Mr. Keller said that recent hires in the bureau and Mr. Baquet’s decision to return demonstrated that “in times of economic uncertainty, when others are downsizing, we invest.” He said those moves also demonstrated that The New York Times is “perhaps the last great American news organization that is not in retreat, where journalists can be confident of our commitment.”
One of [the new editor's] assignments is to set up a training regimen for everyone in the newsroom to develop an expertise on the Internet and become savvy multi-media journalists.
A whole new world in out there -- video, photo galleries, chat rooms, landing pages. And to disprove the adage that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, I am going to be one of his first students. This training is mandatory for everyone.
Currently we have a newspaper staff and an latimes.com staff. No more. From now on, there are no two staffs, there is just one. And we will function as one. One of Russ's first jobs will be to help set up that newsroom. Leo Wolinsky is already working on a plan and details will be coming soon.
Latimes.com will become our primary vehicle for breaking news 24 hours a day. Reporters now enter the newsroom and tell editors what kind of a story they will write for the newspaper the next day.
Then -- we tend to think what can we do for the Internet, as if it were some kind of journalistic orphan.
That kind of thinking must change if we want to remain competitive.
We need to enter the newsroom and think about how we are going to break news on the Internet.
And then what we are going to do that will be different for the newspaper, which will become an even stronger vehicle for tightly-written context, analysis, interpretation and expertise. There is no better example of that than this morning front page story by John Horn and Gina Piccalo's piece on the Oscar's, a sohpisticaed analysis of the international forces driving the decisions of the judges.
Now the truth is there are all kinds of reasons for that [revenue] decline. Delving into them would be a great MBA thesis at the Harvard Business School.
But we can't hide from the fact that smart competitors such as Google and Craigslist are stealing readers and advertisers from us through innovative strategies that are undermining the business model we've relied on for decades.
As many in this room have painfully discovered in their 401K statements, these developments are threatening the value of our stock portfolios. Equally significant, they are threatening the durability of crucial circulation and advertising revenues that enable us to effectively provide the news to a large and diverse audience.
Thanks to those revenues, we provide to citizens of this city, state, nation and world a vibrant great newspaper at a cost almost anyone can afford, 50 cents. Name me anything you can buy today for 50 cents.
If we don't help reverse these revenue trends, we will not be able to cost-effectively provide the news -- the daily bread of democracy. The stakes are high.
[This] newsroom can also be a cold, defensive, insular and conservative place, plagued by a bunker mentality that hides behind tradition and treats change as a threat.
The Times is as fractious and fragile as L.A. itself, as diverse and as divided. Layoffs, careless leadership, and ignorance of new horizontal media structures left The Times in the journalism Dark Ages. While other papers braced for battle and embraced the future, The Times cowered in its Spring Street cave like an injured animal
... this is not a course The Times decided to take, but rather a decision it had to make.
And Microsoft.Competitors once feared and respected Microsoft. Now they simply respect it. And as Microsoft prepares to unveil new versions of its desktop operating system and office programs on Tuesday it finds itself facing emboldened competition, even uncertainty. With the Internet revolution upending business models across a broad swath of industries, Microsoft itself is feeling the heat. The challenges that the company confronts today are different from those of the past, and its market power in the personal computer business matters less than before.There's a great deal in this analysis worth taking note of. In describing the dilemma of bringing change to a large, successful enterprise, this:
... Microsoft, despite its deep pockets and immense resources — in fact, precisely because of those vast resources — has potentially much more to lose in the Internet age than other companies. “This is every bit as disruptive for Microsoft as it is for others,” said George F. Colony, the chief executive of Forrester Research, the technology consulting firm. “The dilemma for Microsoft is that it is a prisoner of its business model, and the fact that it is a gilt-lined prison makes it brutally hard to change.”One of the evolutionary laws of business is that success breeds failure; the tactics and habits of earlier triumphs so often leave companies — even the biggest, most profitable and most admired companies — unable to adapt.
Even with billions in profits and tens of thousands of the best
minds and sharpest programmers around, Microsoft faces a battle in adapting to the key change: namely, that the sweet spot has moved away from the PC and its software, and onto the net. Another snip:An internal memo written 15 months ago by Ray Ozzie, who has taken over for Mr. Gates as Microsoft’s chief software architect, had a [more threatened] tone. It was titled “The Internet Services Disruption,” and it was a call to action. “It’s clear that if we fail to do so, our business as we know it is at risk. We must respond quickly and decisively.”
In an interview, Mr. Ozzie framed the challenge further. “This is a big change; there’s no question about it,” he said. “But it’s been coming since the beginning of the Web.”
I think it's fair to note, in passing, that Bill Gates has been frequently and spectacularly wrong in his public predictions about technology and (especially) the internet.
And [Gates] had a vision of the future of the media. For those of us involved inthe many discussions about whether newspapers can survive online he believed online micropayments and the development of multiple ad markets would mean the businesses would survive. But more than that he believed technology would develop so that the convenience of online newspapers would "overwhelm print". And he was surprised that people had not recognised the huge revolution in TV that was about to break upon us. On-demand TV over the internet would provide huge choice and the end of the linear schedule with all of its inconvenience. TV online would open up creativity and the "long tail" of niche interest content. As it happens, I agree and have been saying so for some time. But strangely people seem more interested when it's Bill Gates saying it....
For journalists who wanted to spend an hour with Google
After tracing a labyrinthine route to Google’s meeting room, reporters heard the search giant’s founders express just a hint of optimism about newspapers, which have struggled to hold onto advertising and readers as online readership has soared. “It will be a long time before displays will be as good as paper,” said Mr. Page, who gets his news online. “I’m still a believer in paper.”“Papers will have to focus more on creating unique content,” Mr. Brin added. “I think unique content is going to become a lot more valuable.” He also said he worries about the small number of professional journalists, which he said is too low for the world’s information needs. “I think it’s a problem for the world.”founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the challenge was finding them. But the payoff was catching a glimmer of optimism about the news business.
During the hour-long session, the two comforted the assembled journalists by assuring them it wasn’t Google’s goal to put newspapers out of business. “I would like to see a strong, healthy ecosystem encouraging people to do what you guys do, ” Mr. Brin said.
Finally, a neat way of differentiating journalists and bloggers. "Bloggers suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, journalists suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder." In other words, journalists report and move on and don't always follow up. Bloggers are obsessive, get hold of an issue and won't let go....
Chris and Howard,
After seeing the Pure Digital point-and-shoot video camera featured in Howard's blog a couple of weeks back, we purchased one for testing purposes.
It arrived at 10:30 a.m. yesterday. I showed it to one of our reporters, and he took it on an assignment at 1 p.m. We posted the video and a short version of the story on the Web around 4 p.m. (the video was ready at 2:30 p.m., 30 minutes after the reporter returned to the office).
Check it out here:
Was this video compelling? Not particularly, but it wasn't bad. It provided a voice and face to the story, and it offered a multimedia element. It was no worse than what most local TV news stations offer at 6 and 11 p.m.
Perhaps of greatest significance, our newsroom embraced this technology in record time: 2.5 hours!
Today, a reporter is taking it to Spokane for another daily story. On Wednesday, Ken Robertson will take with him to Tacoma.
We purchased the 30-minute version of the Pure Digital camera for $99. We decided we'd rather have more 30-minute cameras than fewer 60-minute cameras ($179). If we need something that will shoot longer, better-quality video, we'll send out an Interactive Media staffer with a better camera.
We plan to purchase one or two of these per month throughout the year and deploy them in our bureaus as well as in the newsroom.
Howard, in your Jan. 12 email, you wrote: "We need to accelerate the pace of enhancing our online operations ...."
I think we just did that.
The days of our monopoly business practices are over. Gone, too, are the times when journalists can write a story for print only and reach a mass audience. The Harvard Business School professors, among others, advise that we can view this change as a threat or an opportunity. To choose the path of opportunity means rewriting job descriptions of everyone who now occupies the newsroom. It means looking for new partners and being willing to collaborate far outside of our comfort zone. And it means knowing that we have to cannibalize our print edition rather than grudgingly having it happen because of a corporate dictate.
We needed to stop talking about crises and insecurity and the need for someone to do something. We should do it. Change. Believe in the future. We should try something new by moving toward a totally media integrated newsroom. And learn while we do it. Having this destination would put us on a path with neither tracks nor pavement since nowhere else were journalists working in the same newsroom for several media at the same time. Yet the future I told them about—the one that would happen within 10 months—would find them working at new desks, with new colleagues and perhaps new editors, meeting new deadlines, using new tools, working new hours, and doing all of this with new media.
Leaving the meeting, an experienced reporter lowered his voice and told his colleague, "That guy might become a stress factor ...."
- Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there's more of it than you can possibly grok on your own -- and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don't bother trying. You'll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead ...
- Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you've got online, and invite the world to look at it. They'll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living -- and they'll share it with you. You'll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare ... but now it's so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that ...
- Reputation Is Everything: Google isn't a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas -- and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling -- and, most of all, linking -- has transformed the Internet into a world where it's incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it's better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let's say you don't want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they'll find ... everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you've said yourself. (Again -- just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there -- your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.
For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar.But there are powerful reasons to question what it would mean for society if his preference (however universal) became the norm. The real value from this item comes in the comments that follow his original post – especially the contrary ones. They're worth reading if you have time.Am I proud of this? No. But it's true. And it explains why I've stopped listening to NPR (I can't think of a worse way to wake up than to a news report that begins with the words "Another bombing in Baghdad..." when I know that one of the main reasons for the attack was to get covered by the international media in the first place. Plus it no longer counts as news to me.)
“We’d like people to hear sirens or see traffic jams and go to WestportNow to see what happened,” Mr. Joseloff said. “Before this, there was a lot that happened in Westport that didn’t see the light of day.”
The site is a more of a news organization than most town-specific sites in that it employs a full-time professional journalist, Jennifer Connic, who used to cover Westport as a newspaper reporter for The Hour of Norwalk. In addition to writing for the Web site and taking photographs, she edits articles and photos contributed by readers.
Alongside features about the best trick-or-treating neighborhoods, the site offers breaking news about accidents, power failures and police reports shortly after they happen, and items about home and building teardowns before they happen.
"Much of the current media landscape would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Much of what will be is equally unimaginable. What is necessary now is a determination to insure that the media of the future deliver not merely for owners but for workers, news consumers and democracy. Perhaps newspapers really can survive in a form familiar to those of us who cherish them. But even if that is not to be, they must survive in a form that fosters a healthy transition from old media to new, and that preserves and, one hopes, improves journalism. The transition need not be tidy. It should embody the experimentation, adventurousness and glorious failures that our current crop of risk-averse publishers have shunned."
Companies that have run into trouble, including Knight Ridder and Tribune (TRB), "mangled the transition to the digital age," says Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America. "It's management, not the business."
His group, as well as Consumers Union and Free Press, prepared their relatively upbeat studies ahead of the Federal Communications Commission's Tuesday deadline for public comment in its pending review of media-ownership rules ...
... the consumer groups ...argue that Internet blogs and community sites, and even local cable news channels, still are not much competition for newspapers and broadcasters. People still prefer to get local news from familiar institutions and reporters, they say.
The story doesn't offer any details about who did the studies, or how, or link to them. If I find them, I'll add that info to this post.
opposite is true. I'd love to see us using cinéma vérité video to add value to all kinds of reporting. In Fresno, they've had good success using little digital video cameras that sell for less than $200.
Newspapers know that it is far cheaper to ask entry-level videographers to shoot digital video of a news event and post it on a Web site than to pay a TV reporter, video photographer and producer to create a three-minute news report for television. Many newspapers, including The Post, are training their reporters to shoot video with their stories. Some reporters carry video cameras and shoot video to accompany their articles when they appear on their newspaper's Web site.
New media triumphalists and old media traditionalists have for too long insisted that newspaper journalism's future has to belong almost entirely to one or the other. What the redesigned Journal strongly suggests is that newspapers will be of greatest service to their readers by taking a simultaneous and complementary stance in both venues...
PETER: ... I strongly disagree with you saying “it analyzes the news”. At best, it puts together some statistical numbers about the flow of the news and it’s redundance. This is not news-analysis but search-engine vodoo which has nothing to do with relevance whatsoever.
Interestingly enough I see more and more of our collegues in the media switching their personal habits from being complete newsjunkies to very delibaretly picking a handful of trusted sources and authors (and bloggers) which provide a much more efficient way of getting a view of the world.
At the same time, all my not-so-media-savvy friends tend to become stressed out newsjunkies, getting lost in the ocean of sugar-coated peanuts in an age of everything-is-realtime-and-therefore-news. It’s tempting at first, and then it gets overwhelming and frustrating
JEFF: ... As for the role of editors, which is what you’re really talking about, I agree; in a completely open world, there’s more need for editing (read: no gatekeeping but selection, digging, vetting, and adding perspective) than before. As I said above, I think we’re heading to an architecture — not just technical, but in a business sense — of needing to support (find, send audience to) journalism at its source; we hope this powers that. Finally, it’s also necessary for editors to present not just their coverage but their coverage in the context of other coverage (here’s our story, says the Times of Anytown and here’s the coverage of the Timeses of New York, London, and India). These, I hope, will be tools that help you and your harried friends - which is all of us — find better coverage, coverage closer to events, coverage from different perspectives.
In this public-utility age of newspapers, the institutional blandness which resulted — reporters themselves, once clever and disreputable, became something like public-service employees, seeing themselves with the beleaguered virtue of schoolteachers — helped turn newspapers into a medium for old people (newspapers are for people who remember newspapers). In some sense, newspapers became the inverse of media: designed not to be noticed.
Melanie Sill at the News & Observer. That was just the most recent of numerous occasions upon which the paper's energetic and unsparing journalism has run afoul of particularly passionate bloggers.
Good journalism is defined by what it is, not who does it. Journalism involves a discipline of accuracy, verification, fairness, public-mindedness and truth-telling. As part of democracy it empowers citizens by informing them, holds people in power accountable to the rest of us and, conversely, takes responsibility for its own actions.
Despite all of the publicity about people fleeing to the Web for their daily news diet, the Gallup survey found that twice as many still rely on newspapers: 44% daily vs. 22% daily for Internet use.
"The rapid growth in the Internet news audience may have slowed in the last two years, and cable news viewership has declined," Gallup reports.
these days as a blogger at TPMMuckraker, a spin-off of the popular liberal blog Talking Points Memo. He writes a piece for CBS here that describes the transition, and what his new medium means.Gradually I though of the spaces we were providing for these conversations similar to a saloon, with a collection of tables where people gathered to talk about whatever. We were the proprietor of the space -- a private proprietor of commercial space -- and welcomed the public, and pointed to the sign on the wall that read: "No spitting, fighting, or flamewars." We reserved the right to toss out anyone who was ruining the experience for everyone else ...–Howard Weaver
To paraphrase an old comment about IBM, made during its 30 year dominance of the enterprise mainframe market, Google is not your competition, Google is the environment ... Google is the start page for the Internet ... The net isn't a directed graph. It's not a tree. It's a single point labeled G connected to 10 billion destination pages.
Online businesses which struggle against this new reality will pay opportunity costs both in online advertising revenue as well as product success.
Competitors such as Yahoo should quickly move to align themselves with this inevitability. Yahoo could add an extra $1.5B to their revenue overnight by conceding monetization to Google and becoming a distribution partner for Adwords, as Ask Jeeves did.
Corrections and clarifications December 30, 2006 – 12:39 AM
Nick Coleman's column on Page B1 Friday incorrectly stated the McClatchy Company's operating margins. McClatchy had an operating margin of 18.6 percent in 1998, the year it bought the Star Tribune. Its operating margin last year was 19 percent. In 1998, McClatchy's free cash flow was 28.3 percent, as measured by earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. In 2005, its free cash flow was 25 percent.
Those of you who read the printed WSJ will certainly have noticed that today's the debut of its new design. Instantly different: narrower, new typeface, somewhat more modular layout. It's an attractivenew package and this initial offering is, as you might expect, packed with impressive features.
Peter Kann had his troubles as CEO at Dow Jones, but he's a smart guy and was a good reporter. You'd enjoy this opinion piece on what needs mending in the press.Thomas Jefferson, a better president than we've had in a very long time, penned a line back in 1787: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." By 1807, in his seventh year as president and after seven years of being subjected to severe press criticism, he wrote: "I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them."–Howard Weaver
NewsTrust's more thoughtful approach can yield dramatically different top stories. On Tuesday, NewsTrust's users selected ``Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006,'' from a blog written by Juan Cole, president of the Global Americana Institute. Digg's top story was ``50 Reasons -- why it's great to be a Guy!!'' from a blog written by someone named Mike in Los Angeles. Reddit, a Digg competitor that was recently acquired by Conde Nast, featured ``Why iPods Are Never on Sale,'' from Salon.com.Iraq versus iPods. That kind of sums it up ...
