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The way to fight print circulation declines isn’t to move away from good print journalism, but to embrace what makes print a great platform for great journalism.
My advice to publishers: Embrace the web as the web; celebrate print as print. Don’t try to transfer one mindset on the other.
""Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on)."
— Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The Future’
Hey, better than running it in print first and posting to the web a week after the fact (FAIL Blog).
This is an absolutely fantastic post that lays out the major issues with making your newsroom function on a print-first work flow. Read it and if you’re stuck in print-first mode, heavily consider switching.
"Turns out, the Gulf Region still likes their print. In fact, arguably the region’s best newspaper launched just three years ago. In the U.S. we have the Huffington Post overtaking the Washington Post in online audience, but in the UAE it’s the upstart National shaking up the region – in print."
— Hey, Old Media curmudgeons: Dubai may be for you!(Print is still ‘king’ in Gulf region).
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…traditional media outlets don’t particularly want to hear what people have to say. They want to create content and have people consume it.
“Newspapers don’t like to hear the voice of people, and they are especially disturbed by the voice of assholes,” [Jeff Jarvis says].
Often online, it seems like the voice of disgruntled users is the one that is the loudest, and becomes most prominent. Jarvis says this is only natural given the nature of most commenting systems.
“We allow comments only after we are done with what we’re doing. It’s inherently insulting. We finish our work or stories and say, “Now you can talk about them.”
Jarvis thinks that feedback would be much more useful during the process of writing a story. Of course, many publications are using their comments to fuel new stories and continue the reporting process. But for Jarvis, that’s not good enough. He thinks that the crowd would be more influential during the process of creating stories.
"— Jeff Jarvis: Online comments should be more like Twitter | Econsultancy
This chart lists a bunch of newspapers, their circulation, paywall rate and number of subscribers per site. It’s an absolutely fantastic reference for the next time someone asks you how feasible it would be to put up a paywall on your site.
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Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the American Society of News Editors yesterday in D.C. As part of an apparent strategy of mollifying the media, he insulted the integrity and professionalism of bloggers and the quality of blogs. You know. Like this one.
“There is an art to what you do,” he said to the real journalists. “And if you’re ever confused as to the value of newspaper editors, look at the blog world. That’s all you need to see. So we understand how fundamental tradition and the things you care about are.”
"— What the hell is Eric Schmidt’s problem? (via ReadWriteWeb)
Happy Friday (via The Onion).
Newspapers and magazines should take note of what Penguin is doing here. You build content for the platform; you don’t try to force your preferred form of media into it (a la newspapers to the Web).
I’m surprised Spidey got by this long. I mean, he’s a photojournalist and he doesn’t even shoot video? (Rough economy? Just ask unemployed Spider-Man (AP))
