Category Archives: Media & Publishing

As Feds’ Media Study Begins, Critics Question Timing, Direction

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Panel head Hedy Fry remains optimistic, but journalism advocate says action comes too late.

Source: By Jeremy J. Nuttall, 2 Mar 2016, TheTyee.ca

A national study determining whether Canadians are being well served by local news media began collecting testimony last week, but critics say the panel led by Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry may be too little, too late.

Fry says she is optimistic that Canadian news and media can be saved, but could not say how Monday.

The panel, established last month to examine print, broadcast and digital media, includes former Canadian broadcasters-turned-MPs Seamus O’Regan and Kevin Waugh. Journalism professor and J-Source publisher Chris Waddell said Ottawa is late to the issue and will have a hard time catching up.

So far the standing committee on Canadian heritage has heard from Carleton and Laval academics, representatives from the Competition Bureau, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and the Canadian heritage and industry ministries. No news professionals have yet presented to the panel.

Media concentration a priority: Fry

As Canadian media outlets shutter and the ownership of larger ones becomes more concentrated, there is fear less populated regions may be losing coverage of their communities because larger outlets don’t fill the void, Fry said.

That could lead to ignorance of local issues and culture, she added.

Fry said the panel is also hoping to discover whether Canadian newspapers are really losing money, and probe a perceived lack of Canadian content available online.

Due to its size and sparse population, it is important for Canada to find a way to fix these media woes, she said.

But Fry said thus far she hasn’t made any decisions or formed firm opinions on what is ailing Canada’s media.

“I don’t know what the answer is. We want to know what the impact is and what the answer could be,” she said. “The government is looking at what it could do legislatively, policy-wise and program-wise to deal with these things.”

Fry’s accuracy charge

Last week Fry took some flak for asking the CRTC if the agency would explore how to ensure accuracy of online journalism, similar to the way it regulates broadcasters.

“Who is going to regulate, in terms of accuracy, the digital platforms?” Fry asked the CRTC during the panel. “Anyone can put anything out there and nobody knows if it’s accurate.”

Some expressed concern the government may go too far in its attempt to regulate accuracy, with ardent Conservatives insisting Fry is plotting an attack on free speech.

But she defended her comments and said she was referring to the number of blogs or less-reputable websites marketing themselves as news sites, but without the same established ethics as traditional press.

“All of the other existing media have ways of ensuring quality,” she said. “Is this something that (the CRTC) is going to be looking at. That’s all I’m asking.”

Music industry as case study

Fry suggested borrowing best practices from a variety of countries to craft a made-in-Canada solution.

She pointed to the music industry as an example of a technology shift that makes her optimistic Canadian media can be helped.

Music has made progress dealing with the demise of its traditional model of buying an album from a retailer, she said.

Now, Fry said, bands grow their fan base and make money from people attending their shows, even those on the fringe of what’s popular.

“They’re still getting listeners and they’re still getting people buying into what they do while they put samples out there for free online,” she said “That is forming its own solution.”

Look to start-ups: Waddell

Though Fry is confident solutions will be found and acted upon, not everyone is sure the panel has a chance at solving Canada’s media issues.

Waddell said the feds should have been making efforts to protect journalism years ago.

Despite warnings and previous commissions into the state of media, Ottawa chose to do nothing and let large media organizations merge and dilute the diversity of ownership, Waddell said.

“They allowed all this concentration and consolidation to take place,” he said. “No one seemed to think that maybe the guys who were doing the consolidating and concentrating, maybe their business model wasn’t that smart.”

He added: “When you’ve only got one or two [companies] left and they’ve both guessed wrong at the way the world is going, you’re in big trouble.”

To address media concentration, Waddell suggested the panel should look to encouraging startups rather than support established media.

For example, he said, offer tax incentives to media outlets that are growing or looking at how financial foundations can be encouraged to help journalism projects.

“Maybe if we thought a little bit about how we can make that easier it would be helpful,” he said.

The panel continues March 8.

Around half of newspaper readers rely only on print edition

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Source: pewresearch.com

Click to read entire story here

This weekend, Boston Globe editorial employees received an unusual request: Could anyone run a paper route? Due to problems with the paper’s new distributor, some home subscribers had not received their print editions. About 200 Globe workers responded to the call, and hand-delivered copies to local residents.

Although the paper announced Tuesday that it was returning to its old distributor for help with home deliveries, the Globe situation is a reminder that even in the digital era, many local news consumers still rely on the print product for their news.

Newsosaur : Back to Basics

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Source: editorandpublisher.com

by: Alan D. Mutter

Newspapers are so bad at digital publishing that they should just give up and focus on print.

That’s the bracing thesis of a recently published mini-book from journalism professor H. Iris Chyi of the University of Texas, who likens what she calls the “inferior quality” of online newspaper offerings to the ramen noodles gobbled by many a starving student. Her publication is titled “Trial and Error: U.S. Newspapers’ Digital Struggles Toward Inferiority” and can be found at tinyurl.com/pphdxp5.

Observing that newspapers have been experimenting with “new media” for the better part of two decades, Chyi marshals a raft of research to conclude “the performance of their digital products has fallen short of expectations.”

She urges publishers to “acknowledge that digital is not (their) forte” and abandon the “digital first, print last” strategy that has been widely adopted in the business.

“That is not to say that you don’t need to offer any digital product,” she adds, but “one may conclude that it is easier for newspapers to preserve the print edition than to sell digital products.”

Newspapers certainly have fallen short of expectations in the digital realm. Although interactive newspaper ad revenues have roughly tripled since $1.3 billion in 2003, the over-all digital advertising market has soared by more than sixfold since then.

But doubling down on print hardly seems to be a foresighted strategy when readers and advertisers increasingly are flocking to the digital media. We’ll get back to this in a moment. First, here’s Chyi’s take on where the industry went wrong:

“In retrospect, most U.S. newspapers outsourced their homework to business consultants such as Clayton M. Christensen, whose disruptive technology thesis served as the theoretical foundation behind the newspaper industry’s technology-driven approach. The problem is that most assumptions on the all-digital future have no empirical support. As a result, during nearly 20 years of trial and error, bad decisions were made, unwise strategies adopted, audiences misunderstood and product quality deteriorated.”

Pointing to research showing that people who like to read newspaper-y kinds of articles will pay substantial sums to spend quality time with print, Chyi argues that the digital version of the typical newspaper is “outperformed by its print counterpart in terms of usage, preference and paying intent.”

And she is right. Any publisher will tell you that print is more profitable that pixels.

The problem with ditching digital is that the number of readers and advertisers who value print has been steadily shrinking—and likely will continue to do so, owing to these seemingly irreversible market phenomena:

Tumbling print circulation. The print circulation of the nation’s newspapers has dropped by nearly half in the last 10 years, according to my analysis (tinyurl.com/ln642b7). While changes in the way publishers report their circulation have made year-to-year comparisons difficult, most anecdotal evidence suggests that print circulation is continuing to erode.

Dramatically aging readership. To pick one newspaper, the New York Times recently reported that the median age of its readers is 60 vs. 37 for the U.S. population, making its audience 1.6 times older than the population as a whole. The average life expectancy of a 60-year-old man is 21 years, while 70- and 80-year-old gents statistically have respective life spans of 14 and eight years. Even though some readers will live longer than the predicted average, the superannuated readership of newspapers suggests that significant numbers of loyal readers will begin dying off in the next 10 to 15 years. (Women statistically get an extra couple of years, but not enough to reverse the trend). Most publishers will tell you that the median readership of their newspapers is as senior as that of the Times.

Steadily contracting ad sales. Fully two-thirds of the print advertising at the nation’s newspapers has dried up since hitting a record high of $47.4 billion in 2005. Most of the publicly held publishers reported sales declines in the first half of this year, suggesting that revenues are on track to slide for the tenth straight year in 2015.

Declining economies of scale. Unlike websites that can serve one page or 100,000 pages at little incremental cost once they go live, print publishers must sustain substantial manufacturing and distribution investments in order to print a single paper. If circulation falls another 50 percent or print advertising slides another 67 percent in the next 10 years, will there be sufficient print subscribers and advertisers keep the business viable? This is the existential question facing the industry.

As poorly as the industry adapted to the digital age, it’s hard to imagine how newspaper companies can survive over the long term if they put their primary focus on print.


Alan D. Mutter is a former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO who advises media companies on technology. He blogs at Reflections of Newsosaur (newsosaur.blogspot.com).

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A Firing at The Los Angeles Times Focuses Discontent

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Source: nytimes.com

LOS ANGELES — In January, Jack Griffin, the chief executive of Tribune Publishing Company, took his senior management team to visit The Los Angeles Times, the jewel in his company’s portfolio of newspapers.

At a reception at the newspaper, and a dinner downtown, there was one notable absentee — The Times’s new publisher, Austin Beutner. At meetings the next day, he showed up for just an hour, to make a presentation on his strategy for the paper — one squarely at odds with that of its corporate parent.

Tribune has long pushed to centralize virtually all operations and direct them from headquarters in Chicago, running its newspapers as a group.

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Digital Publishing: Your Story’s Life Span

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Source:editorandpublisher.com

by: Rob Tornoe

In the days before the Internet, news stories didn’t have much more shelf life than the newspaper they were printed in. Other than microfilm, your mother’s scrapbook or the occasional restaurant wall, most content in the paper died as the pages hit the trash can, replaced by the offerings printed in the next day’s edition.

Today, we have the Internet to archive, reserve and promote our content 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It seems we’re only a Facebook share or a Google search away from finding an endless stream of new readers to consume our content. So assuming your story isn’t overtaken by current events, how long is it actually remaining relevant in the etherworld of the Web.

In 2013, the app Pocket found that it wasn’t all that uncommon for an article to enjoy a life span of 37 days. But in the two years since that study, the constant publishing and pushing of content seems to have only gotten more prolific, and 37 days seems way too long a timeframe for readers to still be engaged with your content. So how long do articles really remain relevant online? The team over at Parse.ly, which supplies an analytics platform to top media companies such as The Atlantic and Reuters, was curious as well. So they embarked on a study focusing on page views, visitors, engaged time and social sharing metrics from a couple of hundred premium media publishers. So how long does a story “last” online? The short answer is about two days. The long answer is it’s complicated. “Writers can assume that after the first day, traffic to their story is going to drop,” said Andrew Montalenti, co-founder and chief technology officer at Parse.ly. “But in some cases, editors have opportunities to continue to drive traffic to posts they would otherwise abandon.” Examining the top 5,000 posts from each of Parse.ly’s publishers over a two month period, the team calculated the median life span of articles was 2.6 days. To put it another way, half of the articles that were studied reached 90 percent of its page views in less than 2.6 days, while the other half lasted longer than 2.6 days. Obviously, there will always be outliers. Take “In The Crosshairs,” Nicholas Schmidel’s 13,000-word investigation into the murder of famed ex-Navy SEAL Chris Kyle for The New Yorker. The piece was published in 2013, but started to gain traction a year later thanks to two factors: being featured in Google’s In-Depth Articles feature (where it was the top result for several keywords) and the theatrical release of “American Sniper,” which created newfound interest (and search queries) about Kyle and his life. Based on Parse.ly data from their Google traffic surge, The New Yorker re-featured Schmidel’s story on their homepage, where it was shared more than 5,000 times on Facebook and more than 900 times on Twitter. “All of this new activity happened without writing a single new word of content,” said Montalenti. “It was simply recognizing an opportunity emerging out of the archive and acting on it.”   Extending the life of your story It’s both obvious and true—social media can help extend the life of your story. Parse.ly found stories that do well on social media extend their life to a third day, but not all social media is created equal. Facebook is the key to longevity—stories that did well there enjoyed a median life span of 3.2 days, compared to the quick attention spans on Twitter. In fact, in a study of 12 major news organization researchers from the University of Arizona found that news article life spans on Twitter dissipate fairly quickly, lasting between 10-72 hours. “Forty Portraits in Forty Years,” a New York Times photo essay featuring photographs showcasing the aging of a group of four sisters, was originally published in October 2014. A couple months later, editors wanted to bring the essay back, so they made the decision to purchase Facebook traffic against keywords that would likely garner the interest of Times’ subscribers. Months later, the essay was once again a traffic hit, thanks to keywords chosen by media start-up Keywee, which analyzed the story and determined related keywords like “empowering women” and the movie “Boyhood” would have the more success on Facebook than more obvious choices. “It’s a little like a Facebook hack,” Mat Yurow, the director of audience development at the Times, told Digiday.  “But I think it’s a smart marketing play. It’s unlocking those audiences nobody else is thinking about.” Purchasing Facebook traffic isn’t the only way of extending your reach on the social network. Something as simple as a headline tweak can have huge ramifications in terms of traffic. Over at The Atlantic, editors going over story analytics noticed that political stories using the word “Republican” in the headline far outperformed similar stories that used the term “GOP.” Once they began only using “Republican” in the headlines, stories had better click-through rates, search traffic and increased relevance, leading to a complete change in their editorial guidelines. “My suspicion is ‘GOP’ is more of a provincial term used by beltway insiders, whereas ‘Republican’ is something even non-political readers understand and look for,” said Montalenti. Another way to increase the relevance of a story is to piggy back off a success. Take Ars Technica, where a story about the embattled F-35 Joint Strike Fighter getting creamed in a test dogfight with an 1990s-era F-16D went viral. As editors saw the post continuing to draw in significant traffic over several days, they set about writing breakout stories, including reaching out to the F-35 team to tell their side of the story. Editors added timely links to the new stories onto the still-popular original, which enabled Ars Technica to seed traffic through the site and generate more search traffic to the overall package. Through it all, analytics are the key to figuring out how to maximize the lifespan and popularity of a writer’s story. While newspapers have a reputation of dragging their feet out of fear of being forced to write lighter, “clickier” stories, Montalenti sees things changing in the newsrooms Parse.ly partners with. “Maybe a couple of years ago, pushback to this type of data was much more frequent,” he said. “Now, it seems reporters, as well as editors, are actually driven to the data a lot more by curiosity, which can only help benefit their newsrooms and storytelling.”   Rob Tornoe is a cartoonist and columnist for Editor and Publisher. Reach him at robtornoe@gmail.com.

CWA, MEDIA SECTOR ‘HEARTSICK’ OVER JOURNALISTS’ MURDERS

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Staff
August 26, 2015
NewsGuild-CWA

AlisonAdam

 

 

 

 

 

Reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were shot and killed while doing a live TV interview Wednesday morning.

 

The following statement was issued jointly by NewsGuild, NABET and CWA:

THIS morning’s senseless tragedy in Roanoke, Va., struck close to home for the journalists and other news media workers represented by The NewsGuild-CWA and the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET-CWA).

We are heartsick over the killings of WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward. Our thoughts and prayers are with their grieving colleagues, friends and families,” said CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens. “We also pray for the recovery of Vicki Garner, the woman the journalists were interviewing, who was badly wounded.”

The threats journalists face on the job every day do not normally include their coworkers. But tragically, work-related shootings and other violence are not uncommon in the United States. Our members in the media sector and all of the Communications Workers of America are gravely concerned about this issue and committed to helping build safe workplaces.

Whatever the shooter’s motive, two young people who were looking forward to long and happy lives are gone today. We join with WDBJ, the Roanoke community and all those who loved Alison and Adam in mourning their loss.

Trouble in paradise? How the struggles of two Hawaiian paywalls reflect larger industry trends

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The Honolulu Civil Beat and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser both introduced paywalls a couple of years ago. Now their strategies are showing signs of stagnation.

Source:niemanlab.org
It was billed as the Pugnacious Polynesian Paywall Punch-Up.
Honolulu Civil Beat, a local news site backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, launched in 2010 with an ad-free business model built on digital subscriptions. About a year later, the Honolulu Star-Advertiserput up a paywall of its own. The move set up a showdown between the two news organizations as they competed for subscribers.The fight, however, is fizzling. The trajectory of each publication’s paywall appears to be mimicking industry-wide trends of slow paywall growth: It looks as if there’s a limit in the number of people who are willing to pay for news online.

read entire here

29 years later, Ruby a Cowichan legend

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Source: cowichanvalleycitizen.com

When David Rubenstein, known affectionately by his friends, colleagues and clients as Dave, or Ruby, started at the Cowichan Valley Citizen some 29 years ago, he had no idea he would become such an intrinsic part of the community paper.

Coming to the job from a background of radio announcing (he had that deep radio voice voice), he soon found his groove.

Over the years Dave made the office a more love colourful place with everything from his of the Red Sox, to his passion for tennis, horse racing, and football (soccer).

And when we say passion, we mean it.

Dave has sat down with some of tennis’s hottest st stars, and photographed even more at the various international tournaments he attended.

His photos of the sport he so dearly loved have gained international recognition in recent years. But he always had time for those close to home as well. He has been invaluable to the employees as a long time union representative for the paper, as well as just being someone you could always talk to when you needed an ear. In the spring and summer he’d bring in roses from his garden in Crofton to brighten the office.

Ruby ran for Duncan City council on several occasions and was always up on the latest in the community, if not always the first to master the latest computer technology.

In May, serious health issues meant the end of Dave’s tenure at the paper, but he’s left an indelible mark on our hearts.

David died on Monday, June 22, peacefully at Cowichan District Hospital, with his wife, Bonnie, and stepson, Bobby, at his side.

We’ll always be able to picture him walking into the office in his brown leather jacket and colourful scarf, celebrating the Red Sox or the Bruins, ready with a smile.

We are grateful for all the years we got to know and work with Dave, and we will miss him, but always carry on his passion for life.

 

Philip Wolf:

My favourite memory of Dave, aside from his flashy San Francisco 49ers jacket and that glorious white Ford he cruised around in back in the day, was his rumbling baritone voice.

I can still recall as a kid listening to him on the radio, calling hockey or basketball games. When I started at the Citizen in the late 1980s, I was fascinated to get to hear that voice every day, in person. Once I had settled in and knew I could get away with it, I always greeted him with my own best baritone imitation: “Rrrrruuuubbbyyy.”

Since he was a Bruins fan and I was a Habs fan there was plenty of good-natured ribbing but I always appreciated being able being able to talk sports with him and listen to his tales of oldschool media antics.

Years after I had left, he was doing some B.C. Hockey League play-by-play for the Cowichan Valley Capitals up in Nanaimo and asked me to sit in as his colour commentator. It was the most fun I have ever had on the air. I kept trying to get him to crack his ultra-professional facade but he was too good.

Having grown up in the Valley and always considering it “home” I have seen for decades that Ruby truly is a legend. His own love for the area and his devotion to his community and his craft has always been a shining example.


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