no one will find it?
My prediction is that this ruling monarchy will be augmented by… a prince. Perhaps a duke? Whatever. And it's called Credibility.
In the age that we live in, content is relatively cheap. Anyone can create it. If not through their computer, everyone’s phone can basically do live shots, record newsworthy sound clips and file stories. Some can do interactive 360 videos or augmented reality presentations. Really cool stuff.
And everyone can distribute their content in 140 characters, their own livestream network or their blog (how traditional).
With technology empowering everyone with the ability to create and to distribute, I predict — and wish — that in 2012 the new dominating factor will be Credibility. Actually, earned Credibility.
What will stand out from the sea of content will be the voices we turn to time and time again. Trusted sources of news and information will transcend their mastheads and company brands…and become their own brand. Brands that are solely based on being known for the quality and reliability of their work.
Just to make Gene Weingarten angry, brands brands brands brands brands. Look, that’s all marketing speak for the most important quality journalists have to offer: Credibility.
And, sure, some of us get a head start by being associated with the Washington Post, NPR, CNN, etc. But I predict — hope — that in the coming year, individual journalists will be valued more than their distribution companies. More than the media format of their story.
Judged by the content of their character. (Wait, that’s a different dream.)
Many news consumers are tired of the political left and the political right fighting, and making journalism — or I should actually say "journalism" — the fight's platform. Hell, I’m tired of it, too.
We want people who will cut through the spin and tell us what's going on, how it will affect us and what can we do about it. We want transparent news. We want news that, while it may not always achieve that goal, honestly strives to be objective.
We want to trust journalism. And to do so, we need to trust journalists.
And bypassing the blogger-vs-tweeter-vs-media company-vs-journalist debate, it is going to come down to one thing: Credibility.
Can I reliably trust you to tell me what is going on? If the answer is yes, then I don’t care if you work out of a newsroom or out of your garage.
Let’s see what the new year brings, but that is my predication…that is my wish.
Okay, roll your eyes. Or post a comment. Share your thoughts.
Correction: We initially listed Richard, rather than Robert, Hernandez as the author of this post. We deeply regret the error, and want to stress that it’s the R. Hernandez of USC, rather than the R. Hernandez of Berkeley, who wrote this prediction. Apologies to both.
Image by vagawi used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 20 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is blogging pioneer Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the author, most recently, of Mediactive.
For 2012:
Journalists will start paying serious attention to an issue that will ultimately determine whether they can participate in the digital world: control.
We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. This is not media consolidation in the traditional sense, where a few huge conglomerates used economies of scale to dominate journalism by dominating the local and national agendas. This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous — and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening.
The choke points include (among others):
  • Search engines. Google, for example, has enormous power to decide who is visible, and has collected staggering amounts of data on our individual preferences and how we use the Internet. So far, the company has behaved in mostly benign ways. But will not always be in the hands of people who take seriously the “don’t be evil” mantra the founders established at the beginning.
  • Wire-line Internet service providers. In most American communities there are, at most, two “broadband” service providers: the cable and phone companies, monopolies established with government protection. Cable is vastly superior due to the lack of fiber investment by the phone industry, and is rapidly becoming the de facto broadband provider. Meanwhile, the carriers are demanding the right to decide what bits get delivered in what order and at what speed, if they get delivered at all, to the customer requesting them. With these companies taking on more and more of a content role — Comcast’s buyout of NBC Universal the prime example — fair service provision, also known as Network Neutrality, is a bigger issue than ever.
  • Mobile carriers. With the FCC’s assent, this oligopoly doesn’t even offer a nod to fair network practices. Their bandwidth caps make the wired-line carriers’ own caps (a totally unneeded “fix” that appears designed to favor their own content) look generous, and they’re deploying what amounts to spyware, such as the now-infamous Carrier IQ, to watch everything we’re doing.
  • Apple. The news industry’s love affair with one of the most valuable companies on Earth has only expanded with the death of Steve Jobs. Yet Apple’s censorious control-freakery has never been greater, and its business tactics are no less brutal and predatory than Microsoft’s were in the 1990s — and they have been, and are continuing to be, applied to information providers who wish to use Apple’s increasingly powerful marketplace. (Journalists have barely begun to wake up to this threat, sadly.)
  • The copyright cartel. Hollywood and its allies do not like anything they cannot control, and they are working harder than ever to control the Internet. They’ve come close this year to getting Congress to pass an Internet censorship regime, via “SOPA” in the House and “ProtectIP” in the Senate — legislation that is on the fast track. Broadcast media conglomerates have all but ignored the issue in their coverage, to no surprise, and traditional print coverage of it has been weak. Late in the game, journalists started to understand the threat, but even if the bill doesn’t pass this year it will certainly be near the top of Congress’ agenda in 2012.
  • Government. Not only is Congress working on Hollywood’s behalf, but the Obama administration has been a regressive force inside the United States — while trumpeting Internet freedom abroad. Its virulent attacks on WikiLeaks, and misuse of the ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) process to take down sites with no due process are chilling. American journalists have failed to realize that their non-support for WikiLeaks is non-support for themselves, and they’ve essentially ignored the administration’s hypocrisy.
The forces of control are getting more powerful every day. They are a direct threat to journalism and innovation. Journalists are starting to take note — and we can only hope it’s not too late.
Posted: 20 Dec 2011 06:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is Martin Langeveld, who spent 30 years in the daily newspaper business, 13 of them as a publisher, and who contributes regularly to the Lab.
Here we go again — time to have look back at my December 2010 predictions for 2011, and to go out on another limb with prognostications for 2012.
Below, I’ve listed each of my 2011 predictions (somewhat abbreviated in some cases — just click back to the original post for the full verbiage). Following each 2011 prediction, read my report on  how things actually turned out, plus a fresh prediction for 2012.
2011 Prediction: Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming . . . All these things will not stay in separate silos. . . . imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don't). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we'll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.
How I did: Some hits, some misses in a complex prediction there. Real personalized news still remains an unrealized holy grail of a goal. But we’re certainly moving rapidly in the direction of more and more transactional functionality on tablets and phones — as I described here in an early preview of the Amazon Kindle Fire, which is a big step in the direction of “a device . . . that understand[s] me and understand[s] what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me.” And clearly Google wants to go there, as described in Ken Doctor’s recent post on “Google’s retail push.” (By the way, some very interesting data just came out about how tablet owners are using their gadgets for shopping in the current holiday season: 87 percent of them are using them to shop; on average they plan to spend $325; most are doing their shopping from the couch or in bed; and about half plan to continue doing more shopping on their tablet. Clearly, my early view that tablets will fuel a new e-commerce explosion is being borne out.)
Prediction for 2012: I’m rolling this prediction into 2012, lock, stock and barrel. And I’ll add that tablet-based shopping in 2012 will surpass all expectations.
2011 Prediction: The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I'm going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed.
How I did: The “clearinghouse” is now independently incorporated as News Licensing Group, but it has been virtually mum about its plans. We do have answers to the questions I listed: NLG is for-profit; it has considerable funding from various newspaper companies; its CEO is David Westin and its COO is Srinandan Kasi, former general counsel at AP. Todd Martin is CTO, and the outfit is hiring for key staff positions. So far, NLG doesn’t even have a website yet; the most detailed description of what it is doing and what its plans are can be found on its recent submission for an award at the Cloud Computing Conference. Aside from the content-tracking News Registry system NLG inherited from AP, this document points to a next phase in which NLG plans to create “new and innovative ways for news providers to license, market and distribute their content to digital platforms in a manner that respects intellectual property rights and generates new revenue for publishers.”
Prediction for 2012: Let’s roll the News Licensing Group prediction over into 2012, as well. Expect NLG to (a) come up with a better name for itself, (b) launch a website, (c) be more public about what it’s doing, and (d) demonstrate ways in which news and information content can, in effect, be released onto the web, be used by various published subject to usage and payment restrictions embedded in tags, and send revenue back to the content owners or creators.
2011 Prediction: Embracing real digital strategies. Among newspaper companies, Journal Register will continue to point the way: CEO John Paton ardently evangelizes for digital-first thinking . . . .  So for a prediction: Journal Register will outsource most of its printing, sell most of its real estate, bring the audience into its newsrooms with more news cafes like their first one in Torrington, Conn. It will announce by year end that 25 percent of its revenue is from digital sources. It will also launch online-only startups in cities and towns near its existing markets, perhaps with niche print spinoffs. And finally, toward the end of 2011, we'll see some reluctant and tentative emulation of Paton's strategies among a few other newspaper groups.
How I did: Well, Journal Register indeed continues to point the way; its CEO John Paton now heads up an unusual management company that is running both JRC and MediaNews Group. Since then, Paton has moved quickly to consolidate the MNG-JRC management structures (with “new bosses” all around, although at this point some MNG editors know about “digital first” only from what they read in the media). So my “emulation” prediction is more than right with respect to MNG, but my outsourcing and startup predictions are off the mark. Paton hasn’t said how much of JRC’s revenue is digital now, but he did tell David Carr of the New York Times that it had more than quintupled during his watch, from $6 million in 2009 to a projected $32 million in 2011. I’m sure that’s not 25 percent of total ad revenue, though, but might be getting close to 20 percent (compared to an industry average of 13.2 percent). More significantly, Paton said that 60 percent of JRC’s digital revenue is digital-only, as opposed to print-driven digital “upsells” which still inflate the industry-reported numbers. Paton has also taken some first steps toward my prediction of “online-only startups in cities and towns near its existing markets” — in the form of ventures taking shape in his IdeaLab (now expanding with the addition of MNG), as well as his just announced DigitalFirst Ventures, which will make investments in tech start-ups focused in the areas of content, advertising and audience development.
Prediction for 2012: Let’s morph this one into a consolidation prediction — More newspapers and newspaper groups will be added under Paton’s Digital First management umbrella. Prime candidates include Lee Enterprises, which is now undergoing a strategic bankruptcy, just as MNG and JRC did; Philadelphia Media Network and Freedom Communications, both of which have major investments from Alden Global Capital which also has effective control of MNG and JRC; Tribune Corp., if it ever emerges from bankruptcy; and perhaps even Canada’s Postmedia Network, in which Alden has a stake and to which Paton has served as an advisor.
2011 Prediction: Newspaper advertising revenue . . . . My prediction is for a very flat year, with the quarterly totals (for print plus online revenue) coming in at Q1: +1.5%, Q2: +2.0%, Q3: no change and Q4: -3%.
How I did: Every year, I try for a pretty pessimistic newspaper ad revenue prediction, and every year, reality turns out to be worse. The actual results for the first three quarters were: Q1: -7.0%, Q2: -6.9%, Q3: -8.9%. What on earth was I thinking when I wrote “no change” for Q3? Since employment trends have gotten marginally better and the holiday shopping season seems to be off to a decent start, perhaps they can still bring in Q4 at -3%. That would make it the 22nd consecutive negative quarter for the industry, but the best since Q4 ’06, when the loss was only 2.2%.
Prediction for 2012: Sorry, but I have to continue to be pessimistic here. See my view below on the accelerating decline in newspaper circulation sales, precipitated by more widespread tablet adoption. Even with some improvement in the economic sectors that traditionally benefit newspapers, the disappearing print audience means ad revenue will continue to plummet: Q1: -6.0%, Q2: -8.0%, Q3: -9.0%, Q4: -10.0%.
2011 Prediction: Newspaper online ad revenue . . . . I predict newspaper online revenue will be: Q1: +5.0 percent, Q2: +3.0 percent, Q3: no change and Q4: no change.
How I did: A pleasant surprise here: The actual results were much better: Q1: +10.2%, Q2: +8.0%, Q3: +6.2% — but keep an eye on how much of that is driven by the aforementioned gimmicky upsells, in which online ads are sold as added value in print ad packages, with an arbitrary portion of the revenue journaled to the online side of the ledger. (At McClatchy, for example, less than 50 percent of online revenue is online-only; the majority is bundled with print.)
Prediction for 2012: Mr. Paton’s influence might be helpful in keeping the uptrend going here — although to keep up with the overall growth rate of online advertising, newspapers should be performing in the double digits. Maybe they can return to that territory by the second half of the year. My prediction:  Q1: +7.0%, Q2: +9.0%, Q3: +11.0%, Q4: +13.0%.
2011 Prediction: Newspaper circulation . . . . My prediction: down 5 percent in each of the spring and fall six-month ABC reporting periods. That will mean that by year's end, print newspaper penetration will fall to about one in three households (a long way down from its postwar peak of 134 newspapers sold per 100 households in 1946).
How I did: This year, the industry sort of gets a pass, because it claims that because of Audit Bureau of Circulation rules changes, 2011 circulation results, as reported in the semi-annual FAS-FAX reports, can’t be compared with those from prior years. But I’m going to claim a partial win on this one, because figures reported by individual newspaper chains suggest that the 5 percent downtrend prediction is right, at least for weekday circulation For example, McClatchy reported weekday print circulation declines of 3.7% to 4.3% in the first three quarters, but its Sunday circulate swung from a loss of 2.8% in Q1 to a gain of 2.0% in Q3. Gannett reported that weekday circulation (excluding USA Today) was off 6% for the first nine months, but Sunday circulation was off just 1 percent. The New York Times Company was not specific but said print circulation volumes were still declining, as did Scripps.
Prediction for 2013: Print circulation (never mind those digital subscription), will drop 7% in the March 31 FASFAX report, and 10% in the Sept. 30 edition. That’s not all bad news, because much of the swing will be driven by increases in paid online access including facsimile editions and tablet versions. In other words, I think the 2012-2013 period (see how I hedge my bet there?) will turn out to be the tipping point where widespread tablet adoption leads to much more time spent reading news digitally, and print newspaper sales begin to drop precipitously. Of course, this brings its own problems — newspapers without solid digital strategies will not survive.
2011 Prediction: Online news readership. There are a couple of ways to look at this. For newspaper websites, NAA recently switched from Nielsen to Comscore because they liked Comscore's numbers better. As a base measure, Comscore is showing about 105 million monthly unique visitors and 4 billion pageviews to newspaper sites, with the average visitor spending 3.5 minutes per visit. Prediction: all three of those metrics will stay flat (plus or minus 10 percent) during 2011. The other way to look at it is: Where are Americans getting their news? The Pew Research Center looks at this on an annual basis, and in 2010 showed online, radio, and newspapers more or less tied as news sources for Americans. Is there any doubt where this is going? In 2011, Pew might add mobile as a distinct source, but it will show online clearly ahead of newspapers and radio, with mobile ascendant.
How I did: The Comscore data reported monthly by NAA has shown some ups and downs in newspaper site unique visitors, with Q3 looking particularly positive with about 112 million versus about 105 million during the last few months of 2010, along with roughly 12-15 percent growth in page views and visits. Time spent per visit is essentially unchanged at 3.5 to 3.8 minutes. So we’re slightly better than my plus or minus 10 percent prediction there. Pew did take a closer look at mobile as a source for news, and found (in early 2011) that 47% of Americans were getting local news on cellphones or tablets, compared with just 26% who got news of any kind on cellphones a year earlier (tablets were not a factor yet at that time). So mobile news is indeed “ascendant.”
Prediction for 2012: We’ll see a lot more research during the year on how people are using smartphones and tablets for news, information and shopping. The smarter newspaper companies (Digital First, New York Times, and Hearst) will invest, perhaps jointly, in technology that can compete with Amazon and Google when it comes to not only connecting people with merchandise but actually delivering it to them. Although it would not be easy to do, newspapers could have an advantage in exploiting the local side of this opportunity — via your local news site or app, discover local goods and services, pay for them and have them delivered (perhaps even by the newspaper truck that drives by every house in the market every night…).
2011 Prediction: Newspaper chains. Nobody can afford to buy anybody else, and no non-newspaper companies want to buy newspapers. There might be some mergers, but really, there are no strategic opportunities for consolidation in this industry, because there are no major efficiencies or revenue opportunities to be gained. Everybody will just muddle along in 2011, with the exception of Journal Register, which as noted above will move into adjacent markets with digital products and generally show the way the rest should follow.
How I did: Indeed, there were no major ownership changes, but Journal Register was certainly prominent as part of a quasi-merger with MediaNews Group under John Paton’s new management company.
Prediction for 2012: See above, under Embracing Real Digital Strategies.
2011 Prediction: Stocks. The major indices will be up 15 to 20 percent by September, but they'll drop back to a break-even position by the end of 2011. Newspaper stocks will not beat the market. Others: AOL and Google will beat the market; Yahoo and Microsoft will not.
How I did: I got the pattern right, but the Dow never made it up has high as 15% — it was up nearly 10% by mid-July, fell back precipitously, and is recently up about 5% since the end of 2010. As predicted, newspaper stocks are not close to beating the market, though: Gannett is off more than 11% year-to-date; McClatchy is down nearly 50%; New York Times is down over 20%; Media General is down 28%; Scripps is off 17%.  AOL (driven by ongoing doubts about its overall business model) is in the same boat as the newspaper companies, off 41%. Google is slightly ahead of the Dow; Yahoo is not (down 4%), nor is Microsoft (down 8%). So, all correct except AOL.
Prediction for 2012: The Eurozone crisis gives way to the dollarzone crisis as Congress continues to deadlock over budget and debt issues. The Dow falters, dropping 10% by mid-year. The prospect of a President Gingrich lifts hopes briefly, but when Obama is re-elected while Republicans retain the House and retake the Senate, it sinks another 5%. Newspaper stocks fail to beat the market, but all the digital giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL and Apple) are all in positive territory well ahead of the Dow.
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Can 1,400 Dailies Die in 5 Years? Yes


Newspaper Death Watch

Posted: 20 Dec 2011 10:11 AM PST
The Annenberg School at the University of Southern California created a stir last week with its prediction that only four US daily newspapers will still be in print in five years. "We believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest," said Jeffery I. Cole, the school's director of the Center for the Digital Future. "It's likely that only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.  At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive."
Building ImplosionHow could this be? There are still more than 1,400 metro daily newspapers publishing in print in the US. As one tweeter pointed out, dailies would have to perish at the rate of five per week in order to meet USC Annenberg's forecast.
We think the five-year timeframe is pessimistic, but we certainly believe USC Annenberg's prediction will come true within a decade. We made precisely the same prediction five years ago – including identifying the same four titles Annenberg did – only we gave the print industry until 2025 to implode. It now appears that we were optimistic.
Here's why the Annenberg prediction isn't so far-fetched. American newspapers had a near-death experience three years ago when two venerable dailies – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News – closed their doors, each after more than a century of continuous publication. Two other major titles – the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe – had their own brush with the reaper at the same time. Both were pulled back from the brink only after their unions made massive concessions and hundreds of highly-paid journalists lost their jobs.

Busting the Union

Early 2009 was when publishers broke the back of the Newspaper Guild. At the Globe, the union bargaining position was so weak that the contract that members finally accepted was actually worse than management’s original offer three months earlier. The showdown at the Globe was a turning point for the US newspaper industry. The management victory in the labor negotiations was so complete that publishers across the country were effectively given carte blanche to fire people by the thousands. Which they did. The amazing Erica Smith counted nearly 15,000 newspaper layoffs in 2009 and another 6,700 in the two years since. And her count doesn’t include the many jobs that were eliminated or scaled back without public announcement.
Newspaper publishers basically bought themselves time, and they used it to bring costs in line with revenues. Most newspapers have drastically scaled back the size of their print editions and many have cut back regional distribution. Publishers have raised subscription prices to milk more dollars out of the dwindling cadre of loyalists who are willing to pay for print. Unfortunately, they don’t have much time. The average ago of a daily newspaper reader in the US today is between 56 and 60, depending on whose estimates you believe. That population will shrink more rapidly than any other demographic group over the next 10 or 15 years. Seniors are also the least attractive audience to the advertisers who support print advertising. It’s a bad combination.
For the time being, printed newspapers can survive simply by cutting costs and raising subscription fees, but that strategy invariably turns into a death spiral. At some point publishers will no longer be able to afford to deliver a product that people want to pay to read in print.

Tipping Point

Circulation declines, which have been running about 8% to 10% annually, will accelerate. A tipping point will be reached and the whole print model will fall apart. We don’t know when that threshold will be reached, but demographic trends that indicate it will certainly happen within the next 10 years and will probably hit a lot of titles simultaneously.
The death of the printed daily doesn’t mean the death of print. Many publishers have cut back out unprofitable Saturday and Monday editions as a way to save costs, and more will certainly follow suit. Sunday editions may be around 20 years from now because of the revenue from flyers and coupons. But many newspapers will no longer be able to support a daily publishing schedule within a few years.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that many publishers are beginning to figure out the economics of digital revenues. A milestone was reached just a couple of months ago when the New York Times Co. released its first earnings report since it instituted a paywall early this year. As we reported at the time, Ryan Chitturn of the Columbia Journalism Review estimated that the Times' digital revenue in the quarter actually exceeded its editorial costs, meaning that the paper could conceivably publish profitably without a print edition. We don’t expect the Times will shut down its presses anytime soon, but publishers across the country should cheer its success at crossing that threshold.
The Times is making the move to digital faster and more effectively than any other daily newspaper. Assuming other publishers follow its lead, we can expect that many major metro dailies will figure out a sustainable digital formula over the next five years. At that point they can begin to wind down their print operations without fear of giving up the farm. This won’t be pretty. Lots of jobs will go away when the presses shut down. However, the brands may survive and even begin to grow again.
Speaking of The New York Times, the parent Times Company is in “advanced talks” to sell off 16 regional newspapers, including titles in Florida, California, North Carolina, and Alabama. The Times Co. will continue to own the Globe and International Herald Tribune. Analysts are saying the move simply removes a headache for the Times, since the regional media were collectively losing money, and the company can now focus on its core business, which is a good thing these days.

Miscellany

We know the U.S. Postal Service is hemorrhaging money and facing criticism that it’s slow, antiquated and inflexible. So in a bold move to remedy its situation, the USPS is responding by becoming slower and less flexible. Read what the recently announced changes in service mean to publishers. We actually don’t want to be too hard on the Post Office, since many of its problems stem from a congressional requirement that it fund retiree health benefits 75 years into the future. That’s not a typo: 75 years.

And Finally…

Craig SilvermanThe holidays bring family, friends, eggnog, and, best of all, the Crunks. Only they’re not called the Crunks any more since our friend Craig Silverman (left) gained the legitimacy of a Poynter affiliation and began publishing his collection of the year's best media gaffes as "The year in media errors and corrections" on Poynter Online. Thankfully, the content is still the same.
This year's roundup of the funniest and most outrageous mistakes and corrections is headlined by several major news organizations that confused the President of the United States with the world’s most notorious terrorist and announced the death of “Obama Bin Laden." One anchorwoman on Canadian television made the mistake three times in just 17 seconds and apparently didn’t even notice.
We like the newspaper headline that reminded readers to “turn your cocks back one hour at 2 a.m. Sunday," but our favorite is a lengthy correction from The Guardian about this year's Royal wedding. It includes the passage:
"The piece referred to "damaging stories of royal profligacy past: Charles with his staff of 150, and an aide to squeeze his toothpaste for him". [The couple's press secretary] writes, "The Prince of Wales does not employ and has never employed an aide to squeeze his toothpaste for him. This is a myth without any basis in factual accuracy."
This stuff is too good to be made up. Thank you, Craig.
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Selasa, 20 Desember 2011

Crew Abandoned Passengers, Survivors Say

The New York Times
My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada
December 20, 2011 3:20 AM
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World / Asia Pacific: Indonesia: Crew Abandoned Passengers, Survivors Say
By REUTERS
The crew of an Indonesian boat packed with illegal
immigrants grabbed life vests and swam away as it sank in a
storm, leaving more than 200 passengers missing, Australian
news media reported.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/world/asia/indonesia-crew-abandoned-passengers-survivors-say.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

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The social media bubble may burst, and more predictions for 2012


Nieman Journalism Lab

Posted: 19 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Next up is journalism professor Carrie Brown-Smith, an up-and-coming young academic based at the University of Memphis.
In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not.
2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond "digital first" platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I'm optimistic we will see this trend continue. For example, The Journal Register Co.'s open newsrooms and other efforts garnered a fivefold rise in digital revenue in just two years; the Chicago Tribune continues to hire news developers to work with reporters to build new tools for making sense of and accessing information; the Wall Street Journal has had surprising success with its investments in online video, earning $200,000 in revenue per month. However, other newsrooms seem to be going in the opposite direction, continuing to lay off staff and limit their ability not only to innovate but even to maintain bare-bones levels of basic reporting, including 165 recently let go in Tampa and ongoing attrition at various Scripps properties, which included the kind of digital staffers, like an online video producer and a programmer, that one might expect to be especially crucial to moving forward in the digital space. I expect we'll see this gap between digital news haves and have-nots widen, perhaps hastening the demise of print in some markets.
2012 will be a good year for local television.
As some metropolitan daily newspapers continue to slash their already drastically-reduced staffs, they no longer have quite as commanding of an edge in reporting muscle over their broadcast counterparts. In addition to the election-year advertising boon, local television, with its recognizable personalities, also has a clear opportunity in the digital space. For example, in Memphis, where I live, the Commercial Appeal recently launched a more aggressive paywall than the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which can't be bypassed via Google or social media; shortly after doing so it laid off its social media editor. Broadcast reporters in our market have already generally been more proactive in their use of social media to share stories and interact with the audience, and the door is now open for them to increase the public's reliance on them for [free!] news and information.  Of course, given the documented propensity of local television news to focus on crime over matters of local substance; this is not necessarily a good thing from the perspective of quality journalism, but it may be inevitable nevertheless. Even serious news junkies like journalism professors (ahem) find themselves turning more often to the sources that appear in their social streams and don't require a credit card to access.
2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought.
This might seem odd coming from an avid social media user who developed two new courses on it for our journalism department and who even has been christened with that dreaded "social media guru" title on more than one occasion (ack). And assuredly, I do think social media is an incredibly important tool for news organizations to use to promote their content, improve their reporting, and engage their audiences; I'm especially hopeful that it can help journalists diversify their sources and audiences, given that African Americans use Twitter at twice the rate of whites and other similar stats. But despite all of our excitement over its potential, I'm beginning to wonder about how big of a community can be meaningfully maintained online and how this affects news organizations.  For example, many early Twitter adopters such as myself report that their rate of responses, retweets and click-thrus have declined over time. I suspect this may have less to do with any change in behavior on our parts or that of our followers and more to do with the fact that the Twitter universe is now so large. Already overflowing streams are flooding. The likelihood that even your most interested followers will even see a tweet is ever lower. In order to develop engaged and loyal communities on social media, news organizations are going to have to work harder and smarter and try to find solutions to Shirky's "filter failure" problem.
Journalism schools will increasingly step up to the plate to play a leadership role in journalism innovation in 2012.
While I and others have long lamented how out of touch the Ivory Tower can be, I think we are seeing more and more examples of journalism schools finally stepping up to the plate, as Geneva Overholser of the University of Southern California and others have long called for. Even at smaller, less wealthy programs like mine, we are starting to teach entrepreneurship and helping to fill holes in the local news ecosystem with hyperlocal reporting. Faculty members of all ages are getting excited in ways I haven't seen before about the potential of tablets, and I predict this will raise their game as teachers that will emphasize the importance of mobile and publishing in new platforms.
The co-op model is one to watch in 2012.
I read about it here on Nieman Lab, and this is one of the most interesting ideas I've read about in the future-of-news space in quite some time. I'm interested to see how it plays out.
Posted: 19 Dec 2011 09:00 AM PST
I’ve thought that perhaps a panel of product creators could give awards to journalism that really captures the spirit of technology. The goal would be to move away from the lone inventor myth and see tech projects as more like film production or a even more apt, a TV series. Software is a process. It’s not like Starry Night, as Joni Mitchell said, but it’s not like a song either. It’s like Breaking Bad or Dexter or Boardwalk Empire.1
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
Today, it’s web pioneer Dave Winer, a man key to the evolution of many of the publishing technologies we use online today, and currently a visiting scholar in journalism at NYU.
Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard has asked me to contribute a piece for their end-of-year roundup. I did one last year. I guess we were thinking about paywalls then. It’s not such a hot topic now.
At the end of this year I’m thinking about the need for proper criticism of software, alongside other arts like theater, movies, music, books, travel, food and architecture. It’s finally time to stop being all gee whiz about this stuff. Tech is woven into the fabric of our culture, as much as or more so than the other arts. And it’s headed toward being even more interwoven.
We all need this, on all sides of the art. As users and creators. There’s very little understanding of how we work. That’s illustrated perfectly by the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs. We now see what a disaster this is going to be, from the future-historian point of view.
If I could nudge the editorial people in a new direction, this would be it.
Let’s advance the art of technology criticism.
PS: I’d also like to see J-school students learn how to manage infrastructure.
Notes
  1. And when a developer sells out and the acquirer shuts the service down, it’s like Deadwood, leaving the users in a lurch, wishing to know how it turned out! :-( Ian MacShane: “You’ll never know what the fuck really happened.”
    Joni Mitchell: “That’s one thing that’s always, like, been a difference between, like, the performing arts, and being a painter, you know. A painter does a painting, and he paints it, and that’s it, you know. He has the joy of creating it, it hangs on a wall, and somebody buys it, and maybe somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies. But he never, you know, nobody ever, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’ You know? He painted it and that was it.”
Posted: 19 Dec 2011 06:00 AM PST
We already see versioning strategies at work in the "metered" programs operated by a growing number of papers, including the Financial Times, The New York Times, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Readers lacking a willingness to pay get limited access to the papers' sites for free. Readers who value the content more highly, and hence are willing to pay for it, subscribe for a fee to gain unlimited access. And readers with the greatest willingness to pay shell out even more money to receive both the print edition and unfettered online access. Appification provides an opportunity to create many more versions of the same basic content and deliver them to different customer segments. In 2012, we'll see versioning strategies become not only more common in the newspaper business but more intricate, sophisticated, and lucrative.
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring.
To kick things off, it’s Nicholas Carr, the veteran technology writer, whose most recent book — The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains — was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.
For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. They're ad-supported, subscribed to, continually updated, and the content they incorporate is often as important as the functions they provide. As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form — as code, in other words — they've come to resemble software companies. They provide not only original content, but an array of online tools and functions that allow customers to view, manipulate, and add to the content in myriad ways.
During 2011, the blending of software and media accelerated greatly, thanks to what might be termed the dis-integration of the internet. The old general-purpose web, where everyone visited the same sites and saw the same stuff, is rapidly being supplanted by specialized packages of digital content geared to particular devices — iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, Xbox — or to particular members-only sites like Facebook and Google+. Not only has the net left its Wild West days; it's entered the era of the gated suburban subdivision. As part of this trend, the open, HTML-based website is being replaced, or at least supplemented, by the proprietary app. In app stores, the already blurry line between software and media disappears altogether. Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will.

Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. The influence will be exerted directly, through a proliferation of specialized media apps, as well as indirectly, through changes in consumer attitudes, expectations, and purchasing habits. There are all sorts of implications for newspapers, but perhaps the most important is that the app explosion makes it much easier to charge for online news and other content. That's true not only when the content is delivered through formal apps but also when it is delivered through traditional websites, which may themselves come to be viewed by customers as a form of app. In the old world of the open web, paying for online content seemed at best weird and at worst repugnant. In the new world of the app, paying for online content suddenly seems normal. What's an app store but a series of paywalls?
Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs "versioning." Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers. A software maker, for example, may give away a bare-bones version of an application, sell a version with more features to mainstream consumers at a modest price, and offer a high-end version, perhaps combined with added services, to professional users at a premium price. As Varian explains, "The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay. Consumers with high willingness to pay choose one version, while consumers with lower willingnesses [sic] to pay choose a different version. The producer chooses the versions so as to induce the consumers to 'self select' into appropriate categories."
The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won't work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won't pay for a bundle of news online. Last year, media blogger Jeff Jarvis dismissed The New York Times' metered plan as "cockeyed economics." Earlier this year, Nieman Lab blogger Martin Langeveld opined that "newspapers are slowly digging their graves by building paywalls." It seems likely that 2012 will be the year when we stop hearing such gloomy proclamations. Well-designed versioning strategies, spanning various devices, formats, functions, content bundles, and access plans, will provide smart newspapers with new ways to charge for their products, in both digital and print form, without sacrificing the unique opportunities presented by online distribution. That won't mean the end of the industry's struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that's good news.
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Minggu, 18 Desember 2011

Gunmen in Indonesia Attack Helicopter of Mine Workers

The New York Times
My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada
December 18, 2011 1:42 AM
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World / Asia Pacific: Gunmen in Indonesia Attack Helicopter of Mine Workers
By SARA SCHONHARDT
One person was injured and police said a motive for the
attack by the unidentified gunmen remained unknown.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/asia/gunmen-in-indonesia-attack-helicopter-of-mine-workers.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y


Arts / Art & Design: Strong Showing at Museums, While Galleries Seemed
Complacent
By HOLLAND COTTER
Museums in New York City offered some potent fare this
year, and at least two museums with national interest
opened in 2011, but many gallery shows were dull, all about
cash and caution.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/arts/design/strong-showing-at-museums-while-galleries-seemed-complacent.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
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Sabtu, 17 Desember 2011

As Indonesia Grows, Discontent Sets in Among Workers

The New York Times
My Alerts: Yuli Akhmada
December 17, 2011 1:16 AM
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World / Asia Pacific: Indonesia: Inquiry Into Beheadings
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has ordered an
investigation into the videotaped beheadings of two men,
said to have been killed by security forces hired to
protect a palm oil plantation.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/world/asia/indonesia-inquiry-into-beheadings.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y


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Business Day / Global Business: As Indonesia Grows, Discontent Sets in Among Workers
By SARA SCHONHARDT
As the labor force has watched certain sectors grow fat on
rising commodity prices and booming domestic demand, it is
pushing for a greater share of company profits.
Full Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/business/global/as-indonesia-grows-discontent-sets-in-among-workers.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
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The web censorship fight heats up, and BuzzFeed’s new social news model


Posted: 16 Dec 2011 07:30 AM PST

Sides line up on SOPA: The Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, continues to make its way through Congress, earning derision from all corners of the web every step of the way. This week, a House markup was held on a new version of the bill amended to allow Internet service providers to choose the “least burdensome” means of preventing access to websites, rather than explicitly requiring them to block domain names. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick explained, it also contains several other changes to bring it more into line with the Senate version of the bill, though it’s still a censorship bill. Julian Sanchez of the Technology Liberation Front made a similar argument: “There is no "right" way to do Internet censorship, and the best version of a bad idea remains a bad idea.”
Meanwhile, the bill’s supporters and detractors seem to be organizing along predictable lines: Many of the largest media companies in the world, like Disney, News Corp., Viacom, and Time Warner, voiced their support for the bill. Of course, they’re also maintaining that they’re “pro-Internet” as they do this, as the film industry’s Chris Dodd declared. Journalists — most recently the American Society of News Editors — have been lining up against the bill, and top constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe made the case against the bill as well.
Wikipedia has been considering imposing a brief blackout on itself, and its attorney, Geoff Brigham, laid out the site’s legal argument against the bill. A bunch of stars from the tech start-up world launched a site called I Work for the Internet highlighting the economic threat SOPA poses, which was immediately mocked by Gawker.
There’s also an international angle to this: Global Voices’ Ivan Sigal and Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out the potential global censorship threats of the bill. And it’s also worth noting that a SOPA alternative (called OPEN) has been introduced in the House, which, as Mathew Ingram of GigaOM noted, has been received a bit more warmly by some SOPA critics.

A social model for news: One of the web’s top political bloggers, Politico’s Ben Smith, announced this week he was leaving to take the editor-in-chief job for an unlikely employer: BuzzFeed, an aggregator of what’s viral on the web. As Smith and BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti (a co-founder of the Huffington Post) told the Atlantic Wire and Fast Company, their goal is to make their site the first to organize itself around its social distribution model at its core, incorporating the talk on the web around issues into each story and building content fundamentally to be shared. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram noted that this distribution-oriented model is the opposite of the one employed by most traditional news orgs and advised to observe its fate closely.
Smith and Peretti see it as the next iteration of the SEO-focused approach pioneered by the Huffington Post and currently followed by many others, and Smith told Fast Company he saw it as an improvement: “A lot of online journalism has been about gaming search engine algorithms — writing, in a way, for machines. Sharing is fundamentally about producing things people like.”
Smith also told the Lab’s Megan Garber he and his staff would still be doing old-fashioned political reporting, and Reuters’ Jack Shafer looked at another viral aggregator, Fark, to find out why adding journalism to that mix could be a good idea.

Twitter’s play for the casual user: One issue to catch up on from late last week: Twitter unveiled a redesign that orients the site around four new tabs: Home, Connect, Discover, and Me. In a critical review, John Gruber of Daring Fireball explained how the new interface works, but also worried about what the changes mean for where Twitter is headed: “The Twitter service this new UI presents is about … mass-market spoonfed ‘trending topics’ and sponsored content. It's trying to make Twitter work for people who don't see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be.”
Gruber wasn’t the only who looked at the new Twitter and saw a grab for traffic and advertisers. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan said it’s about keeping users on longer and feeding ad revenue, and Gizmodo’s Casey Chan called it “Twitter for the lurkers.” The New York Times’ Nick Bilton explained further how Twitter is trying to make itself simpler for non-techies, and as Ad Age reported, this redesign also includes the addition of brand pages for companies and marketers.
New ReadWriteWeb editor Dan Frommer also had some good takeaways from the redesign: Search and lists are being de-emphasized, and Twitter is trying to scale up to get really, really big. On the latter point, Mashable’s Sarah Kessler pointed out several ways in which Twitter is going after Facebook with these changes. As far as news goes, Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman saw a lot of potential for driving traffic and discovering news through the new Discover tab.

Classfying journalism by “what,” not “who”: As much as we complain about it, it turns out we were apparently eager to take another opportunity to argue about the “bloggers vs. journalists” issue. Discussion continued this week about the Oregon court ruling, reported last week, that declared that a blogger was not entitled to the same legal protections as journalists.
The New York Times’ David Carr echoed some of skepticism summarized here last week about whether the blogger in question was really acting as a journalist or more as an online antagonist. Others maintained that this blogger’s particular behavior was irrelevant to the larger legal question at hand: Boston j-prof Mark Leccese worried that this ruling could become an important precedent, though Eric Robinson of the Citizen Media Law Project pointed out that there are other legal precedents classifying bloggers as journalists.
John Dvorak of PC Magazine ripped the decision apart, and The New York Times brought several people together to consider whether and how the courts should consider bloggers to be journalists. The Atlantic’s Rebecca Rosen threw some (needed) cold water on the entire argument over who’s a journalist by contending that the notion of press freedom as protecting journalists is an anachronism, as the idea of a professional journalist didn’t exist when the First Amendment was written. Instead of focusing on the “who,” she said, we should look at the “what” — the quality and content of information for the good of the public and democracy, rather than who’s producing it.
A couple of others jumped on that theme of journalism being defined by what it is, rather than who does it. Free Press’ Josh Stearns tied the issue to the recent journalist arrests in the Occupy protests and said journalists should be defined by their actions, not any professional or institutional specifications. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram said it may be difficult to define journalism outside of traditional means, but the definition still needs to be rethought.
Reading roundup: There wasn’t any dominant story this week, but it was a pretty busy one overall. Here’s what else you might have missed:
— Mark Hemingway of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard issued a critique of journalistic fact-checking operations, calling them an attempt by liberal news orgs to impose some authority on political discourse. Forbes’ John McQuaid agreed that fact-checking is indeed flawed, but not in the way Hemingway described — he called for more reporting and less unmerited certainty. Meanwhile, Ethan Zuckerman reported on a talk on the rise of fact-checking by a Columbia grad student.
— There are new holes being poked in News Corp.’s phone hacking defense every week, but this could be a particularly big one: We found out that James Murdoch replied to an email referring to the hacking as a major problem in 2008, long before he’s said he knew about the breadth of the issue. The New York Times’ David Carr wondered when James Murdoch’s house of cards will fall, and another former News of the World editor was arrested in the scandal.
— A USC study predicted that most newspapers (all but the smallest and largest) will be dead in five years. Longtime newspaper editor John Robinson was dubious.
— Free Press’ Josh Stearns commented on another USC study on open journalism to argue for journalism as a service, rather than a product. O’Reilly Media’s Alex Howard reported on a talk given by the scholar who wrote that study, Melanie Sill, and Lab contributor Nikki Usher about what open-source culture can teach journalism.
— Media consultant Judy Sims gave newspaper executives two ways to think radically differently, one of which hasn’t been discussed much: Jealously defending their talent, giving them more control over and equity in the products they’re developing.
Twitter bird by Matt Hamm and typing photo by Fabien Jakimowicz used under a Creative Commons license.
Posted: 16 Dec 2011 07:00 AM PST
 
This understated, almost coy advertising strategy mirrors Owni’s tentative ebook sales strategy. Though ebook sales in France are rapidly picking up, especially with the Kindle store opening this past October, Owni is the first media outlet in France to sell ebooks as part of its core editorial output.
Editor’s Note: Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with their Winter 2011 issue,”Writing the Book,” which focuses on the new relationships between journalism and the evolving book publishing industry. Over the next few days, we’ll highlight a few stories from the issue — but go read the whole thing. In this piece, Federica Cocco writes about how the French site Owni is investing in ebooks in a big way.
Visit Owni.fr and adjacent to its logo, among French words and enticing graphics, is its English tagline: News, Augmented. The words reflect the website’s ambitious spirit, its dictum, and manifesto: to present news with an added layer of digital bonuses — maps and apps and interactive infographics. An intriguing red circle on a tiny pull string hangs from the top of our homepage. Scroll over the circle and the OwniShop logo appears. Move it away, and the logo vanishes.
The Owni website features augmented and data-driven stories and investigations. Blogger and Web entrepreneur Nicolas Voisin founded Owni in 2009 at a time when bloggers were involved in a massive campaign against France’s passage of the antipiracy HADOPI law involving copyright issues. With Owni, he created a platform for the blogging community and he hired staff to oversee the content, its presentation, and its distribution. The website’s editorial focus is promoting freedom of expression.
Like other websites in France, Owni receives a government subsidy and brings in some money through fundraising. Voisin’s Web agency 22Mars, founded in 2006, takes in revenue from the sale of various products related to Owni, including apps, online platforms, interactive maps, and infographics. Yet none of these items sells enough to make a profit. Will selling ebooks make a difference? It’s too soon to know.

Keep reading at Nieman Reports »
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