An interesting experiment by the Wall Street Journal: someone with a video camera sat in on a recent editorial board meeting talking about whether the paper should write an editorial about a recent attack in Najaf. If you follow this link, click on “Opinion” and then “Inside the Editorial Page.”
Google is widely seen as being the enemy of newspapers — particularly by the short-sighted newspaper publishers in Belgium and elsewhere that have sued to keep their news results out of Google News — but billionaire co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin say they think newspapers have a bright future. Really. At least, that’s what they reportedly told a forum at the exclusive Davos retreat for tall foreheads and global celebrities.
Admittedly, neither one of them reads newspapers very regularly, although Sergey apparently likes the New York Times on Sunday (but then, who doesn’t). “I think that newspapers have a good future,” Larry said, adding that his company was working “really hard” to help advertisers get their ads into newspapers. However, the Google founders said newpapers would have to re-think their strategy in terms of content. “Papers will have to focus more on creating very unique content,” Sergey said.
A hat tip goes to Roy Greenslade at the Guardian for the link. Roy notes that the plug from Google’s dynamic duo is somewhat ironic, and “hardly a ringing endorsement.”
The new editor of Los Angeles Times, James O’Shea — who took over after the previous editor, Dean Baquet, was ousted (along with the publisher) for refusing to make substantial newsroom cuts — has announced a restructuring of the newsroom aimed at focusing the paper more on breaking news online, and using its resources better in terms of integration between paper and Web, something a lot of newspapers are currently struggling with.
Among other things, he announced an “editor for innovation” and a series of newsroom courses in writing and filing for the web. According to the L.A. Times story on it (which must have been fun to write), O’Shea told an auditorium full of reporters and editors that the Times had been complacent because it was doing fairly well financially, but that it couldn’t rest on its laurels. He also said that an internal report found:
– a lack of assertive leadership and adequate focus on the website.
– understaffing.
– “creaky” technology.
– failure to integrate the newspaper’s large news staff into operations at the web.
My favourite quote from the report: “To put it bluntly, as a news organization, we are not web-savvy. If anything, we are web-stupid.” More on the topic from Greg Sterling at Screenwerk and at Editor & Publisher, which got comments from L.A. staffers, as well as PaidContent and online veteran Steve Yelvington.
Christine Herron, a venture capitalist with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s fund, has an interesting post about the New York Times, and Martin Nisenholtz’s challenge as vice-president of digital operations for the Grey Lady. As she puts it: “How does a established news institution transform itself into a sleek Web 2.0 business?”
The answer, according to Nisenholtz, is to focus on circulation rather than traffic. In other words, try to convert the 2.5 million visitors that the newspaper’s site gets on an average day into long-term readers — and possibly even into subscribers to TimesSelect, the for-pay service that about 500,000 people have signed up for. So his goals are to a) “Keep users coming back, and staying longer,” and b) “Increase not only the average number of visits per reader, but also the average number of page views per visit.” But how to do that?
As usual, some of the most interesting stuff shows up in the comments: in a response to a commenter who works at CNN, where they get lots of hits but not a lot of longer visits, Christine says that one formula that seems to work is “snippets/facts drive traffic [while] essays/analysis build readership. So in theory, you need both if you’re building an actual community or reader base.” Good advice.
The winter issue of The Neiman Reports, a quarterly publication from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, is all about journalism in the age of the web, with a number of pieces by a variety of authors looking at everything from social media to print/web convergence (hat tip to Martin Stabe for the link). The essays include:
– “When the Web Feeds the Newspaper”
– “Inviting Readers Into the Editorial Process”
– “Myths and Realities of Convergence”
– “The Challenge of Community Building”
One I found particular well-done — although it won’t come as much of surprise to regular readers — was “Journalism and Web 2.0″ by Francis Pisani, a 1993 Neiman Fellow. He looks at the definition of Web 2.0, and the impact of things such as search engines and craigslist on newspapers and the way they do journalism on the web. He looks at Wikipedia, social news sites like Newsvine, bookmarking services like del.icio.us and the issue of citizen journalism.
Here are some excerpts:
– “Before the Web, storytelling was platform specific. Newspapers and magazines focused on text and photos, radio told stories with audio, and television dealt with moving pictures and sounds. Each platform has its tools and specialized skill sets, advantages and disadvantages. The Web forces these platforms to integrate. Today’s best media Web sites are multimedia productions combining text, stills, audio and video.” (from here)
