media notes 28.03.13

03/28/2013

 
Media stories of note for Thursday, March 28, 2013:

Danny Sullivan, writing for SearchEngineLand, notes that Google has weighed into the controversy involving content sponsored by advertisers that commingles with news. It wants publishers to segregate this non-news content carefully so that it does not end up as part of what Google News ranks. If they don't, Google is threatening to exclude their organizations from Google News, a measure that would significantly affect their traffic and referrals. 

Add Portugal to the list of countries whose news organizations are asking Google to compensate them for running their content through its search engine.  News organizations in Portugal are suffering their worst economic results in 40 years. Google has rejected the initial demands, Reuters reports, but negotiations are continuing. Google has struck support deals in other European countries in recent months.

R.B. Brenner, writing for Poynter.org, provides a tip sheet on how newsrooms can create plans to deal with breaking news. He cites editors' ideas, among them: focus on roles, not personnel; think across platforms and how you want information to flow from the newsroom; be iterative; look for non-journalistic help; practice the plan; conduct postmortems.
 

How the Washington Post is changing

03/18/2008

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Newspapers are now newsrooms and in some cases newscentres. Their steady momentum to the end of the day and the print deadline has been replaced by an incessant humming of the 24/7 digital priority.
It is a news manager's challenge to help reshape the culture, and one of those cultures is the layered editing that often improves and occasionally blandizes the reporter's copy.
The Washington Post has done as much as any North American media to operate across platforms in the last decade. Its washingtonpost.com functions separately from the newspaper, in a different state, and while the two complement each other, they have distinctive qualities that make for a slightly different content organization and hierarchy --- and thus a different consumer experience.
In recent days the Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie, has outlined changes to the production of the newspaper to put it on a more aggressive footing in the new environment. His memo  (available through Slate.com) is an insightful elegy to different days and a clear signal that times have forever changed. In particular it is instructive to read how some non-local desks are being merged, how the rhythm of the newsroom will change to adapt to earlier consumer expectations in the day, and how the newsroom will reduce the number of "touches" on a story (they found as many as 12 editors --- yikes --- had handled a story in one instance).

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By way of introduction

01/20/2008

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I am a new media manager with old media experience. This is a time of transformation in which innovators will win.
This blog is about changing times in journalism and news organizations. I will use it regularly to link to new research and ideas and I will supplement the blog with resources on other pages on themediamanager.com to spur the dialogue.
It is not a blog for media criticism. We have too many of those and it is fruitless to add one more.
It is also not a blog of trade secrets. We have too few of those and it is fruitless to lose one more.
Anyone looking for competitive information is wasting time. Anyone looking for collaborative information is in the right place.
I will attend to the site regularly and I am hoping that a good network of journalists and non-journalists alike will participate.
Enough preamble. Let the conversation begin.

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