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Archives for August 2007

Drudge, Rosenstiel, and the news media’s RIAA strategy

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At the end of an LA Times profile of Matt Drudge, journalism teacher and expert Tom Rosenstiel admits that Drudge has “come to play an important role”:

In a study of the online medium’s election-night performance in November, Rosenstiel says his group found that Drudge quickly sent his audience to the best destinations. “He had figured out in real time what we figured out more conclusively in hindsight,” Rosenstiel says.

When the balance of the Senate came down to the race in Virginia, for example, Drudge linked to the secretary of state’s office for updated tallies. The resulting flood of visitors crashed the government site.

Still, Rosenstiel says, “Drudge is vulnerable because he’s not producing anything. He’s just got muscle through his links to the work of others.”

One day, he says, news organizations are going to say, “We’re not going to give this stuff away to Drudge. We need to get some source of revenue to subsidize the creation of the content.”

Although Drudge has spent years taking aim at the mainstream media, Rosenstiel says, the truth is he needs their links for his livelihood.

“The dirty little secret about Drudge,” Rosenstiel says, “is that he’s a gateway for conventional journalism.”

I found this a fascinatingly muddled perspective. On the one hand, Rosenstiel says, Drudge is doing something better than the big newsrooms: figuring out where to send his visitors in real time. On the other hand, he’s vulnerable because all he’s doing is linking to other people. Rosenstiel describes a situation in which the big, established publications know that Drudge can send them firehose-level traffic; yet he somehow concludes that it’s Drudge who “needs” the media’s “links for his livelihood.” In fact, he’s just described the precise reverse. Then there’s the threat that the media might somehow stop “giving this stuff away” to Drudge. But nobody’s giving anything away to Drudge — when we publish on the Web, we hand the URL to everyone. How exactly would you boycott Drudge without also sequestering your work from the entire Web?

I’m no fan of Drudge; I’ll visit other filters, thank you. But vast swarms of people clearly like his approach. He had a first-mover advantage but he’s also found a formula that works. If many people are choosing Drudge as their “front page” over the front pages of newspaper sites and magazine sites and portals, the appropriate question to ask is, why? Why is a low-budget two-person operation satisfying some significant chunk of the public better than the formidable resources of the big newsrooms?

Rosenstiel, lost in the same “who stole our business model?” fog that is enveloping so many of his colleagues at the journalism schools and in the newsrooms, doesn’t even notice this question buried in his contradictory statements. Sure, these new Web news models erode the underlying media businesses that pay newsroom salaries. But the answer isn’t to ignore customers’ preferences and threaten to take your marbles home. That’s the RIAA strategy the music industry pursued, and look how successful it proved.

Editors and publishers need to start by accepting reality. Drudge’s neo-Walter Winchell act is simply one example of what the Web does to the news: It places new “front ends” on the mainstream news back-end — remixing new front pages to the pool of news the network aggregates. The algorithmic editing of sites like Memeorandum is another example. The communal editing of Digg is another. Here’s yet another, which, apparently, springs in part from the efforts of Michael “Burn Rate” Wolff. (See this piece in today’s Times about Wolff and Newser.) Despite that, I rather like it. (In fact, it’s where I found that Drudge profile in the first place.)

Why aren’t today’s newspaper editors conducting more of these experiments themselves? Why have they ceded the field to twentysomething entrepreneurs and marginal mavericks? Obviously, institutional inertia, turf-protection reflexes and disappearing-profit panic are all potent forces. On a deeper level, I think most editors just hate the idea that readers might prefer an alternative mix of their news product. They’d rather go down with their ships than accept a demotion of their authority.
[tags]matt drudge, newser, newspaper industry, tom rosenstiel[/tags]

Travels: Motley Fool, Gnomedex

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I took a quick trip to the DC area at the end of last week to talk about Dreaming in Code to the folks at The Motley Fool. It was a blast. The Fool, as it’s known, has been around online from the earliest days of the Web; like Salon, it’s had its ups and downs, weathered many storms, and is now in a growth phase again.

The engagement happened because a developer who worked for the company happened to read the book, liked it, and thought it would be a good topic for the rest of the company to learn more about it. What I heard from the “Fools”, as they call themselves, is the same thing I’ve heard from lots of other software developers: they feel that the book captures the elusive nature of their work, and they want their colleagues to read it to learn, in greater depth, about the difficulties of creating software.

I’m home for a few days, then heading up to Seattle for Gnomedex. It’s an event I’ve heard about for years, but never made it up there before. If you’re going too, let me know!
[tags]dreaming in code, motley fool, gnomedex[/tags]

Newspaper shrinkage

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This morning the New York Times joined much of the rest of the American newspaper industry in shrinking its pages. The result for it — as for the Wall Street Journal, which made the same change recently — is that the paper now feels like a toy. Oh, sure, we’ll get used to the change. But at a time when all these papers are already watching their gravitas ebbing away, this change — designed to save printing, paper and distribution costs — is a self-inflicted wound.

The Times says it’s losing 11 percent of its column-inches, but making half of that up by adding pages. The op-ed and editorial pages are permanently smaller, though. And look where the Times — like the Journal before it — decided to cut back: the letters to the editor. (Originally, the Journal also buried its letters page far from the editorials; after a hue and cry from its readers, the letters got shoved back to the flip-side of the editorial page.)

Here we are, in the middle of a vast transformation of the news media from a one-way broadcast mode into a many-to-many free-for-all, and, when push comes to shove, the great newspapers of America decide that the one place they can afford to cut back is the paltry few columns they have traditionally dedicated to their readers.

It’s hard to see this as anything other than another twist on a long downward spiral.
[tags]newspapers, new york times[/tags]

Murdoch, the Journal, and the newsroom diaspora

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It is no surprise that Rupert Murdoch will be the new owner of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal: This was inevitable from the moment he put his money on the table (at a share price approaching double the market value).

Nor is there any surprise in the ritualistic pronouncements being heard throughout the world of traditional journalism — beginning on the Journal’s own editorial page with assurances from both the editorial column and the paper’s publisher that standards will be upheld and independence will be maintained, and spreading far and wide. These assertions are inevitable. Equally inevitably, they will be trotted out to be quoted, with suitable irony, the first time the paper’s new owner throws his weight around and demonstrates their irrelevance.

So the Journal will now have an oversight committee of some sort — a figleaf-shaped offering to pacify the consciences of those members of the Bancroft family who felt some remorse at grabbing Murdoch’s cash. Murdoch will pay no more attention to the oversight of such a committee than the president his TV network helped elect pays his congressional overseers. (Congress, at least, has some constitutional authority.)

And why should he? He paid good money for the Journal. The Journal is a property first and foremost. Under our economic system — the one that the Journal has always championed — owners are free to manage their properties. It is this cold reality, far more than any specific fears about how Murdoch will wreck the Journal’s newsroom (which is full of great talent but which many outsiders in the profession see as overstaffed and underworked), that has so many journalists wringing their hands.

The truth is that most professional journalists in the U.S. have lived in a cocoon for decades. The so-called Chinese wall that separates the newsroom from the business side is typically framed as a noble device for insuring that advertiser cash does not influence news coverage. That’s an important goal. But in practice these walls are only as strong as the ethical principles of those who maintain them. Pair a bullying publisher with a weak-willed editor and no wall will help.

Meanwhile, these walls have had a more insidious effect on the newsroom side: they have encouraged journalists to pay no attention to the economic basis for their work. Most editorial employees in major-city newsrooms, protected by their unions and shielded from the “dark side” of business by the traditional wall, end up thinking of their jobs as the journalistic equivalent of endowed university chairs.

This worked as long as the news business remained healthily profitable — and, in many areas, a monopoly. But in the past couple of decades, technological change has knocked over the business’s foundations. The endowments are going bankrupt. The walls are crumbling.

Journalists’ reactions to all this have generally fallen into two camps. Some dream that the old order can somehow be reconstituted. Find an angel investor who doesn’t mind losing money! Set up non-profit newsrooms! Do anything as long as you can find a way to maintain the journalist’s state of purity!

Others have looked at the changing business and said, no way are we going to be able to beat this, so let’s join it. Let’s take the principles we understand — accuracy and fairness and independence and speaking truth to power — and see how we can ferry them into the new environment.

Doing so requires some level of entrepreneurial thinking. You can’t avoid getting your hands a little grubby. You can’t sit back and let somebody else worry about the “dark side” while you keep yourself immaculate. But you don’t get stuck in the powerless, paralyzing backwaters of so many of today’s newsrooms, either. You trade in the infantilizing paternalism of the old-school newsroom for a level of autonomy that is precious.

I made this choice when I left the San Francisco Examiner in 1995; many others have made it since. It’s not easy. But there are plenty of examples of success. Salon is the one I’m most familiar with, but there are a million experiments out there — from big-name blogs and blog networks to tiny local sites to niche news efforts.

Some of these manage to pull off the neat trick of staying afloat and staying ethical; others don’t. But none that aims to pay a staff has the luxury of pretending that it’s not a business. Now the Wall Street Journal’s journalists face the same choice.

I don’t trust Rupert Murdoch. He has a long and well-documented record of using his properties to further his own agenda. But I trust that there are a lot of smart writers and editors at the Journal. Either they’ll get an opportunity to reshape their paper in a way that suits the times and their own consciences — or they’ll find themselves in the great newsroom diaspora with the rest of us, helping figure out new models for the future.
[tags]journalism, wall street journal, dow jones, rupert murdoch, new media, newspapers[/tags]