The executive director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association believes the cost-cutting at newspapers has been necessary in making them competitive as they transform.

But Earl Wilkinson believes the short-term is vital in redefining the newspaper and working inside a new business model.

"As the smoke clears from these tough cuts, the issues now are about:
  • Quantifying editorial output. Because pages printed won't work anymore, daily output is a good beginning measurement.

  • Re-imagining the role of newsrooms beyond narratives and beats.

  • Going below our current definitions of “local” and defending that against all competitors.

  • Matching output with the proper medium."
Wilkinson's post makes clear that quality isn't simply about hiring more people, but about determining better what the audience needs and wants.
 
 
Ryan Chittum's essay in the new Columbia Journalism Review suggests newspapers are by no means extinct or imminently heading that way.

"For those of us of a certain small-but-growing subset—the blogging, commenting, techno-savvy, early-adopting, extreme-news consumers—it’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They (some 100 million or so) still actually pick up the newspaper and read it."

Chittum argues that newspapers continue to outweigh Web readership of information and that even the most prosperous news sites are only fractionally as large as their print readership.

There is an underlying resiliency of print and shortfall in their effort to sell the Web to audiences, he concludes.
 
 
The eMarketer Web site carries a new study from TNS and The Conference Board identifying reasons people are using Twitter. More than two-fifths do so to keep in touch with friends, rather like an extended emailing.

Nearly 30 per cent use it to keep people apprised of their status. Interestingly, though, one-quarter are on Twitter to keep abreast of news. More than one-fifth used it for professional purposes and nearly 10 per cent for research purposes.

Who do you Tweet? Friends and family, mainly. Who got you hooked? One-half said friends and family, one-third said co-workers.
 
 
Zachary Seward posts a new take on user engagement at the Nieman Journalism Lab and suggests a metric that ought to be evaluated is how much content is cut and pasted --- and thus shared.

Other services carry shared content, of course, but new technology is emerging (from such firms as Tynt) with the Web analytics field to measure which passages in a post are moved to another file.

It suggests there is more to Web success than page views and unique visitors.
 
 
The Pew Internet & American Life Project continues to produce solid trendsetting data. The latest suggests a continued growth in online video consumption among Americans, with a majority now watching  --- a near-doubling of the total to 62 per cent from 33 per cent in 2006.

"As the audience for online video continues to grow, a leading edge of internet users are migrating their viewing from their computer screens to their TV screens," Pew reports.

Daily use has reached 19 per cent, up from 8 per cent in 2006. Earlier this year it reported some decline in cable use, but a much smaller decline in Internet use, owing to economic conditions. Pew now believes some of those cable-cutters are watching online.

Particularly of interest for the traditional production industries is that movie and television show consumption is up to 35 per cent of the viewers from 16 per cent in 2006.
 
 
AdAge has explored Monday's release by Forrester Research of the important time-spent metric involving the Internet. The research indicates the time has levelled off at about 12 hours weekly, more than double the amount five years ago, an obvious reflection of accessibility, choice and bandwidth.

The question is: Why is it levelling off now?

AdAge brought in a Forrester analyst and posed several questions on the topic and the approaches people are taking to Internet consumption. The answer, in short form, seems to be: People under the Net now, so they're more defined and refined in how they use it.

There is still much room for growth, says Jackie Rousseau-Anderson, primarily in the area of specialized content. E-mail and search are less likely to grow, she adds.
 
 
Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and the newly released Free, tells Spiegel Online he doesn't use words like journalism, news and media. They're meaningless in the 21st century, he asserts.

Are there alternatives? No, "we're in one of those strange eras where the words of the last century don't have meaning."

Anderson says he reads a lot of mainstream media content, but it comes through Twitter or RSS, a world of technical filters and word of mouth instead of professional filters.

"I figure by the time something gets to me it's been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn't matter is not going to get to me."

As for the craft of journalism, Anderson acknowledges no one has a new business model to pay for what used to be paid for.

"In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby."
 
 
A couple of weeks ago Ken Doctor implored publishers to think through the consequences of restraint on the craft. His latest post on Content Bridges serves up a series of nine questions for publishers to assess the impact and plot the future.

Among the questions:

1. How much circulation was cut willingly?
2. What's happening with time spent on the Web site?
3. How is community connection measured?
4. How is unique visitor count growing --- organically or through SEO?
5. How many advertisers?
6. What percentage of the business comes strictly from online?
7. How much business is coming from selling your own products?
8. How much comes from selling others' inventory?
9. How are your salespeople using social media to assist merchants?

Doctor adds a bonus question: How much of the lost business do you expect will come back?

His quiz aims to help publishers determine the strength and weakness of the enterprise. He also cites the loss of journalists --- and their stories, written and read --- as a fundamental shift.
 
 

The new mantra is that journalists will not in the digital age be gatekeepers --- they'll be curators. In essence they'll pull together an exhibit of the best content and ensure it's most relevant in presentation.

Andrew Keen, journalist and author of The Cult of the Amateur, writes in defence of gatekeeping in The Daily Telegraph. He suggests the thrust of relevance --- of relevant-focused curation --- is a dumbing-down of content to its most banal level.

Indeed, the gatekeepered model is costly. Keen notes that it's that commitment we should defend.

The notion "that the newspaper industry spews out popular garbage because of their greedy mogul owners is ludicruously wrong. If anything, the problem with the mainstream media and its supposedly monopolistic “gatekeepers” is quite the reverse. In their commitment to high quality content authored by professional (ie: paid) reporters and columnists, newspaper publishers are compromising their bottom line rather than the quality of their product."

If not gatekeepered, then what? Keen believes it will be the death of quality.

 
 

Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, produces a very interesting take on the future of the newspaper. Indeed, he thinks it ought to be the present, not the future.

He calls it the "nichepaper." The newspaper, he says, isn't fit for the 21st century. The nichepaper focuses on a particular vein and explores it in depth.

The nichepaper comprises several principal attributes:

1. Knowledge, not news.
2. Commentage (curation of comments), not commentary.
3. Topics, not articles.
4. Scarcity, not circulation.
5. Now, not then.
6. Provocation, not perfection.
7. Snowballs (meaning criticism), not sell-outs (meaning clubbiness).
8. Tasks, not tech (meaning platform- and tech-agnostic).
 

 
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