Category: Journalism

Online Extra: Memo to Today’s Media Execs

 

This from BusinessWeek online — a Q&A with Spencer Stuart’s Jim Citrin on what it takes to maker it to the top in the media business. Upshot …

" Don’t try to become a "mogul." The business today is far too complex and interdependent for one person to make all the decisions and wield all the influence."

 

Bye-bye, Nando — a piece of Internet history This is the season for a lot of tenth anniversaries for online journalism. 1995 was when the first serious HTML based news services launched — Pathfinder (I think HotWired was out in late 94), WSJ, Forbes, and one of the granddaddies of online news — NANDO.

 

Steve Yelvington writes:

"Over time, Nando evolved into the first serious, professional news site on the World Wide Web — long before CNN, MSNBC and other followers — and one of the nation’s first commercial dialup Internet services providers. When the McClatchy Co. bought the News and Observer in 1995, Nando’s Internet savvy was thought to be a major factor (although the newspaper itself turned out to be a very smart buy)."

I was following some links from Romensko’s daily email yesterday and one landed me on the New York Post which lo and behold was testing IntelliTXT, the contextual adword technology that automatically highlights keywords in a story and provides a link to an advertiser.

Forbes.com was one of the first pubs out of the gate with the technology but pulled the plug in December when the editorial staff righteously stood up and cried foul. Today’s NYT reports that the Times itself is considering implementing the stupid, stupid, stupid technology. Even though Steven Hall at Adrants was quoted as saying the ads are “easy to ignore.” I disagree. They aren’t. Especially for the clueless who may, at first pass, think they are a hyperlink to more detail on the story or a definition. They are annoying as hell, stupid in their blindness, and probably, sigh, the way of the future.

This crap completely crosses the line between church and state. Penenberg equates them to the comments in Pop-Up Videos. While Hall says they are easy to process and preferable to flashing banners, skyscrapers and other dancing baloney, I disagree — the news hole needs to be sacred — ads need to be labelled ads and kept out of the content well. Figures Popular Mechanics would use them.

Congratulations to the editorial side of Forbes for swatting it down.

Adam Penenberg writes a fine piece on the implications of the Valerie Plame scandal and the protections afforded to journalists at Time and the New York Times to keep their sources confidential and what that means for bloggers.

I may quibble with Adam’s observation that the issue is a First Amendment issue, when in fact it is the lack of a national press shield law that would allow journalists to keep anonymous sources anonymous, but I thought I’d weigh in on the more hairy issue of whether bloggers are journalists.

There is no official certification in existence for journalists. Journalists are not officially regulated and licensed the way physicians, attorneys and accountants are. One does not pass the equivalent of a bar exam to become a journalist. While there are professional associations of journalists that often extend credentials to reporters — the four Congressional Press Galleries review and grant press passes, not Congress — some entities such as the White House, approve the granting of credentials. Hence the recent fracas over a gay hooker gaining access without any “professional” oversight.

Journalists have resisted the official regulation of their ranks and should continue to do so. I also feel they should eschew the protection of the law when it comes to anonymous sources and take their chances on the stand with the rest of the citizenry. Anonymity is a slippery slope and should only be applied, in my opinion, to physician-patient privacy, client-attorney privilege, and pastor-congregant communications.

When reduced to their essence, bloggers are individuals who write and publish into a public medium. Whether they are acknowledged as journalists by the subjects they attempt to report and write about is a reputational problem, not one of credentials, professional standards, or other frameworks. If a blogger can develop a reputation for whatever salient elements define a “journalist” (objectivity, accuracy, literacy, and audience), and win credentials to a Presidential convention, well then good for them.

The crux of Adam’s thesis is:

But should bloggers receive protection under the law as regular reporters? Should they be able to maintain the confidentiality of their sources and not be forced to testify before grand juries or at trial?

Sadly, no, because contrary to conventional wisdom, journalists don’t have these protections. The press has been under assault from the legislative and judicial branches for the past 40 years. These constitutionally protected privileges have become essentially meaningless to reporters and, by extension, everyone else. Bloggers simply can’t count on the law to protect them from the law.

State shield laws have proliferated — there about 31 states with such laws — and calls to extend them to a federal level are mounting. Senator Dodd filed legislation last November to implement a shield law on a federal level.

I dissent. The issue is not a classic First Amendment freedom of speech argument, but the right to publically publish anonymous information and keep that information anonymous in the face of subpoena and other fishing expeditions by law enforcement. I believe that seeking legislative protections above and beyond the First Amendment is a concession of privilege by a free press to officialdom. Journalist should reject all attempts to classify, certify, and protect them by the legislative and judicials branches they are supposed to cover. Permitting elected and appointed officials to determine who is and isn’t a journalist is abhorrent.

The question, which Adam hit on the head, is the definition of who is, and who isn’t covered by a shield law. The definition generally comes down to an employee of a recognized news organization. Well, bloggers should get indignant right out of the box on that definition, and accept the fact that if they want to publish, bloviate, attack, or slander they have to take their chances with the so-called professionals.

Bill Ketter at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune sums up my opposition to shield laws in this column.

He writes:

“In Washington, U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., has proposed a shield law. He feels that while reporters carry the burden to report news accurately, the government must ensure them the freedom to report the truth without fear of imprisonment.

A noble purpose indeed.

But one of our fears is the government. What it gives it can also take away. And while politicians can help us, as they’re apparently trying to do now, they can also hurt us the next time they get mad at the press.

They can, that is, if we let them by conceding that the First Amendment isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Relying on something other than the language of our founding fathers could end up costing us dearly in this risky business of publishing news some people don’t want out.

There is cause for concern. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that reporters have no right to refuse to give information to grand juries, there have been several efforts to break the bond of confidentiality between reporters and their sources. This has the indirect effect of censorship by scaring off those news sources who won’t risk possible disclosure.

But even most shield laws make exceptions when disclosure is necessary to avoid violation of a person’s constitutional rights or a miscarriage of justice, such as a wrongful conviction. Or there is absolutely no other means of obtaining the information in a case that has an overwhelming public issue at stake.

These exceptions strike at the heart of press freedom. The minute we agree that the press is free except for this remote eventuality or that one, we’ve started giving away this little piece of the First Amendment or that one. The result might be that, over time, the legislative effort to bolster the rights of reporters could end up diminishing them.

Better that we rely on the First Amendment, and fight for reporter’s privilege — and the public’s right to know — on a case-by-case basis.”

Michael Wolff – I Want Media

Michael Wolff — not he of McKinsey’s Media Practice, but the one who wrote Burnrate — spoke at the SIIA summit in NYC at the beginning of the month.

He weighs in on subscription vs. free models:

I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal’s activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don’t think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle.

While the New York Times on the other hand became this ubiquitous information brand. It became finally the national information brand. And it did this, I think, because it was free. So free is the word. And free is what I want to talk about — free information, which in the media industry is now the topic, the theme. This is the thing that is unavoidable, that everyone has to deal with.

In the mid-90s, Neil Budde (now running Yahoo News) was THE man for subscription models and posed a massive challenge to overcome within Forbes and other publications that were wrestling with the inclination to lock their words down behind a subscription model. “Well the Journal is kicking butt by charging!” was thrown in my face every time I tried to argue that the game was about reach, not subs. I was banging the give-it-away-and-get-massive model and lo and behold Jim Cramer tries to nuke the plan with this 1997 screed.

Dark days indeed when we trying to argue the point that even simple registration was enough of deterrent to cause users to shift to friendlier destinations.

Anyway, now comes Wolff saying that the Journal trashed itself by charging and the Times (which is rumored to be mulling a paid model) went global by being free.

I’m a little surprised the paid vs free debate even lingers in this day and age. My read on the Marketwatch acquisition was it was Dow throwing in the towel and admitting they were leaving a lot of money on the ground by choking their pageview inventory behind the subscription wall at the Journal (which I pay for and have paid for since it launched).

Check out Jack Shafer’s “Unbundle-Rebundle” at Slate to see how the winds of give-it-away are blowing through the newspaper industry.

P.1 of today’s (2.4.05) New York Times has Markoff and Ives reporting on Google’s success with ad sales. The story is jumped inside underneath a Stuart Elliott column about Conde Nast — the publishing house with one of the more befuckticated online strategies (ever try to find a New Yorker article? try to understand why Terra Lycos owns Wirednews.com? wonder why Vanity Fair isn’t even online?) when it comes to a trying to push the power of print on advertisers.

One stat cited is that readers spend 45 minutes between the covers of a magazine.

George Sansoucy, senior vp and managing director at Initiative is quoted:

“When marketers buy media, ultimately it is about the quality of the engagement with consumers … the average time spent reading a magazine is 45 minutes … makes magazines a superior engagement medium.”

Superior to what? Buses? The roof of a cab? Banners towed over the beach in August?

I love how the noses grow on magazine ad execs faces when they start babbling about “engagement”, “pass-a-longs” and the latest Audit Board of Circulation audit. Online is the most trackable advertising medium in history and still ain’t getting the respect it’s owed.

ranting over. no blogging until this evening. off to Boston on job interviews today.

Talking on the phone the other night to an entrepeneur building a very cool web-based collaboration tool and he mentions he heard that John Batelle is raking in “$30,000 to $50,000” a month from his excellent Searchblog.

Wow. In another recent conversation another very prominent blogger told me his efforts yielded him $2,500 last month.

That’s a pretty big gap. Both sites use Google AdSense. There’s one source of revenue. My personal experience with Google — not on this blog — has been about $300 a month from a million pageviews. So obviously I’m doing something wrong with my AdSense placement on the other site, or my audience isn’t compelled to clickthrough too much due to the niche bias of the site’s topic.

Both Batelle and my unnamed friend also use some pretty interesting “buy it yourself” ad placement services. BlogAds and AdBrite. My anonymous friend, who blogs in addition to a day job, says he has to turn away pretty lucrative sponsorship offers because of a conflict of interest with the day job. So, his financial potential could be up to $5,000 a month.

Monetizing blogs through impressions seems to me to be a short walk off a long pier. My experience with ecommerce affiliate programs is that they do not work. Period. Sorry, but my five-year’s experience with commerce affiliate program is a case study in how to piss off a partner.

And if I had to name the number of sites I see using CafePress to sell thongs with their logos on them …..