WSJ Writer: All The Failings Of Print Journalism Are The Fault Of The Internet

from the pshh-obviously dept

We've seen this before. Whenever something happens that people don't like and they need a quick repository upon which to place heaping amounts of undue blame, they always seem to choose the internet. Who do we blame for murders? Ghost stories on the internet, obviously! Why is that batshit celebrity's reputation in the pooper? C'mon, all the thetans point to it being the internet's fault, of course! Your South American government is experiencing a bit of the old rebellion-time amongst the citizenry? Yo soy internet (ed: Tim, you never took Spanish in high school, did you?).

But, typically, when somebody swoops in to blame the failings of one thing on a more internet-y thing, there's at least some tangential relationship. Those ghost stories were on an internet site after all, and that celebrity's antics were as well. And it's not like rebellions don't actually use internet services to coordinate protests. But what Edward Kosner of The Wall Street Journal managed to cobble together is truly amazing: high-profile failings in print media recently, notably the Rolling Stone University of Virginia rape story debacle, Newsweek getting the inventor of bitcoin wrong, and the traditional print media's complete failure to report on the known rape accusations against Bill Cosby, are the internet's fault too, even though the screw-ups themselves were within the print media. Confused as to how this could be? Well, Kosner's thesis essentially amounts to: this internet shit is, like, totally fast, and print media is trying to print really fast too, which is why they're screwing up.

To prove how completely unhinged this piece is, take two sections and put them side by side. Take, on one hand, the accusation that print journalists failed to report on Bill Cosby:

And the vastly experienced author of a new 500-page biography of Bill Cosby managed to blow the lead: to leave out detailed accusations by more than a dozen women that the beloved comedian had drugged and raped or otherwise sexually molested them.

And put it alongside his assessment of the real problem:

Quite simply, print editors and their writers, and especially the publications’ proprietors, are being unhinged by the challenge of making a splash in a new world increasingly dominated by the values of digital journalism. Traditional long-form journalism—painstakingly reported, carefully written, rewritten and edited, scrupulously fact-checked—finds itself fighting a losing battle for readers and advertisers. Quick hits, snarky posts and click-bait in the new, ever-expanding cosmos of websites promoted by even quicker teasers on Twitter and Facebook have broadened the audience but shrunk its attention span, sometimes to 140 characters (shorter than this sentence).

Got that? Traditional print journalists failed to report on the splashy story of Bill Cosby's accusers because they're trying to compete with the splashy internet journalists and...wait...what? I'm confused as to why Kosner would offer such a complete counter-example to his entire thesis. It must be a print journalist's thing. I'm just here to be splashy and sarcastic, so let me just say that Kosner is a buffoon and then put this cute picture of a cat in for good internet-y measure.
God bless this guy's stupid little furry face. But, wait, there's more. The only reason the Rolling Stone post was found out to be a big bucket of internet-speed wrongness was, wait for it, because of the internet as well.

Here was a story made to go viral—doing journalistic due diligence on it might blunt its sharp edges and sap its appeal. As it happened, the Rolling Stone piece was undone by old-school reporting by the Washington Post, which has the resources to do its job only because it is being subsidized by the Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who bought the paper from the Graham family last year for $250 million.

Phew, thank god for that internet guy and his filthy, splashy, click-bait-y money, otherwise we wouldn't have had any journalism this Christmas, Virginia. The internet, it would appear, much like beer, is both the cause and solution to all of journalism's problems. It created the crappy Rolling Stone piece, then it fixed it too. It's almost as though the internet isn't really the controlling factor here, only the occasional trappings of lazy journalism. Sometimes that happens on the internet and sometimes it happens in print. All this is really driven home by Kosner's concluding paragraph, which appears to have been written as though all the preceding words had never been uttered.

The new, disruptive pressure of digital publishing on what has come to be thought of as traditional journalism isn’t going to ease anytime soon. Those who are owners or workers in legacy publishing have to understand that they can survive the onslaught—and perhaps eventually thrive—only by maintaining the rigorous standards that once made these publications not only respected but trusted by their readers and advertisers. Desperate times call for disciplined journalism.

In other words, the failings described above are all to do with the journalists in those instances failing their own standards, not because of the scary, super-speedy internet. Come on, WSJ, you guys have editors over there, yes?

Filed Under: competition, ed kosner, edward kosner, get off my lawn, internet, journalism, print

Don't Weep For The Past; Plan For The Future

from the disruption-in-action dept

Clay Shirky is angry. Shirky, who is often one of the most perceptive thinkers on the nature of digital innovation and trends has put forth a good old fashioned rant against people who ought to know better, but are so nostalgiac for print newspapers that they cling to any shred of evidence that there is a business model for print. He highlights the high profile collapse of the Orange County Register. If you don't follow the newspaper business (or live in Southern California), you may have missed that a few years ago, some folks with no real newspaper experience bought the paper and doubled down on the print business, putting up hard paywalls on the website and spending lavishly on the print side. They wanted to believe that with money and paywalls, they could bring back the past. The crew of folks who love print and paywalls were happy to hype the story.

And, of course, it didn't work. Because it couldn't.

Shirky angrily bashes them for jumping on the hype bandwagon in a way that gave false hope to others wishing to bring back a glorious past (that wasn't as glorious as people remember) and which is long gone:

There’s no nice way to say this, so I might just as well get to it: Kushner’s plan was always dumb and we should celebrate its demise, not because it failed (never much in doubt) but because it distracted people with the fantasy of an easy out for dealing with the gradual end of profits from print.

The most important fight in journalism today isn’t between short vs. long-form publications, or fast vs. thorough newsrooms, or even incumbents vs. start-ups. The most important fight is between realists and nostalgists. Kushner was running a revival meeting for nostalgists: “The internet’s not such a big deal! Digital readers will pay rather than leave! Investing in print is just plain good business!”

That was some old-time religion right there. It was fun while it lasted, for people who miss the good old days. For people who do not miss the good old days, it was not fun.

Of course, the print-first folks have an obvious comeback: plenty of digital businesses are flopping (often badly) too. Just a couple of months ago, one of the people that Shirky calls out in his post, Ken Doctor, was writing about the demise of an ambitious digital effort from the aptly named Digital First Media, which is trying to reinvent the newspaper business for a bunch of legacy newspapers while building a brand new digital airplane mid-flight. That effort has run into lots of trouble as well, as have plenty of purely digital news businesses.

It turns out that running a successful media business is not an easy thing.

And, of course, the nature of innovation often involves a lot of experiments, many of which will fail before people find the things that do work. So while I hesitate to jump on the singular failure of Kushner's OC Register efforts as signalling much more than a single failure (in the same way that Digital First Media's troubles may only really be indicative of the unique issues that company faces), Shirky's overall point is still an important one. While experimenting with new business models and new ideas are important in this ongoing effort to figure out what might work (and discovering first hand what doesn't work), if you're going to experiment, you have to experiment with an eye towards the future, rather than nostalgia for the past.

In short: not all experiments are equal. Experiments that look to embrace new opportunities and to leverage what's powerful about new media are attempts to understand and plan for the future. Experiments that look to just recreate a past world that does not exist any more are destined for failure, while (as Shirky notes) bringing false hope to those who wish to bring back those times.

Another way of thinking about it: if your experiments are about leveraging what's changed in the world to your own advantage, it's a worthwhile experiment. If it's about trying to deny what's changed in the world and hoping you can swim upstream against the larger direction of the world, you're just asking for trouble. Innovation is often about surfing waves. Many people wipeout along the way, but you have no chance at all if you're trying to surf at the wave rather than with it.

Filed Under: clay shirky, innovation, journalism, newspapers, orange county register, print

Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops Publishing Dead Tree Version; If You're Unfamiliar, You Can Read About It On Wikipedia

from the end-of-an-era-that-actually-ended-years-ago dept

There is something symbolic about the news that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is finally giving up on its printed product -- a product that was once more or less "required" for middle class families. Of course, if you'd asked me last week if Britannica actually still printed its books, I might have guessed they'd already stopped. Britannica had lost an awful lot of relevance even before Wikipedia came along, and its efforts to embrace the web have always come across as too little, too late in an era dominated by Wikipedia. While the ending of the print publication is a milestone, it seems unlikely to be an indication of fortunes turning around for Britannica.

Filed Under: encyclopedia, print
Companies: encyclopaedia britannica, wikipedia

Is The NYT Paywall Just A Ploy To Sell More Print Subscriptions?

from the or-are-they-just-crazy dept

There are so many strange and problematic aspects of the New York Times' ersatz paywall plan that sometimes the big and obvious one doesn't get discussed enough: it's really really expensive. A year of full access on all devices comes out to $455 (or $421 if you count their paltry four-week introductory discount). That's more than the Wall Street Journal - way more. In fact it's more than a lot of things, as this chart by Michael DeGusta illustrates nicely:

But it gets even crazier when you compare that price tag to a New York Times print subscription. A year of weekday home delivery only costs $285 the first year, and $322 after that (with some variation by location). That's right: over $100 cheaper than a digital subscription - and a print subscription includes full digital access. Perhaps one of the economists who writes for the New York Times can correct me on this, but that doesn't make any goddamn sense. If you're going to charge $455 a year for a website, you better not tell me I can get the same thing plus a few hundred pounds of free kindling for two-thirds that. If I pay you $150, will you also mow my lawn?

I can think of only two explanations for this. One is that I am severely misinformed about the nature of the internet, and websites are in fact delivered to my computer by truck while system administrators dump barrels of ink in the sewer. The other is that, in the long run, the paywall is just a giant ploy to get their print subscriber numbers up. Some believe that the print prices are purposely obfuscated, but I think this is a temporary situation. I predict two things will happen before the year is out: readers who hit the paywall will start being greeted with home delivery offers alongside the digital packages, and digital subscribers will begin to receive offers to "add on" a print subscription at no "extra" charge.

If I'm right about the New York Times' motives, I'll be pretty disappointed. Their strategy is so confusing that everyone is having a hard time figuring out exactly what they hope to accomplish, but at least it seemed to be an acknowledgement that the economics of news distribution have changed (even if they reacted in an entirely backwards fashion). Now it is beginning to seem like nothing more than an attempt to prop up the same legacy model that has been holding them back this entire time.

Filed Under: business models, paywall, print
Companies: ny times

Watching A Newspaper Go From A Print Mindset To A Digital Mindset

from the cool-to-watch-in-action dept

With our upcoming Techdirt Saves* Journalism event to be held June 16th at Google's offices, we've been looking deeper and deeper into stories of newspapers doing interesting things. One interesting one to follow is the Journal Register, who got a new CEO, John Paton, at the beginning of the year, and he's trying to shake things up. In April, he announced the Ben Franklin Project, as an attempt to get the company to stop thinking about the digital side of the business as being an afterthought to the print side, and to get the company more focused on being "digital first, print last." The Ben Franklin project involved getting various Journal Register newspapers to use entirely open online tools to really actively involve the community in the process of creating a new story. It was about recognizing that more and more people view themselves as being a part of the news process, not just consumers of the news. It doesn't mean getting rid of reporters or editors. They still do what they do. It just means involving the wider community more in the whole process -- and using free and open web tools to do so.

The initial results were pretty impressive, and all put together very quickly.

But Paton seems to already be pushing the bar further. Picking up on Google's "20% time" concept, Paton is setting up something he calls "idealab", where any Journal Register employee (full- or part-time) can apply to be one of 15 members of this "lab," where they'll be given 10 hours a week, as well as some modern tech tools, and then told to "experiment with these tools and report back on how we can change our business for the better." Even more interesting, as the Nieman Lab report above notes, Paton asked people to apply via comments on his blog. You could also apply by email, but many did apply on the blog, and there are lots of interesting ideas.

The program is interesting, though, I'm not sure the initial setup goes far enough. Initially, it's giving each participant an iPhone, an iPad and a netbook as "the tools" to experiment with. I wonder if the company might find more interesting (and useful) results if it didn't even set those particular parameters (or set a budget). While I can definitely understand the value of experimenting with the currently hot and popular technologies out there, I also wonder if something more interesting might come from even greater freedom. Perhaps that's the next step.

Either way, these sorts of ideas and models are certainly among what we'll be exploring at the Techdirt Saves* Journalism event, so if you haven't yet, you should sign up for here: We've already got a great and diverse group of participants, so it should be a fun evening full of interesting ideas and discussion.

Filed Under: digital, journalism, print
Companies: journal register

The Future Of Print: Better Connect With Your Audience

from the it-ain't-one-way-any-more dept

Kevin Yank sends over an interview he recently did with Derek Powazek who, among other things, developed one of the first truly cool online publications in Fray, and also JPG Magazine, discussing the future of print. Powazek makes a point that we've tried to make here in the past, but weren't able to highlight as clearly as he does:

And the other crazy thing we found when we were doing JPG is that by far, the majority of our subscribers were people who did not subscribe to any other magazines. I thought that was weird. Like, you'd think, "Okay, maybe the people who like print would buy it." But what we learned was it was the people who felt involved in the creation of it who were buying it. The people who were submitting their photos, voting on other people's photos, who felt involved in the community were the ones buying it.

So I think there's a real opportunity here for media makers to learn from this to say, "Well maybe the reason why people aren't buying newspapers and magazines is because they feel completely disconnected from the product, right? Because the old style of journalism was sit down, shut up and consume what we say. And in a world of collaborative media where everybody can participate online, everybody can make content, maybe what these media organizations need to do is tear down the walls a little bit and let people feel involved in the making of it, and then they'll buy the product.

Exactly. We've discussed in the past how much the community now wants to be a part of the news process, whether it's helping out with some aspect of reporting or (more frequently) in spreading the news, sharing the news and offering commentary on the news. But that's not the way the old school publishers think. They still think of themselves as being part of an ivory tower of sorts, where they deliver "the word" from on high. But that doesn't create any connection with the community.

And that's a disaster for a publication -- since it's always really been about bringing together a community, and then trying to monetize the attention of that community. But by actually involving the community, inviting them in, and making them feel a part of the process creates amazing connections that create people who are loyal to publications. It's something that a lot of old school publications really need to understand. And, if they did, they'd quickly realize that a concept like a paywall pretty much destroys that relationship.

Filed Under: derek powazek, future, magazines, print

UK Shop Refuses To Make Prints Of Digital Photos Because They're 'Too Good' And Must Infringe

from the welcome-to-your-digital-economy-bill dept

Want to know what happens when you increase the liability of third parties for copyright infringement? Stories of shops refusing to print digital photos. We've seen it for a while in the US. Five years ago we had stories of photoshops in the US refusing to make prints on photos because of the assumption that they must infringe on someone's copyrights. Wal-Mart got caught up in the story a few years back when an employee made some clueless statements about copyright in refusing to make prints of certain images -- and there was a repeat story just a few months ago.

It appears that a similar story is playing itself out across the pond in the UK, where the popular retailer Boots apparently refused to print one woman's photos because they were seen as "too good" for her to have taken, and therefore must be infringing on someone's copyrights (thanks to Dave Michels for sending this in). The woman even got a signed letter, and when that didn't work, came back with the (pregnant) woman who was in the photos to let the staff know that these photos were, indeed, legit and not covered by someone else's copyright. The store still said no.

And, of course, this sort of thing only becomes as bigger and bigger issue as amateur photographers improve. Of course, it's easy to put the blame on Boots or the employees here for being over-zealous (or, as Boots put it, "over-cautious"), but the real issue is what we've turned copyright law into these days, where people are taught to fear being involved in anything that might possibly infringe, as it may lead to lawsuits or a loss of an internet connection or whatever. As copyright laws get more ridiculous, we're teaching people to not move forward if they don't know for sure -- and that can create a massive stifling of creativity and expression.

Filed Under: copyright, photography, print

Print Mindset vs. Internet Mindset: Do You Link? Do You Credit Sources?

from the fight-for-the-digital-ages dept

We recently wrote about how the NY Post was caught taking a blogger's story and rewriting it for itself -- noting the hypocrisy of a News Corp. newspaper copying from someone else, after Rupert Murdoch and his top execs have been going around decrying various news aggregators (and Google especially) for "stealing" from News Corp. newspapers. It's even more ridiculous when you think about it -- because the "stealing" that Rupert is upset about is Google linking to the original story -- a step that his NY Post writer couldn't even be bothered to do.

Of course, as a few people pointed out in the comments, this sort of "re-reporting" is quite common in the traditional news business. You see it all the time in newspapers, magazines and broadcast TV. They take a story that was found somewhere else and just "re-report" it, so that they have their own version of it. That this is incredibly inefficient and a total waste of reporters' resources never seems to be considered. But it's a very traditional reporting mindset.

But sometimes that leads to trouble. Felix Salmon has an excellent discussion going about how the recent NY Times plagiarism "scandal" really came about because of this mindset. First, he notes that the "reason" that reporter Zachary Kouwe gave for plagiarizing a variety of stories on his NY Times blog, was that he saw the stories elsewhere and wanted to re-report them and "in the essence of speed" clearly cut some corners in his re-reporting. But, as Salmon notes, this is a traditional reporting mindset. An internet blogging mindset would just see this story, and in the "essence of speed" link to it:

If there's a minor news story on a trustworthy wire service, and you think you need it on the blog, then link to it. You add no value by rushing -- with "essence of speed", no less -- to get the exact same story yourself. You're a well-paid full-time journalist at the New York Times; there are surely higher and better uses of your valuable time than going back to rewrite a story which already exists elsewhere.

The sin that resulted in Kouwe's departure from the NYT was that he rewrote badly, and left large chunks of other people's work unchanged in his own copy. But the true underlying sin was that he spent so much time rewriting in the first place: the beauty of blogs, which exist to link elsewhere, is that he should never have needed to do that at all.

Salmon goes on to point out that the big newspapers, like the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, keep putting traditional reporters in charge of their blogs (not always, but quite frequently), and they blog like reporters, rather than digital natives. That is, they re-report stuff, rather than linking. And that's often because traditional reporters lived by the "scoop" and the idea that they had to be first. Acknowledging that someone else got the story first is seen as an admission of failure. But in the blogging world, it's seen as a sign of respect and of gratitude. But it's difficult for those who've lived in that first world to get their heads wrapped around this.

We recently wrote about the important role of curation in journalism -- which includes the ability to link to other stories, and add value to those stories (whether by fact checking or commentary or discussion). But too many traditional newspapers still have no interest in that kind of journalism, even as greater and greater numbers of their readers are actively seeking it out.

Filed Under: blogging, internet, journalism, links, plagiarism, print, reporting, zachary kouwe

Can Print Be The Next Vinyl?

from the it-would-take-work dept

One of the more interesting trends in the music world is the “return” of the vinyl LP. While sales of CD’s continue to fall in the face of digital downloads, vinyl LP sales continue to rise:

Consumers purchased 1.88 million new vinyl LPs in 2008, an 89 percent increase over 2007 and the highest sales volume recorded in the 17-year history of Nielsen SoundScan. Further, in good news for some physical retailers, two out of three vinyls LPs were purchased at independent record stores.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious is that the LP is a tangible object that can’t be easily reproduced and can only be shared through a physical, real-world exchange. For true fans, the LP is a sort of badge of fandom, proof of just how much you love the band. Compared to a digital download or a CD, the LP is a crafted thing, complete with large-scale artwork and often other inserts.

While it isn’t likely that LP sales will eclipse digital downloads anytime soon, it is also highly unlikely that the LP market will be undercut by piracy.

Could these same factors be a forecaster for the future of printed books and newspapers? It is hard to imagine that these items, so easily digitized, will be able to maintain their current position on top of the mountain and we are already seeing the rapid decline of the newspaper business.

In the cases of both newspapers and books, it might be that their only hope in surviving over the long-term is to invest in elements that can truly not be pirated. As Dave Eggers points out in a recent Salon interview:

I think newspapers shouldn’t try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. You know, including a full-color comic section, for example, which of course was standard in newspapers years ago, when you’d have a full broadsheet Winsor McCay comic. So we’ll have a big, full-color comic section, and we’re also trying to emphasize what younger readers are looking for, what directly appeals to them.

Now, I am not saying that comics section will save newspapers, but the point is to make the object something desirable to possess in physical form.

For the moment, we are going to see traditional publishers fight futilely to maintain the status quo but the ground is quickly falling away beneath them and it is going to take some innovative thinking about the value of printed matter to keep them in the game.

Crossposted from My Media Musings

Filed Under: print, vinyl

Online Journalism vs. Print Journalism: Real Time vs. Batch Processing

from the think-about-it dept

Last week, there was a bit of a silly fight over the NY Times publishing an article noting that blogs sometimes publish rumors. I didn't find the story to be all that bad, actually, as it did a fair job explaining why those blogs publish rumors without confirmation, and how they do it in a reasonable way (i.e., saying it's a rumor and hasn't been confirmed). Some felt the article was a hit piece, but on the whole it actually seemed pretty reasonable and accurate. Still, in response to that, Cody Brown (via Jay Rosen) put up a fascinating and thought-provoking writeup comparing online to print journalism -- noting that print is "batch processing" while online is "real-time processing" and explaining why this makes it so difficult for print to either understand the value of online journalism, or to keep up with it. To be honest, I think the point was made even clearer in last week's hilarious Daily Show takedown of the NY Times, where Jason Jones refers to the newspaper as "aged news" and asks Rick Berke, the assistant managing editor to point out a single article in today's newspaper that "happened today" (at around 3 minutes): Separately, I should point out that I find it amusing that around 1:45, the video quotes Kristin Mason, the NYT's communications coordinator, noting that "The NY Times really prides itself on making sure that the information we're putting out in the newspaper and online is factual. We have editors going through and checking on a variety of sources...."

Fair enough... But what happened on Friday? That's when the NY Times falsely reported that The Pirate Bay had lost its appeal... and that false story has remained uncorrected at least up until I published this story. It appears that the "pride" the NY Times takes in getting the story right doesn't necessarily extend to things like The Pirate Bay.

Filed Under: batch processing, fact checking, journalism, online, print, real-time
Companies: ny times