Archive for the ‘Web’ Category

Here’s a column I wrote for the Aug. 1 Birmingham News.

Viewpoint: There are Real Perils in non-stop news

By CARL CARTER

The principle that “more isn’t always better” is well-known and preached by every doctor dispensing medicine, every mother fighting with her teenage daughter about make-up and everybody who’s ever nursed a hangover.

But we still can’t seem to grasp that reality when it comes to news. We check our iPhones and BlackBerries constantly during the day for the latest tidbit. Fox and CNN keep up a constant stream, trying desperately to keep the news fresh hour after hour. On most days, it doesn’t matter much. We consume a lot of trivia and pick up some “facts” that get reversed by dinnertime, but there’s little harm done. But when something goes wrong, as it did with the recent Shirley Sherrod fiasco, it can get ugly very quickly.

For those who’ve been in a cave, the drama started when conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a video at 11:18 a.m. on Tuesday, July 18, showing Sherrod describing her supposed discrimination against a white Georgia farmer who risked losing his home. Several conservative outlets immediately picked up the story, and soon, mainstream media were reporting it. Before 8 p.m. the same day, Sherrod had resigned under pressure.

Naturally, pundits and politicians are using this as the basis for a “national conversation about race,” and that may well be in order. But it’s also a good opportunity for a national conversation about how we consume news.

Today’s nonstop news cycle has stripped us of the safeguards that traditionally have filtered out the trivia and brought us dependable news about what really mattered.

The turning point came in 1980, when Ted Turner founded CNN. The next big change came 15 years later with the introduction of the first browser, making possible the World Wide Web. While broadband was still a luxury, dial-up Internet service became ubiquitous in short order, and before long, it was impossible to escape the minute-by-minute flow of news.

Before the nonstop spigots opened up, the day’s news was driven largely by newspapers and TV stations. Reporters covered meetings, trials and other events. Others worked the phones, interviewing sources for features or backgrounders. When a major story broke, there would typically be several hours before a story had to be finalized for the next issue or the next newscast. An experienced editor would ask hard questions. He or she would point out angles that needed to be checked, and facts that needed to be independently confirmed. Editors and reporters would huddle and debate these and other questions:

+ Is this credible?

+ Does the source have an ax to grind?

+ Is there another legitimate side to the story?

+ Is it true?

+ Is it significant?

When the Sherrod story broke, there was no time for such questions. Even though everybody knew the video came from a source with a partisan history and a spotty record for accuracy, some media accepted it at face value, not realizing the tape had been heavily edited to convey precisely the opposite of what Sherrod was saying.

To its credit, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quickly checked out the story with the wife of the farmer Sherrod had supposedly wronged, and they put a story on the Web early in the day saying Sherrod had, in fact, kept the family out of bankruptcy. Other media? Not so much.

By the end of the day, Sherrod had been drummed out of her USDA job.

The reality is that, for all the ebb and flow of noise during the day, practically every important news story can be told in a few paragraphs. Anybody who wants to stay informed can do so with a

daily read of his or her local newspaper, supplemented by one mainstream national source, such as The New York Times or The Washington Post.

For years, we were protected by the filters of the media. It sometimes felt like deprivation or censorship, and sometimes, it was, but it was far more efficient. Now, those filters are gone, and they won’t be reinstalled. The lessons of the Sherrod story may slow the media down a bit, but, ultimately, it’s up to us, as news consumers, to decide how to most efficiently stay informed.

Carl Carter is president of NewMediaRules Communications, based in Birmingham, and is a former Birmingham News reporter. He writes about media issues at www.overcoffeemedia.com.

The Christian Science Monitor was one of the first – and one of the best – experiments in largely abandoning print in favor of online news distribution. The Boston-based newspaper has always been small but widely respected. Unfortunately, respect doesn’t pay the bills.

Poynter’s Rick Edmonds followed up with an update on how the experiment is working out. (Before I get away from this, Edmonds needs to be on your reading list if you follow developments in the world of journalism. Nobody does a better job of covering the business side of media.)

• 93% of the CSM’s subscribers 43,000 subscribers agreed to subscribe to the publication’s new weekly news magazine, which now has an even larger audience: 67,000 paying the full rate of $97 per year, with another 18,000 at a reduced trial subscription rate. I keep saying (and hoping) that readers are looking for some depth and perspective to balance out the flow of trivia that bombards us each day. The Christian Science Monitor has always provided that, and apparently its weekly product continues that tradition well.
• Unique visitors to the web site, which carries the daily news load, are up 20 percent from April.

It is worth noting that half the Christian Science Monitor’s budget comes from an endowment and subsidy by the Church of Christ, Scientist. Their strategy might not translate to an environment that has to be self-sustaining.

If you haven’t read Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair article about Politico, you’re cheating yourself.  Politico.com is a virtual case study on why good journalism is destined to survive even if the newspapers were to disappear. During the presidential campaign, the organization emerged as the “go to” source for solid, authoritative coverage that matched or trumped anything the Washington Post or New York Times could produce.

And here’s the real kicker: While we think of Politico primarily as a web site, it’s actually making money off its print product, even though it gives away its content free on the web site, which can’t support the organization by itself because Internet ad rates are too low.

How does this differ from what the “newspapers” are doing? It starts with the understanding that the product itself is the reporting. The story. It’s pure information, and the way we read it is secondary. Newspapers have the tail (the print medium) wagging the dog (the story). They still think the product is the thing that gets ink on our fingers.

Fortunately, there are others at places like Politico, Salon, Slate and a few hundred local web-based news startups who can tell difference.

The first true “online” service I ever used was CompuServe. It was a packet switched service (ask your granddaddy who worked for the phone company) and was dial-up at 300 bps. It cost $6 an hour, which was a bargain in those days. Its e-mail at first wouldn’t reach beyond the CompuServe system itself, but it eventually did. It made it possible for me, for the first time, to communicate effectively with internal clients in Australia. It brought me news, weather, and a little fun stuff. Eventually it got swallowed up by America Online, which had become the first packet network to offer a portal connecting users through to the Internet.

Once the World Wide Web appeared in 1994, it was easy to see that the old online services would die. It’s amazing they lasted as long as they did, because they charged for content that people were able to get directly on the Internet. Sound familiar?

Editor & Publisher reports that the amount of time people spend on newspaper web sites is “stuck in neutral if not reverse.” Of the 30 top newspaper sites, the average time spent at 17 of them declined in May 2009 vs. May 2008. Most of the declines were modest — some just a few seconds. For example, the New York Times time online went from 28:52 to 27.34, and USA Today went from 13 minutes to 12 minutes and 11 seconds. Time spent at the Washington Post dropped more significantly, from 16:04 to 10:58. But let’s remember that last May, we were in the middle of a heated presidential election, and The Washington Post is a top destination for political news. And some were up considerably, including the San Francisco Chronicle.

The most interesting result to me was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which saw user time drop by about half even though the print version was no longer available in May 2009. Is that a signal that the print product supports the online version?

USA Today’s new President David Hunke told Editor & Publisher he might begin offering some paid content. (E&P story.)

One thing is for certain: Hunke doesn’t mind taking bold measures. He was the CEO of the Detroit Media Partnership when it decided recently to cut printing for the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press to three days a week.

USA Today’s a different animal, and he said he doesn’t plan to cut printing there. But it does sound like he’s thinking in terms of holding back some content and making readers pay for it. He didn’t tip his hand much beyond that. It could follow the Wall Street Journal’s current model, in which you have to pay for much more than first couple of paragraphs of most stories. Or he could be thinking of something along the lines of the model recently abandoned by The New York Times, which required a subscription to read prime content such as its Op-Ed columns.

Whatever he does, it’ll have a huge impact on the industry, because USA Today is the nation’s biggest daily. Local newspapers have been copying it since the day it first appeared in 1982.

Newspapers have always conducted focus group research to refine their product. When I was a reporter and editor, we’d get called in once or twice a year for a read-out on the results. But it was always about such things as the news mix (how much national, local, business, sports etc.). And of course it was always dominated by people saying they wanted “good news,” though of course they never read it.

What the Chicago Tribune blundered into recently was different. (Background.) They were surveying readers on actual specific story ideas, apparently with the idea of using reader input to determine which stories would be pursued. This speaks somewhat to the desperation of some newspapers, who are searching for ways to keep readers and stay profitable (the Tribune is in bankruptcy). Happily, the newsroom protested, and the idea was dropped. We don’t need journalists who are testing the winds of opinion to decide what to cover. They need to listen to readers, of course, or they’ll lose touch with their audience. But decisions need to be independent.

Nobody has brought it up yet, but I suspect the current practice of inviting comments on individual stories on web sites crosses that line. Often, anonymous comments are allowed from unregistered users, and many come from people with an ax to grind. It’s impossible for reporters not to read and react to such comments, and they can find themselves tossed about by public opinion rather than simply doing the job they are paid (for the time being, at least) to do. Letters to the editor are a better way to handle such feedback, because they are filtered, and the identities of the writers are known.

One of the most useful Twitter functions is sending out headlines that lead people to media web sites. I’ve found myself dropping some feeds because they just crowd out everything else. If Google tweets everything it picks up, that may just be way too much of a good thing. But it will be interesting to watch. Information Week story.

Politico.com really arrived during the 2008 presidential campaign, and they have to be hurting the Washington Post. I got addicted to it, and it is a good reminder that the future of the news business doesn’t necessarily belong to successors of the old guard. Jon Friedman of Dow Jones is always on top of these things. Friedman’s MarketWatch story.

The New York Times reported a whopping $74 million loss, though the company said it is ahead of schedule on cost cuts with operating expenses down 9.5%.

Ad revenues were down 28.4%, and even Internet ad revenues were down by 8%. The company’s About subsidiary, which includes the popular About.com site, had a revenue drop of 4.7%.

Before we panic about the online losses, let’s not forget that the lousy economy has hurt everybody. (Yahoo! announced it was cutting another 675 workers after reporting revenues that were down 13%.)

The news continues to be bad at the NY Times’ New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe and the Boston.com web site. The company has threatened to close The Globe if it doesn’t get labor concessions. The Globe is on track to lose $85 million in 2009.