OJR front page archive for November 2011
Should a news publisher be a cheerleader for the local community?
November 29, 2011
Should a news publisher be a cheerleader for the local community?This month, San Diego businessman Doug Manchester bought the Union-Tribune newspaper from a Beverly Hills-based private equity firm.
"We'd like to be a cheerleader for all that's good about San Diego," incoming Union-Tribune president and CEO John Lynch told VoiceofSanDiego.org. "Our motivation, both of us, was to do something good for San Diego."
Lynch's boss, Manchester, is politically active - he's a Mitt Romney donor and gave more than $100,000 to support Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative in California that's now being reviewed by the courts. So when the new management crew says it wants to be "pro-business," as Lynch told VoiceofSanDiego, I don't think it unreasonable to read that phrase - "pro-business" - as conservative "code" for advocating against government regulation and against anything, including unfavorable news stories, that could impede deals from getting done. Even if those deals hurt others in the community.
I'm not afraid to say that I'm "pro-business," too. But I'm an entrepreneur, not a conservative ideologue. I want my business, and other businesses in my community, to succeed - not just in the short term, but long into the future, as well. When I say I'm "pro-business," I suspect that I mean something very different from what Manchester and Lynch imply.
What's the point of media credentials?
November 22, 2011
Is getting a credential really worth it any longer?I had to wonder that, following the New York Police Department's appalling treatment of reporters covering Occupy Wall Street protests.
Of course, the NYPD's not busting up just reporters, which is part of my point. While credentialing helps make reporting easier, it brings with it a risk of compromise that can put us out of position to capture the full picture of a story. That's worth thinking about as the NYPD's actions draw fresh attention to media credentialing.
The whole point of media credentialing is a trade-off. We submit to a background check and approval from the police or some other agency or organization and it provides access in return. I don't recall ever talking in journalism school about credentialing, and I haven't had a police credential since I was reporting for the local newspaper while in graduate school, *cough**cough* years ago.
But when I had that police credential, that got me behind (some) police lines at crime scenes and demonstrations and behind the desk at the county jail, where I could do my work without getting busted by the cops, the way I would if I were a "normal" citizen in such places, without a credential card hanging around my neck.
What's the point of having that credential, though, if it's not going to keep you from getting hit, gassed or hauled off to jail with the rest of the crowd at a protest you're covering?
It's okay: You don't have to use every social media service
November 18, 2011
If you're like me, you love hearing about the next new thing in social media and publishing technology. Hey, we're online journalists. Tech is part of what we do.But after a few years in this business, that list of "next new things" gets pretty long, doesn't it? And it grows more and more difficult to keep doing all those old things while making time for the new.
So I'm here today to tell you… it's okay to let some things go. You don't have to do everything.
You don't have to be on Facebook. And on Twitter. And on Google Plus. And on LinkedIn. And on Tumblr. And on YouTube. And on Vimeo. You don't have to use Google Analytics. And Quantcast. And Compete. And Klout. You don't have to post in your comments and the comments of every other blog on the Internet that references you.
You can give it a rest. It's okay.
In trying to learn as much as we can about the means in our industry, let's not lose sight of the ends. Ultimately, we publish to meet a need in our communities. (And to get paid for meeting that need.) All these social media services and publishing gadgets are tools to help us do that. That's all. Sometimes, you don't need every tool in the shed to get the job done.
Encouraging grassroots journalism as a defense against news blackouts
November 15, 2011
If the police arrest reporters who show up to cover the news, then let's help all the other people whom the police can't arrest become the reporters."Citizen journalism" - the reporting of news events by non-professional reporters - isn't just a nifty little gadget that we pros can append to our reporting, to make it seem more "social" or interactive online. When circumstances and agencies stand in the way of news reporting, grassroots reporting (my preferred term) becomes an indispensable part of the news-gathering process.
We've seen that over the past weeks with the Occupy movement, and especially last night in New York, when city police launched a middle-of-the-night raid on peaceful protesters camped out in a private park in lower Manhattan - then blocked and even arrested news reporters who showed up to cover it.
By now, we should be used to relying on readers and viewers to provide coverage for us in times of natural disasters. Sure, we can drive the trucks to the point where a hurricane is forecast to make landfall, but forecasts aren't always spot-on. And we get little warning for tornadoes, and none for earthquakes. (Twitter notwithstanding.) Professional journalists have relied upon eyewitness descriptions, photos and videos from people on the scene of calamities, since long before the Internet.
But if that's all we're using user-generated content for in our news reports, we're leaving ourselves too vulnerable to authorities who wish to control our coverage. Organizers and supporters of the Occupy movement have recognized the importance of putting cameras in the hands of participants, to minimize the chance that a newsworthy moment happens without being recorded for the public at large.
That ought to become more journalists' role, too - not just specifically for Occupy protests, but for all continuing coverage of daily life in our communities. I hope that reporters across the country take into their news meetings a copy of that NY Times blog post I linked earlier in this piece, and say to their colleagues, "we need to find ways to prevent this from happening in our community."
This isn't just about just riding your local officials so your community's voters won't elect the type of official who orders a press blackout of the news. Good luck with that. It's about making a press blackout a pointless endeavor, by inspiring, training and enabling as many people in your community to become witnesses for the news, 24/7.
Afraid of cultivating your competition? Don't be. If you can't deliver the news, you've got no chance of surviving, much less making money, in the information marketplace. We need grassroots reporting.
Banging my head against the computer screen
November 11, 2011
What a depressing day to be an online journalist.First, yesterday we lost access to Jim Romenesko (at least temporarily), thanks to a ham-handed and misguided "investigation" by his bosses at the Poynter Institute.
Poynter Online Director Julie Moos gently scolded Romenesko for "incomplete attribution" in his blog posts on Poynter.org. Which is ridiculous within the context of his blog, which links and excerpts media news stories from around the Web. Moos wrote that Romenesko should have placed quotation marks around the words he was excerpting from the articles he linked, and that would now be Poynter policy for the his and other blogs on Poynter.org.
So Jim quit.
The reason for using quotation marks and attributions on information from sources to clearly identify to readers what information in a story is coming from which sources. Neither I nor hundreds of the readers who took to Twitter, Facebook and blogs to support Romenesko found that a problem with his work. Romenesko helped invent a new format for news reporting online, one that aggregated information from multiple sources and delivered in a way that deviated from traditional journalism formats, but that communicated that information more effectively and efficiently than those old forms could have.
Trying to impose those old forms on Romenesko's blog not only ignores its purpose, it helps to defeat it, by cluttering it with pointless keystrokes.
As Topix CEO Chris Tolles tweeted, "CJR & Poynter represent neither reader nor journalist. Just voices from inside coffin of the institution of 'editor'." [Moos credited an editor at Columbia Journalism Review for tipping her to the quotation mark issue.]
Let's not forget that ethics stand as means to an end. When ethical rules become an end to themselves, we open the door to actions that are right by the letter of the law but completely wrong by its spirit. Sometimes, the rules have to change to preserve their spirit. You want an everlasting code of ethics for journalism? Try this: Tell the truth, and by doing so, inspire people to read it, to share it and to act upon it.
Everything else is just technique.
Diversify your ad base to survive in the news publishing business
November 8, 2011
I lost an advertiser on one of my websites last week. As much as I hate to lose customers, I understand completely why she felt she had no choice but to not renew her ad campaign.I'll start with some background, which will lead to why these types of situations are important for news publishers to understand.
The advertiser didn't quit because her ads failed to perform on our site. In fact, she enjoyed one of the highest click rates of any of our advertisers last month. Plenty of our readers wanted to learn more about her product. And she made sales.
But she didn't make enough profit from those sales to cover the cost of the ad campaign. She was selling a relatively low-priced product. Not only that, most consumers would buy the product only once in their lives, making the future, ongoing value of having those customers next to nothing for her.
Here's why this sort of thing is a problem for news publishers. So that I don't have to dwell on the specifics of my personal site, let's use an example from another industry. Let's say you cover cars and publish an automobile news and reviews website. You're selling banner ads on a straight CPM basis - run of site, the same rate for everyone.
Now your local Ferrari dealer can afford to spend several thousand dollars for a banner click that leads to a sale of a new Ferrari. Of course, not every click leads to a sale, but let's say enough do that the Ferrari dealer can afford to buy banner ads at a CPM rate that works out to several hundred dollars per click. Nice for you, right?
Okay, now let's say there's a Ford dealer up the street. That dealer's willing to pay a couple hundred bucks for lead that results in a sale of a new Ford. Let's also say that enough banner clicks lead to Ford sales that the dealer's willing to sponsor a campaign at a CPM rate that works out to a couple dozen bucks per click. Not bad.
Now let's say that there's a whiz-kid mechanic at a garage in town who's developed this spectacular oil additive that his customers swear by. But he's priced the additive around $10 a bottle. Lots of people who click his banner ad want to buy, but his profit on each bottle is only a buck or so. He can afford to buy a banner campaign on your site only at a CPM rate that works out to pennies per click.
COPPA, part two: New study suggests a majority of kids are on Facebook... by age 12
November 4, 2011
A newly published study quantifies some of the fears I expressed earlier this year in a post about the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act [COPPA].The title lays out the problem: "Why parents help their children lie to Facebook about age: Unintended consequences of the 'Children's Online Privacy Protection Act'." It's by Danah Boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey and appears in First Monday, a peer-reviewed Internet journal from the University of Illinois-Chicago.
The study reports the results of a survey of 1,007 U.S. parents, age 26 and over, who have children between 10 and 14, and who do not work in the software industry. The survey found that 55 percent of those children had Facebook accounts by age 12.
This is in violation of Facebook's COPPA-inspired Terms of Service, which prohibit anyone under age 13 from creating an account. COPPA makes it illegal for Web publishers to knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children under age 13. But that's not what today's kids want, I wrote in September:
"By effectively closing the social Web to preteens, COPPA has had the unintended consequence instead of simply encouraging kids to break the rules of the websites and services they wish to use - and by extension flouting the law's purpose."
The survey confirms that not only are children violating the spirit of COPPA by lying to register for online social networks, it suggests that the majority of children might be breaking the spirit of the law.
One more option for self-published journalists: Talking with Will Bunch about Kindle Singles
November 1, 2011
Here's one more reason why you need to be looking at eBooks as part of your "I'm-a-journalist-who-needs-to-make-money" career strategy.Kindle Singles is Amazon.com's effort to promote shorter-length eBooks, between 5,000 and 30,000 words. Prices are low, too - Amazon requires that eBooks selected for the Kindle Singles program be listed between 99 cents and $4.99. However, all titles listed under Kindle Singles are eligible for a 70 percent commission to authors instead of the 30 percent commission it offers for titles priced under $2.99.
(By the way, if you haven't read our series on publishing eBooks, you might want to start there before reading more about the Kindle Singles program.)
With Kindle Singles, Amazon's using the flexibility of the eBook medium to target stories whose natural length falls in the gap between magazine articles and books:
"We're looking for compelling ideas expressed at their natural length--writing that doesn't easily fall into the conventional space limitations of magazines or print books.... A Kindle Single can be on any topic. So far we've posted fiction, essays, memoirs, reporting, personal narratives, and profiles, and we're expanding our selection every week. We're looking for high-quality writing, fresh and original ideas, and well-executed stories in all genres and subjects."
But can Amazon create a market for this content? To get a first-person perspective on publishing a Kindle Single title, I emailed Will Bunch, who recently published October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge about a pivotal day in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
"As a writer, it's always exciting to experiment," Bunch replied. "Although I was pleased with my 2010 book about the rise of the Tea Party, The Backlash, it was hard to get people's attention with a $16-20 hardcover book with so much good free and immediate writing on the same topic on the Internet. I thought with the Kindle Single I could produce a piece of writing that would come at the right time (when Occupy Wall Street was still at the top of the news) at the right length (14,500 words) at the right price (99 cents, in the spirit of the 99 percent.)"