Jan

30

How far we&amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;ve come

Posted by admin on Jan 30, 2009 under: newspapers | Leave a Comment

Jan

7

Gloom and doom

Posted by Vera Haller on Jan 7, 2009 under: economy, newspapers, online news | 1 Comment

The start of 2009 has not been kind to the newspaper business. Go to any industry Web site, such as Poynter’s Romenesko, and find the page filled with stories about layoffs, revenue drops and the elimination of print editions.

Why this happened and where we are heading are key questions on most insiders’ minds. Two articles cited here try to give some answers:

Michael Hirschorn, writing for The Atlantic, imagines a world in the not so very distance when the venerable New York Times goes out of business.
Jack Schafer, on Slate, reports on “how the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web and failed.”

Both these articles serve up large doses of harsh realities.

Jan

5

Times’ front-page ad causes stir

Posted by Vera Haller on Jan 5, 2009 under: business, economy, newspapers, online news | 1 Comment

A color display ad on the front page of The New York Times today had the blogosphere buzzing. A Google blog search conducted mid-morning found many comments already posted.

A Gawker posting asked why the Times took so long to sell front-page advertising given the decline in newspaper ad revenues. A posting by Peter Kafta on the Web site, All Things Digital, concluded that it was no surprise since the Times was trying to mortgage its midtown headquarters and shed its assets in the Boston Red Sox.

The ad, which promotes the CBS television network, runs as a strip across the bottom of the page. Now, only The Washington Post, of all the major U.S. newspapers, does not run ads on the front page, an area once considered sacrosanct for news only.

In a story in the Times’ business section today, newspaper executives declined to say how much CBS paid for the front-page ad. The article did note that the New York Times Co. said its November revenues fell 13.9 percent from November 2007.

Jan

5

Web beats print, study finds

Posted by Vera Haller on Jan 5, 2009 under: foreign news, newspapers, online news, politics, television | 2 Comments

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is out with a new study that found more people get their national and international news from the Internet than newspapers.

According to the study, the Internet has passed all other sources except television as the leading source for national and international news. The center said 40 percent of respondents said they got most of this type of news from the Internet as compared to 35 percent who said they relied on newspapers.

That percentage goes up when looking at just respondents under 30. According to the study, nearly 60 percent of younger Americans rely on the Internet for national and international news. A similar survey taken in 2007 placed that number at 34 percent, indicating that Web sites are consolidating their roles as definitive news sources.

The study doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but backs up these trends with some numbers. The survey was conducted Dec. 3-7 among 1,489 .

Oct

30

How long is too long?

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 30, 2008 under: multimedia, newspapers, television, video | 1 Comment

The New York Times’ Bits blog has an interesting post today about online video. It addresses a question about how long Web site users will spend watching video on their computers. The answer seems to be that they are committing more and more time to this Internet activity.When I first started doing video for the Web, as early as 2001, the conventional wisdom was to keep these news reports short — in part to keep the file sizes at a manageable weight so people could access them. Now, just about everyone has high speed Internet access and Web phenomena such as YouTube have made using computers to watch videos as common place as checking e-mails. I guess it would make sense that Web users would have more patience to stick with longer news videos as well.

Oct

28

It was bound to happen soon

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 28, 2008 under: business, economy, newspapers, online news | 1 Comment

The Christian Science Monitor announced today that it would drop its daily print edition next April and place more focus on delivering the news on its Web site.The move makes the Monitor the first national newspaper to stop publishing a daily edition on paper and focus on its online presence. It will also publish a weekly print version and daily news updates via e-mails. The move, top newspaper executives say, will allow the Monitor to continue operating its overseas bureaus and Washington newsroom.

“We plan to take advantage of the Internet in order to deliver the Monitor’s journalism more quickly, to improve the Monitor’s timeliness and relevance, and to increase revenue and reduce costs. We can do this by changing the way the Monitor reaches its readers,” Judy Wolff, chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Christian Science Publishing Society, was quoted as saying in the Monitor’s story about the changes.

You can check out a presentation of changes planned for the more robust Web site here.Although the Monitor’s financial situation is a little different from most newspapers because of the support it gets from the Christian Science Church, it may be a foreboding of what is to come in the next few years for other newspapers with national reach.

Oct

2

‘Charticles’ and online storytelling

Posted by Vera Haller on Oct 2, 2008 under: multimedia, newspapers, online news, video | 1 Comment

The current issue of American Journalism Review has an article titled “Charticle Fever,” which examines a type of storytelling gaining prominence in newspapers. A charticle mixes text, photos and graphics to tell a story. It is visual and allows a reader to drop in and take only the information that he or she may be interested in. According to the article, some editors and reporters aren’t crazy about this type of storytelling because they see it as undermining traditional, narrative-style reporting.
Without commenting on the pros or cons of charticles, it strikes me that the fact that these types of stories are becoming more prominent in print could be a reflection of how stories are told online. Web versions of stories also meld text with photos and other media such as video, audio, flash files and interactive features. Maybe what’s happening online is influencing what’s happening in print.
I’ll include here a couple of examples of Web journalism that are taking this melding of different media to new places. The first is Flyp Media, an online-only magazine, and the washingtonpost.com’s Video Haiku, which brings together text, photos and video in a linear format.

Sep

18

The Wall Street story

Posted by Vera Haller on Sep 18, 2008 under: business, economy, multimedia, newspapers, online news, video | 1 Comment

The business news this week has been staggering. The complexity and range of the stories make them difficult to understand, thereby making the need for explanatory reporting great. So I wondered, does the Web, with its complexity and range in story telling possibilities, lend itself to helping readers understand what is happening on Wall Street?
My guess is that sometime soon, we will see a terrific interactive graphic that lays out the events, crunches numbers and gives us some perspective. So far, I haven’t found it. What I’m seeing in terms of multimedia coverage is not very compelling video of editors and experts giving interesting summaries and analysis. Take a look at this one from wsj.com. Maybe these type of features are better as audio podcasts because what they are saying is much more interesting that what we are seeing.
I like that the nytimes.com is trying to maximize the Web’s ability to link people together quickly with its Q&A with experts. Readers send in questions and the experts give the answers. I also liked wsj.com’s photo gallery, which recorded reactions to the financial crisis around the world. A viewer was left with an impression that the gloom and worry was being felt everywhere, not just on Wall Street.
Please send me links of interesting multimedia coverage of this story.

Sep

8

The Power of the Web

Posted by Vera Haller on Sep 8, 2008 under: business, newspapers, online news | 1 Comment

This story came to my by way of Al Tompkins, the Poynter Institute’s resident expert on online and broadcast news. He points out that a six-year-old news story about United Airlines showed up online today and it caused the company’s stock to tank. Here is the story from the Chicago Tribune.It goes to show that people believe what they read online — so be careful what you post.

Sep

8

When the media is blamed

Posted by Vera Haller on Sep 8, 2008 under: newspapers, online news, politics | 8 Comments

Some major fallout from the frenzy that followed John McCain’s decision to pick Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate has landed in the lap of news organizations. In the past few days, McCain, Palin and their supporters have launched an all-out offensive against some media outlets — asserting that they unfairly went after Palin.From conservative commentators, such as this column written by radio host Howie Carr in the Boston Herald, to the more liberal-minded Huffington Post publishing a round-up of who’s saying what, everyone seems to have picked up this story line.The New York Times’ public editor Clark Hoyt looked at the question of an overzealous press in his column this week and came to this conclusion:

The drip-drip-drip of these stories seems like partisanship to Palin’s partisans. But they fill out the picture of who she is, and they represent a free press doing its job, investigating a candidate who might one day be the leader of the Free World.

But perhaps Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s Daily Show had the best approach — a direct and humorous rebuttal.

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