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Future journalism business models: research and explanation services

September 23, 2009 /

Two interesting idea-bombs via Jay Rosen:

To my eye, one of the more interesting new-model ideas popped up at this summer’s meeting of investigative reporting nonprofits outside New York. The idea, mentioned by two participants, was to set up a separate unit that would do contract or customized research for paying clients. Revenue generated would supply one piece of the business-model formula that would pay for the core investigative reporting business.

The concept seemed both promising and potentially ethically tricky, but in any case it seemed like a fresh approach. Fresh, anyway, till I discovered that the owners of the Economist have been doing this since 1946 through the Economist Intelligent Unit. These days the EIU, with more than 40 offices worldwide, sells country analyses in 200 markets, provides custom research and presentations for executives, convenes conferences on both government and business topics, and more. It calls itself the “world’s pre-eminent global research and advisory firm.” If that’s true, it’s obviously a business that’s bringing in tens of millions of dollars annually in revenue.

Online Journalism Review: Research for hire: A revenue model for the news?

And:

Common Craft, a professional “explainer” service:

Common Craft is a small company owned by Lee and Sachi LeFever in Seattle, Washington, USA. The company was founded by Lee in 2003 as an online community consulting company. We started making videos in 2007 with our first video: RSS in Plain English. Since then, we’ve published two kinds of videos:

1. Educational Videos – Videos we create to sell on this website (our current focus)
2. Custom Videos – Videos we were hired to create by companies like Google, Ford and LinkedIn.

Combined, we’ve created over 30 videos that have been viewed over 10 million times online. Our current focus is building a library of educational videos that help educators save time. If you’re in need of a custom video, please contact us or visit our Explainer Network to find talented producers.

Rosen indicates they are very busy.

Time Magazine: the liberal bias of facts

September 17, 2009 /

Time isn’t allowed to critique right-wing claims even when they’re totally false. Doing that would make Rush Limbaugh and Fox News angry. So rather than pointing out what actually happened — that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations — they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it’s not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that’s not their role, since they’re objective and unbiased. According to the rules of establishment journalism, there is no truth and no facts — only competing, irreconcilable claims from “the Right and the Left,” and their only job is to mindlessly repeat those claims. […]

Here, the reality — that the 9/12 crowd numbered in the “tens of thousands” — has to be dismissed as coming from “liberal sources” because, as Stephen Colbert famously pointed out, “reality has a liberal bias.” Time’s readers are thus kept in the dark about the actual facts of this matter, and are actively deceived into believing that reports from establishment journalists that debunked right-wing hyperbole are nothing more than “information from liberal sources” that should be deemed every bit as paritsan and suspect as the blatant right-wing falsehoods. That’s how American journalism typically functions.

Glenn Greenwald: Time Magazine: the liberal bias of facts

Conde Naste buried investigative piece on Putin

September 4, 2009 /

NPR has been so spineless recently, it’s refreshing to see something like this from them:

His investigative piece, published in the September American edition of GQ, challenges the official line on a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in 1999 in Russia. It profiles a former KGB agent who spoke in great detail and on the record, at no small risk to himself. But instead of trumpeting his reporting, GQ’s corporate owners went to extraordinary lengths to try to ensure no Russians will ever see it. […]

On July 23, Jerry S. Birenz, one of the company’s top lawyers, sent an e-mail memo to more than a dozen corporate executives and GQ editors.

“Conde Nast management has decided that the September issue of U.S. GQ magazine containing Scott Anderson’s article ‘Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power’ should not be distributed in Russia,” Birenz wrote.

He ordered that the article could not be posted to the magazine’s Web site. No copies of the American edition of the magazine could be sent to Russia or shown in any country to Russian government officials, journalists or advertisers. Additionally, the piece could not be published in other Conde Nast magazines abroad, nor publicized in any way.

It wasn’t just that there was no reference to Anderson’s piece on the cover of this month’s GQ, which featured a picture of Michael Jackson, a reference to tennis star Andy Roddick’s wife and a ranking of obnoxious colleges and top drinking cities. At this writing, I cannot find any reference to Anderson’s piece on the Internet.

The idea that information can be sequestered at a time when people can communicate instantly across oceans and continents may seem quaint. But in this instance, Conde Nast sought, against technology, logic and the thrust of its own article, to show deference in the presence of power.

NPR: Why ‘GQ’ Doesn’t Want Russians To Read Its Story

In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus

July 14, 2009 /

heart beat curve

Perhaps owing to those biological origins, we have come to describe particularly fast-moving Internet memes as viral, which evokes the image of passing through a population (and doesn’t, for what it’s worth, have anything to do with genetics). In New York magazine’s discussion of Wasik’s book, Times culture critic Virginia Heffernan questions whether the virus metaphor is “misleading — and ripe for retirement.” The meme-tracking study provides an alternative analogy: the heartbeat.

Back to Kleinberg’s idea of the web as a “single organism.” The study found that, yes, memes peak on prominent websites — that is, those indexed by Google News — before less prominent ones, but both of those peaks are generally preceded by a blip on the less prominent sites. Here’s how it’s illustrated in the paper; we’re looking at the percentage of each meme’s mentions that occur on sites not indexed by Google News. Zero hour represents the meme’s overall peak.

Nieman Journalism Lab: In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus

(via Jay Rosen)

The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

June 12, 2009 /

time magazine satan occult revival

10. June 19, 1972: The Occult Revival
9. April 5, 1976: The Porno Plague
8. August 6, 1984: The Population Curse
7. September 15, 1986: Drugs: The Enemy Within
6. May 7, 1990: Dirty Words
5. May 13, 1991: Crack Kids
4. July 3, 1995: Cyberporn: On a Screen Near You
3. Nov 22, 1999: Pokemon!
2. March 19, 2001: The Columbine Effect
1. June 7, 2004: Overcoming Obesity in America

Reason: The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years

See also: Fox News Journalistic Masterpieces.

Competing Against Free

June 5, 2009 /

Under the circumstances, I think it may prove very difficult for commerce-oriented enterprises to succeed over the long term. Someplace like a dry cleaner is able to make money because it doesn’t need to worry about being undercut by competitors who aren’t trying to earn a profit. If for some reason Bill Gates decided to pour $5 billion into a foundation dedicated to offering not-for-profit dry cleaning services to Washington, DC then the existing dry cleaners would be in huge trouble. They don’t have that problem because nobody wants to run non-profit dry cleaners. But lots of people want to write about political issues for reasons that have nothing to do with profit-maximization. And my sense is that organizations are increasingly doing this. CAP/AF was a think tank early adopter in terms of building robust in-house new media capacity, but to the best of my knowledge just about every think tank and advocacy shop in town would like to get in on the action. And ultimately, a proliferation of content that’s not supposed to make money is going to make it even harder than it already is for those trying to make profits to do so.

Think Progress

(via Jay Rosen)

See also: Kevin Kelly’s article The New Socialism.

TPM Cafe: NY Times’ Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM’s Josh Marshall

May 17, 2009 /

Dowd:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

Marshall:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

TPM Cafe: NY Times’ Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM’s Josh Marshall

(via Jay Rosen)

What does it mean when NYT columnists are plagiarizing blogs?

West Seattle Blog editor defends journalistic blogs

May 16, 2009 /

Once again, speaking in defense of those of us who publish original news in blog format:

Yes, we have cultivated sources. Not “just” the community members who kindly turn to us when they see a crash or a fire or a crime, because they know we will cover it NOW, but also politicians, community leaders, government employees, other ‘insiders’ who know we understand that if they feel something is important enough to check out, chances are it matters to thousands of community members, so off we go to dig in.

And yes, we sit through never-ending community meetings. Almost every night of the week. Some afternoons too. From design review, to Hearing Examiner appeals, to hearings scheduled just as formalities for some ongoing government process – buried in published public notices – and we go to City Hall and the County Council Chambers and the courthouse downtown.

We cover important stories that others don’t bother with. No paper in our area, big or small, saw fit to bother with a murder trial last year that started with a shooting in an area of our neighborhood where “that just doesn’t happen” and led through a story of stalking and self-defense, with the teenage suspect ultimately exonerated after a year behind bars. They all read our work so they knew it was happening and chose to ignore it.

I paid a reporter to cover it daily — it lasted a few weeks — even though at the time I couldn’t really afford it — just knew it had to be done and I couldn’t do a full day of court justice while also managing the rest of the site. Now, months later, we have the revenue to pay more journalists to work with us – freelance for starters but I hope more permanent soon – including two veterans whose jobs were cut at local papers big and small for $ reasons.

So, dear old-media folks who I understand are acting out of pain and fear – I have been through layoffs myself — please stop attacking and dismissing everything with “blog” attached to it – it is only a publishing format. If there is a specific writer you are upset about, call them out by name/site, but get educated and learn that the “blog” world has a surprising amount of REAL JOURNALISM going on, produced by REAL JOURNALISTS, and since some of us small operations seem to be showing signs of sustainability, this just may be the way a lot of REAL JOURNALISM is produced for the foreseeable future – you are welcome to buy a domain, install a CMS, and get after it yourselves, too.

–Tracy Record, editor/co-publisher, West Seattle Blog
(Seattle, WA, 650,000 pageviews/mo., 20,000 homes/businesses visiting at least once weekly)

From: Jay Rosen’s Tumblr

West Seattle Blog

David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur

May 9, 2009 /

I caught some of David Simon’s testimony to the Senate on the radio the other day. It was like nails on a chalk board for me – listening to the same dead wrong arguments over and over again.

Ryan Tate says some of the things I wanted to shout through the radio:

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

Gawker: David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur

Memo to newspaper journalists: “online news” doesn’t begin and end with Matt Drudge, and newspaper subscription never paid your salary.

New York Times won’t call torture torture because the Bush admin said it wasn’t

April 28, 2009 /

Doug Jehl, who’s the Washington editor for the New York Times, explains today why his paper cannot use the word “torture” to describe “waterboarding” when no legal or political or cultural authority from the Spanish Inquisition until the Bush administration ever doubted for a moment that it was torture. […]

In the face of this, are there any legal decisions, judgments or trials in the last five centuries in which waterboarding has not been deemed torture? None that I am aware of. And this is not surprising. If waterboarding someone 183 times is not torture, then nothing is torture.

The fact that the editors of the New York Times cannot reflect this core truth in its use of plain English is a scandal of journalistic cowardice, evasion and willful ignorance. It is entirely a function not of seeking the truth but of placating those in power and maintaining a fictitious illusion of “balance”. The idea that the Bush administration’s insistence for the first time in human history that waterboarding is legal and not torture – when it has itself used the torture technique – is to be weighed equally against the entire body of legal, historical and cultural evidence in deciding what to call torture is preposterous.

Andrew Sullivan: Can Doug Jehl Read?

(via Jay Rosen)

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