"Frontline" prepares to move online

"Frontline" has hired a veteran newspaperman to help prepare the show for the post-broadcast world. As radio and television move online, there will be a convergence with text. Perhaps this is where the writers, marginalized by shrinking print products, get their second life. Huffington Post

End of the Independent

The nonprofit Washington Independent will shut down after three years of strong national reporting because of a lack of funds. From Aaron Weiner at TWI:

TWI has always relied on donations, primarily from foundations seeking to promote journalism in the public interest. Those donations began drying up long ago. I’m grateful to the American Independent News Network for keeping TWI alive long past the point when its expenses began exceeding its receipts. But it wasn’t sustainable, and today the bosses informed us they’re pulling the plug. On Dec. 1, TWI will begin mirroring the content of our network’s other national site, The American Independent. TWI’s reporters and I will look elsewhere for work.

-snip-

The crisis in the world of journalism today isn’t really about journalism — it’s about the bottom line. Reporters and editors everywhere are trying to find a way to keep their very good work alive. We thought our model had a chance. It put up a good fight.

The "World Wide Web" turns 20

Twenty years ago, a placeholder name for a revolutionary idea became the foundation for the lexicon of the Internet. On this anniversary, the New York Times explores how the World Wide Web got its name.

And here is the Nov. 12, 1990, proposal to create "...a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will."

From the proposal:

The application of a universal hypertext system, once in place, will cover many areas such as document registration, on-line help, project documentation, news schemes and so on. It would be inappropriate for us (rather than those responsible) to suggest specific areas, but experiment online help, accelerator online help, assistance for computer center operators, and the dissemination of information by central services ... are obvious candidates.

I wonder if it'll ever take off?

Press-Enterprise's owner wants to toss the old newspaper image

The Press-Enterprise Company, which owns and operates the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, La Prensa, and a few other publications and websites, has adopted a new name: Enterprise Media.

The name change has several purposes, not the least of which is to shed the image of a company tied to a tired, "one-dimensional" product: newspapers.

The new name also appears designed to position the company to better capture new revenue sources - Belo, Enterprise Media's parent, is going to experiment with paywalls come spring - and could simplify matters if Enterprise Media chose to partner with other media companies in the region.

From the memo to staff (my emphasis):

This change in our Company name has been planned for some time to ensure our business is seen by our clients as keeping pace with the significant, rapid and dynamic changes that are happening in the media industry. It also is aligned with the long-term vision for our business to reflect the innovation, new directions and forward-thinking multimedia strategy that our Company is actively pursuing. We have expanded from being a newspaper company to become a diversified media company. It’s now time for our customers to know us as more than a newspaper company as well.

The name Enterprise Media describes and defines who we are as a company. It effectively conveys our position as a future-focused media company; a leading and digitally savvy, multi-media news and information content provider. It is a name that will impress and influence our advertising and business-side clients to change their minds and attitudes about who we are.

This change is important because the name ‘Press-Enterprise Company’ does not align with our strategy. It is inextricably tied to our daily newspaper, ‘The Press-Enterprise,’ and it does not communicate to our customers the size, scale and capabilities of our multi-media product portfolio. ...

[T]he name ‘Press-Enterprise Company’ is tied to their past experiences with a newspaper company and it evokes attitudes and perceptions that are:

· One-dimensional. It causes our B2B [business-to-business] clients to see us as a one-product company; in their minds, one that has limited, if any, value for their needs. Reality is we are so much more as a business partner.

· Geographically limited. In the minds of our B2B clients our Company’s market and audience reach is limited to the geography of our newspaper circulation area. Reality is that our sphere of influence and audience extends well beyond the geographic area our newspaper serves.

· Institutionally bound. It says “newspaper” which means “inflexible,” “high rates,” and “old media” to advertisers who are looking for new ways to reach their clients using social media, mobile, and more. We want our name to convey that we’re playing in that space too.

The full memo is here.

Google kicks AP out of the house

Contract negotiations between Google and the Associated Press broke down a few weeks ago and, as a result, Google is no longer adding new AP content to its search results.

From the Business Journal:

The action apparently came before Christmas but wasn't noticed until Monday.

"We have a licensing agreement with the Associated Press that permits us to host its content on Google properties such as Google News. Some of that content is still available today," a Google spokesman said in an e-mail statement to CNNMoney. "At the moment we're not adding new hosted content from the AP."

Four in the morning

1. Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, is looking to diversify its advertising dollar with Tribune Hispanic. Ed Padgett

2. The Los Angeles Times has hired Jack Dolan of the Miami Herald to beef up its database journalism in Sacramento. LAO

3. Newspapers' silver lining rides on a big gray cloud. Alan Mutter

4. Are we all becoming pawns on a vast digital chessboard? Newsweek

Going big in Texas

The nonprofit Texas Tribune launched today. Aggregater, blogger, investigator, data miner, pollster, bloviater - the site promises to include all the best online journalism has to offer and with a defined mission to promote civic engagement.

From the editor, Evan Smith:

In true twenty-first-century fashion, we're approaching the task of storytelling across multiple platforms: text, audio, video, blogs, databases, mobile, social. We're treating you, the reader or viewer or listener or user, as if you're the customer, and we're busily puzzling through how best to meet your various demands. Our goal is to maximize your ability to personalize your experience; as we move to day five and day ten and day thirty, we'll be adding new and innovative ways to do just that.

The top story on the site is about the use of physical restraint to control or discipline disabled students. There are also several stories about state politics and the nasty race for governor.

Union-Tribune gets facelift

The San Diego Union-Tribune today unveiled its newly redesigned website. The front page is more colorful and relies on large photos and minimal text to draw readers to the day's top stories. Unfortunately, I couldn't get to the link to the paper's story about the redesign to work.

Crazy, mixed up world

The downturn in newspapers has been so prolonged and pervasive that Dean Singleton, once derided as "Lean Dean" for his gut-and-consolidate strategy, has become spirit raiser.

From a story that ran yesterday CJR:

And the mood of the writers rose—briefly, at least—when Dean Singleton, whose MediaNews Group owns both The Salt Lake Tribune and The Denver Post, recounted the conclusions that his top executives reached following a three-day planning session at his Colorado ranch: Instead of continuing to provide free of charge all the contents of its newspapers on their Web sites, the group’s papers would provide breaking news online for free, but reserve many of the newspapers’ in-depth and analytical stories for paid subscribers. In three to five years, he predicted, the newspaper business will be a combination of “print, online, wireless mobile and niche products.” The business “will be better than it is today, although not as good as it was yesterday.”

I think many reporters at Singleton papers would welcome such a plan, as long as it meant investing in newsrooms so that they could produce sufficient in-depth and analytical stories to justify the charge.

Trust is valuable

Most people haven't thought much about what distinguishes a piece of journalism produced by, say, the Miami Herald from a piece of journalism produced by, say, World Net Daily. Neither are the subtleties dividing a Huffington Post roundup on protests in Iran and BBC story on the same topic much debated around the dinner table.

In the past, the more consistently credible reporting came bundled in a newspaper or beaming out of the radio; the less credible stuff got passed around in glossy tabloids, partisan newsletters or by word of mouth. Now all of it arrives on the same screen and often through aggregation sites that don't distinguish the well-researched, impartial story from the breezy opinion piece. Wheat and chaff are linked to side by side - and there's nothing to say any two people will agree on which is the wheat and which is the chaff.

That's not to say people don't know the difference between what Townhall does and the Los Angeles Times does - although the lines between opinion and straight reporting are getting more blurred, and not to the benefit of the reader.

Which is why the intellectual appeal to readers to pay for quality journalism, produced with high standards and under the rigors of honest editorial review, will probably never work. Instead, news organizations should come up with new ways to communicate clearly what standards and ethics they subscribe to. It will require publications to think through issues that they are too often on auto pilot about. Slogans ('Fair and Balanced') won't do the trick. And there will have to be a level of engagement with and accountability to readers that goes beyond feedback for the sake of feedback (as most online comments, reader surveys and letters to the editor are these days).

Bits of information might be passed around the Internet such that everything gets covered in the same mud, but serious readers will track information back to an original source. Original sources that have clearly laid out why their reporting is trustworthy will have a value that distinguishes them in the eyes of advertisers and potential subscribers/donors/micropayers.

PE.com gets facelift

The Press-Enterprise in Riverside has launched a redesigned website (readers can offer their two cents here). The site has echoes of the recently unveiled Los Angeles Times web page and is, at least upon a cursory view, much, much better than the previous one.

A new voice from behind the Orange Curtain

A new nonprofit online newsroom called the Voice of OC hopes to get off the ground by the end of the year. The website, which will model itself after the Voice of San Diego, will cover public affairs in Orange County and be edited by former Orange County Register reporter Norberto Santana Jr., the Los Angeles Times reports.

The initial funding for the site comes from the Orange County Employees Association, which kicked in $140,000. Supporters hope to raise $600,000 to cover first year expenses.

The nonprofit board for the venture includes Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Irvine Law School and trial lawyer Tom Girardi. Former LA Times reporters Harvey Weinstein and Dan Morain also sit on the board.

Labor unions, trial lawyers and journalists are not the first things that come to mind when thinking about Orange County....

Google buddies up to newsrooms

After announcing a proposed platform that will allow publishers of any size to charge for content, Google has launched an experimental site called Fast Flip to gives big publishers a share of the advertising revenue from the search.

Neither of the products will save the publishing industry nor give independent bloggers and startups the kind of revenue they need to stay afloat. This does indicate, however, that Google sees a future in which people pay something for online content. In the former case, we have a farmer's market model in which smaller publishers can get something for home grown work. The latter points to a more traditional mall product, where name brands are on display.

Ken Doctor at Content Bridges has more on Fast Flip. He notes that Google, now #9 on the list of top news search engines, needed a better mousetrap. Indeed, Google may have found the ultimate cheese to lure newspapers and magazines away from all the other aggregators: revenue.

The more things change....

In what seems to be a case of creeping professionalism, Wikipedia plans to impose an editorial review process before information can be published about living people. Michael Snow, chairman of the Wikipedia board, told the New York Times:

“We are no longer at the point that it is acceptable to throw things at the wall and see what sticks ... There was a time probably when the community was more forgiving of things that were inaccurate or fudged in some fashion — whether simply misunderstood or an author had some ax to grind. There is less tolerance for that sort of problem now.”

The decision comes in response to several well publicized hoaxes - but also in recognition of Wikipedia's increasing influence as a primary online source. Again, from the Times:

The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.

-snip-

Under the current system, it is not difficult to insert false information into a Wikipedia entry, at least for a short time. In March, for example, a 22-year-old Irish student planted a false quotation attributed to the French composer Maurice Jarre shortly after Mr. Jarre’s death. It was promptly included in obituaries about Mr. Jarre in several newspapers, including The Guardian and The Independent in Britain. And on Jan. 20, vandals changed the entries for two ailing senators, Edward M. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd, to report falsely that they had died.

LATimes.com gets a facelift

The Los Angeles Times has launched its redesigned website. Here's the note from editor Russ Stanton and online managing editor Meredith Artley. And here's a screen shot:

AP lock box

Nieman Lab got hold of a confidential AP memo that outlines strategies to protect online content. One of the ideas is to block both AP member and readers from putting "unique" AP content on their websites, directing them instead to a central AP hub.

From Zachary Seward at Nieman Labs:

Utility content, [AP general counsel Srinandan] Kasi told me, might be your traditional breaking-news story: “So a headline item that says, ‘Mid-air collision outside of New York and tourists die,’ let’s say. You can imagine, in the New York area, there are lots of media covering that story.” The AP would treat that content as it always has, putting it on the wire for members and customers to publish on their own sites. But other pieces of content — say, an infographic or a sidebar documenting the history of similar collisions — would be held off the wire and published only on a central AP site, Kasi said.

The plain-vanilla wire story, meanwhile, would point to the more in-depth material in the form of a link. He explained: “We have unique pieces of data, maybe, or we have a unique visual narrative, a graphic. We have unique photos, a photo gallery, and so on. How can you use some pieces of content to drive traffic to other pieces of content? That’s really what’s being addressed here.”

I should note that this has nothing to do with the AP’s print offerings, and the AP has various online feeds for customers that could see different changes.

Growth industry

Just over one-third of Internet users visit newspaper sites, according to a recent NAA survey.

Or to put it another way, roughly two-thirds of Internet users don't visit newspaper sites.

Nieman Journalism Lab dug a little further into the NAA's numbers and discovered that newspapers account for less than 1 percent of total online page views and less than 1 percent of total time spent online.

To put it another way, 99 percent of the time people are online, they're looking at something else.

Which means there's quite a lot of room to grow.

Is San Diego California's online news incubator?

The Los Angeles area is peppered with individual and group blogs, but San Diego seems to have an edge in start-up online publications. PaidContent reports that the online news site San Diego News Network is making fine progress in its fund-raising efforts, having raised $707,000 toward its $2 million goal. The company has 16 full-time staff, 23 freelancers and 12 bloggers. In addition to the the downsized San Diego Union-Tribune, SDNN will compete with one of the best-known startups, Voice of San Diego.

One-stop shop for former Times talent

A group of former Los Angeles Times writers and editors has launched The Journalism Shop, an online freelancers' network that offers hiring editors and others a range of services, from investigative reporting to book reviews to public relations. The J-Shop has partnered with Pro Photography Network, a mirror network set up to shop the services of former LA Times photographers.

The genesis of both networks was a Yahoo newsgroup called "ex-LATers," which was formed by the laid off and bought out to exchange job tips and gossip. As part of the discussions, the former staffers contemplated the creation of a new online publication for Southern California, using the freelance networks to attract and maintain a stable of talent while they searched for financial backing.

Scott Martelle, one of the leaders of the effort, wrote wrote on his blog that about two dozen former Times writers had joined the J-Shop so far and he expects more to sign up. Leo Wolinsky, former Times associate editor, is also part of the project.

This is a closed network for now. Only Times veterans are being recruited.

Outside the bubble

Many more people spend much more time time reading a physical newspaper than reading the news on a paper's website, CJR reports:

For those of us of a certain small-but-growing subset—the blogging, commenting, techno-savvy, early-adopting, extreme-news consumers—it’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They (some 100 million or so) still actually pick up the newspaper and read it.

In a rough estimate of online versus print reading, CJR found:

Of the top five newspaper websites the average reading time online is 12.1 percent to print’s 87.9 percent. That widens to 8 percent online, 92 percent print when considering that more than one person reads each print copy.

The disparity illustrates why most publishers haven't heeded calls to junk the presses in favor of an online only presence. Such advice only makes sense if one doesn't own a press and wants to see the playing field leveled.

These numbers also show us why most of the advertising dollars still flow to print.

The quick survey does not, however, provide any details about whether online readership is increasing - and at what pace. Nor does it give us a sense of how many people have left print and online newspaper sites for alternative sources.