BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Tag: newspapers

  • Hyper about local

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    Go read this wonderful essay about life in the hyperlocal lanes from Debbie Galant, the Baristanette.

    Now, on the other hand, I dwell in the journalistic equivalent of a roadhouse – a neighborhood newsblog – where I stand behind the counter, a dirty dishtowel over my shoulder, barking at the rowdies in the corner to keep it down, serving up mugs of draught and occasionally pulling up my skirts to show a little ankle….

    I pictured it more like a café, hence the name “Barista”–the job of one who serves cappuccino–“of Bloomfield Ave.” I pictured recapturing the readers I’d lost when the New York Times decided to offer my column to another writer. Which I did. I pictured making a ton of money. Which I may. I saw the product, quite clearly, but I didn’t yet see my readers. I didn’t see how they would emerge as individual personalities, with opinions of their own, and how this would alter both the product and my experiment.

    When I try to explain Baristanet to someone who’s never heard of it before, I often say “it’s like your weekly small town newspaper meets the Daily Show.” …

    The question was, how would that attitude play in our own backyard? And a second, related, question: would it alienate advertisers? In other words, could you do a Wonkette or a Daily Show in the same place where you live, shop and take your kids to school?

  • The Wapping of the newsroom

    2 comments on The Wapping of the newsroom
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    The Observer looks back on Rupert Murdoch’s Wapping revolution — when he moved his papers off Fleet Street and away from antiquated rules and methods and unions as well — 20 years ago this month. That revolution changed the backshop of journalism in Britain: typesetting, production, distribution.

    I wonder what it will take to bring a revolution to the front end of journalism: to the newsroom. I’ve argued that Katrina may have been the explosion news needed, though I suspect it was temporary change. Wapping was a permanent move.

    Hear Andrew Neil, who was editor of the Sunday Times, a Murdoch paper, during Wapping:

    ‘Before Wapping,’ I explained recently to a group of young journalists, ‘if any of you had done this’ – I pressed a letter at random on the computer keyboard – ‘the print workers would immediately have walked off the job and the paper wouldn’t come out.’ …

    Wapping changed all that. In the process it saved the British newspaper industry. If Fleet Street had staggered to the end of the last century with pre-Wapping, absurdly high labour costs, world-beating low productivity, antediluvian technology and the industrial relations of the madhouse, then probably only a handful of papers would have survived – concentrated in Rupert Murdoch’s News International and Lord Rothermere’s Associated.

    There would certainly have been no colour printing, no multi-section Sunday newspapers, no rise of the big Saturday editions, no new sections during the week, no Independent (which slipped out unscathed during the Wapping dispute while we were locked in mortal combat), no newspaper websites, and a lot less of the diversity and dynamism that makes the British newspaper market the most exciting and competitive in the world. The idea of launching an all-colour, Berliner-size Observer would never have crossed anybody’s mind because the very idea would have been beyond the pale….

    At one stage, a union official hurled a box of matches across the table at us, shouting: ‘Why don’t you just burn the place down? Don’t you understand? We’re never going to go there!’ If we’d taken his advice, not just Wapping but the British newspaper business would have gone down in flames.

    Of course, the conditions are different, but the stakes are the same: survival into the future.

  • The value of scoops vs. collaboration

    25 comments on The value of scoops vs. collaboration
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    Steve Baker laments that he could not blog to the world about the gigantic Business Week cover story on math that he has been working on for months. It frustrated him not being able to talk about what was consuming his days because Steve is now living the transparent lifestyle. I know, because Steve told me about it over lunch but swore me to secrecy until the thing was out. And knowing Steve, I’m sure it also frustrated him that he could not tap the knowledge and generosity of his readers and fellow bloggers — and there are, no doubt, plenty of amazing mathematicians among them who could have enriched the story and even enlarged the audience. (And I’m not one of them.)

    So I’m about to say something patently naive but I say it to raise a question:

    Is it better for Steve and Business Week to have held back their story from public view until it was packaged and polished and delivered in print, or to have sought out the best advice on it from an informed public by seeking collaboration via Steve’s blog as the story was being formed? Which produces a better product and a better business?

    Of course, the magazine vets would say that they could not possibly let the world know about such a megastory because then the competitors would steal the scoop. How silly of me even to ask. But what competitors: US Weekly? And if Fortune came along and did its mondomath story, at least colleagues in the business would know it was a ratty thing to do, stealing from Steve’s blog, indicating they didn’t have ideas of their own.

    If publications shared what they were working on and if the practice succeeded in improving stories — and, indeed, in drumming up excitement for them — then they’d all end up doing this and all would fear being stolen from. Honor among hacks.

    : The bigger question is whether there is value left in the scoop. As good as it is, will that math story really drive extra newsstand sales (no matter how much Steve tried to get them to sex it up)?

    Or is the essence of a magazine — and its strength in a world where content has been dethroned by connections — that it is about an ongoing relationship with a public that shares interests? Obviously — except for the aforementioned US and other outlets of bodily fluids journalism — I’d vote for the latter. Perhaps it is better to create the means for that community of shared interests, needs, and expertise to improve stories and gain and share knowledge. Perhaps it is better to make magazines less of a product and more of a process, less of a subscription to a thing and more of a membership to a community. Stop me before I go too far. Oh, too late.

    : Now let’s ask, what is the value of the scoop in the more timely media of newspaper and broadcast? Do scoops really drive the business? Or do they stoke the ego? Here, too, I’ll vote for the latter. Now you could argue that in this marketplace, where Google kills brands and levels the content playing field, it’s more necessary than ever to have the scoops and exclus and stars that separate you from the pack. Except I’m not sure they do separate you. My wife reads newspapers and magazines far more loyally and diligently than I do and she remembers every fascinating thing she finds … except she never remembers where she reads the stories she repeats because that matters only to me, not to her. My mother used to quote stories to me that she’d read in the Chicago Tribune, when we all lived there — even when I had written them. Bylines and scoops and exclus are not worth as much as we assume they are.

    : I just came back from the Online Publishers Association confab, where I spoke at the end, and I said that we waste too much resource and money on ego: on having our own movie critic, though the movies are the same everywhere and the opinions that matter are those of the audience; on having our own golf writer go to the tournament far away, though the score is the same as the one reported hours before on TV; on sending our own political pundits to the political conventions, when nothing happens there.

    And perhaps holding back stories like that Business Week cover also carries a price. Perhaps involving the public of interested and expert people will bring more knowledge to the story and to the community gathering around that formerly print brand. And perhaps that community will help market itself, linking to the discussion and the story to tell people who wouldn’t have otherwise cared that Business Week has a story about math that will interest them; perhaps that’s the real newsstand bump you want.

    As the news industry faces huge business challenges and the urgent need to find new efficiencies, one of the questions it has to ask is what the real value — and cost — of scoops, exclus, stars, and secrecy are. Or to put it another way: How much are we investing in institutional — and often, personal — ego that should be invested in better information and stronger relationships?

    : LATER: Little did I know that this also applies to the Philippine energy sector.

  • Well, it’s only TV

    3 comments on Well, it’s only TV
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    Media Orchard has a good inteview with Regret the Error‘s Craig Silverman and here’s an interesting bit on the NY Times’s boo-boo-prone TV critic Alessandra Stanley:

    This is an instance where I sometimes wonder if I’m piling on. I don’t like the personal nature of the attacks on her, but she continues to make inexcusable errors. I call them inexcusable not because they are particularly egregious in the sense of their consequences. They are inexcusable because she is getting very simple things wrong on a consistent basis.

    There’s a side element to this: the New York Times — the paper that created the modern correction format in the early 1970s — does not as a rule indicate the source of an error in a correction. Some other papers will note that it was a reporter’s error, or an editing error. It’s possible that some of her errors were inserted by an editor, but we don’t know because the paper doesn’t specify.

    At this point the errors in her work have become a distraction and I would hope that this is something that her editors are working with her to change. You can’t just dismiss the criticism as blog chatter. Gawker and Reference Tone have proven that there’s an issue here.

    I would prefer to see someone receive training and extra attention before getting canned for making errors, but there is a point where you have to draw the line. Really, is it so hard to re-check all the names and titles in a piece before putting it in the paper? I understand the pressure on newspaper reporters to file quickly, but it’s better to get it right than get it fast.

    d

    : And they continue.