From Price Waterhouse Coopers, the folks who count the ballots for the Oscars, comes a report called Newspaper Outlook 2009 (PDF), presenting results of a seven-nation survey they undertook with the World Association of Newspapers. While it reassures that “[n]ewspapers have a long-term future and will coexist with other media,” it hedges that bet with: “[T]his is unlikely to be either in the formats or volumes seen today and there will some casualties and losses of well-known papers along the way.” In a factoid quoted variously as positive and negative, PwC found that 62 percent of consumers are willing to pay for online news. But the report itself qualifies this finding as well:
This does not mean that they would actually buy online content at this amount however. Free content is abundant online and consumers would choose free content when the quality was comparable or sufficient for their purpose. On average, respondents expressed no willingness to pay for general news and background information on e-paper or mobile devices, and they do not see them as alternatives for full newspapers.
Kenneth Crews, director of the Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia, gave a talk here at Harvard yesterday about issues of copyright, publishing contracts, and open access. He looks at these issues from the perspective of the academic world, where openness in scholarship is getting lots of momentum (including from my employer). But a lot of the same issues apply to journalists who own copyrights, do work for hire, or get entangled in less-than-reasonable contracts. What’s the best path — openness, control, or something in between?
A quick update on our summer microinternships: We got 166 applications from six countries. I’ve read them all, and there’s some real gold in there. And I have maybe five spots.
What I’m trying to say is that a bunch of great applicants are going to hear less-than-great news from me in the next week or two. They shouldn’t interpret that as anything other than the fact they had some terrific competition. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of journalism in all those PDF resumes and cover letters.
Here’s the second of our videos from inside the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., where they’re envisioning how news will be consumed in two to ten years. (You can catch up on the series here.) Some of the goodies you’ll notice: a Samsung tablet, an iPhone, a Sony Bravia TV, and an application called CustomTimes that they’ve developed to work on all three devices.
The R&D group is obsessed with the ability to seamlessly transition among web-enabled gadgets. They’re not convinced that the future will land on a single, multipurpose contraption — like some sort of Kindle meets Chumby meets Minority Report. Instead, they predict consumers will connect to the Internet through their cars, on their televisions, over mobile networks, and in traditional browsers, while expecting those devices to interact and sync with each other.
Nick Bilton, the group’s design integration editor who narrated yesterday’s video, and Michael Young, the lead creative technologist who stars in today’s installment, won a major hacking event in 2007 with their startup Shifd (pronounced “shift”), which is an attempt to achieve some of that cloud-like portability. And the same philosophy is evident in the way they’ve conceived CustomTimes (which, it should be noted, is more a proof of concept than a product on its way to the marketplace).
One term I didn’t hear in our visit to the R&D lab last week was “platform agnostic,” a concept once championed by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman to describe how the newspaper would offer its content on any medium desired by the audience, from e-readers to television.
That philosophy remains intact, I think, but the phrase’s meaning is worth some thought. One of the more pointed passages in Mark Bowden’s recent Vanity Fair profile of Sulzberger was a quote from Tom Rosenstiel, director of Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism:
When I first heard Arthur talk about being platform agnostic, I knew he was trying to suggest that he was not stuck in a newspaper mind-set. But I thought there were two problems with that language. One is, agnostics are people who don’t—who aren’t sure what they believe in. That’s the first problem. And the second problem is, in practice, there is no such thing as being platform agnostic. You actually have to choose which platform you work on first, which one comes first. [...] Platform agnostic means that all the online companies are going to zoom past you, because they’re going to exploit that technology while you’re sitting there thinking, Well, we don’t care which platform we put it on. You need to exploit the technology of each platform. You need to be, in fact, not platform agnostic but platform orthodox.
There’s no doubt that the R&D group — and probably Sulzberger, too — agrees with Rosentiel’s point. (In tomorrow’s video, you’ll see one way that they’re attempting to repackage multimedia content for different platforms.) But I think “platform orthodox” is a useful perspective from which to assess their work: How well does CustomTimes prepare for our gadget-juggling future?
A full transcript of today’s video is after the jump. Keep reading »
Mark Potts lists seven good ideas for improving local news on his blog today. They’re yours for the taking.
But first, Potts takes a swing at the notion that Paid Content™ or Attacking Google™ or Embracing Kindle™ provide some kind of magic bullet to save the day for the news business:
There is no magic bullet. In fact, most of the bullets just listed are of the dumb-dumb variety (as opposed to dum-dum, nitpickers). They reflect the thinking of executives and journalists who don’t really understand the business of journalism, the reality of the new Internet-driven world, or what consumers are looking for these days. Mostly, they’re defensive maneuvers, tired attempts to salvage a print-centric business model that is close to long gone.
How many of these kinds of posts are necessary before some of these progressive ideas get adopted?
On this week’s edition of Rebooting The News, NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen riffs on the seminal NPR/This American Life co-production from last year, Giant Pool of Money, and finds in it the germ of a compelling argument: Deep reporting is not only good journalism, it may actually be the thing that creates a desire for more news, building new consumers of news where there were none before.
In other words, a topic that may have been something you knew about peripherally through the headlines — say the financial crisis — becomes a must-know obsession once you understand the core facts and the storyline. And the best way to get to such a place of understanding is through unvarnished explanatory journalism.
Here’s an excerpt of Rosen making his case:
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The Nieman Journalism Lab is a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age. (More.)
