PBS’s FRONTLINE airs the first in a series entitled “News War.” What will be the future business model for the news industry? How will we get news? Where is the line between legitimate national security concerns and the public’s right to know? Should reporters have the right to protect anonymous sources?
Looks like a must-see for anyone in the news business. You can watch it on-air and online beginning February 13th. Set those Tivos.
Podcasting News reports:“The Associated Press and NowPublic.com announced Friday that they have agreed to an initiative designed to bring citizen content into AP newsgathering, and to explore ways to involve NowPublic’s on-the-ground network of news contributors in AP’s breaking news coverage.
NowPublic.com, based in Vancouver, is the world’s largest participatory news network with more than 60,000 contributors from 140 countries. The AP is the world’s largest newsgathering organization with a staff of more than 4,000 employees located in more than 240 bureaus in 97 countries.
The goal of the effort is to expand the world’s access to news as it happens, the companies said.”
A couple of years ago I suggested adding comments to the stories we post on our news websites. The reporter to whom I offered the suggestion said he really didn’t care what readers thought about his story. No shit.
We have just relaunched our news sites and have a comments feature we have yet to enable. Should we? It won’t be my call but, stay tuned.
Radio Iowa reporter Stella Shaffer produces “Radio Iowa: Week In Review” and it’s a nice toe-in-the-podcast-water for the network. She pulls together the top stories of the previous week:
“The old governor’s got a gig teaching law at Drake, the new governor wants a dollar-a-pack increase in the cigarette tax, and an economist tells us what that might cost. The new improved state minimum wage may also have unanticipated consequences, according to HeadStart heads. Bitter cold played a part in the apprehension of an auto-theft suspect, OSHA offered a helping hand to migrant workers while one mayor wants a fulltime cop to bust them, and we mourn two more Iowa soldiers lost.”
Another of our networks began repurposing feature programs as podcasts last year. But RIWIR is our first true podcast (by my definition).
We have some really good reporters working in our newsrooms. Historically, if they came up with a good idea for a new program, it could only fly if we could convince enough affiliate stations to “clear” it.
In the world of podcasts, they are only limited by their imaginations and the hours in the day. I’m hoping to hear some good stuff in the coming year.
LostRemote points to a survey of over 1,000 teachers that found that 57 percent use national or international news websites as a source of news for teaching purposes, compared to 28 percent for daily newspapers and just 13 percent for local TV news.
“Students do not relate to newspapers at all, any more than they would to vinyl records,” one teacher said in the study. Local papers “haven’t recognized how quickly this transition is taking place,” said the study’s author, Thomas Patterson, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. What about local TV sites? They weren’t even mentioned.
Uh, any mention of radio news?
Allbritton Communications launched The Politico today. It’s a free tabloid with an estimated circulation of 25,000 aimed at political junkies and Beltway insiders, and its companion website.
The Politico has garnered attention by snagging high-profile journalists to run the paper. Two of The Washington Post’s top political journalists — editor John Harris and reporter Jim VandeHei — left to become The Politico’s editor-in-chief and executive editor, respectively. Reporters have been lured from Time, U.S. News and World Report and the New York Daily News, among others.
One of these superstars, Ben Smith, is blogging and includes our own Kay Henderson (Radio Iowa) in “Ben’s Favorite Blogs.” Just the latest high-profile link love for the Bloggerista.
In this 2003 post, I included Kay in my list of “Blogs I Would Read if They Existed.” And now it does. And I do.
More The Politico here and here.
The Hardest Working Blogger in Show Business, Chuck Zimmerman, is in Berlin, covering the annual meeting of the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists. IFAJ is “a non-political, professional association for agricultural journalists in 29 countries.” As far as I can determine (and Chuck is aware), he is the only person blogging this event.
You gotta figure that at least some of the attendees have laptops and digital cameras with them. Not one blogger in the bunch? Maybe there’s coverage of the event at the official IFAJ website…nope.
Old Media types can’t understand why I’m even asking? Bloggers can’t imagine attending something like this and not putting up a couple of posts.
I was reminded this week of the scene in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) when Kris Kringle, the store Santa at Macy’s Department Store, tells a shopper she can find the toy her child wants –and Macy’s is out of– at Gimble’s, a competing New York store. Kris put the needs of the customer ahead of Macy’s and is rewarded by none other than Mr. Macy himself. You’ve seen the movie about a thousand times.
Where was I? Oh yeah.
Last Friday, police and the FBI found a 13-year old boy who had been missing for four days, and a 15-year old boy who had been missing for four years in a suburb of St. Louis.
I clicked over to Missourinet.com to see what we had on the story and found a couple of grafs with some sound contributed by a radio station stringer in St. Louis.
I should explain that I am not a journalist and don’t mess with the stories written by our reporters. I do, however, add photos when we have them (as in this instance). But because I knew there was a lot more on the story than we had, I added links to Yahoo! News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and NPR. Something I almost never do. I was definitely off the reservation.
Our reporter later pulled the link to NPR and explained: “We don’t want to send people to a competing news organization.”
I confess I hadn’t thought of NPR as a competitor to our state news network but –again– it wasn’t my call to make. I found myself using the Miracle on 34th Street defense:
“I thought I was putting the needs of those visiting our site ahead of any competitive concerns. They’ll appreciate the links and come back to us next time.”
I got off with hardly a slap on the wrist but came away thinking about how much blogging has changed my thinking. A lifetime ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling a listener to our radio station they could get what they wanted/needed at the cross-town competitor. But these day, I’m all about the links.
I think I was right in this instance but a) it really wasn’t my call and b) I wouldn’t know where to begin to convince our hard-working reporter. Somewhere on 34th Street?
Graeme Newell –the president and founder of 602 communications– is a consultant “who shows cable and broadcast teams how to effectively market and tease their shows.” We’re talking TV here but his ideas for increasing revenue from news websites apply equally well to all media.
Most broadcast web sites are money pits. Still, there are a lot of companies making serious money on the web. These are entrepreneurial pirates who have a bloodhound’s ability to sniff out revenue models that actually work. All of these moneymaking sites share some common traits and business characteristics.
Lesson #1 – Web moneymakers are entrepreneurs, not businessmen.
Lesson #2 – Businesses making money on the web are typically small.
Lesson #3 – A 30 year old is considered ancient.
Lesson #4 – Moneymaking web sites focus on niche content.
If one of the Learfield Grownups called me in tomorrow and asked me for a strategy to make money with our news websites… I would point them to Mr. Newell’s lesson plan.
I searched (in vein) for his article on the 602 COMMUNICATIONS website. I hope Mr. Newell doesn’t mind me posting it (after the jump). Emphasis (bold) is mine. [Thanks, Bob Priddy]
TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel describes some changes at the magazine that “…reflect the way the Internet is affecting pretty much everything about the news business.”
In addition to a new publication date (Friday), the new feature that caught my eye was a blog:
“…now you can start your day by checking our news blog, The Ag, which smartly aggregates and summarizes the most important stories from daily newspapers and blogs around the world.”
Hmm. Someone forgot to tell the editors at TIME that real journalists don’t blog.
This post by Terry Heaton made me flash on a Google search page with a “Pages from Missouri” button (or any of the states where we have networks):
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible to everyone. This ought to be the mission of every local media company, for one day we will find a similar button on Google regardless of the zip code from which we are logging in.”
Will Google be able to cover state news (with audio, video, stills,etc) better than our networks? Blasphemy I know, but it doesn’t seem wise to assume that our little corner of the news/media world will be untouched by the changes happening all around us.