Urban Vancouver

Too sick for meetings, carpentry and everything else on the list but, apparently, have energy enough to blog. There may be more later as I try to clear a huge backlog of open broswer tabs.

• Fwix, the local news and social aggregator. Yet another entry in the local information aggregation field and, I presume, yet another warning shot across the bows of the local newspaper. See also: No Joke: The Onion Launches CitySearch Competitor.
• The atlas of Canada. A great resource for Canadian maps of all kinds, with such categories as environment, people & society, health and history. Via The Canadian Journalism Project.
• On Copy Editing. A nice piece by Jeff Baron, a Washington Post metro copy editor, on why copy editors still matter. Somewhat related and well worth the read: Why Copy Editing Is in the Trouble It’s In.
• Star Tribune plans to “reinvent” its print and online opinion journalism. Getting bloggy, using the newspaper as the snapshot of the day and changing the web version of the newspaper throughout the day. Also: Star-Tribune cancels AP, which is somewhat big news.
• BBC to launch targeted web music service. Not sure if this is hugely significant but it bears watching as both a source of music and a way of capitalizing on deep, rich archives.
• Publicis’ Tobaccowala: Mass Media Is Far From Dead (But It’s Not Growing Either). Interesting short post. Of note: Rishad Tobaccowala says TV is more valuable to advertisers than newspapers because it is shedding viewers more slowly than newspapers are shedding readers.
• With Canon, Loyalty Has its Privileges. A David Pogue piece of interest to both users of Canon cameras and to those looking at ways of building customer loyalty.
• Globe signs printing deal with Transcon. One of Canada’s two national newspapers has signed a new printing contract that runs through 2028. Hmmm.
• Monitoring the future of newspapers. Alex Beam, who was curmudgeon-of-the-week a while back, suggests that the Christian Science Monitor may point to what large dailies will become. There is some value to the idea, but while he includes the fact that the CSM is heavily subsidized, he doesn’t touch the issue of how the non-subsidized can make it work.
• Proof that the new Baltimore Sun and Sun-Sentinel will not work. Juan Antonio Giner’s argumnt is that the flashy newspapers fail the readership test when they ignore the big stories of the moment. He stirs some debate, part of which is his response, which includes this: “My impression is that soft-news newspapers will die faster than hard-news ones.” Related: Tribune Editor Seeks to Delight, in which the idea of softening the newspaper is promulgated.
• Beijing 2008 - It’s a wrap. Yeah. I’m late on this, but The Big Picture’s Beijing roundup is well worth a look The boston.com feature really is one the premier sites for web-based photojournalism.
• Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2). Part two of Vin Crosbie’s look at how newspapers have gotten themselves into this state focusses on the industry’s failure to grasp the principles of supply and demand. If you only have time to track down one of these squibs, this is the one.

…for those who love photojournalism. Melissa Lyttle is in Denver for the Democrats’ gala do, shooting for herself. In a post that accompanies her first few photos, she writes:

It’s great. No deadlines. No headaches. No pressure.

With Melissa bringing her eye, art and craft to the DNC, working to her own aesthetic and not the daily needs, I suspect we’re in for a run of solid, solid photojournalism.

(You can tell: I’m a big fan of her work.)

TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, DNC, MELISSA LYTTLE

Surfing the web on a rainy Sunday has produced these:

• video links. Alexandre Gamela shares a bunch of video how-to links that he’s been collecting. Lots of value there.
• Announcing Flickr Slideshow. Flickr’s slideshow feature has added the ability to plop a video into the photostream and you can (maybe) embed the resulting show in another web site, a nice way to show a portfolio.
• Poynter Online beta. Poynter’s website gets a long overdue makeover. Definitely easier to navigate and prettier, too.
• Dealing with the elephant: Build the software you need, then sell it. The fourth in Ryan Sholin’s series on ways newspapers can deal with the changing world. “I heartily recommend you build an extensible Web application for the next unserved need in your organization.”
• Some thoughts on ‘going local’. A good Doug Fisher piece as we move beyond the mantra “Go hyperlocal,” and start probing what that means to real readers.
• Yes, people will post news, but perhaps not when YOU ask. Steve Outing’s piece is related, in a way, to Doug Fisher’s as he looks at how real readers want to share their experiences. It’s interesting, as shown by both these pieces, how broad-based concepts (hyperlocal, citizen journalism) are being continually redefined as they run up against reality.
• Newspapers will not survive despite blind journalistic optimism. Roy Greenslade’s reaction to Vin Crosbie’s gloomy piece on newspapers, includes this: “The problem, as I know well, is that too many journalists react to this kind of material by calling it doom-mongery, as if by recording reality we who have thus far correctly predicted the demise of print are somehow responsible for causing the demise. What journalists need to do instead is take part in the debate rather than go on arguing endlessly that print will survive as, all around them, it is dying.” (I am briefly mentioned in the post, but that’s not why I’m squibing this.)
• Pew: More people becoming news ‘grazers’. Another take on the recent Pew readership survey, which does not contain particularly good news for newspapers.
• The incumbent’s solution: 90% transformation, 10% innovation. An excellent piece from Simon Waldman on how disrupted businesses need to approach their futures. He promises a future post on how his ideas apply to newspapers.
• Moving to Mobile. An extensive Newspaper Association of America guide to mobile news distribution Lots to read and learn from. Via Innovation in College Media.
• Small Suburban Newspapers Far Less Screwed Than Big Dailies. Not thriving, mind you, but “far less screwed.” As Michael Learmonth writes, that doesn’t give them a pass on potential failure, just more time to get the local market figured out before someone else does.

Vin Crosbie, who has been away from the mediasphere for a while, is back. Boy, is he back.

Here’s what he has to say in Transforming American Newspapers (Part 1), which popped into my feedreader yesterday:

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business.

~snip~

The deaths of large numbers of daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t cause a new Dark Age but will certainly cause a ‘Gray Age’ for American journalism during the next decade. Much local and regional news won’t see the light of publication. (America alone won’t suffer this calamity. Many other post-Industrial countries’ newspaper industries will suffer or, at best, skirt a version of this disaster.)

Vin’s piece is bleak, but what he writes should come as no surprise to those who have followed his writing in the past. He covers some of the well-known details of the meltdown in American newspapers and points back beyond the birth of the net to show this is no sudden emergency, a point he and others have repeatedly made.

There has been some web reaction to Vin’s piece (part two in the series is promised for tomorrow; part three next week). Len Witt wrote:

If you love newspapers, reading Vin Crosbie’s well researched essay on the imminent death of newspapers will break your heart.

Len also augments what Vin has written with excerpts from a presentation he made to the Second Annual Global Conference on Individuated Newspapers in June.

I’m somewhat surprised that the overall response to Vin’s piece has been muted. There are only two comments on his piece (one at Rebuilding Media, the other at Digital Deliverance: the essay is at both sites).

As if to help prove the point, this also popped into my newsreader yesterday: Where we get the news. Deborah Potter has parsed findings from the latest Pew study on U.S. news habits. One of the findings that she highlights:

This year for the first time in roughly 15 years of asking the question, fewer than half of all Americans report reading a daily newspaper on a regular basis. Only 46% say they read the paper regularly - this number is down from 52% in 2006 and was as high as 71% in 1992. In a similar vein, fewer now report having read a newspaper “yesterday,” a more reliable measure of newspaper readership. Only 34% say they read a newspaper yesterday, down from 40% in 2006.

And, by the way, that 34 per cent appears to include both print and online. Just 27 per cent of people read a print edition “yesterday.”

I’d like to tie one more thing in here, which I think is relevant. It was a tweet I got from Scott Karp a while back during one of those occasional multiparty Twitter discussions. Scott wrote:

…(there’s) a lot of searching for a new model that validates all of the old assumptions about the practice of journalism.

It seems to me, that encapsulate a lot of what Vin is writing about, as well as a lot of the current angst (and blindess) that prevails in the newspaper industry. The idea that things will be all right once the economy picks up, or once someone (else) figures out this online thing is still fairly rampant in a lot of the mediascape. So is the idea that newspapers only need to find a way to keep doing what they’ve always done and everything will be okay.

Vin obviously doesn’t think everything will be okay, at least in the U.S, and, likely, in most of the post-industrial Western countries. Along the way he knocks down some of the “solutions” — more Web 2.0, more multimedia, etc. — by pointing out the declines that are affecting newspapers started well before even Web 1.0. (He doesn’t deal with the issue of going hyperlocal but others have, pointing out the problem is that the geographical local breaks down pretty quickly into finer and finer niches.)

It’s a depressing read (as Len wrote, it’ll break your heart), but an important one, I think, that will become vital as more people join (or at least start) the conversation.

TAGS: BUSINESS, NEWSPAPERS, VIN CROSBIE

Somehow Wednesday got away from me. Among my 68 open browser tabs/windows are these:

• Fear of Preroll Ads Eases. Survey puts the loss of online video viewers due to preroll ads at as little as five per cent, which is good news. Personally, I don’t mind prerolls, but I greatly prefer no more than 15 seconds.
• Blatchford pines for the monologue. Ah, dueling columnists, in this case Christie Blatchford and Mathew Ingram, both of the Globe & Mail. I have some sympathy with Christie (follow the link to her column), but not a lot. Mathew quite nicely dissects the illogical statement at the centre of it all.
• Allvoices: Get 1 Million Views, Make $10,000. Len Witt has details on an online media company’s bid to attract writers by paying on a per-pageview basis.
• Drum Roll. Kevin Drum is on the move, from the Washington Monthly to Mother Jones.
• Yahoo News’ Original Content Efforts, Again. Another go at providing some content, this time in cooperation with Politico.com. They also have their own reporters at the Olympics, apparently.
• 5 ways the newspapers botched the web. At Valleywag, a fond look back at the stumblings of the big newspaper companies in the early (and not-so-early) days of the web.
• Report: People Spending Less Time with Newspaper Web Sites. Uh-oh.
• When Twitter beats local news outlets. Steve Outing thinks newsrooms should be following the local Twitter stream the way they once followed the local TV and radio stations.
• Bloggers post Health Canada climate change report on the web. When the Canadian government didn’t post a federally-funded report online, some bloggers did. Question: Why the bloggers and not the watchdogs of the media?
• Newspaper Stories We Tell Ourselves. Ken Doctor’s piece on the new realities of the newspaper business should be required reading. (Don’t worry, it’s not that long.)
• What print bosses want. Top of the list, according to a new survey, is good writing, which is the knee-jerk answer. More interestingly, multimedia skills were judged somewhat or very important by 90 per cent of those surveyed.

The mediasphere has been particularly vibrant lately. In my efforts to get caught up, here are some of the things that have caught my eye.

• What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent? Mark Potts musings about what will likely happen if (when) a city loses its daily will surely have some in legacy media setting their hair on fire.
• How Photography Connects Us to the World. A TED Talk by National Geographic’s David Griffin on the storytelling power of photography. Nice quote: “Everyone one of us has at least one or two great photographs in them.” Via A Photo a Day.
• Industry Moves: Jonathan Dube Returns To ABCNews.com As VP. CBC’s loss, as Dube was head director of digital media for the national broadcaster.
• NewsCred launches public beta. Mathew Ingram’s detailed look at yet another news aggregator with a difference, this one drawing from a wide number of sources (none of them Canadian, by the way) and using a combination of audience votes on “credibility” and, eventually, a recommendation engine to rate the trustworthiness of the news. As Rex Sorgatz writes, “Good luck with that.”
• Dealing with the elephant: Hire web-native salespeople. The third post in Ryan Sholin’s excellent series looking at the business of newspapers and what can be done.
• Journalism: If They Dont Pay, Should We Stop? I pointed to Len Witt’s piece on this yesterday. Today’s reaction from Amy Gahran includes the response that there may be some fallacies behind the question, one of which is the idea that people ever wanted to pay for news.
• The Bigger Picture. The Wall Street Journal introduced a blatant rip-off of boston.com’s The Big Picture — right down to the name — then quietly killed that and has resurrected it as Photo Journal. Gerik Parmele has been on the story.
• The biggest challenge facing a young journalist - Steering the Diaspora. Digidave — Dave Cohn — rocks.
• YouTube to launch journalism program in September. That’s journalism program as in TV program, not as in educational program. What they appear to be doing is offering prizes and exposure for themed entries.
• The Cloud is Falling. A longish piece at Sportshooter on the current realities and future possibilities for photojournalists. From the piece: “… the reason that I’m using the analogy of the “cloud” - is to point out that as frightening as some of these prospects are, clouds always obscure the blue sky above - our industry is not dying - it’s evolving - and there’s no reason to run around in a panic… many of us will survive…and many of us will be forced to work in an entirely different field.”

Currently playing in iTunes: Beni Beni by Niyaz

Some stuff (which doesn’t come close to clearing out the things I’ve flagged in my news reader):

• Twittering with excitement? Hardly. I have wasted much less time on Twitter than I did reading Alex Beam’s column at boston.com, the latest addition to the look-how-witty-I-am genre. Dan Kennedy’s take is much better. And shorter. Related: How Do You Use Twitter? video at Vimeo.
• Apple Seminars online: News and Sports editing. A long look at using Final Cut Pro for news and sports. I’m halfway through and have learned a tonne.
• An open letter to The Grand Forks Herald. Zac Echola lays into the newspaper for running an accident pic on the front page. Part of it: “I have never understood media’s desire to pander to rubbernecks and gawkers. It is one thing to set aside your emotions to report a story, another to set aside your humanity to sell litter lining. To call you vultures would be incredibly unfair to vultures.”
• L.A. Times names Eddy Hartenstein to publisher’s post. Does it matter that he comes from DirecTV, with no newspaper experience? I mean, it’s not like those with a newspaper background have done the Times a lot of good recently.
• Spreading Lies, Rather Than Debunking Them. Tough words about the Washington Post’s political reporting: “Newspapers like the Post used to tell the truth to its readers, no matter who was offended. The truth always offends someone. But now they can’t do that, unless it’s buried on an inside page without the particulars that the truth demands. They’re too worried about losing readers they’ve already lost.” Ouch. Via Jay Rosen on Twitter.
• Newspapers see drop in ad revenue… online. Uh oh.
• The Ultimate Journalism Ethical Question. Len Witt asks: ” the America public does not want to pay for journalism — in other words, doesn’t find value in what we as journalists do — should we simply stop doing it?” Go read and join the conversation.
• New models for print journalism are popping up all over, so stop whining. Some examples of new ways in which journalism is being done.
• The battle for local: The players. A nice round up of who’s who on the battleground for local advertising. Lots of comments, lots of disagreement. Well worth the time.
• The Market’s Most Overvalued Stocks. Morningstar’s stock strategist Matthew Cofina: “Newspaper stocks have been decimated over the past year, as the Internet continues to steal readers and ad revenue from traditional print media. We think the stocks have further room to fall, as declining revenues and negative operating leverage combine to create a downward spiral for this moribund industry.” He looks at five newspaper stocks, without optimism. A sample: “We are most pessimistic about GateHouse Media, a publisher of low-circulation papers in rural and suburban communities. We think GateHouse’s equity is worthless.”
• Game-changing newspaper buyers. Alan Mutter does an interesting what-if exercise and looks at where the buyers may be for America’s battered newspaper chains, suggesting the UAE and Singapore as possibilities.
• Where Newspapers Are Thriving. And some good news It’s from Germany.

Currently playing in iTunes: Nanourisma by Takis Vouis

…according to wordle.net. Larger, original is here.

Currently playing in iTunes: Big Foot by New Grass Revival

How come the Vancouver Sun’s Olympic pages look so much better than the rest of the newspaper’s website?

(Although it is a little odd that the main feature box is titled “Photo of the Moment” and features four photos.)

Are we seeing a preview of what the Sun is working toward?

UPDATE: Ah! As John Lehmann points out in the comments, the reason for the difference is because it’s not a Vancouver Sun web site at all. It’s a template being used by a bunch of CanWest newspapers with, local branding, a big chunk of common content and a scattering of local features.

TAGS: ONLINE NEWS, VANCOUVER SUN, DESIGN


Currently playing in iTunes: Opuszczona by Edyta Geppert & Kroke

YouTube footage of a Georgian journalist who comes under fire from a sniper, suffers a minor injury and appears to keep broadcasting. Via Gerik Pamele on Twitter.

Turkish journalists come under attack, also at YouTube.

Georgian Soldiers Fire on Fox News Crew, by Georgian irregulars, Fox reports.

And yet another one: Another Georgian journalist shot

These have caught my attention so far today.

• The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn. An approachable and interesting Scientific American piece (with great comments, too) that looks at research into storytelling. Among other things, it introduced me to the idea of literary Darwinism.
• YouTube Not Getting Into Live Streaming, After All. It’s the expense of it all. Google, apparently, is content to sit back and wait to see if advertising support develops for live streaming.
• NBC sees new media habits form with Olympic games. If you parse the numbers, you get a clearer picture of the relatively slow — but still impressive — uptake of “new” media.
• My blog for the iPhone age. New plugin for WordPress serves up a mobile version of the website automatically to iPhone users. Gotta get me one of those.
• The great disconnect. Will Bunch: “In many newsrooms – but especially in the larger metro newspapers that are suffering the biggest drops in circulation and ad revenue – there is a gaping divide between overworked, career-conscious reporters and the communities they cover.” Read the whole post and then go read the original article.
• Playing on TV’s Turf. Deborah Potter with a nicely balanced look at what newspapers are doing with video and what it means for local TV.
• Viral Video Film School. A brilliant, funny video on how financial media’s video journalism fails to inform those not already in the know. The last 30 seconds or so are priceless. (I am now hooked on VVFS’s three-minute creative rants.)
• If one candidate misled us way more would the press say so? Several interesting things about Jay Rosen’s latest, besides the value of thing itself. His piece appears at open salon, a new site that combines elements of Digg, social-network sites and other Web 2.0-ey things, as well as a tip jar. And the piece itself was developed through Jay’s questions and musings, and the responses to them, yesterday afternoon on Twitter. (Following Jay on Twitter is a good way for the non-tweeting to see some of the potential for the service.) Related: Mathew Ingram on open salon.
• The outsider solution: chuck away your business..wrong, wrong, wrong. Simon Waldman has come fully back to the media blogging world with a new site (Digital Disruption) and his usual trenchant commentary.

What? It’s Wednesday already?

• US media’s crimes against Web 2.0. Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC provides a measured look at two recent media controversies — NBC’s delaying the broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremonies and the infamous Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper-first memo. Related: The Great Philadelphia Kerfluffle. Will Bunch on that memo and what came next.
• The AP–Of All Places–As News Industry Think-Tank. Mark Potts has details from a little-noted AP report that deals with the issue of young folk and the news. Lots of ideas there to play with.
• Conventional Nonsense. Lots of fulminating over the fact that 15,000 journalists are expected at the less-than-newsworthy Republican and Democrat national conventions. Jack Shafer has the best take I’ve read.
• i are cute kitten. Okay, no redeeming value here at all. A rather well-edited, home-shot LOLcat video that I’m passing along only because the star of the show is what my cat looked like a dozen years ago or so.
• Twitterer/streaming video broadcaster evicted from Olympics. Can we stop congratulating the Chinese on how nice their Olympics are?
• Cox Enterprises To Divest Of Papers; Valpak Direct Mail Unit. I first learned of this through tweets from William Hartnett. This is the Paid Content brief on the latest newspaper chain to attempt to shed assets to pay off debt.
• Magazine sales tumble. Forty-four per cent of 62 Canadian magazines that were audited showed a double digit decline between January and July. Even Hockey News took a big hit, which should make Canadian souls shudder.
• National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News. Jay Rosen has expanded on a recent Idea Lab piece on explanatory journalism and offers some suggestions where the much-needed beast might come from, to benefit both readers and journalists.
• Sisyphus and Cassandra don’t live here any more. Steve Yelvington gets all classical to explain that the world is changing within the newsroom.
• The reading is all gloomy for newspaper proprietors. In Britain too, apparently. Repeat after me: the doom and gloom is not all, or even mostly, American and recessionary. Related: A paper’s sad decline in debt’s grip, where Alan Mutter turns his fine, analytical eye on the MediaNews Group.
• Death toll rises for journalists killed in Georgia. Four journalists have been killed so far.
• Google wants to eat your lunch, not feed you lunch. Lucas Grindley speaks truth to power.
• What the propane depot explostions taught me about coverning breaking news on the web. Bill Dunphy, who pointed how how media failed to take advantage of Web 2.0 when big news broke in Toronto, offers some lessons learned and ideas for next time.

I know there’s a lot of negative stuff in the list above, but remember: I also pointed to a cute kitten.

Currently playing in iTunes: Asik Oldum (U.H.) by Aynur Haşhaş

Boston.com’s The Big Picture is featuring 29 photos from Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia and has done well in handling the images.

Several of the photos show people who are either wounded or dead. But they’re not shown. Instead, you get a black rectangle, with a warning that the image contains graphic content, and the option of clicking through to the photo or moving on.

Classy and respectful.

TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, boston.com, THE BIG PICTURE

A few things now, maybe a few more later (it’s been a busy day).

• Canada news websites added to Interactivity Index. The Interactivity Index is a great way of comparing which newspapers are doing what, but the Canadian additions are, I hope, just a start. Six of the seven are in the province of Quebec, which leaves out an awful lot of my country.
• Propane depot explosions expose shortcomings in breaking news coverage by newspapers living in a Web 2.0 world. Bill Dunphy details how Toronto media — including bloggers — generally failed to take advantage of Web 2.0 when big news broke. Read and learn.
• Don’t Fear Twitter. Twitter is suddenly getting an awful lot of attention, which means there’s no excuse for not knowing about the potential it offers. Related: Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience.
• Black and White Fine-Tuning in Photoshop CS3. Being essentially lazy, I am constantly searching for ways to do things better and, I hope, quicker. This type of tutorial helps.
• None of Your Business Model. There is much to think about in the suggestion that maybe we don’t need a traditional business model. I’m not entirely convinced the analogy to open source software works for journalism, but it’s worth pondering.
• CitySearch begins free video offer. One more competitor to keep an eye on.
• Lost Remote’s new local focus. Cory Bergman redefines the focus for the invaluable Lost Remote — local TV and the battle for the web. And he draws some interesting comments, both for and against the idea. (Newspaper folk need to read Local Remote: this is where some of your competition hangs.)

From the newsreader:

• Robert Fisk: Avoid cliché like the plague? Never. I usually run screaming from writerly ruminations on clichés, but Fisk’s is an admirable addition to the genre. Via Crawford Killian.
• BBC: Pods and Blogs: South Ossetia in social media. Martin Stabe provides links to social networks providing coverage and insight into what’s happening in South Ossetia and Georgia.
• 50 of the Best Websites for Writers. I’m not sure all 50 deserve the “best” rating, but there are good links here. Via PolyMeme.
• How Can We Get People to “Geek Out” About Journalism? David Cohn, in the midst of running spot.us, pauses to consider what needs to happen to further the cause of journalism. He writes: “I’m talking about a cultural shift of magnitude such that journalisms will be something people feel a cultural pressure to contribute to.”
• 2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Boston.com’s The Big Picture is the obvious place to find images from the Big O. A little repetitive, perhaps. Related (in the interest of balance): Boycott Beijing Olympics coverage.
• Tuning and Feeding: My best practices for getting the most out of Twitter. Twitter has moved beyond the either-you-get-it-or-you-don’t stage. Howard Rheingold offers great advice on how to get the most of it.

Currently playing in iTunes: Tamana (Acoustic) (Acoustic) by Niyaz

This may become a semi-regular feature here, at least when big news is breaking: a quick snapshot of what editors of online editions of some news agencies figure is the story of the moment.

New York Times: Georgia and Russia Nearing All-Out War

Washington Post: Civilian Deaths Increase In S. Ossetia Conflict

BBC: Russia ‘bombs Georgian airport’

CBC: 600 gather for funeral of bus slaying victim

National Post: Miranda’s first and last Olympic test

Globe & Mail: Loved ones say goodbye to young man beheaded on bus

Vancouver Sun: Bomb blasts rock China’s Xinjiang region

Non-Philadelphia Inquirer stuff from the media blogopshere.

• Expresso, great design, better journalism. A potentially intriguing development from Lisbon, where Juan Antonio Giner reports: “In a few weeks, UNICA, EXPRESSO’s glossy magazine, will present its new editorial and graphic formula. Working with INNOVATION’s Guillermo Nagore, Juan Cano, Marta Botero and Carlos Soria, we decided that the editorial formula for this project required a new kind of creative journalism which we have branded ‘Fusion Journalism.’” No explanation of what “fusion journalism” is, but Juan Antonio promises that pages of new concept will be shown at his site soon.
• The business. Three somewhat related posts on the business of the news biz: Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying, from the NY Times a few days back, The Ultimate Newspaper Survival Guide: Sell The Business, and Horse-Trading on the Gold Coast, the curious tale of Hearst’s purchase of some east coast newspapers.
• Are small-town newspapers thriving because they’re better, or because they happen to be located in small towns? Justin Fox at Time figures it’s the latter.
• Twitter commentary. Alexandre Gamela has produced the pithiest and best comment on China and the Olympics yet, in the form of a tweet. Go see.
• What are your most useful online tools? I truly believe it is not possible to keep up with online tools and the innovative uses to which they are being put. Paul Bradshaw, though, is attempting to find out what his readers are using and how.
• The virtuous circle of journalism process. Some of what I do in the classroom is very much influenced by the blogging of Paul Bradshaw and Andy Dickinson. This post, from Andy, shows you why.
• Collection of video compression instruction. Angela Grant has some great links to sites that help take some the voodoo out of video compression.
• Dealing with the elephant: build a better business directory. Newspaper execs who are waiting around for someone to invent the next business model could spend some profitable time with Ryan Sholin and the first in what he says will be a series of posts on doing better business. I cannot stress enough that newspapers who don’t try some of this stuff are leaving themselves vulnerable to others who will.
• It’s the Election, Stupid. Mark Potts points to some of the innovative ways the election is being covered in the U.S., not many of them, unfortunately, by legacy media.

I’m not sure what to make of this, but as of this moment — 9:48 a.m. PST — the fighting between Russia and Georgia in South Ossetia seems to be of little importance to some news organizations here in Canada.

Coverage of the opening of the Olympics, understandably, is front and centre at five media web sites I checked. Less understandable is that on a couple of those web sites, news from Georgia is either underplayed or missing, at least “above the fold.” That’s surprising , given reports of more than 1,000 dead so far, pitched battles and bombings and Georgia withdrawing troops from Iraq to join the battle at home. By any definition, this qualifies as major news.

The Globe & Mail has the Olympics in its featured position. In the tiny, “Breaking News” line at the very top of the page, there’s the headline “Russian Tanks Roar into Battle.” I only get the story if I scroll down.

At Canada’s other national newspaper, The National Post, there’s nothing on the first screen of the front page. Scroll down a page and you get the headline “Russia sends forces into Georgian rebel conflict.”

CBC does better: “‘Russia is fighting a war with us’: Georgian president,” is the first item in the headlines, running under the highlighted Games opening coverage. CTV, another national broadcaster, has its story — “Georgian army moves to retake South Ossetia” — as the fifth headlined item, again under the Games story. (The fourth headline is “Eleven Scouts recovering well after collision”.)

The best performance of the five comes from the local Vancouver Sun, which also gives front-and-centre treatment to the Olympics, but where “More than 1,000 dead so far in Russia-Georgia conflict” is the first item in the Latest News column.

By contrast, at 10:03 a.m., the Russian-Georgian battle is the top story at CNN, the BBC, and the Guardian.

TAGS: BREAKING NEWS

Note: Updates are being added at the bottom of this post.

There was a bit of end-of-the-day excitement in the mediasphere, kicked off by a memo to Philly Inquirer staff that appears to tell them to put down the mice and back slowly away from the web.

One of the first reactions I read was from Jeff Jarvis:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore.

A little more measured was the discussion on Twitter between Zac Echola, Scott Karp, Tim Windsor, Howard Owens and a handful of others. (If you’re not on Twitter, providing links here would be pointless; if you are, you are likely following these folks anyway.) One of the results of that was Howard’s own post this evening, The Philadelphia experiment isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Part of it:

There are a ton of other web-centric things newspapers can and should do with their web sites, but none of them include publishing first online enterprise and investigative pieces, columnist, lengthy features, trend stories and even analysis pieces.

Techcrunch published today a poll that showed that on a typical day, 39 percent of the Internet audience went online to check the news. That’s 39 percent of the not quite 80 percent of Americans who even have Web access (75 percent in 2004(pdf), I assume it’s higher now, but maybe not).

That is a number that represents a boon of an opportunity for newspapers, but it also points out how far online must come to be an major news destination.

(You need to read the whole post for the full argument, which is a good one.)

The memo, reproduced by Jim Romenesko, seems relatively benign. Some of it:

…we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

~snip~

This does not mean that we will put the brakes on the immediate posting of breaking news that puts us first in a competitive Web marketplace. On the contrary. That’s one of the reasons that we instituted the morning team led by Julie Busby at the beginning of the year, and I want to re-emphasize that being first with the news is all-important.

So breaking news goes to the web first and larger pieces (and reviews, oddly) go to the web after the paper comes out, enhanced in some cases with “extensive online packages.” A little 1990s, perhaps, but hardly backward, at least on the surface.

I’ve had a couple of reactions to the moves in Philly. The first was to wonder if it doesn’t make sense to concentrate on print when print remains the core of the franchise, and when news staff is being cut. After all, claiming the online space with breaking news and then augmenting the longer stuff from the print edition is not a bad transitional strategy.

But (and here’s the second reaction) I wonder if the problem with this is not one of culture. Does this send a message to Inquirer writers and staff that the web is fine for the headlines and the spiffy graphics, but the “serious journalism” belongs in print? Are they really serving the reader or are they serving an increasingly outmoded idea of what a daily newspaper is?

UPDATE: While I was sleeping Zac Echola weighed in saying, in part:

To me, this smells not like differentiating a product. It smells a lot like reallocating scant resources to the print product so they can use the Web mostly as a place to shovel their content. And shovel it later than they were shoveling their content previously.

UPDATE 2: Two more, calm measured responses to the Philly memo, one from Steve Yelvington and the other from Jay Small, are both worth reading. While all this is, on the surface, about the Inquirer, what’s emerging is more considered conversation about how newspapers need to deal with current realities and possibilities.

UPDATE 3: A tweet from Ryan Sholin points to the Twitter feed of Inquirer Executive editor, online/news, Chris Krewson, which includes:

For those who’re curious, this “massive policy shift” is a tempest over an internal memo. 75 pct of what we do online will not change.

UPDATE 4: Ryan Sholin does the journalism on this and interviews Chris Krewson.

TAGS: NEWSPAPERS, ONLINE NEWS, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

Currently playing in iTunes: Avre Tu Puerta Cerrada by Los Desterrados

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