The Apocalypse Now Times: Handwritten Newspapers From Ravaged Japan
Proof that newspapers will survive, even during apocalypses. Newseum has this story about reporters in Tsunami-hit Japan creating
handwritten newspapers for 6 days, while the power was gone:
For six consecutive days after the twin disasters, reporters used flashlights and marker pens to write their stories on poster-size paper and posted the "newspapers" at the entrances of relief centers around the city. Six staff members collected stories, while three spent an hour and a half each day writing the newspapers by hand.
You used to find hand-drawn newspapers, created by poor kids, pasted on the pillars of Inner Circle in Connaught Place.
Getting students to create 4 - page handwritten newspapers, and spreading them with photocopies, can be an excellent way to teach news writing.
There will be no mobile towers in an apocalypse.
Labels: newspapers
The Satisfied Heart, Part2: Newspaper Front Pages After the Win
Labels: cricket, newspapers
Why Economist must be the role model for Online Journalists
Comparing struggling newsweeklies Time and Newsweek to the thriving Economist,
Matt Pressman points out the
difference between being yourself and trying to please somebody:
...instead of filling their articles with self-serving quotes from government ministers you’ve never heard of, The Economist’s correspondents just give you the essential facts and a meaningful takeaway, whether the information came from their own reporting, the local press, or some obscure think tank.
The Economist was one Western Product even Mahatma Gandhi liked.
Time and Newsweek magazines are
'Readers' Digest meets People' for the kind of people who are now getting their time-pass fix from online sources.
What makes The Economist different and successful?
1.
It is about saying the truth as it is. Do more than original reporting and analysis.
Blunt is good.
2. Fluff is bad. Worse is fluff disguised in useless, fawning interviews. The Economist is sparse with praise and full of constructive criticism.
3
Do not listen to customers. Despite what you may have heard about Americans ignoring global news, The Economist will cover news from Bangladesh if it is important enough.
4.
Be useful: Give actionable intelligence rather some self-serving interview with some corporate 'hero'.
5.
Bylines do not matter if the words and ideas are too good to gloss over.
Labels: newspapers, online journalism, print media
On Newspapers asking for preferential treatment from Google
Newspaper publishers have reportedly asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt
if Google would change the search algorithm to move their brands up in the SERPS. Before we ask how legitimate this would be, consider this:
1. Google's value as the Go To search engine would go down, if it were to do such a thing. Possibility of this happening: Less than zero.
2. Are all the stories in these big newspapers original reporting? How much of the daily output is rewriting of wire stories?
3. Contrary to perception, as Techmeme Gabe Rivera points out, big newspapers like the New York Times aggregate links too.
Labels: news business, newspapers
What We Will And Will Not Miss When Newspapers Are Gone
Seth Godin gives a figure -
2% - the budget share of investigative reporting and serious coverage of important issues at a typical paper. Seth goes on to write what he will miss when the printed newspapers are gone and his main point is: some things are best found on the web and some things only a resourceful newspaper can do.
Some people say that the majority don't care about investigative journalism.
But the customer isn't always right. Besides, investigative journalism pays out through book deals, film/TV deals and most importantly, by building brand value. People still remember The Washington Post through the Watergate Scandal.
Things that we will not miss- Sports, weather, op-eds, comics, books, theatre, restaurant and movie reviews: already available on the web
- Beat Reporting: Better done online with readers' help
- Page long ads and ads covering the front page
- The stuff that goes in newspaper production & distribution: t
rees, woodpulp, printing presses, typesetting machines, delivery trucks, those stands on the street and the newsstand- Media Owner's political opinions masquerading as news
- Unnecessary health scares
- Stories about Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Rhianna and how great Justin Timberlake is
-
"Product news" story that is just a Press Release
-
"Fresh news" that's just rehashed from other sources without attribution
Things that we will miss- Local news
- Investigative journalism: Special reports, deepr investigations
- Intelligent coverage of national news
- Editorials and op-eds that are genuine conversation starters
- Abuse of power - Uncovering corrupt officials; Examining pieces of legislation
- Political and Social Satire Cartoons: excellent sources of education
- Infographics: another excellent source of information
- The newspaper legal staff: necessary to back you up when you are up against the big guns.
- Jobs generated by publishing newspapers. Printing jobs, office jobs, delivery jobs
- Our physical relationship with the paper - and the ink. + the typography and design [e.g. The Times Magazine's elegant look]
- Cutting and sharing articles
- Crosswords and Sudoku
- The Serendipity. You never know what's on the next page
- The Sunday Section. Window shopping the Sunday ads.
- Sharing the big weekend paper with family during breakfast: and shared news experience in general
- The letters page (online, only The Economist has been able to replicate it through the letters section).
- Alternative distribution media - inserts, goods through the newspaper deliveryman
- Local Newspaper of record: Worldwide, newspapers serve important legal functions - Notices to Creditors, Calls for Tenders, Obituaries/estate notices, Notices of Hearings/Public Meetings, etc.) that are important to meet regulatory requirements
- No need of batteries and power to read the news [unless it is nighttime]
- Not being able to tell what is 'real news' and what is 'created news'
- Alternate uses for the paper: packing materials, burning, ass wiping...
- Free Clothing and blanket for the homeless.
Vote for your choice:I have created a poll on Bighow Poll about
20 things that we will miss when newspapers are gone: What will you you miss?
Recommended ReadingJeff Jarvis: Newsroom EconomicsCutting up the NewsroomLabels: news business, newspapers, poll
How Newsroom 2.0 deals with breaking news
Speaking at the DNA 2008 conference, the Telegraph Media Group's digital editor, Edward Roussel talked about their much-talked about new newsroom and
how the Telegraph newspaper deals with breaking news:
*When news breaks send out immediate alerts: SMS, email, desktop
* After 10 minutes get 150 words on the website and solicit reader help with images/video or other accounts
* Within an hour update story to 450 words and add additional images and video
* Then look to commission analysis and opinion pieces, develop a topic page with multiple angles and multimedia
Plus,
Special web pages for ‘Really big stories’.
Labels: breaking news, news 2.0, newspapers, newsroom, telegraph
What the Newsroom Fat Layer looks like (and what to do about it)
Alan D. Mutter has written about what many seasoned journalists would call the 'touchy' issue of
"How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?". His article comes in response to the recent news about the New York Times planning to lay off 100 people from the editorial pool.
It is more than a quality issue. It is a focus issue.
Let's have a look at my brief question list:
1. Do you need more people to cover Britney Spears, the G8 summit, Davos meet, Sports Event?An enlightened mind said this, pardon me for not remembering who:
"The real problem for news is not that there are too many reporters, but that there are too many reporters in the wrong places."2. Do you need more people to cover Gadgetporn, something that pays the bills for many top blogs? Instead, you can easily rewrite using the data from the RSS feeds.
3. Finally, do you need more people to cover issues that readers care about?Editors may say that people care about whether Britney gets custody to her kids but then you can easily get the story from the Wires instead of putting a dedicated reporter.
Jeff Jarvis has posted results about a survey where he asks readers about
newspaper jobs and sections they would cut off. Early results have come in and people have indicated what section/job they would cut:
Financial tables 43.06%
Sports section 21.65%
Sports columnists 8.00%
Entertainment section 3.76%
Movie critic 3.76%
Business section 2.59%
Syndicated features 2.59%
TV critic 2.59%
Music critic 1.88%
Book critic 1.65%
Comics 1.65%
Foreign bureaus 1.65%
Lifestyle section 1.41%
Washington bureau 1.18%
Editorial columnists 0.71%
Copy editors 0.47%
Online site 0.47%
Top editors 0.47%
Editorial page 0.24%
Photographers 0.24%
What this survey tells you is that
there are certain things other people are covering better than you and
you are probably better off using data from Wire services and RSS feeds instead, saving costs in the process.
Locking at the graphic above and the survey results, make your own judgments.
Labels: blogging, citizen journalism, news 2.0, news business, newspapers
What kids don’t tell us about the future of news media
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, studies his three kids’
media diet as a micro sampling of the habits of the
Always On Generation and comes out with predictable conclusions:
the net and video games rule, social networking is the new IM, people still read (case in point: you)…If you are into Venture Capital or if you want to start a mee-too media company, then maybe, Fred’s article may interest you. After all, we all like to like to know about the likes and dislikes of that hard-to-please demographic which reside in and around San Francisco (one of the so-called
Twin Capitals of the Blogosphere) – they are rich and have the time to spare to preside as the tech tastemakers for this world.
Fred notes that his kids are not much into newspapers, preferring websites for updates. This too is old hat. But, must we follow kids’ news reading preferences to predict the future for newspapers?
A future that is already taking place everywhere on the internet –
free news websites, salubrious celebrity/sensation/gadget coverage are the way to go. Even my brother is talking about starting his own spam blog network.
The average lifespan of an online news story is said to be 32 hours or something. That is more than thirty two times the attention time of an average kid. When we were kids, we scanned the front page and quickly moved to the sports pages near the end followed by bollywood startlets on the back page. As I grow older, I started reading the Op-ed pages and the syndicated columns. I am still improving the quality of my reading list for any given day.
I am 100% positive Fred's kids will have an even more extensive media diet than mine when they grow up and will eventually discover that playing video games and passing time Facebook doesn't seem so hot anymore.
The Internet pulled me out of the proverbial frog's well and I like that I am not paying for my access to the latest issue of The New York Times Magazine, but I wonder how long this free run would last. My free access to the NYT magazine is subsidized mainly by the ad-rich print version, and in a minor part by online advertising.
How long will this state of subsidy last? How long will the New York Times last in its present form?
Despite the low-cost nature of online publishing, I doubt whether anyone can start an online publication of the NYT Mag's quality from scratch and survive without long term funding strategy.
Nick Denton has come closest to
creating a respectable online publishing empire with his Gawker network, but where are the long form stories ? Being Snarky doesn't cut it.
Coming back to Fred's point: A world full of adults with the attention span and habits of kids is good news for marketers of things that let us deal with our boredom.
But, we also need things that help us understand our world better. Nothing does that better than good journalism.
A study in 2007 pointed out that people do read long articles on the internet. Long pieces of investigative journalism, good feature writing (thank you New Yorker) will always have their say.
To know about the future of news, two important questions need answers:
1. Which news model must we follow?NYT (free), WSJ? Economist (paid), Guardian (trust)
2. How do we make people pay for news?Free paper (aggregated wire feeds, tips and tricks, and lots of ads) and the paid version (bigger stories, analysis)
Sadly, investors don’t seem interested in these tough questions. What the news business urgently needs now is investors who are willing to go beyond investing in oddities like Digg.com and work with those in the News business to create New Brands of the Internet Era.
Till now, all I have seen on this front are 101 Social News startups.
Maybe more...Come on, think hard.
Labels: new media, newspapers, trends, web 2.0
In support of NYT bestsellers' list and other things
We live in a time where the world economy revolves around the tastes and whims of the young and very young. This is an age ( some will say it began with the release of "Jaws" )where entertainment primarily targeted at kids and youth dominates the charts. It has become so big that we have crossover entertainment - material with kids as leads but meant for a wider audience (Spy Kids, Lemony Snikkets) . I understand that Variety includes animation and kid films in its top grossers' list.
Michael Giltz goes ballistic because the New York Times doesn't feature books aimed at kids in its main bestsellers list and goes on list out other examples where it the exact opposite, although I still can't get the analogy of country music, reality TV shows and adult entertainment.
What's wrong in Harry Potter topping the Kids list? That doesn't take the fantastic sales numbers. I know there are adults in India who go around with Harry Potter bricks that are books as something of status symbols, but hey these are still books for children. The book series may be once in a lifetime Publishing phenomenon, ask Scholastic and J.K. Rowlings, but that doesn't mean anything.
By Michael Giltz's measures, it would be appropriate for textbooks to be included in the bestsellers list.
There are too many blockbusters, comedies, animation and youth-oriented films on the top movie grossers list. Film magazines including
Film Comment and
Entertainment Weekly carry critics' ratings for films. I would like other media outlets to carry these ratings, ala
Metacritic so that serious adult-oriented films get more exposure.
As things stand today, serious books and movies get short shrift in the media on a whole. In the blogosphere, people pile up rewritten blockbuster review after another.
People don't write long pieces because few read them.
Chris Anderson has written about the long tail economy.
I fear we run a risk of pushing serious, insightful and useful works of art to the tail.
While the rest of the media world dutifully bowed to the might of the Potter series, the NYT went ahead and published a review of the seventh book in spite of the publishers' diktats. These are not books, These are big businesses thriving on manufactured realities, pseudo events, among other devices.
We should be thankful that the Oscars still go to films like "Monster's Ball", and "Sideways" among others - films that relatively few people saw when compared to "Pirates of the Carribean" but are testimonies of human artistic achievement.
I wonder why someone hasn't said this.
Let me venture -
LEAVE THE ADULTS ALONE!Labels: book publishing, newspapers, trends
The future of print news media, according to Mr. Magazine
Samir Husni is a leading magazine industry consultant and teaches journalism at the University of Mississippi. Recently, he sat down with Mediashift’s Mark Glaser and
talked in depth about the future for print newspapers and magazines vis-à-vis the online threat.
Mr. Magazine’s most important advice: More analysis, less of stale data.Mr. Husni (from hereforth as Mr. Magazine ) says that 'the immediacy of news delivery can no longer be done in a newspaper... You cannot compete with the web or mobile devices for immediacy'.
Those in the business have started acknowledging this publicly. A student journalist recently said this, as reported in
Romenesko:
The paper news should provide long-form, in-depth coverage, while the Internet should be interactive, immediate, provide an open dialog with the audience and throw in all those nifty doo-dads and videos people love to play with."
I have summarized Mr. Magazine’s advice from the interview, adding some related data wherever I could.
- Change the name of a newspaper to daily paper.
- Go beyond the 5 W’s and H [who, when, what, where, why and how] and start talking about ‘what’s in it for me?’ and leave the 5 W’s and H to electronic delivery.
- Provide more in-depth analysis on a few topics.
- Deepen the story. More narrative and more pictures.
- Do not be afraid of full-page stories.
Print has competition from the web in another place: Recent research shows people like to read long, single page articles online.
I think it was Jeff Jarvis who said that
newspapers are becoming more like newsweeklies in terms of coverage depth; newsweeklies like Fortnightlies, fortnightlies like Monthlies; monthlies like quarterlies.The battle for extended coverage is on.On newsweeklies and magazinesMr. Magazine says they were wrong in putting their content online.
1. At no website do they ever say, ‘By the way, you need to go back to the paper to read page 20 where we have this article that you’ll only find on page 20 today.’ There is no two-way street, we have created a one-way street and people get lost in the jungle [online].
2. The day I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek was when I saw in print a snippet of an interview, and below that it said, ‘For the whole interview go to msnbc.newsweek.com.’ I am paying money and you are offering me less in print than what I can get for free on the web.
Bringing in more service aspects to the business modelThe new publisher is a marketer.
Print is the cornerstone to take more readers online.
You pick up National Geographic or Conde Nast Traveler magazine and read a marvelous 20-page article about Italy with gorgeous photography. At the end of the article, you [could] say, ‘Interested in going to Italy? Check our website and see all the hotels and museums.’ All the service aspects. Of if, you go to the website you see all these services, and then it says, ‘Interested in going to Italy? Pick up the magazine for this article.’
Changes in journalism education Teaching people what works in each media, how one media complements other is very important.
What online newspapers and magazines lackThey lack complementary media. What works in print does not necessarily work online and vice versa.
The ‘Teens don’t read anymore’ mythMr. Magazine says teens have rarely been big readers of newspapers and magazines. However, they will read all information relevant to them.
He asks, “Why do kids read 700 pages Harry Potter book?”.
True. Many adults have bought Harry Potter books never to pick them up and read. Too thick, they say.
On online-only magazines (Salon, Slate) One can go online without a print magazine. Salon and Slate took huge amounts of money to be where they are.
It depends on your business model: costs, revenue.
Costs are very important to manage to survive in the long run.
True. Building media brands requires time and money.
Using Citizen JournalismHe cites the example of JPG magazine, a hybrid of Digg-like submission & voting and regular publishing.
A journalist can be a blogger. But a blogger is not a journalist.
- The blog is like a virtual barbershop.
Print publishers’ wrong publishing modelCatering to advertisers instead of readers.
Publishing magazines to win awards, or to fight against other magazines.
Labels: citizen journalism, magazines, news business, newspapers
The Non-profit way, anyone?
Earlier, I wrote about
why Google should buy NYT. Now I hope someone buys the
‘paper of record’ turning into a non-profit.
Who better than big-spender,
‘do no evil’ Google?
About the rumors of Google wanting to buy Dow Jones,
John Battelle suggests that Google should buy Dow Jones and convert it into a non-profit.
Media brands cruising along the non-profit route include heavy hitters such as BBC, Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, PBS, NPR.
As for India, I wish the government really got out of way of Prasar Bharati, making it fully autonomous like BBC, putting a regulator like Ofcom in place.
Labels: news 2.0, newspapers
