Thoughts about newspapers and the Web
Here are some links that I’ve come across to discussions that are going on about newspapers, journalism, the Web and so on:
- The Guardian has an op-ed piece by a journalism instructor that warns about newspapers adopting blogging too eagerly, and talks about the conflicts inherent in journalists blogging. That piece drew some strong criticism from Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, a former journalist, who responded on his own blog — and the Guardian writer in turn responded to Jarvis’s comments.
- CNet News has a piece entitled “Newspapers woo bloggers with mixed results” that is a nice overview of what some newspapers have done — including a couple of high-profile disasters, such as the Washington Post one — and it also includes this fact, which I emailed around: “According to a recent study by Forrester Research, blogs and newspaper Web sites now have the same audience share–about 17 percent–among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.” The article also links to the Austin American-Statesman’s blog hub, which hosts a whole pile of blogs by regular mortals (i.e., not journalists), and is worth a look.
- In response to the CNet article, a blogger at ZDNet (a competitor) has a nice summary of advice for newspapers or other traditional media when adding blogs to the mix. And John Blossom at ContentBlogger notes that part of the problem newspapers have with blogs is that they represent a clash of cultures, and that “most newspapers will fail to embrace weblogs and other forms of user-generated media because of its inherent lack of appeal for mass advertisers - and in the process turn loose a world of news content to be contextualized elsewhere.”
- The managing editor of the American Journalism Review, Rachel Smolkin, has a piece in the current issue called “Adapt or Die,” in which she talks about the struggle that newspapers are going through and has a few examples of what some papers are doing. There is also a quote from Esther Dyson of Release 1.0, who says newspapers have to be clear what they are doing: “Are you a media company, tailoring content to reach an audience and sell ads? Or are you a journalistic enterprise, focused on finding out and publicizing important truths? If you don’t really know what you’re trying to do, then you keep disappointing people who think they understand,” she says.
- The Korean “citizen journalism” website OhMyNews, which has a group of more than 10,000 people who file reports and are managed by a team of editors — and which recently arranged a partnership with the International Herald Tribune — has a story up (a positive one, not surprisingly) about the promise of participatory journalism. It contains a quote from Associated Press CEO Tom Curley, who says journalists need to learn to free their content from “expensive containers we call the newspaper or broadcast bulletin,” which means a change from the “news as lecture to the news as conversation.”
- NowPublic.com, the “participatory journalism” site based in Vancouver which just announced $1.4-million in financing from angel investors and Brightspark Ventures, says it plans to use some of the proceeds to deliver a “News on Demand” service to traditional media, using citizen reporters who are on the ground in some foreign location or at the scene of some event as a local source of news for newspapers far from the scene.
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