• About this Blog

  OnlineNewsWatch is a blog that follows developments in the ever-changing landscape of online journalism. It is edited by Vera Haller, an assistant professor of journalism at Baruch College.

• This weblog was developed and is supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, Baruch College, CUNY

  

  
  
  

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A New York Times article today describes an interesting battle brewing between the sports world and the news world. Developments in the way sports stories are reported is causing tension between the teams and the news organizations covering them.

According to the article, with bloggers detailing every word and news Web sites posting slideshows and videos, sports executives are looking to limit this ever-growing coverage - and drive fans to their team Web sites.

So the Times asks, “Who owns sports coverage?” Some sources in the stories suggest that these disputes may end up in court.

 I’m not the first person to point out the incongruity between the loads of money spent on the glitzy Newseum, opening today in Washington, and the money that continues to drain from the newspaper industry.

The Newseum, whose slogan is “The Interactive Museum of News,” is funded mainly by the Freedom Foundation, a non-partisan group devoted to furthering the freedom of press, so it isn’t totally fair to compare the investment in the museum to what’s happening in the real world. But it is an interesting observation.

I haven’t seen the museum personally, but the write-ups paint an impressive picture - a brand new building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a news helicopter hanging from the ceiling, dozens of interactive computer exhibits, 15 theaters, and the list goes on.

I was struck by the juxtaposition of the article I read about the museum in today’s The New York Times and an article published earlier in the week about the financial difficulties faced by Sam Zell, who recently took over ownership of the Tribune Corp., my former employer.

Here are some numbers from both articles.

According to the museum story, the Newseum cost $450 million to build. That’s about half of Tribune’s $1 billion debt service bill for this year and close to the amount of money needed to buy Newsday, which Tribune is considering selling to offset its huge debt, according to figures in the Zell story.

Again, taking numbers from these two articles — the museum’s operating budget for this year is $50 million, not an insignificant sum when compared to Tribune’s reported net income last year of $87 million.

The figure that struck me most was in a Washington Post article, which reported that rooms can be rented for events at the Newseum for $500 to $30,000. That $30,000 figure is within range of some starting annual salaries for reporters breaking into the business.

That the younger generation seeks out its news from different sources is hardly new, but The New York Times today takes it a step further. An article states that young consumers are spreaders of news, especially in the realm of politics. Here’s an excerpt:

“According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well - sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter - reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com - with a social one.”

The article underscores the fact that the ease with which the Internet allows the transfer of information is leading people to get to their news in non-traditional ways.

An area I haven’t touched upon yet in this blog is the ability of the Web to aggregate news by subject matter. This may seem very obvious to some of you, but I wanted to draw attention to the way it affects traditional news Web sites.

 

More and more people are using searches such as Google and Yahoo news, which organize the news by topic and then list links to stories written by different news organizations. When you can see the top news stories from a selection of outlets, why go to just one site for your news?

 

This means that people are entering news Web sites through larger search engines, not by going to the home page and seeing what the editors have posted and chosen as the top stories. It also means people might not have the same attachment and loyalty to “their” news Web site like they used to have to the local newspaper. Just another example of how news consumption is changing.

 

Another type of news aggregator to watch are sites such as digg.com, which post stories, photos, videos and podcasts based on the number of times they are recommended by readers. I find these lists interesting but often skewed heavily with stories about technology, politics and the weird and whacky.

 

 

Under a headline “Obama speech on race gives Web a workout,” USA Today took a look at how the candidate’s take on race relations in America played out on the Internet.The article includes statistics on the number of hits and stories and blog entries out there about Obama’s Philadelphia speech. It’s interesting that how a story plays out on the Web has become the story itself.  

Each year, the Project for Excellence in Journalism releases a report that analyzes the status of journalism in the U.S.  So obviously, I clicked straight through to the section abut news on the Web.The findings aren’t surprising. More people are going online for news, more people are watching video online and no one has figured out yet how to make a lot of money off of news Web sites. News about foreign events (particularly the war in Iraq) filled a larger news hole on major news Web sites than in other news outlets.

The editorial part of  news organizations were credited with being innovative in finding ways to use new technology. The report criticized Madison Avenue for not moving more quickly to find ways to make advertising pay on news Web sites.

The section on the major trends  identified by the study is important reading for all who work - or those of you looking to work - in the news business.

That blockbuster of story – the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal – has spurned a million stories, blog entries, photo galleries and interactive features. 

As an exercise, I scrolled through the local online coverage and pulled out a few links that illustrate how the written word was augmented by many online features.

If anything, the breadth of coverage shows how a big story gets covered in the digital era.

 

nytimes.com:

Interactive timeline: Milestones in an Ambitious Career

Audio: Back story with Sewell Chan

 

nypost.com

Write your own Post headline (not censored)

Video: Spitzer’s apology

 

nydailynews.com

Photo gallery: Political career

Poll: Should Spitzer resign?

 

amny.com

Video: Reaction on Wall Street

Photo Gallery: Inside the Emperor’s Club

 

nysun.com

PDF: Criminal complaint about Client 9

 

nymag.com

Predict the New York Post’s headline

News that New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was implicated in a prostitution ring hit the Internet right around 2 p.m. today when The New York Times broke the story.  It took no time at all for the news to spread throughout the Web.

This was a big story. The quickness with which it was disseminated was in direct proportion to the magnitude of the story. Readers surely will be clamoring for details and the Web will oblige as a platform that permits immediate updates and room for unlimited copy.

Because of how quickly the story developed, Spitzer was out there in front of the television cameras only a short time after the story broke to apologize to his family and constituents for his involvement in a “private matter.”

 

Here are a few links to check out. A Google News search on Eliot Spitzer shows how far and wide this story went. Also, The New York Observer wrote up an item about how the Times metro staff broke the story.

 

A new poll shows that younger people (those under 30) are increasing turning to the Internet for their news. No big surprise, but this survey on the state of the news industry by Zogby International really drives home the point.

Blogs are good for many things, among them giving journalists a forum to focus on a particular subject. This blog is an example. It gives me the opportunity to write about changes in the news business.

Blogs also allow journalists to tell the story behind the story, to go into detail or to shoot off on a tangent in ways traditional news stories wouldn’t allow. The Iraq story has spawned many a journalist blog – most of them offering up painful stories of life behind the headlines. The New York Times is the latest to launch such a blog, Baghdad Bureau. The item I read, about a platoon of U.S. soldiers about to go home, provided vivid reporting with photos and audio clips from individual soldiers.

In another such blog, Baghdad Observer, McClatchy Newspapers Baghdad bureau chief Leila Fadel recently posted a poignant item about the isolation felt by the 13-year-old son of an Iraqi  colleague. The NBC News bureau also blogs at Blogging Baghdad.

The war also has inspired non-journalists to write. Take a look here at a directory of blogs and diaries from Iraq compiled by Yahoo.

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