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AP to Blogosphere: Stop sending us traffic

by Jason Preston

By now you’ve probably heard that the AP recently announced their intention to strictly regulate the amount of text that can be quoted from AP stories in blog posts.

The reaction from the blogosphere is, as you’d expect, vicious. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch is calling for a boycott of all AP stories, and likens the AP to the RIAA:

So even thought they say they are making these new guidelines in the spirit of cooperation, it’s clear that, like the RIAA and MPAA, they are trying to claw their way to a set of property rights that don’t exist today and that they are not legally entitled to. And like the RIAA and MPAA, this is done to protect a dying business model - paid content.

And Scott Karp at Publishing 2 has put out a call to local news outlets to seize the opportunity to co-opt the linking, quoting, and high-profile discussion that has been centered around AP work.

I understand the perspective of the AP. It’s easier than ever to take any amount of their stories (which they’ve invested a lot of money in creating) and redistribute enough of those stories that the reader might never have to click back to the AP site or buy a newspaper that paid to license the content. They’re worried that rampant citation will cut into their revenue—and it probably will.

But Arrington and Karp are right that the value going forward is in making sure the online conversations and links happen around your content.

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June 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Changing the printer

by Jason Preston

Another succulent item from Romenesko today (incidentally, if you open Firefox and type “romenesko” into the browser bar—and nothing else—it loads the right page): The Bing Blog from Fortune calls out the newspaper-haters:

So let’s take a breath and just agree: newspapers aren’t any deader right now than any other coughing, wheezing business in this lousy environment. Lehman (LEH) is losing nearly $3 billion dollars this quarter. Nobody talks about investment banking being dead. Broadcast television just racked up more than $9.2 billion in its upfront sales season, in spite of analysts’ predictions that this year would be its last. And not one social network is really making a go of it yet.

For now he’s right. The premiums that newspapers get from selling ads in the physical format still outweigh the costs of printing and delivering it.

But that won’t last forever. I alluded to my solution in my last post, I think it will be some eventual form of electronic paper that can eliminate all those pesky costs from the print + delivery equation.

It’s an amusing and probably good-for-your-perspective read. There’s a lot of “all old media is dead!” ringing around the industry right now, but I think it’s both a bit premature and a bit shortsighted.

Over the years, newspapers have changed what kind of printing press they use. That’s just happening more publicly this time.

June 13, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

What can be replaced in a newspaper? It’s the paper, not the news

by Jason Preston

“Newspapers still do some things that can’t be replaced”

That’s a juicy looking headline on Romenesko today. I jumped into that hoping for a good fight.

But it turns out that I mostly agree with Jon Fine, who finishes off his Media Centric column with that take-away quote:

For one thing, city media ecosystems have proven to be vibrant things that constantly spawn new local and niche blogs. The best—never underestimate the voltage one energetic reporter can generate—match or even outdo their traditional rivals in many respects. But not all of them. Newspapers still do some things that can’t be replaced. Unfortunately, we’re about to find out exactly what those things are.

What I think he means (and what I agree with), is that newspapers as an organization spend time and money doing the kind of reporting that is central to the value that journalism brings to our society. If newspapers as companies really disappeared in the next ten years, I think we’d feel the effects.

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June 13, 2008 | 1 Comment 

Should journalists be required to identify themselves?

by Jason Preston

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Jacques Steinberg wrote about the resurfacing of an old issue in journalism: should reporters be required to identify themselves to the sources they talk to?

In particular the article discusses Mayhill Fowler, who writes for the Huffington Post and is most notable as the source for the following recent political hot topics:

  1. Bill Clinton calling the author of a recent Vanity Fair article “sleazy” and “dishonest.”
  2. Obama claiming that some people cling to guns and religion out of bitterness.

In both of these cases Fowler did not identify herself as a journalist, and Obama’s quote came from an event to which the media were not invited.

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June 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Adding my two rules to Jon Friedman’s eight

by Jason Preston

Perhaps because of some collective media groupthink, the internet is often seen as the deathknell for magazines and newspapers and news media of all kinds.

That’s bull. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Jon Friedman at MarketWatch wrote a column about it as a follow up to a presentation he made at the annual meeting of City and Regional Magazines in Mississippi:

There is no excuse for magazine editors and publishers to be uneasy about the Internet. They talk as if it’s some strange, exotic instrument that nobody quite understands.

And then he goes on to present eight excellent guidelines for finding success with your web site. I’ll let him share the details of each point in his own post, but here’s the fly-by:

  1. Have an attitude
  2. Make it easy to read
  3. Stress interactivity
  4. Entertain
  5. Maintain an identity
  6. Live in real time
  7. Be true
  8. Experiment

Of course a lot of this advice makes a lot more sense for magazines than it does for a large portion of newspaper reporting (some news, for example, should definitely be presented sans attitude). But as far as understanding what works on the web? It’s a damn good list.

I would add two of my own:

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June 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Local-local journalism is not a dead-end

by Jason Preston

Jon Talton, a journalist of 27 years, writes that local-local journalism is an exercise in stupidity. I’ve already made my case for hyper-local news coverage here, but Jon makes some good points and I think it’s worth clarifying why he’s wrong.

He uses the Washington Post’s ill-fated LoudounExtra.com as an example of why local-local is not worth your time (I could just hold up MySeattlePets as a counter-example, of course, but what fun would that be?).

If you really see hyper-local journalism the way the WSJ describes it:

It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions.

then yes, you’re going to run into a few problems. The fundamentals of what is interesting to people and what is important to a community have not significantly changed. What has changed is that as a newspaper you need to find a community to engage with.

Hyper-local coverage, to me, means that you cover what matters to your local audience, which may or may not be the same thing as what score the high school football team got.

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June 6, 2008 | Leave a Comment 

Steve Ballmer says all media will be over IP in ten years

by Jason Preston

In the Washington Post yesterday, Steve Ballmer was quoted on the future of media, in conjunction with technology and what Microsoft is doing:

In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.

Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

10 years?

Yeah. If it’s 14 or if it’s 8, it’s immaterial to my fundamental point. . . . If we want TV to be more interactive, you’ll deliver it over an IP network. I mean, it’s sort of funny today. My son will stay up all night basically playing Xbox Live with friends that are in various parts of the world, and yet I can’t sit there in front of the TV and have the same kind of a social interaction around my favorite basketball game or golf match. It’s just because one of these things is delivered over an IP network and the other is not. . . .

In other words, it’s all about the capabilities of the medium. Television and print are both one-way mediums that don’t easily allow people to form communities and interact with each other and even help produce what’s on the screen (or page).

I think 10 years is a bit fast, but I think he’s right about the direction.

June 6, 2008 | 3 Comments 

What is a widget and why should newspapers care?

by Jason Preston

I wrote a post the other day about thinking beyond text and images with online journalism. Looking back, I sound a little bit grandiose while talking about something that some newspapers are already excelling at.

The New York Times‘ rent or buy real estate calculator is one example that I’ve been aware of for some time.

Right now, there’s an interactive graphic on the New York Times home page that elegantly displays the breakdown of various voter blocks in the democratic primary. Want to know how women in their 30’s voted by state? Click. Cool.

What I should be able to do is treat that graphic like a YouTube video, and embed it on my site. That way anyone who comes through here can play with the Times‘ brand, data, and journalism, and cool graphics can spread virally across the internet.

You could embed a directory of related graphics, so that people can play with a series of connected pieces. They could click through to nytimes.com for associated articles or more detailed explanations.

As it is, I can’t even figure out how to find a permalink to the graphic they have up right now. The best I can do is show you a picture (top of the post). Once they move it from the home page, it is lost.

Step one is creating really cool interactive content. Step two is leveraging the viral power of the internet to build your audience and get your content everywhere.

June 3, 2008 | 2 Comments 

Seth Godin asks: What are you defending?

by Jason Preston

I recently wrote an e-mail to Seth Godin asking him about his opinion of journalism. I was reading his book, The Dip, which more or less advises all journalists to jump ship:

If you work at a big city newspaper, you can see that there’s no light at the end of that career-choice tunnel. Circulation is dropping, and it’s going to drop ever faster. most papers have little chance of replacing their traditional business with an online alternative.

You can see his response on his blog here, where he introduces a great question that all newspapers should be asking themselves: what are you defending?

If you’re clinging to a paper product, you are facing a dead end. If you’re spending time and resources trying to defend the practice of printing and delivering, instead of discovering new ways to deliver and monetize your content, you are wasting your time.

Especially because what you’re really defending is the printer, not your own business.

If this all sounds interesting to you, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed to follow the conversation.

June 2, 2008 | 6 Comments 

Thinking beyond text and images

by Jason Preston

When the motion picture camera was first invented in the late 1800’s (Louis Le Prince’s design in 1888 was probably the first), people were instantly fascinated with its ability to capture and reproduce exactly the scenes of reality.

It wasn’t until Georges Méliès kicked off Science-Fiction films with A Trip to the Moon that people began to really explore the idea of representing things in film that were not reality. Before 1902, filmmakers had failed to recognize that this new medium could be used to create a completely convincing alternate reality.

Once again we are encountering an entirely new medium, and we have yet to figure out the possibilities it creates. The internet is ideal for displaying text and pictures. It’s also ideal for displaying video. It’s also ideal for interactive, user-prompted interfaces.

Classically, a newspaper has confined itself to what paper as a medium will support: text and images. There’s not much sense in a newspaper putting together an audio program because you can’t just plug headphones into the print edition that shows up on your doorstep.

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May 29, 2008 | 1 Comment 

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