An Earthquake for News

Yesterday's East Coast earthquake was a perfect example of how the order of news has changed for breaking news stories.  We've all been aware of this change for years, but yesterday you could actually see it play out over a period of just a few minutes.

Sequence of the order of news in yesterday's tremor:

1. News happens - in this case, our buildings wobble.
2. Twitter, social media and email light up - there's a massive instant discussion about what happened.
3. News organizations try to catch up and explain what people are already talking about.

This is the reality of news today.  Items two and three in the order of news have changed places.

The old order of news put reporting ahead of discussion - like this:

1. News happens.
2. Reporters cover the story and put it in the newspaper the next day.
3. People read the paper and discuss the stories in work breaks and at dinner.  They make calls and write letters about the stories they read in the newspaper.

Another interesting aspect of yesterday's news coverage was the early appearance of old news.

People felt the tremor, tweeted and then searched, for example "earthquake Massachusetts".  Since in the few seconds since the quake no reporter had written anything longer than a tweet, search engines, which were fairly instant in finding new stories, also had some old stories high in the search returns.

What does this all mean for news?  It means that the discussion generates the news in big news stories, and it means any journalist who isn't watching the discussion of the beats he's covering will be left behind when news breaks.

Social Stories That Right Themselves

We've all heard the complaints from newsrooms and editors that you can't trust Twitter.  It's too fast, it publishes factoids that aren't right: it can't be trusted.

But two stories this week appear to show that stories emerging through social media actually follow a similar track to stories making their way though a newsroom.

The Publisher Audience

For years I've been meaning to write this post, but it seemed so obvious that I kept neglecting to write this thought down.

I am the publisher. You are the publisher. Anyone with a screen is the publisher.

That changes everything. It moves institutions that are publishers on paper or on the air one step further away from the audience. It means newspapers and broadcasters have to find ways to market their wares to the new publishers.

Platforms and Tollbooths

Everything in the media world seems to be in flux as we move into 2010.

News organizations don't know how or where they should be delivering news. Cable companies face a significant challenge from the Internet. Users are trying to decided where they want their media to appear. On their phone, on a TV, in an e-book?

I want everything on every tool. Why not? My iPhone gives me a lot on a single small screen. Photos, news, video, books, podcasts and even phone calls.

But users can't have that because the companies that own the means of communication don't want them to have that. They want tethered tools. Amazon only wants the Kindle to buy from the Amazon store. Ditto for the iPhone and the Nook.

Daniel Lyons in Newsweek says he only keeps paying his cable bill out of force of habit. That's what's keeping old media organizations in business. But as 2010 gets under way all that ground seems to be beginning to shift dramatically. Well, that's my feeling.

The Times reports there's a tablet from Apple on the horizon. Perhaps due for unveiling on Jan. 26. Google's phone is here and will attempt to break into what has been an iPhone business.

It's a struggle of platforms, channels and tools, and it could be a turbulent and exciting year.

Views of News

What do people in social networks want? According to this article by Chris Crum the biggest slice of them are looking for news.

So if news organizations are looking for a new audience, Twitter wouldn't be a bad place to start.

The Internet Changes Reporters' Work

The Internet has changed a reporter's life in so many ways that it's hard to know where to start. Older reporters often celebrate the changes, remembering how it used to take fifteen minutes to upload a single black and white picture to a single destination using a wire machine.

That's not including the time it took to develop the film, print picture, type up a caption and paste it, with glue, on the front of the picture and attach the still damp paper to the drum of the wire machine.

Learning from CNN's Success

Battling for the top slot in online news are CNN.com and MSNBC.com according to an article in the New York Times by Brian Stelter this weekend.

Stelter says in 2008 "MSNBC.com's network of sites received more visitors than CNN.com's network, according to Nielsen - though CNN.com's visitors still viewed substantially more pages." CNN.com's visitors view about 1.7 billion pages a month.

What I found most interesting about this article, is that CNN.com apparently struggles with the same issues as every other news Web site. Their bounce rate is high. They have fought to develop a coordinated editorial strategy. They are searching for an elusive unique signature. Their advertisers are developing an appetite for digital only ads. Success costs more and challenges site stability.

There is an interesting line in the article which has CNN.com executive K.C. Estenson "huddled with staff members at YouTube ... to discuss a collaboration."

Add to this an article a little further on the in paper that describes how young Web users increasingly turn to Youtube.com as a search engine. Apparently they want answers to their questions in video. And they search for answers not at CNN.com, but at Youtube.com.

This raises the other old question of where a news organization should focus its attention in a world where the mechanics of publishing have changed. CNN.com's huge size may mean it is a destination for years. But smaller operations should spend more time considering themselves not as destinations, but as contributors to destination sites whose names, like Youtube, are more associated with traffic than with news.

All good food for thought. And perhaps most encouraging of all, CNN.com has apparently be profitable for eight years.

Show Me The Money

As the news industry keeps searching for the model that will pay reporters for hard work of reporting online, David Carr writes in the New York Times about Steve Jobs and how how iTunes changed the game for digitized music:

Mr. Jobs saw music ... as an ancillary software business to generate sales of the iPods and iPhones. That’s not a perspective that flattered people in the music business, but it did persuade listeners to pay for their wares

It seems obvious to me that newspaper will disappear the moment an affordable digital alternative that offers more or less the same functionality (and a whole lot more) comes along. The issue remains, if newspaper itself is no longer a vehicle for news, what replaces it? It could be a computer, a phone, digital paper, something like a large iPhone.

News organizations need to be concerned about how to get their news into those place as much as, or more than, they are concerned about how to maintain their old business infrastructures.

Social 2009

One of the questions all media people are going to be considering in 2009 is how social media will support newsrooms.

Erick Schonfeld in TechCrunch reviews the Top Top Social Media Sites of 2008, with Blogger in the lead and Facebook coming in a close second place. Whatever you make of these numbers social media spaces are clearly places that news organizations can look for an audience.

Meanwhile, over on Mashable Leslie Poston looks at HOW TO: Give Back With Social MicroFunding in 2009.

Social networking in not going to bring in money the way that selling newspapers did. But it might make a growing source of revenue if social networkers can find something they value from newsrooms in their social networks. Like NPR's listening application in Facebook, or newsfeeds that are specifically focused on group topics.

Thinking about spot.us, the Bay Area social news network that allows users to fund reporting, it's hard not to imagine the spot.us idea would do well in a social networking environment.

Spot.us is aiming to gather groups of interested people around a story to fund it. Social networks have already created groups of people who are interested in the same topic. Would a Spot.us application in Facebook find revenue for stories in groups that are interested in those stories?

Obviously we won't know until someone tries it. But perhaps 2009 is the year for news organizations to look into social networks for new revenue streams.

Decline and Fall

David Carr wrote an article in the New York Times today which read like a list of people lost at sea on a wrecked ship:

- The Christian Science Monitor abandons its daily paper.
- Time Inc. to lay off 600.
- Gannett to lay off up to 3,000.
- LA Times to reduce newsroom my 75.
- Newark Star Ledger to reduce staff by 40%.
- TV Guide (the institution) sold for $1.

Carr says the collapse is not from lack interest, but because "more than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product." He adds that advertising is in decline and he repeats the old observation that revenue online is pennies to dollars compared to old media products.

All of this is bad news. Carr ends the piece raising the issue that the blogosphere without newspaper reporters' stories to annotate will be a quiet place.

But the point about the blogosphere is that it is a place where new trusted brands can grow. Those brands are able to publish news at a fraction of the cost of newspapers or broadcasting systems. So the pennies that they earn don't need to be dissipated on costly legacy publishing systems. Those pennies can go into reporting.

The challenge is for online media organizations to show they can produce better reporting than we see today in our legacy newspapers, and to do it at a cost that online revenue can support. Is that such a tall order?

Journalists and Blogging

I've tried to convince a number of journalists that they don't exist if they don't have their own blog.

For the modern journalist it's a wonderful and free way to interact with your readers and find out more about the stories you're working on. I'm always surprised at the amount of resistance journalists and editors put up to the idea of starting their own blogs.

So it was very refreshing to read an article on Alfred Hermida's blog entitled How blogging creates new opportunities for journalists. It lays out a number of examples of how blogging has helped journalist and blogger Scott Elliott to do his job, and ends with an editor's reasons why he likes to hire journalists who are blogging.

Also: For beginning bloggers here are a few useful words from Jay Rosen about "mastering the hoziontal part of publishing."

Exellence in Journalism 2008

The Project for Excellence in Journalism yesterday released its 2008 report on the State of the News Media. This always creates some fanfare and it's not hard to find articles on the report today. (e.g. SF Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Poynter.)

Ironically, or perhaps offering a statement about the state of journalism today, of the two hundred articles thrown up by Google news few are anything more than a republishing of the AP or Reuters story. (And the AP story, at the time that I read it, had a number of typos in it.)

The full PEJ report is available at journalism.org.

Reuters reports "In a study of more than 70,000 stories appearing in newspapers, cable and network television and radio news shows, pieces on the war in Iraq and the U.S. presidential campaign occupied nearly one-third of the coverage.

""The whole rest of the world filled less than 6 percent of all the space," Rosenstiel said. Domestic issues such as education, welfare, religion or labor each accounted for less than 1 percent of coverage."

Rethinking What We Do

Today's E-media tidbits from Poynter online had some great links to pages and conferences where journalists are trying to rethink what we do.

From Long Tail to Zero

This is not the future of news, but the history of news.

Chris Anderson's article in Wired Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Relationships with Groups

The challenge for anyone who has anything and wants to distribute it through social media is, obviously, how to get it into the correct groups. How to build a relationship with a group so that it s members get what they want, which is your stuff.

For example, if I sell refrigerators, I want to have a relationships with all the groups that love and talk about refrigerators. I also want to have a relationship with all the groups that think about the best ways to make refrigerator parts, and the groups that are talking about the future of refrigeration, and the groups that are wondering what to do with old refrigerators, and so on.

But if I'm a news organization, what I'm producing is focused on something different every day. Certainly there are groups around that talk about news in general. But that's not the way networks work. They focus on niches.

So if today I'm talking about tattoos (as WBUR was on this On Point show) I have to find a way to make relationships with groups that talk about tattoos today. But it's going to be a relationship that only lasts a day, because we won't be talking about tattoos tomorrow. And relationships don't work like that. Relationships are more than a day long.

So what's the solution?

Andreessen NY Times Strategy

Fortune's Josh Quittner wrote this article about a conversation with Marc Andreessen.

Andressen said he thought that the New York Times should shut down its paper newspaper immediately and build on its online edition with social networking features.

Andressen also writes about this in his blog.

Newspaper Circulation Stories

A New York Times article describes how some major newspapers are accepting declining circulation as good business.


Resources:
1. 2003: Top 100 Newspapers (Editor and Publisher)
2. 2005: Top 10 Newpapers (Washington Post graphic and article)
3. 2006: Newspaper Circulation Falls Sharply (New York Times)
4. 2006: Newspaper sales dip, but websites gain (USA Today, chart of top 20)
5. 2006: Top 100 Newspapers (Largest reported circulation, Infoplease)