News

This week I was lucky enough to participate in an Aspen Institute conference, “Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.” The participants were an all-star bunch, including Madeleine Albright (a journalist before becoming a diplomat) for day 1, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Marissa Mayer of Google, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, and other assorted top dogs from News Corp., MediaNews Group, Associated Press, American Public Media, the Knight Foundation, etc. (Here’s the full list; it opens up a Word doc.)

A significant part of the 3-day event was devoted to business models to sustain journalism (legacy news institutions, upstart digital news entities, community bloggers, and non-profit news initiatives), and especially the idea of getting online users to pay for news, whether through force (pay-wall schemes) or persuasion (donation models).

I’ll write more about the event later, but for now I want to toss out one quick impression: It didn’t turn into the jihad over business strategy that I expected going in.

First, some context. … In recent months, some of the news industry’s leaders have made some statements that seemed to indicate that they were gearing up to put a lock on a lot of their online news content (or even all of it) and make users pay for access, that they’d seriously go after people “stealing” their content, and that even headline-and-excerpt news links might be banned. For example:

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. … We can be platform-neutral but never free.”

Tom Curley, Associated Press: “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group: “The content is ours and we can do anything with it we choose to do with it. If it’s in our best interest to give it away, we will give it away. If it’s in the best interest to charge, we will charge.”

But after spending a few days in Aspen, I returned to Boulder feeling more optimistic. While overall the news industry remains in a state of confusion, with no clear immediate solutions to the decline in legacy news organizations (especially newspapers), the outcome of the conference discussions were, I dare say, reasonable. I had feared either that the conversation would become hostile between “paid vs. free” camps, or that the group would come to bad decisions, such as a stronger move toward unity on charging for news online. Rather, I’m thinking that recent statements like those above are mostly bluster.

While it’s not clear that all news publishers will follow the quasi-consensus of the elite Aspen Institute crowd, I got a sense that for the most part, really bad moves like putting up high pay-walls on news websites won’t happen.

Here are a few quick takeaways:

• Most news publishers recognize that many revenue streams will be necessary for digital news. They’re not stuck on just advertising, just paid content, or just both; they know they’ll need more, including new models not yet devised. To quote Clay Shirky on saving the news industry: “Nothing will work, but everything may work.”
• Most everyone wants to charge for some premium content, but few think that any news publisher will be able to get money out of more than 10% of their most-loyal users. That sounds too high to me, since newspapers and other old media have cut back so much on staff and they’ll have a hard time creating content and services that online users will pay for. I didn’t sense any kind of death wish, so for the most part we’ll probably see 90%-plus of legacy news sites’ content remain free.
• That desire to find the right “freemium” model leaves room for implementing other options simultaneously, including allowing users to donate and support their favorite sites via networked donation solutions (e.g., Kachingle, whose founder was an Aspen participant), as well as tracking copyright infringement and making revenue-sharing offers to the offenders rather than punishment being the only option.
• The non-profit news sector will grow quickly, as more foundations, philanthropists, and the public become aware of the “news crisis” and support investigative and public-interest journalism as the struggling private sector falls down on that job.

More later…

A poignant video goodbye from Rocky Mountain News staff. If you love(d) newspapers, or grew up reading the Rocky as I did, it’ll bring a tear to your eye. The staff did a great job on it. Personally, I’m feeling a combination of sadness and anger. The latter is because this didn’t have to happen. But management and staff culture couldn’t change fast enough. Perhaps some good will come of the largest U.S. newspaper yet going down. Surviving metro newspapers surely can no longer ignore the need for radical change. Well, they can, but they’ll end up with their own farewell edition and video.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

My latest column for Editor & Publisher Online was posted this morning:

The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future

It’s my take on what a newspaper that’s decided to completely ditch its print edition but survive and reinvent itself as a digital-only local news entity will look like. I envision a news operation that still has enough left to be a force in the community and an effective watchdog, and run as a profitable business.

It’s looking like we’ll see that happen soon. Top candidate is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which owner Hearst Corp. has said will either be shut down soon or become a down-scaled online-only news organization. That’s of course if no buyer is found. In this economic landscape? Not likely.

Similar situations are possible in other U.S. cities.

Please discuss. … What do you think a surviving and reinvented digital “newspaper” will look like?

This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:

“Dear Parents:

“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat had been phoned in to the Police Department regarding the King Soopers at Broadway and Table Mesa. BVSD and the Boulder Police Department determined that this was not a serious threat. Nevertheless BVSD asked Summit, Fairview High School and Southern Hills Middle School to go on a heightened alert status as a precaution and we (at Summit) did so for the last couple of hours of the school day. This involved students passing only in the hallway, locking all outside doors and having administrative staff and faculty outside during passing periods and after school to increase our level of supervision. The day ended without incident.

“Please call the school if you have any questions.”

I’m happy to get these kind of alerts from the school, and this one was somewhat timely, though I would have preferred to learn of it earlier since the initial threat was received by the school at 12:45 p.m. (Previous similar instances at my kids’ various schools have seen the e-mail parent alerts come much — often, annoyingly — later.)

The principal’s note made me think that our local newspaper could better serve the community by tapping into information like this and quickly sharing it with the community at large and, in a more in-your-face way, with anyone connected to the schools affected.

When I checked the Boulder Daily Camera website about half an hour after receiving the e-mail, there was nothing about the incident at the King Soopers grocery store or the school lockdowns. I don’t mean to fault the Camera; it sounds like it ended up being not much of a story, and/or they may not have gotten word as quickly as I, as a parent, got it.

But here’s my point: Local newspapers should be plugged in to alternative news and information sources such as alerts coming out of schools. This is how I’d imagine it:

• News editors ask to be put on parent-communication e-mail lists, so reporters will learn about incidents like the above right away.
• When an alert like this comes in, post it as “breaking news” on the newspaper website. Today’s school incident might warrant nothing more than a tiny blurb on the homepage, but a more serious incident like a school shooting in progress will get prominent website play plus e-mail and mobile news alerts to subscribers.
• Ultimately, this sort of information is of most use to those connected to the schools involved: parents and relatives of kids who attend, teachers’ spouses, etc. So here we get into the notion of the “personalized news service,” where registered users of a newspaper website have filled out a profile with information including where their kids go to school. (Explain, of course, that the information is used only to provide personalized news and information.)

This afternoon’s little incident may have been so inconsequential that a news editor wouldn’t deem it worthy of publishing a write-up in the print edition or the website. Even so, it’s significant news to those people in the community associated with the three schools that were locked down. This would be an opportunity to alert just those who care about a small story. (I’d include this in what I call “micro-personal news.”)

Yes, in this case the schools themselves got the word out in a timely enough manner, given the low significance of the threat. A more serious incident — say, a gunman being hunted in the neighborhood near the school — would demand more immediate news alerts, especially to parents. In that case, the newspaper staff most likely will spread the news faster than the school principal will get around to e-mailing parents.

A personalized-news feature that will send me special digital/mobile alerts when they involve an institution that I have an interest is an element I hope we’ll see offered by local newspapers soon.

We are, after all, in the age of instant news.

I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical leave, and he was amazed at the amount of instant chatter and information being shared about the announcement.

Posted to Twitter & Twitpic

For any reporter and editor when an important event occurs — especially a local one — watching Twitter and/or Friendfeed is a great information-gathering tool. Yes, as Scoble notes, there’s a lot of noise and you don’t necessarily know who to trust. But the more you use Twitter and/or Friendfeed, the more you’ll come to know the people who you follow — so over time you can pick up a sense of what sources of instant Twitter/Friendfeed news you might trust.

Anyone can do this, of course. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River earlier today, lots of people posted to Twitter, or added eyewitness photos to Flickr, or other social networks. For an editor sitting in a newsroom overseeing coverage of this event, monitoring the social media stream of eyewitness reports could be a useful addition to the staff reporting arsenal already assigned to the crash and calling in details.

Scoble is a fan of Friendfeed, and it is indeed a useful service for something like this plane crash, since it scans a number of social media outlets. For example, check out this Friendfeed search for “Hudson crash”, which includes all sorts of stuff — from short reports by people who witnessed the crash, to an eyewitness on a ferry who took a close-up of the plane being evacuated and posted it to Twitpic via a Twitter post. (The photo became so popular that it overwhelmed the tiny Twitpic service.)

I think Scoble is correct in saying that the now wide popularity and use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the front lines of news. Most of the time for unexpected events, like plane crashes, eyewitnesses are going to be there before professional journalists.

A new role for journalists is to tap into this instant stream of eyewitness accounts. Editors can perform a public service by filtering out the best and most accurate of these early “citizen” reports, saving online users the trouble of combing through all the junk to find the nuggets.

One of the great things about Twitter, of course, is that when a big breaking news event happens, there are often witnesses on the scene with a cell phone who will post some quick tweets about what’s going on, before any reporters can get there. (You’ll remember the Continental jet that went off a Denver runway recently and one of the survivors tweeted about his experience.)

An incident a few days ago proved that’s not always the case. I woke up on New Year’s day and looked at the news on my iPhone to see what was new in the world. Top story in a bunch of places was a crazy bombing threat that shut down much of the resort city of Aspen for much of New Years Eve. By the time I heard about it, the bomber had committed suicide and there was plenty of mainstream media coverage of the story.

But I was curious to see if Twitter was a decent source of news and eyewitness tidbits the evening before, when the craziness was going on and police were roping off city blocks and defusing bombs. I checked out several services (including Twitter’s own advanced search) and looked through tweets sent on New Years Eve by people in Aspen. I was a bit surprised to find not much. Plenty of chatter about sections of the city getting roped off, but nothing from the tweeting witnesses that shed much light on what was going on.

So the local Aspen newspapers got a bit of a break in being the ones getting breaking details onto their websites as their reporters learned what was going on. Columbia Journalism Review has an article that lauds the papers’ coverage: “Aspen New Year’s Eve Bomb Threat Proves—once again—the value of a local paper.”

Egads. It was painful reading through the reader comments on this column by Mike Littwin of the Rocky Mountain News, bemoaning the impending doom of his newspaper. (It seems highly unlikely that there’s a white knight in the Rocky’s future, which means it will probably shut down in early 2009, after 150 years of serving Denver.)

Reader comment threads often bring out the loonies, and the thread on Littwin’s column was full of them blaming the Rocky’s failure on its “liberal bias.” I get the occasional e-mail from someone saying that about newspapers in general, since I write a lot about what ails the newspaper industry; I normally write off such comments as the rantings of someone who doesn’t have a clue about the news business.

(You want liberal bias in your news? Listen to or watch Democracy Now. Want right-wing bias? Watch Fox News.)

But the amount of “it’s the liberal bias that’s killing newspapers” (in a country that just elected its first Democratic black president and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress) in this comment thread surprised me; Denver is a pretty “blue” city and long has been.

To those who buy the “liberal bias” argument, I say bullshit. Do some research on the industry; read back over columns that I’ve written for Editor & Publisher Online for many years. Newspapers are suffering mightily now because of the catastrophic hit they’re taking in this recession, on top of secular changes in media consumption habits and advertising shifts that have been evolving over the last decade. On the latter, newspaper executives haven’t mustered the will to transform quickly enough to serve the digital generation, and they would have paid the price for that mistake, recession or not. The severity of this economic crisis just speeded up the process — by a lot.

If political bias in media meant anything and was a financial negative, Fox News would be but a (pleasant) memory instead of a major success story.

(Correction: I originally misspelled Mike Littwin’s name; it’s been fixed above.)

I liked media consultant Alan Mutter’s latest blog item, “It’s time to rip the lid off,” in which he urges newspapers to get serious about doing hard-hitting journalism in order to save themselves.

His advice complements my thoughts as expressed in my most recent Editor & Publisher Online column.

Publishers, now operating with severely lessened resources, need to stop focusing on the less important stuff and put everything they’ve (still) got into producing quality journalism, Mutter says.

“All but the most aggressively down-sized paper can generate excitement on a day-to-day basis by practicing the sort of muscular, crusading journalism that afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted by kicking over rocks, exposing social injustice and holding public officials and corporate leaders to account.”

It’s becoming pretty clear: Newspapers cannot continue to cut staff and cut back while continuing to try to serve everyone and try to attract new younger readers. Focus the print effort on print loyalists who are older and want serious journalism. Bring younger people to the newspaper brand by developing and improving digital offerings (web, mobile).

Sticking to the topic of “micro-personal news” (see previous blog item), John Paul Titlow wrote me the following note which responds to my September Editor & Publisher Online column, “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.” He makes some good points worth sharing, so with his permission here it is:

“I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. I am a 25 year-old news junkie and Web content delivery manager for a weekly newspaper company in Philadelphia. Personally, I am able to consume most of my ‘news’ from the home screen of my iPhone.

“That includes the NYTimes and NPR apps for iPhone, a Digg app to see what the Digg community is pushing, CNN to tune into what’s considered ‘news’ by one of the big cable players, and Google Reader (any number of Web design & tech blogs, newspaper industry sites, Reuters, about 2 dozen other sites I read).

“But what I find myself tapping just as often as Google Reader or NYTimes are Twitter and Facebook. You’re right; it’s addictive. In a few seconds, I can see what friends are tweeting or posting as their ’status’ on Facebook. It’s even called a ‘News Feed’ on Facebook.

“Before reading your column, however, I hadn’t thought of it that way — these status posts and tweets are just as much news to me as headlines about the Iraq war or tech news.

“Newspaper companies will have to find a way to leverage this. You correctly point out that the ‘open’ nature of (most) social networks and their API’s should help enable this. I would also add that recent moves towards a universal log-in (OpenID, etc.) should also make this vision of ‘news’ closer to a reality.

“Hopefully publishers will catch on before it’s too late.”

My latest column is up over at Editor & Publisher Online: “Newspapers First Need to Redefine ‘News’ to Move Forward Online.”

I’m very curious to see the reaction to this one, as I think I’m hitting some significant new ground. And if anyone can point me to examples of the global-to-micro-personal news service that I’m imagining, please do.