Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category
News Media Consumption Among Gen Y: Implications for the News Industry
The audio component of this story can be found here.
By Ryan Boulanger
Part Two: Applying These Lessons
Seattle’s recent loss of one of its oldest print newspapers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, may have been a surprise to some people but it’s a trend that’s happening to major newspapers across the country.
As a result of our survey, we found that 85 percent of current college-aged students get most of their news from on-line sources – compared to 13 percent that rely on newspapers. Print newspapers have on-line counterparts that relay their content to a greater audience, using their branded name to gain trust on the Web.
Our survey also found that 88 percent of college-aged students use traditional news websites – a descendant of print newspapers – as their main source of on-line news. Blogs and other alternative news websites represented the remaining 12 percent.
Digital Media and a UW Communication Student
The typical day in the life of a University of Washington Communications student:
-Meeting with advisers
-Internship
-Current job
-Spending hours studying for their 300/400 level classes
It seems like they don’t have the opportunity to stop. Moving ever so swiftly, I managed to sit down with a current communications student at the University of Washington.
For most communications students, their careers could lie anywhere from advertising, human resources, to digital media. Their discipline gives them a sense of flexibility – this could be their best friend or worst enemy. And with the pace of developing technologies, their prospective jobs seem to be in jeopardy.
Where’s my paycheck? Thoughts on the future of journalism
We’re obviously in an age of very uncertain times for journalists. I sat down with two experts, Robert McClure and Hanson Hosein, to get an understanding of their unique perspectives on where journalism is headed and some of the current obstacles and opportunities provided by “the shakedown.”
Robert McClure is Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism, has covered environmental news since the late 1980s and has been working in Seattle since 1999. He covered groundbreaking stories and ran a popular blog at the Seattle P-I until the paper halted it’s print edition. Since then, he’s been working with a team of accomplished journalists on a project called Investigate West. Investigate West (website coming soon) is a nonprofit start-up devoted to Web 2.0 investigative and narrative journalism in the West. It’s funded by members, media partners and major donors.
As the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington, Hanson Hosein is well aware of the technological changes that uprooting the values of traditional journalism. He’s worked as a solo broadcaster around the world for MSNBC.com. Through his company HRH Media, Inc. he’s produced the award winning films, Independent America: The Two Lane Search for Mom and Pop, and Independent America: Rising from Ruins.
By: Scott Nordquist
The Survival of the Fittest: Online Advertising and Content
There is no doubt that there is an ability for on-line content to make adequate, and in rare cases, more than adequate revenue. However, on-line media space requires precise and strategic planning.
In the case of advertising and revenue, the success of on-line social media has catapulted its own independent success and has segued to many other parent sites as well. As demonstrated in the info-graphic above, Twitter has parented many other successful subsidiaries.
While the ability of news content to be freely available on-line scares the the typical media employee, the info-graphic above demonstrates on-line content more as an opportunity than a restraint.
The developmental pace of such on-line social media tools has created dependent websites that are able to generate revenue on their own. In this case, Twitter has allowed a space for businesses to have free on-line advertising through consistent tweeting.
Many bloggers have predicted that in the near future there will be paid tweeters and bloggers. However, the conflicting issue for on-line versus print revenue is the mere fact that print involves more key players to be paid – a trend that I believe is the key to success for the on-line social media space.
Newspapers’ Doomed Business Model
Xark‘s Dan Conover has some excellent criticism of the newspaper industry in his article, “The newspaper suicide pact.” Below is an excerpt.
Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren’t predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation). It’s a “well, we’ve got to do SOMETHING” solution, not a logical, do-the-math solution. And since since most media companies are owned by shareholders, the resulting loss of confidence could be catastrophic.
What will these media executives do when that reality hits them? When these debt-burdened chains, stripped of journalistic talent by a decade of profiteering, their web traffic reduced by 60 percent by their paid-content follies, their pockets emptied by the cost of the proprietary paywall systems offered by Journalism Online LLC and other opportunistic vendors, what will they do?…
They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And in many cases, they’re literally paid not to get it.
America’s journalism infrastructure – from corporate giants to non-profit foundations like the American Press Institute and the Newspaper Association of America – is funded by dying companies. So when you hear about efforts to save newspapers (and, by extension, journalism), understand that answers that don’t return the possibility of double-digit profits and perpetual top-down control aren’t even considered answers. They’re not even considered.
They’ll do anything to survive… so long as it doesn’t involve change.
Full text at Xark!
New Business Model?
If the future of news is all about the citizen, how will journalists be earning their money? This video explores one of the possibilities for journalists to make a living in the new world of news.
Bernoff on “When and How to Pay a Blogger”
Josh Bernoff writes on the thorny issue of “When and How to Pay a Blogger” for the Advertising Age.
Some take-aways:
Bloggers gotta eat, too. Should they take cash to write about products? Should you pay them?
…
Here’s an excerpt of our recommendations:
- Know the [FTC] rules and educate everyone involved.
- Mandate absolute disclosure and transparency.
- Ensure authenticity.
[via Advertising Age]
Be sure to read the linked articles and comments.
Community-Funding: The Future of Journalism? (Update: Poll Results)
(PC’s Project)
OR: Spot.us Our Paycheck!
How much would you pay for news?
Will the community fund journalists to "digg deep" in the future? ©pc britz
Nothing, since you can get it online for free? That’s what worries journalists about the changing media landscape!
What if somebody was looking into what really interests you? What if YOU could tell a journalist where to dig? Sound any better? Getting your wallet ready?
Spot.us is a platform that pitches news stories to get them funded by “the crowd.” This is an audience who actually cares about a topic – so much that they are willing to invest money into it. And this is why the model might work. David Cohn founded Spot.us in November 2008 and the site has been running succesfully since.
My story:
Spot.us appears to be an example of a new biz (or rather non-profit) model that is becoming part of the future of news. Will business even remain a part of journalism?
I will interview David Cohn to find out more about the business side of Spot.us, its potential for the future of news and to ask him:
WHERE IS MY PAYCHECK?
The Future of News 