Newspapers have become deadweight commodities linked to other media commodities in chains that are coupled or uncoupled by accountants and lawyers and executive vice presidents and boards of directors in offices thousands of miles from where the man bit the dog and drew ink
Link: Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper—By Richard Rodriguez (Harper’s Magazine)
Let’s talk about citizen journalists.
There are many people who think they can replace professional visual journalists.
Link: Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’ – The Digital Journalist
As we were closing this issue, two stories have come across the wire that underline how profoundly deep the crisis is today for journalism and photojournalists.
Dallas Observer blogger Robert Wilonsky reveals “a memo Dallas Morning News editor Bob Mong and senior vice president of sales Cyndy Carr sent to everyone at A.H. Belo Corp. … outlining what they call a ‘business/news integration.’ Which means … some section editors at all of the company’s papers, including The News, will now report directly to Carr’s team of sales managers, now referred to as general managers. In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo’s products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo’s products, which is a radical departure from the way newspapers have been run since, oh, forever.”
There is something wrong in how some in journalism currently view the profession. Thousands of professional journalists are out of work. More join the unemployment lines every day. Yet, I see many in journalism moving steadily toward using citizen journalism as if it is the answer to the future of our profession. For starters, citizen journalists will not save journalism. I can understand startups on the Web wanting to change how journalism works. The desire to succeed in a new world is intense. Because of the economy and the changes in journalism, there is no guarantee anything on the Web will succeed. Threats from outside the profession are expected. However, it is the establishment which has me worried. It is one thing to face intimidation from within. It is another when journalism turns on its own and starts to eat itself.
Link: Citizen Journalism: A Recipe for Disaster – The Digital Journalist
That’s been apparent this week, as White House reporters have privately discussed and debated the recent addition of sites like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post to the White House in-town press pool. It’s not that reporters are criticizing the work of either Christina Bellantoni or Sam Stein, but some have expressed concerns about pool reports coming from left- or right-leaning news organizations that will then be used by the rest of the press corps.
Link: New W.H. pool rotation sparks debate – Michael Calderone – POLITICO.com
New Zealand’s National Business Review stuck a paywall in front of its website back in mid-July, betting that enough readers would stick around and pay for “quality” that it would…
New Zealand’s National Business Review stuck a paywall in front of its website back in mid-July, betting that enough readers would stick around and pay for “quality” that it would make up for the stupendous drop in readership. Looks like they bet wrong. Their traffic plummeted, and traffic to their free competitors skyrocketed
Two freelancers, who were kidnapped and held for 15 months, went to Somalia with fewer resources than their counterparts from major news organizations.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/media/30somalia.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Amanda Lindhout was a waitress at an Irish pub in Calgary, Alberta, with a dream of becoming a journalist. But Ms. Lindhout, who has no formal journalistic training, did not join the ranks of citizen journalists who blog about their communities. Instead, she used her earnings from the bar to finance reporting trips to several of the world’s most dangerous war zones.
Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer, and Amanda Lindhout, a Canadian freelance reporter, described a hellish experience, alternating between tedium and terror.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/world/africa/26somalia.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Never in the history of journalism have the news media suffered such a heavy loss of life in one day
Link: Breaking: Twelve Journalists Killed in Philippines | dvafoto
Prankster/artist Jason Eppink threw “Print After Parties” inside newspaper boxes in honor of the the death of print. Very clever. From Eppink’s project description: Abandoned by f…
Prankster/artist Jason Eppink threw “Print After Parties” inside newspaper boxes in honor of the the death of print.
Americans were tied with Britons at 48 percent, the lowest figure among nine Western nations surveyed.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/media/16paywall.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Americans, it turns out, are less willing than people in many other Western countries to pay for their online news, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group.
In his new memoir, Harold Evans recalls an exuberant run in 20th-century journalism.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Carr-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Sir Harold Evans knows his way around a story, having served as the editor of The Sunday Times of London, The Times of London, and all manner of publications up and down the food chain. As the title of his new book, “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times,” suggests, he describes an epoch past, an era in British journalism when type was poured hot, articles deemed unfit landed on an actual spike, and the men — and it was mostly men — who commanded all of it were literate buccaneers.
In the end, one wonders how it’s possible to even put out a magazine anymore. When I think of what we used to do, the budgets we had – and they never felt extravagant at the time – were essentially an investment in excellence.
The horse has escaped the barn, but almost all the discussions over the years as newspapers began their downward slide failed to acknowledge, or even seemed to grasp in some cases, that “newspapers” are, in essence, really TWO businesses – the “front half” and the “back half.” The “front half” is the news operation, with reporters and photographers leaving the building to report and editors in the office who package that news, and the business office where ads and subscriptions are sold. The “back half” involves trade union workers – pressmen and such – who take the news operation’s pictures and ads into a production facility not that far removed from the 19th-century “hot-type” era of linotype machines and newsprint rolls weighing a ton or more each, printing inks and giant presses, where they manufacture the actual “product” that gets trucked away by union drivers (some making six-figure salaries) to distribution points.
Link: All the News That Fits the Horse-Drawn Cart – The Digital Journalist
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/06/AR2009110602462.html?wprss=rss_world
Iranian officials arrested a Japanese reporter and two Canadian reporters during anti-government protests this week and charged them with “unauthorized reporting,”
We at McSweeney’s love newspapers. We love the internet, too. But we believe that print newspapers are an invaluable part of the journalistic landscape. So we’ve spent five months collaborating with dozens of reporters, designers, photographers, and authors on a 21st-century newspaper prototype.
Link: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The San Francisco Panorama Press Release.
via: dvafoto
Newspapers are certainly in a state of flux, I’m not sure if they’re on their way out quite yet, but things are definitely not looking good. The Telegraaf Media Groep from the Netherlands has something new they want to try with newspapers. It’s a vertical newspaper, which unlike traditional newspapers you turn the page from bottom to top and vice versa.
Several Web sites repeated Monday erroneous allegations that The New York Times had paid a ransom for the release of its reporter David Rohde, held by the Taliban for seven months.
via At War Blog: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/times-responds-on-reporters-kidnapping/
False reports persist. On Sept. 13, The Sunday Times in London
reported that $9 million was paid for our release. Then it issued a
full retraction.