Good news vs. bad news
Now that’s market research for you.
Archives: October 30, 2008
Quick video explainers: An easy way to tell a complicated story
The public radio program Marketplace deals with some pretty complicated issues — sometimes too complex to be summarized in a minute or two of airtime. So senior editor Paddy Hirsch is making a series of short videos explaining difficult concepts: naked shorts, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and so on. They’re really quite clear (via Marginal Revolution):
The current financial crisis has really brought out the best in explanatory journalism. This American Life has been justly praised for its two programs that, straightforwardly and using their standard storytelling toolkit, explained to millions why the economy was going in the tank. And while those episodes were done up the This American Life’s standard production values, anyone could do what Marketplace is doing here. Their videos are almost no-tech: no editing, one camera, and no prop more expensive than a dry-erase board.
What complicated stories in your newsroom could best be told this way? At my old newspaper, there’s been an ongoing and years-long bribery scandal at city hall. I paid more attention to it than most Dallasites, I imagine, but I still couldn’t sum up the issues and accusations as easily as I can explain why the credit default swaps market tanked, thanks to This American Life. The next time you’re covering a complex, interwoven story, the kind that stretches for months, think about shooting an explainer video that captures how you would explain the story to a buddy at a bar.
Beam me up, Wolf Blitzer!
Apparently unchastened by the mockery of Anderson Cooper’s “flying pie chart” during the primaries, CNN is planning to introduce three-dimensional holograms to its broadcast on election night. Correspondents and interviewees at Obama and McCain headquarters will be “teleported” to the Situation Room, where their holograms will appear alongside real-life Wolf Blitzer in New York, reports Broadcasting & Cable (via TVNewser).
Hey, it worked for Star Trek.
Gimmicks could certainly help attract viewers on an intensely competitive night for the cable news networks, and John King’s “magic wall” has proven worthwhile. But this one seems like a dubious allocation of resources: “CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed,” according to USA Today. The quantum-leaping correspondents will, if nothing else, provide wonderful fodder for Jon Stewart, who has long maligned the technological arms race on cable news. After the jump, watch one such “Daily Show” clip from February, plus “Saturday Night Live”’s recent mockery of the magic wall.
BU panel: Peter Osnos seeks distribution possibilities
[We had two folks attending Boston University's one-day conference on non-fiction book publishing yesterday. Below, the afternoon session from Zach Seward. —Ed.]
At BU, a bunch of well known journalists spent the morning doing what journalists do best these days: bemoaning the state of our industry. As they insisted that print was essentially dead, a voice piped up in the back of the room, claiming to bear good news. It was Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books and vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. He pointed to the settlement announced on Tuesday between Google and a group of book authors and publishers. The upshot of that agreement, Osnos said, will be wider distribution of more books and increased revenue for the book industry. (Google will pay royalties to publishers so it can sell online access to books still in copyright.) Osnos suggested that the settlement could serve as a model for newspapers as well.
Whether Osnos is right, several Nieman fellows in attendance said his words were greeted as though a doctor had walked into a funeral, opened up the casket, and found a pulse in the deceased. I saw him speak in the afternoon, when he joined a panel with others in the book industry and continued to be the most forward-thinking person in the room, despite also being one of the oldest. He said the greatest challenge facing book publishing is “inventory management, putting the books in the right place at the right time.” But Osnos was not despairing. He said “technology, on that score, is our friend…We are going to take every book and make it available in every way that technology permits: ebooks, audio books, large print, by chapters. There’s nothing that stops us technologically from making books available in every way that is now possible.”
BU panel: Doom, gloom, and the promise of a nice advance
[We had two folks attending Boston University's one-day conference on non-fiction book publishing yesterday. Below, the morning session from Chris Vognar. —Ed.]
Official title of the morning session Wednesday: “The Writer’s View.” Unofficial title: “Newspapers are screwed.”
But hey at least there’s hope — at least if you’ve got your act, schedule, finances and connections together enough to get a successful book published. The conference, which featured writers in the morning and publishers in the afternoon, came complete with a cumbersome name: “The Nonfiction Book as the Last Best Home for Journalism.” But the panelists were among the best and the brightest in the game, so they came with some alternative titles. My personal favorite came courtesy of Charlie Savage: “The Last Man Standing for Serious Journalism as Our Industry Dies.”
Quinnipiac: A study in loss of institutional control
Two events that may seem unconnected but aren’t: Tuesday’s announcement of The Christian Science Monitor leaving the daily print world and Wednesday’s editorial in The New York Times damning the administration of Quinnipiac University for clamping down on a new online student publication, Quad News.
The first is all about shuffling off the cost of daily print distribution in exchange for the freedom to try a new model. The second is a story of how that new freedom isn’t always appreciated by all parties involved.
At Quinnipiac, some students became concerned about the university administration’s attempts to control the established student newspaper. Not exactly a new phenomenon, particularly at private colleges. But these students decided to launch Quad News as an online-only alternative newspaper. The administration has responded by hounding the new publication, issuing gag orders to university employees approached by its reporters and threatening to toss the school’s SPJ chapter off campus for being too friendly with the rebels.
College journalism has always been in the odd position of being an enterprise funded by the very powers journalists seek to question, investigate, and sometimes criticize. By the same token, college administrations often end up trying to shut down the voices of the very customers paying to learn the craft of journalism. (Quinnipiac has an average “cost of attendance” of $45,300 for the typical student.) And that funding model is what gives the administration its primary power.
I suspect over the next few years, college newspapers will be the most likely publications to follow the Monitor’s lead and do away with paper and ink. With the primary costs of a college paper eliminated (few have paid staff), there’ll be little keeping those journalists from breaking free of their universities’ control.
Meanwhile, the past year has seen booming growth in what might be called the college gossip market — sites like Juicy Campus and Bored At which allow students to post whatever libelous rumors they want about their peers. These sites rely on college administrations for nothing: not funding, not interviews, not a stamp of approval. And as a result, colleges have no control over them. It’s strange to think of the Juicy Campuses as being on the same continuum of independence as the serious-minded Quad News. But administrators will eventually have to come to whatever uneasy peace they can with both models, plus whatever iterations sprout up in between them.
Yes, she can
An update on Ana Marie Cox’s efforts to crowdfund her campaign-trail reporting: She’s raised $7,000 from her audience (likely more by now). That’s probably not including the $2,000 she got to write down the stretch for The Washington Independent. And in a blow for transparency, she’s started detailing her expenses on the trail, including a $56 cab ride from Toledo Express Airport to a Palin rally in West Toledo.
Who will be the IMDB for books?
A plea for better metadata in book publishing, wondering who will be the industry’s IMDB.
Not everyone chooses a film because of who directs it or who the screenwriter was, but some of us do, and now with databases like IMDB we can easily find lists of films containing the actors we like, or directors and discover more things we might like to watch. I think books can be the same. Currently I don’t get to know who edits each book, or acquires the rights, but if I did I might start to follow their work. Authors need not be the only brands. Publishers can establish a brand identity the way imprints used to. Most will have to start over as they’ve diluted any meaning they ever had.
We all know superstar journalists who have established similar brands. Newspapers typically encourage it for columnists, and by default discourage it for reporters. What if newspapers made it trivially easy to be told every time there’s a new story by ace reporter Jane Doe? Or a big project edited by the local Pulitzer winner? Or a new photo shot by your brilliant portraitist? And papers promoted those individual talents accordingly?
