kirk lapointe's themediamanager.com: how the news business is changing

The announcement that the New York Times and Linkedin have found a way to provide customized pages to Linkedin users bodes well for future old media-social media alliances. Now it should be possible for an array of such deals to permit content to find new audiences..
In essence the Times is serving sector-related content to sector-working Linkedin users. A good deal for both.

With all apologies to Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, I have stolen that headline --- or that line --- he used some time ago at a conference I attended. I'm not sure if he coined it, but if someone had it trademarked in recent times, they might be in for a killing in the years ahead.
In reading AdAge, it's apparent that the big guys are going to start linking to the others and aggregating content to be the best utility for their audiences. This has started to happen in the New York Times' blogs, but it'll now be a feature of the home page material in the fall. The page itself, says Jonathan Landman, will be more of a blog patch.
The notion of linking out to others' news is coming into its own. The sentiment is that the competitive terrain in future will have a little less to do with who reported what than with who can gather what. In other words, do what you do best, link to the rest.
This is more than a little frightening for organizations that invest in work that then is linked by aggregators, but if everyone starts, no one will be able to stop it.

I am on the other side of the world on what passes for hoidays in the 21st Century and it seems everyone back home is in need of therapy.
A read of Mark Potts' usually-even-handed Recovering Journalist blog is downright depressing. About the best he hopes is that a string of bankruptcies in America will stave off the vultures or precipitate a rethink of the industry.

While I'm taking a break, I tripped on Eric Alterman's latest column for The Nation and how it mourns the tone and disposition of those in the newspaper business as the wide-ranging media industry attempts to predict the future of news.
The dearth of decent ideas to save the business is "curious and depressing."

There's nothing like a power outage for the soul of a newsroom.
Journalists use their wiliest resiliance to defy the odds and produce on deadline. No matter how challenging human dynamics often are, there is something about an outage that builds an exceptional bond.
I'm several time zones away from a massive power outage in the Vancouver downtown that may take another day to restore, but the Sun and Province newsrooms used technology (mainly the Canadian-developed BlackBerry) to get the papers out overnight. Thankfully generators revived the production system by Monday afternoon, but not before many hours of production had been lost. Still only a fragment of the newsroom is fully wired and humming.
Here is a Sun accounting of how it got done, typically reserved in its storytelling about what people had to do to report and edit.

 If advertisers are only willing to really pay as their ads are viewed, should publishers only pay if the content is read?
Blogger Tim Anderson is the latest to weigh in on a fledgling debate on the way in which writers should be compensated in the digital sphere. His piece is based on an interesting technical method from Chris Green on quantifying an author's appeal online. Anderson and others have noted the problems in this approach. There are many dynamics in the publisher-writer relationship that transcend click-per-view models.
Forget the click fraud issue; technology can likely address that. Bigger issues are the value attached to a reader (income, education, etc. that an advertiser might cherish), how a particular piece of writing contributes to the value of the publication (its placement and prominence), and how important a publisher wants to retain a writer for competitive purposes --- among many other things. Pay-per-click doesn't encompass those issues in the least.
In recent weeks Gawker has pruned its pay-per-click compensation for its writers.
Anderson notes that a changing model of journalism is going to need rethinking on compensation. Newsrooms essentially pay the same rates for their staff's work. But how that might change is anyone's guess, and a minefield after the guess.

AllVoices.com is an aggregator of networked and conventional news media, drawing on some 3,500 traditional sources and any number of registered users for content. It validates citizen content and uses algorithms to rank and place them for relevance and context. The merge is optimally a good pro-am blend.
It has been in beta for about a year now, but it's at last being rolled out in public form. The look and feel of the site are quite competitive. The searchable map helps pinpoint geographical content, while the categories reasonably group content (we should all have a section called Conflict and Tragedy). When I went looking for Canadian news this morning, it provided a relative impressive assortment of traditional material --- at this point it seems to have only a smattering of user-generated content.
There are many other crowd-sourcing sites in the mix, but AllVoices is on the surface a worthwhile addition.

Mary Nesbitt's posting on the Readership Institute site points to its latest wave of newspaper tracking research. The every-other-year survey examined 100 communities and their local newspaper and online sites.
What it makes clear is that readers aren't fleeing at the same rate --- not nearly --- as are advertisers in the U.S.
The local paper's reach is still there, a large part of the paper is being consumed and at some length, and while there are not good signs that young people are acquiring the newspaper habit, the data involving those aged 45 and older indicate a stability in the audience.
Interestingly, a large number of those surveyed had not gone to their newspaper's Web site. The penetration rate in the market of those sites remains very low, which doesn't mirror developments north of the border, where newspaper Web sites are actually faring better in terms of traffic and reach.

Two of Canada's largest telecom companies, BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., announced yesterday they are proposing to charge cellular customers 15 cents for each incoming text message. Wanted or unwanted.
The implications for consumers are clear, but the implications for journalism are not far behind in being clear, either. If anyone wants to launch an underwritten text service or a for-a-fee text service, life is about to get much harder.
The Canadian Industry Minister, Jim Prentice, has weighed in today, saying the idea was "ill-thought" and stands to penalize consumers who are spammed or sent unsolicited content. He wants a meeting with the telcos to explain the matter, and one has to believe this will be a major regulatory matter quite soon. Canadian consumers have already been noisy about the arrival of the iPhone and the associated fees, and today the telecom carrying the iPhone, Rogers Inc., has altered its proposed data charges to permit a lower-cost plan.
Certain mobile technologies with journalistic applications have not caught on in Canada because the country has among the highest cellular fees for industrialized countries.
This latest text issue is far from over.

From former Philadelphia Inquirer editor Rich Heidorn Jr. comes TreeHouse Media, a turn-on-its-head approach to the contemporary angry journalist. The site is striving to give journalists the tools to self-soothe. It's discursive, but not looking for gripes and grievances. Rather, it has a collaborative, let's-get-out-of-this-morass-together tone. Mainly it seems to say the newsroom is morphing into a batch of self-employed service providers, so join the club.