Is transparency the new objectivity? 2 visions of journos on social media

By Mathew Ingram

Nothing brings home the clash of cultures between “new” and “old” media like the debates over social-media policies at mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Earlier this year, the Times was in the spotlight for its attempt to develop a policy on Twitter in the wake of some indiscreet twittering about internal staff meetings. Last week it was the Post’s turn: The paper introduced a new social media policy that restricts its staffers from posting their opinions on Twitter (or any other social network), after one of its managing editors posted his thoughts about certain political issues such as health care and Congressional term limits.

The editor in question, Raju Narisetti, appeared frustrated with the moves, saying: “For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it comes to censoring personal views.” He has since said that he agrees with the policy, however, and has cancelled his Twitter account. Other WaPo journalists mocked the changes, meanwhile, with media reporter Howard Kurtz saying that “Under new WP guidelines on tweeting, I will now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes.” Keep reading »

Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?

By Mathew Ingram

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of the answer. The latest to make an impassioned plea is Jeff Reifman, the co-founder of NewsCloud, a “community-driven news aggregator” funded by the Knight Foundation.

In a recent blog post, Reifman outlines why he believes that micropayments can solve the newspaper industry’s problems. His post is a response to one by Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher, which carried the somewhat argumentative title “Your News Content Is Worth Zero To Digital Consumers,” and argued that charging people for news isn’t going to work unless that news is highly targeted to a specific niche. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a similar point recently about why The Wall Street Journal has been able to charge, and Paul Graham echoes that point as well.) Keep reading »

Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve

By Mathew Ingram

Since I became the first “communities editor” for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto almost a year ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes for a good community — a healthy community — and what makes for a bad one. I’ve looked at every newspaper I can think of and tried to figure out what works and what doesn’t. I’ve looked at non-media communities like Metafilter and Slashdot and even (so help me) 4chan. I’ve looked at research into real-world communities and how they evolve, and why some thrive and some die out.

There are all sorts of manifestations of community on news sites — blogs, wikis, etc. — but one of the most fundamental elements of community is reader comments. Some media outlets only allow comments on certain stories; some pre-moderate, while others wait for readers to flag unpleasant comments and then remove them. Some sites do the moderating themselves; others outsource to companies like ICUC in Winnipeg. But everyone sees the value of comments, right? Wrong.

The reality is that — as Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia journalism school writes at MediaShift — many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value. Hermida writes about research presented at the recent Future of Journalism ‘09 conference in Wales (where he presented his “Twitter as ambient journalism” paper) that said most journalists see comments as containing very little news — and mainly view them as a nuisance.

As Mike Masnick at Techdirt points out in a recent post, this kind of attitude is revealing. Keep reading »

Was the NYT wrong to conceal David Rohde’s kidnapping? Yes.

By Mathew Ingram

It’s been more than a week since New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from his captors in Pakistan, so maybe now is a good time to try and look dispassionately at the massive coverup that prevented news of his kidnapping from being reported for more than six months — a coverup that included not just 40 or so mainstream media outlets but Wikipedia as well, with the personal help of founder Jimmy Wales. Raising such ethical issues seemed somewhat crass in the days following his miraculous escape (although that didn’t stop some observers, including Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute, from being early critics of the coverup). But those issues deserve to be talked about in more detail.

For the record, I don’t know David Rohde. From all accounts, he is a wonderful friend and colleague, not to mention an excellent reporter who has a great deal of experience working in troubled areas. All of which is — I would argue — completely irrelevant to the issue at hand, namely whether the New York Times and its senior management were right to conceal evidence of his kidnapping, and whether the editors at dozens of other outlets were right to go along with this plan.

I would argue that they were not, and that if anything the coverup has made things harder not just for future kidnapping victims such as Rohde, but for newspapers and other mainstream media outlets as a whole.

Keep reading »

The golden age of computer-assisted reporting is at hand

By Mathew Ingram

Computer-assisted reporting or CAR has been around, well — ever since there were computers. Even when I was in journalism school (which was longer ago than I care to remember), we learned about databases we could search, etc. But the explosion of Web-based tools and ways of sifting through and sharing data has created something approaching a revolution, and the potential benefits for journalism are only just beginning to reveal themselves. If this movement has a patron saint, it is probably Adrian Holovaty, who gained renown for creating the amazing Chicagocrime.org — one of the first Google Maps mashups — and then worked on data-driven features at the Washington Post, followed by his fellowship-financed Everyblock, which aggregates local data about an area.

Another recent example of how data can drive reporting, and how Web-based tools can extend and enhance that reporting, comes from several British newspapers — primarily The Guardian — and their coverage of an emerging expense scandal involving British politicians. One of the really interesting things that The Guardian has done is to publish all of the expense info they have through a laboriously detailed and publicly accessible Google spreadsheet. As Paul Bradshaw points out at the Online Journalism Blog, this structure actually allows reporters (or in fact anyone who is interested in the info) to extract useful data simply by changing the URL. Someone has even created a page where you can run queries on the database with a simple click.

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Newspapers and rules on Twitter

By Mathew Ingram

This is an update to a recent post about the Wall Street Journal and its policies on Twitter use by its staff. In that post, I essentially agreed with a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he argued that the WSJ policy “missed the point” of social media in general by trying to lock down the behaviour of reporters too much — by restricting them from discussing their stories, being too personal, etc.

Both Steve Buttry of Gazette Communications, in a post at his personal blog and Gina Chen at Save The Media agreed with Jarvis as well, saying the rules were too restrictive and that the newspaper was in danger of missing out on much of the value of social media. Similar thoughts were posted by Pat Thornton at BeatBlogging.org.

Pat also quotes a Twitter post from John Robinson (editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina) that also caught my eye, in which he said:

Twitter rules: I trust the staff to report the news. Shouldn’t I trust them enough to tweet? Is twitter that much harder than reporting?

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times (who recently joined Twitter himself) put it very similarly in a quote he gave to Editor & Publisher magazine:

“I have asked people to use common sense and respect the workplace and assume whatever they tweet will be tied to the paper. Even when they are tweeting personal information to their followers, they are still representing the New York Times.”

As both the Editor & Publisher piece and this piece in the New York Observer make clear, there has been a bit of controversy within the NYT about tweets that staffers (including @jenny8lee and @michaelluo) were making during a strategy briefing at the paper. I wondered at the time whether what they were broadcasting was an internal meeting or not, but assumed it was not. As it turns out, some editors were of the opinion that posting such things to Twitter should always be out of the question, and that even posting positive things from the newsroom shouldn’t be done by Times reporters.

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The benefits of a live-blog: news, discussion and “crowd-sourcing”

By Mathew Ingram

Like a lot of newspapers and media outlets, the paper I work for in Canada — the Globe and Mail — has been experimenting a lot with a great live-blogging and live-discussion tool called Cover It Live. The software comes from a company located in Toronto, but is being used by everyone from Newsweek and Yahoo to Vanity Fair and the Austin Statesman-Review. We’ve hosted live discussion/news stories involving the Obama inauguration, the NHL hockey trade deadline, federal communication hearings and even a shooting in a Toronto subway station.

One of the big benefits of the software is that it allows you to do so much within the app itself, which is embedded in a story page as a widget via javascript. You can post photos right in the stream, embed video clips and do instant polls — and integrated into all that are comments from readers. You can also pull comments from Twitter, either by approving individual users or by pulling in tweets that use a specific hashtag or keyword related to the topic. The editor or “producer” can see all the comments and moderate them, and the live blog can be archived and replayed.

For large public events such as the Obama inauguration (or the Oscars), there is a very powerful desire to interact with other people who are watching the same event, and Cover It Live makes that very easy and appealing. News updates are interspersed with user comments in a very natural way, and reporters and editors can respond easily. For events such as the NHL trade deadline, several readers asked specific questions of the reporters and columnists who took part, and got answers within minutes — something that simply doesn’t happen with traditional newspaper stories, even online.

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Blogs: One person’s curation is another person’s scraping

By Mathew Ingram

Curation has become a popular term in media circles, in the sense of a human editor who filters and selects content, and then packages it and delivers it to readers in some way. Many people (including me) believe that, in an era when information sources are exploding online, aggregation and curation of some kind is about the only service left that people might be willing to pay for. That’s why it’s been interesting to watch one prominent website — All Things Digital, the online blog property that is owned by the Wall Street Journal, but run as a separate entity by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — wrestling with how to handle that kind of aggregation, amid criticism from some prominent bloggers that it has been doing it wrong.

As described by Andy “Waxy” Baio in an excellently reported roundup of the brouhaha, the fuss seemed to start with comments from Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson about how Google and other aggregators of news are “parasites” in the intestines of the Internet, because they republish the content of others and then make money from it. Pretty soon, some bloggers were pointing out that All Things Digital did exactly the same thing in a section called Voices — namely, published long excerpts from a variety of prominent bloggers, displayed in exactly the same way as the rest of the site’s content, and surrounded by ads.

Josh Schachter, founder of Delicious, noted this behaviour in a Twitter message, and Metafilter founder Matt Haughey said that “apparently The Wall Street Journal’s All Things D does a reblogging thing. I sure wish they asked me first though. That’s a hell of a lot of ads on my ‘excerpt’.” Merlin Mann, who blogs at 43folders, said on Twitter that “republishing online work without consent and wrapping it in ads is often called ‘feed scraping.’ At AllThingsD, it’s called ‘a compliment.”

Keep reading »

Papers: more creativity please

By Mathew Ingram

As many people probably know by now, Google came out with another of its Google Labs features on Monday: a Google News timeline view, which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. The sources of this data can also be customized to include not just traditional news sources but also Wikipedia, sports scores, blogs, etc. It’s a fascinating way of interpreting the news — not something that is likely going to replace a regular old Google News headline view, but an additional way of looking at things.

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this latest Google effort at delivering the news, and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? (I’m not the only one to wonder this). Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing? Apparently not. Even the most progressive of newspaper sites still looks very much like a traditional newspaper — not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. But is it too much to ask for a little variety? Why not have some alternative display possibilities available? Who knows, it might even con some people into reading more.

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Google helps newspapers — period.

By Mathew Ingram

As the newspaper industry has grown weaker and weaker, there has been a steady stream of articles and blog posts blaming Google for some or all of this decline. I’m not going to link to them all, because there are simply too many, and they are easy enough to find. The standard allegation is that the search engine, and other similar engines such as Yahoo and MSN, hijack readers by aggregating content, and then monetize those eyeballs by posting ads near the content. Newspapers get traffic, but Google critics argue that this traffic is essentially worthless — or at least can’t make up for the value that Google has siphoned off.

One of the most recent articles to take this tack appeared in the Guardian and quoted Sly Bailey, the chief executive office of newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror. Among other things, Ms. Bailey said that:

“By creating gargantuan national newspaper websites designed to harness users by the tens of millions, by performing well on search engines like Google, we have eroded the value of news. News has become ubiquitous. Completely commoditised. Without value to anyone.”

This argument is almost too absurd to be taken seriously. In a nutshell, Ms. Bailey is claiming that by expanding their readership and making it easier for people to find their content, newspapers have shot themselves in the foot, and should do their best to avoid being found by new readers. It’s particularly ironic that the Mirror CEO is making these comments in a story in The Guardian, which has built up an impressive readership outside the UK thanks to its excellent content.

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What Ashton Kutcher can teach us about the evolution of media

By Mathew Ingram

The standard response from many people on Twitter this week to the news that Ashton Kutcher wanted to get a million followers was thinly veiled (or not-so-thinly veiled) disgust. Long-time Twitter fans were outraged that anyone — let alone a two-bit TV actor — would be so blatantly egotistical, and trivialize such a great social-media tool in that way, just so he could get on the Oprah show. Shane Richmond said that it wasn’t clear who was the bigger “Twitter tool,” Ashton or Oprah. All of these comments, of course, ignored the fact that Kutcher was using his campaign to raise money for malaria relief efforts, and has in fact raised a total of almost $1-million, according to a recent tweet.

So Ashton is more or less using Twitter as the 21st-century version of Jerry Lewis’s telethon for muscular dystrophy. That isn’t the interesting thing about his use of the social network, at least as far as I’m concerned. Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself — although there could well be an aspect of grandstanding to it, as there is for many people — it seems clear that the actor has thought fairly seriously about the implications of Twitter from a media-industry standpoint (my friend Andrew Cherwenka seems to agree). And as a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

Keep reading »

Steve Brill wants to try charging for content online… again

By Mathew Ingram

In the media industry, the name Steven Brill tends to bring back a lot of memories. The founder of CourtTV and Brill’s Content, he went on to create a new media entity called Inside, which was staffed with writers from Fortune and other leading publications. But the venture eventually folded. As more and more content moved online, Brill later tried to create a venture known as Contentville, which he envisioned as a sort of one-stop shop for content of all kinds — text, photos, video, audio — which publishers and distributors could offer through his online store.

Sound familiar? It should, because Brill is trying to revive the idea through a new project called Journalism Online, which he and his new partners announced this week. But the new venture has an unusual twist that Contentville — which eventually shut down due to a lack of revenue — did not.

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Defending Gina Chen and her journalism “rule-breaking”

By Mathew Ingram

Gina M. Chen, a veteran journalist and editor who works at The Post-Standard in Syracuse, N.Y., writes an excellent blog called “Save The Media,” which is aimed at helping journalists get used to some of the new tools in social media.

Chen’s recent post, titled “10 ‘Journalism Rules’ You Can Break on Your Blog,” caused a stir in my newsroom at The Globe and Mail. One of my colleagues, for example, suggested that the post was irresponsible and that such rule-breaking is one of the reasons there is a “credibility gap” between bloggers and mainstream journalists.

You can read Chen’s post for the full list, but among other things, she suggested that bloggers should:

• Use partial or fake names because “there are times on a blog that what a person says as an indication of public sentiment is more important than who said it.”
• Tell only part of the story because “the beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed.”
• Insert an opinion because “I think readers appreciate knowing that journalists have feelings, opinions, lives that shape how they view the world.”
• Link to the enemy because “with blogging, you can give your readers the best — even if it’s not from your staff.”
• Get personal because “you’re creating a community; that community wants to know you’re a person, not a robot.”
• Answer your critics because “blogging is a conversation with readers. If someone criticizes your post or raises an opposing point of view, you should respond.”
• Fix your mistakes because “I still don’t want to make any mistakes, but if I do, I can fix it in real time, not just run a correction the next day that few may see.”

So is this list an invitation to be careless, cut corners and risk your credibility as a journalist, as my colleague suggested? Hardly. I would argue that nearly every suggestion on Chen’s list makes perfect sense. Breaking these so-called rules not only isn’t bad, it could improve the practice of online journalism.

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Why Nick Carr is wrong on Google as a middleman for news

By Mathew Ingram

After seeing recommendations on Twitter from Clay Shirky and others, I was expecting a tour de force from author and former Harvard Business Review editor Nick Carr, but I confess that I found his post on Google as middleman — and its effect on newspapers — disappointing. Not just because the middleman comparison is one that has been made repeatedly over the past couple of years, and therefore doesn’t really add much to the conversation, but also because I think he is wrong. Or rather, I think that his description has some merit, but the lessons he draws are flawed, and ultimately unhelpful for newspapers (I would have put some of these thoughts into a comment, but Nick says he has disabled comments on his blog because they are too distracting).

Is Google a “middleman made of software,” as Nick describes it? In many ways, yes. And as he points out, entities that act as middlemen in a market typically act in their own interest. But what about his third point, in which he says:

The broader the span of the middleman’s control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman’s power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here. The broader the control that Google has over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater its power — but that power doesn’t lessen the power of Google’s suppliers. If anything, in fact, it amplifies it. Does Google indexing my website, and providing a link to it when someone searches for my name, lessen the power that I have over my content? If you think of power as control over who sees the content and where, then yes. But in reality, it provides me with far more reach than I could otherwise achieve on my own, by exposing that content to people.

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A Twitter workshop for journalists

By Mathew Ingram

I did a workshop about Twitter yesterday for some of the journalists I work with at the Globe and Mail, and uploaded it to our internal wiki — and then I figured I might as well upload it to Slideshare so others could see it as well. I’ve embedded it in this post, and you are free to share it or download it as you wish. I took a couple of slides out that had Globe-related traffic data in them — traffic pushed to stories by Twitter — but other than that it’s as I gave it (without my witty commentary, of course). I’m happy to say that while there was a range of knowledge in the room when it came to Twitter and social media, from a general familiarity to virtual nothing at all, I detected a lot of openness to the idea of using such tools to connect with readers in different ways.

I tried to make a number of points in the workshop, among them that Twitter is extremely simple to use (so why not give it a shot); that yes, it has a silly name, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful or valuable (Google had a silly name at one point too); that it is a great way of a) reaching out to and connecting with users, b) promoting our stories and c) finding sources for stories (otherwise known as “real people”); and that there are a number of tools that can make it even more useful (Tweetdeck, etc.). I also noted that you really only get out of it what you are prepared to put into it, and that the experience depends a lot on whom you choose to follow. And just to drive the point about promoting our stories home, I noted that our most-read story ever appears to have racked up a lot of those views because of Twitter.

Revenue 2.0: Practical solutions

By Mathew Ingram

As almost everyone is well aware by now, there’s been a never-ending roll call of doom in the newspaper business for some time — papers closing, companies filing for bankruptcy, massive layoffs and so on. Some have chosen to deal with this by clinging to the old “accentuate the positive” approach, but the most optimistic signs by far have been the journalists who are forging ahead (such as the InDenverTimes, an online startup staffed by laid-off Rocky Mountain News reporters and editors) and trying to come up with concrete solutions, instead of moaning about how much better everything would be if we could only convince people to pay 50 cents every time they read a story on a newspaper’s website.

One of the most recent efforts at developing practical solutions was the Revenue 2.0 project, which came together for a brainstorming session last weekend in Washington, D.C. aimed at revenue-generating ideas that newspapers of all kinds could implement right now. The project started with a manifesto, in which the group declared that “unlike recent confabs of executives, editors and academics, we are hands-on professionals charged with delivering media solutions every day” and added:

We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy. The latest report from Pew concurs. Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it from advertising.

The group was brought together by Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design and Matt Mansfield of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, a former deputy managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News. They set out four practical goals:

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The Guardian ups the ante on APIs

By Mathew Ingram

The New York Times was the first major newspaper to take its cue from Google and open up its data via an API (which stands for application programming interface). In a nutshell, this allows developers to write programs that can automatically access the New York Times database, within certain limits, and use that data in mashups, etc. Now the Guardian newspaper in Britain has upped the ante: not only has it opened its data up via an API, but it has also done two things that the NYT has not — namely, it provides the full text of its articles to users of the API (while the Times restricts developers to an excerpt only) and it also allows the data to be used in for-profit ventures, while the Times restricts its data to non-profit purposes.

As Shafqat at NewsCred notes on his blog, these two differences are pretty important, and I would argue that the Guardian has really put its money where its mouth is in terms of turning its paper into a platform (to use the title of a blog post I wrote when the NYT came out with its open API). Not to denigrate what the Times has done at all, mind you — an API of any kind is a huge leap, and one that many newspapers likely wouldn’t have the guts to take, limits or no limits. But to provide full-text access to all Guardian news articles going back to 1999, and to allow all of this data and more to be used in profit-making ventures as well, takes the whole effort to another level entirely.

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Google exec, NYT go hyper-local

By Mathew Ingram

There’s an interesting battle shaping up in the “hyper-local” online journalism market, at least in the New York and New Jersey area. The New York Times confirmed on Monday that it is launching a new project called The Local, in co-operation with journalism students at the City University of New York. The network of local blog sites will reportedly start with Clinton Hill and Fort Greene in Brooklyn and Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange in New Jersey, and will apparently cover the usual neighbourhood fare such as schools, restaurants, crime and government. After the launch was mentioned by a local blog called Brownstoner (and also by PaidContent), blogger and journalism prof Jeff Jarvis wrote a post describing how he was working on a local-blogging project and happened to run into someone from the NYT, and the two agreed to co-operate on a joint venture. As Jarvis describes it:

In each of these two pilots, they’ll have one journalist reporting but also working with the community in new ways. The Times’ goal, like ours, is to create a scalable platform (not just in terms of technology but in terms of support) to help communities organize their own news and knowledge. The Times needs this to be scalable; it can’t afford to – no metro paper can or has ever been able to afford to – pay for staff in every neighborhood.

A spirited battle subsequently broke out in the comments section of Jarvis’s post, and on Twitter, between the blogger and Howard Owens — the former head of digital media for GateHouse Media (which recently settled a contentious lawsuit with the New York Times over one of the “hyper-local” sites run by Boston.com). Owens said he was skeptical of the plan, in part because of the failure of previous local journalism networks such as Backfence and YourHub, and made the point that local staff need to be in each community. Jarvis and Owens then got into a debate over (I think) whether the staff working for such a hyper-local site should be primarily professional journalists or people who emerge from the community itself.

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How The Globe and Mail uses social media to engage its audience

By Mathew Ingram

I gave a short presentation at the Podcamp Toronto “unconference” a few days ago about some of the things we’re doing at The Globe and Mail (the national daily newspaper I work for in Toronto, for those of you from elsewhere), and a number of people asked me if I would be putting the slides up anywhere. So I uploaded them to Slideshare and have embedded the presentation here in this post. They don’t include my witty banter, of course, but I may add that later if I get ambitious.

Here’s the condensed version: Keep reading »

WSJ: We charge, why aren’t you?

By Mathew Ingram

Not a day goes by without someone adding their thoughts to the growing pile of opinion about what newspapers should do when it comes to charging for content online. The latest treatise comes from L. Gordon Crovitz, a columnist with the Wall Street Journal — whose opinion is notable if only because his publication is one of the few that actually does so successfully. Not only that, but Crovitz is also the former publisher of the WSJ and the former head of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group, and helped launch the Factiva information group. As he describes it:

For a decade beginning in the late 1990s, I was the Dow Jones executive chiefly charged with defending the paid-subscription business model of The Wall Street Journal’s Web site. The skunk at every Internet-bubble-era garden party, the Journal team was often told we “just didn’t get it,” that information wants to be free and the paid model was idiotic.

Is there just a little gloating there, underneath the surface? Possibly — and perhaps some of it is justified. In any case, Crovitz wants to make the case that newspaper publishers gave up too easily in the fight to charge for content, and that they need to think about how to make their content worth paying for instead of whining about it quite so much. And he notes that there are many examples of publications and services that get people to pay for what they produce:

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The micropayment debate continues

By Mathew Ingram

Is it possible to be fascinated by an issue and yet tired of it at the same time? If so, then micropayments for online news pretty much fits that bill for me. I know that it’s a crucial time for the newspaper business (which pays my salary), and I know that many thoughtful and intelligent people believe that micropayments are the answer to the industry’s woes — including former news executive Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur, and whose recent argument about paying for things I took on in this post. But there has been an awful lot of talk about the issue over the past few weeks and months, including some excellent pieces by Clay Shirky and others (I’ve collected a list of the major ones at my personal blog if you’re interested).

And still the debate continues. The Freakonomics blog at the New York Times is the latest to throw its rhetorical hat into this particular ring, which seems fitting given the authors’ focus on the conjunction of economics and society. Both Alan Mutter and Clay Shirky show up in this forum as well, making similar arguments — the former in favour of micropayments, which he says will overcome the “Original Sin” of giving content away for free online, adding that readers wouldn’t mind being nickel-and-dimed “if the content were sufficiently unique and compelling.”

Shirky, meanwhile, argues that:

Online, small payments only work when the collector of those payments has end-to-end control of delivery, generally by controlling the hardware or software the user has access to. (This is true of all metered billing, in fact.)

and adds:

The fantasy that small payments will save publishers as they move online is really a fantasy that monopoly pricing power can be re-established over we users. Invoking the magic word “micropayments” is thus grabbing the wrong end of the stick; if online publishers had that kind of pricing power, micropayments wouldn’t be necessary. And since they don’t have that pricing power, micropayments won’t provide it.

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Alan Mutter’s question backfires

By Mathew Ingram

Alan Mutter is a former journalist-turned-entrepreneur who writes an excellent blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, where he takes on various aspects of the newspaper industry from time to time. One of his recent posts, however, tries to make a point about the validity — or necessity — of charging for content online by using author and journalist/blogger Jeff Jarvis as an example. Not only does his post fail to make this case, but it actually winds up making the exact opposite point.

Mutter’s argument, in a nutshell, is that while Jeff Jarvis is telling everyone that they should be giving their content away for nothing, and that “free is a business model,” he himself is selling an old-fashioned book the old-fashioned way — for cash, in other words — as well as a version for the Kindle e-book reader and a video of himself making some of the central points from the book. As Mutter puts it:

Given Jeff’s deeply held belief that content should be free, why is he charging a retail price of $26.99 for his new book?

The central thesis of Jeff’s book, “What Would Google Do?”, seems to be that music, news stories, legal advice and other types of intellectual property should be free to roam the web to create links and communities which, somehow, Providence eventually will monetize.

So, why is Jeff charging $27.99 for the audio version of his new book?

This no doubt seemed like a slam-dunk argument to Alan. After all, as he notes towards the end of his post, Jarvis even admits in his book that he is “a hypocrite” for not just giving his book away online (although it’s worth noting that you can read the entire thing through his publisher’s website, if you so desire). But I think Jarvis is actually a little too hard on himself in that quote, and that Mutter draws almost exactly the wrong conclusion from this case.

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“Locally grown” news gets a boost

By Mathew Ingram

It’s easy to spend a lot of time focusing on what’s wrong with the way newspapers and other media outlets are dealing with the Web, because let’s face it, there’s plenty of material (a great recent post along those lines is this one from Lectroid.net). But I think it’s worth noting some of the positive things that are going on, and some of the interesting experiments in doing things differently. One that I came across recently is Georgia-based journalism professor Leonard Witt’s “representative journalism” or RepJ project. I found out about it because Witt just recently received a grant of $1.5-million from the Harnisch Foundation to set up a Center for Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University. In his description of Representative Journalism, Witt says:

As mass journalism markets unbundle and become niche markets, news operations, if they are to survive, will have to join the niche movement rather than fight it. Rather than think in terms of a circulation of, let’s say, 100,000, they should think in terms of 100 niche markets of 1,000 each and form membership communities around those niches.

The centerpiece for each membership community will be the news and information tailored to each community’s needs, with a reporter and editing support devoted specifically to each community of 1,000. Online social networking, interactivity, face-to-face events will all be used to build group cohesion.

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The NYT and “real-time news”

By Mathew Ingram

On Saturday, the “public editor” of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, published a long discussion of a story the newspaper had recently reported, and how problematic it was for the Times, and titled his column “Reporting in Real Time.” The original story was about how New York Governor David Paterson had decided not to appoint Caroline Kennedy (who later withdrew from the race) to the Senate because of concerns about a tax issue and an incident involving a nanny with an expired visa. But as the story evolved, it appeared that the Times had been played by an anonymous source within the Governor’s office who wanted to slam Kennedy (as described in this NYT followup).

In his description of the events, Hoyt says reporters knew that the paper’s policy is to avoid the use of anonymous sources if the quote in question is damaging to the subject of the story, but they checked with a senior editor and the decision was made to proceed — in part because “the New York Post had just beaten The Times by nine minutes in publishing its Kennedy-had-problems story.” The editor who gave the original story the green light told Hoyt that “there was a sense of expediency because it’s a very competitive story.” Although the original version of the story that was posted to the website was about the Paterson claims, it evolved through the day and eventually the claims were effectively discredited in what had by that time turned into a very different story.

Is this an example of how the news business is evolving online in real-time, or an example of how a newspaper can screw up its reporting on a competitive news story? Hoyt seems to see it as the latter, saying “The Internet is The Times’s future. But the Kennedy saga is a sharp reminder that a newspaper that prides itself on getting things right must exercise great discipline before pushing the button on a fast-breaking story.” But is that really the case?

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Please pay us for our news — please?

By Mathew Ingram

As the financial pressures on newspapers continue to increase, the chorus of voices calling out for a new kind of payment scheme grow louder and louder. Some, like New York Times writer David Carr, have argued that newspapers should be able to concoct some form of “iTunes for news” that would allow them to pool their resources and charge users for their content (provided they get a waiver from the anti-trust authorities, of course). Others — including Carr’s boss Bill Keller, in a recent interview — have mused aloud about whether they couldn’t just re-erect the old pay wall and convince some people to pay for the news that way.

The latest voices to add themselves to this chorus are Stu Bykofsky of the Philadelphia Daily News and veteran journalist and author Walter Isaacson, writing in Time magazine. Bykofsky wrote a piece that managed to hit pretty much every highlight (or lowlight) of the crotchety old newspaperman genre: bloggers can’t replace journalists, every other outlet copies the news from newspapers, and if it wasn’t for the darn Internet we would all be a lot better off. Isaacson is less crotchety, but still thinks that advertising isn’t a suitable business model (even though it has been the driving force behind the newspaper business for half a century or so) He and Bykofsky both think maybe micro-payments are the way to go (and the latter recommends a few lawsuits aimed at Google, just for good measure).

As Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist points out (along with a few others), this entire argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. Newspapers have *never* been paid directly by readers for the news. When readers pay for a paper at the box or at the store or by subscription, they are paying for a small fraction of the content in the newspaper — maybe the first half a dozen pages or so, for a large metropolitan daily. Everything else is paid for by advertising. What newspapers have been in the business of doing is aggregating attention and influence, which they then transfer to advertisers in return for cash and other items of value.

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Newspaper staff cuts: Good news?

By Mathew Ingram

At the risk of being burned at the stake by my fellow journalists, I wanted to pass along a thought that occurred to me recently about the wave of layoffs and mass firings that has been rolling through newsrooms across North America — namely, what if this is actually a good thing? Please, hear me out before you arrive at my doorstep with pitchforks and torches.

In order to agree with me, you would have to admit that there are a lot of newspapers (and I know of many personally) that haven’t been moving quite as quickly as they might towards an online future. To a large extent, these papers have been insulated from the need to change by a healthy cash balance, a lock on local advertising markets, a magnanimous owner, a sense of entitlement, etc. (feel free to pick more than one).

What better way to force some change than by administering a large but hopefully non-lethal shock to the system?

With the advertising-revenue wolf clearly at the door, managers at these papers can and have moved swiftly to shed entire categories of sub-editors, to reconfigure the desk system, to merge Web and print duties where they might not have been merged before, and so on — many of these necessary and even crucial changes. Even papers with strong unions have been able to accomplish this, because the economic necessity is so obvious.

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Reuters: An editor-in-chief Twitters

By Mathew Ingram

David Schlesinger, the editor-in-chief of Reuters News, has a fascinating post up at his blog, Full Disclosure — a fitting title, given the topic of the post. Schlesinger writes about how he has been Twittering from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and how his Twitter messages (or “tweets,” as people insist on calling them) actually beat his own wire service, as described in a post at Silicon Alley Insider. The news? That billionaire financier George Soros believes the current economic downturn could be worse than the Great Depression, and that as much as $15-trillion might be needed to save the banking system.

As Schlesinger notes in the post, people have raised a number of issues about this practice, including:

Is it journalism?

Is it dangerous?

Is it embarrassing that my tweets even beat the Reuters newswire?

Am I destroying Reuters standards by encouraging tweeting or blogging?

to which he says he answers: “Yes, Potentially, No and No.” In a comment on the Silicon Alley Insider post, he continues:

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J.P. Morgan: “Significant headwinds” for newspapers

By Mathew Ingram

I’m not sure how much J.P. Morgan likes their brokerage research reports making their way out into the world through document-sharing sites such as Scribd, but the firm’s investment overview for 2009 — entitled “Nothing But Net” — is available (for now) through that service, and it has some sobering things to say about the newspaper industry. This isn’t news to anyone who has been following the business of late, but seeing it described so bluntly is still a bit of a shock. Here’s the important chunk:

“In our opinion, newspapers face a significant number of headwinds that will likely contribute to this decline. First, we believe consumer news consumption behavior is changing.

Magazines and newspapers usually have a significant lag time between the news occurrence and its publication, as the process of writing, printing, and distribution is complex. Therefore, instead of reading newspapers, consumers are becoming more dependent on the Internet for breaking news. Secondly, we think newspapers have failed to manage their cost structure. In our view, they try to be the source for all news, and we think this model is unsustainable.

We think recent layoffs will hinder newspapers from broadly covering all news and will thus make them even more irrelevant to the hyper-local or vertical-specific blogs and postings on the Internet. Instead, we think newspapers need to allocate more resources to investigative journalism. This would enable newspaper companies to provide exclusive content and more in-depth opinions that could be difficult to glean from citizen journalists.

Finally, blogs have existed long enough that they are becoming mainstream, with some bloggers making their living off the blogs. As a result, we think some bloggers and publications have become as trusted a news source and opinion provider as traditional media. Thus, we think that when the economy recovers, newspaper dollar losses will go to the Internet.”

All in all, not a bad analysis, I think.

The Policy Wiki: A social experiment

By Mathew Ingram

After about 15 years writing about business and technology for both the print and the online versions of the Globe and Mail (a daily national newspaper based in Toronto), I moved into a newly-created job a few months ago as the Globe’s “Communities Editor.” It’s still evolving, but in a nutshell my job involves thinking about, developing and implementing new ways of interacting with our readers online, as well as helping to improve some of the ways in which we already do that — such as the comment feature on our news stories, which we were one of the first newspapers in North America to offer, but which needs some additional features in order for it to be truly useful.

As part of that mandate, I helped launch a site called the Public Policy Wiki several weeks ago. A joint venture between the paper and the Dominion Institute (a non-profit agency dedicated to improving the dialogue about public policy in Canada), it’s a combination of a traditional wiki — that is, a publicly-editable resource similar to Wikipedia — and a public discussion forum, with comments and voting features as well. In many ways, it’s a kind of social-media mashup aimed at pulling in suggestions from readers and other concerned Canadians about public policy issues (the Obama administration has also experimented with this kind of idea, with what it called the Citizen’s Briefing Book).

Right from the beginning, the wiki was designed to be an experiment — something we could learn from, and get ideas for future projects involving social media of all kinds. My approach was to adopt something similar to the “rapid prototyping” approach used by many online technology startups: get something out the door in beta, and see what happens. Of course, as many people who have worked at newspapers probably know, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing that traditional media entities are used to doing — not to mention the fact that the last time a newspaper experimented with a wiki (the Los Angeles Times in 2005) it ended rather badly.

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GateHouse-NYT Co. deal: A bad precedent for the web

By Mathew Ingram

It’s going to take some time to think through the implications of the settlement (PDF link) announced today between the New York Times Co. and GateHouse Media, over the issue of NYT’s Boston.com site aggregating content from local sites belonging to GateHouse, but my first instinct is that it is almost unrelentingly bad. Why? Because while the settlement is not a legally-binding precedent — the one piece of what might be called good news — it still involves the New York Times voluntarily refraining from what many would argue is perfectly defensible behaviour. As Joshua Benton notes in his post here, that could well embolden other publications to launch similar cases, on the assumption that if the NYT caved then someone else might too.

The Times tries to argue that this settlement does nothing to change the way it approaches linking to or even quoting from external sources on its websites, but that clearly isn’t the case at all. It completely changes the way the paper does that, but only when the content involves a GateHouse website. The NYT claims that it will continue to link to and quote from external sources whenever it wants, but will no longer do so with GateHouse content (under the agreement it can continue to link, but can no longer aggregate content in an automated way, and has agreed not to quote from a GateHouse site).

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Tracking breaking news on Twitter

By Mathew Ingram

By now, I would hope that most journalists with an interest in online or social media have heard about Twitter, and are at least open to the idea (if they haven’t adopted it entirely) that this group-chat/instant messaging hybrid can be a powerful tool for tracking breaking news events. For me, the tipping point was probably the Chinese earthquake last year, followed by a series of forest fires in California. Twitter and other social-media tools such as Facebook helped spread the news about the latter so quickly that a study by sociologists later found they did a better job than either the official emergency information networks or the traditional media.

More recent events, such as the emergency landing of a US Airways jet in the middle of the Hudson River and the inauguration of President Barack Obama, have only reinforced how much a part of the news cycle social-media Twitter has become. In some cases it functions more as a social network than a news-delivery mechanism, but it is still fascinating to watch, and it can provide instantaneous crowd reaction to an event in ways that are definitely newsworthy. During the inauguration, for example, I was live-blogging for the newspaper I work for, and we were also feeding people’s Twitter posts and thoughts into the blog.

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Many newspapers are healthy — some owners, not so much

By Mathew Ingram

Amid all the doom and gloom about newspapers laying off staff and closing bureaus and even — as in the case of Tribune Co., parent company of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun — filing for bankruptcy, there has been very little attention paid to one of the main reasons for those cutbacks and business failures. And I’m not talking about a decline in journalistic principles or the sudden departure of advertisers for other online properties, or anything as apocalyptic as that. One of the main reasons has very little to do with journalism or even the Internet, and everything to do with the world of mergers and acquisitions.

That reason, as one or two astute observers have pointed out (including former newspaper exec Alan Mutter at his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, and most recently a commenter at the popular political blog Talking Points Memo) is debt. In the case of Tribune Co. — acquired by corporate raider Sam “Grave Dancer” Zell — and several other major newspapers as well, acquisitions and corporate financing have created the conditions that led to much of the pain they have inflicted on the papers they own. Tribune Co. has built up a staggering debt load of $13-billion, and and chains like McClatchy have accumulated their own unwieldy debts over the past few years, by acquiring newspapers from family firms and smaller chains.

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Meet: Mathew Ingram

By Mathew Ingram

Hello, readers. My name is Mathew Ingram, and I’m a journalist with the Globe and Mail, a daily newspaper in Toronto and one of Canada’s two national newspapers. I’ve been a business reporter, stock-market columnist, online technology writer and (most recently) a blogger for the Globe over the past 15 years or so, and recently became the paper’s first “communities editor.” My main role in that job is to think about all the ways in which we interact with our readers — from story comments and blogs to wikis, Twitter, Facebook, and everything in between — and how we can do that better.

To many people, this may seem like a terrible time to be a newspaper journalist. After all, newspapers are closing up shop, shutting down their print editions, filing for bankruptcy, and generally sliding deeper and deeper into irrelevance, aren’t they? Well, yes and no. Yes, a major newspaper — the Christian Science Monitor — recently decided to stop printing a daily edition, and yes, Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy, saddled by billions of dollars in debt. Other papers are struggling financially as well, including the venerable New York Times. Does all of this fill me with gloom? Not at all.

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