People used to say that content was king. Amid the recent upheaval in mass media, Time Magazine recently demoted content to a pauper. But an article in the current issue of Wired makes me think Time set the bar too high. Content — or at least content creators [...]
Working at the center of the newspaper industry meltdown has been humbling. I can’t recall how many goodbye cakes I’ve tasted in the last few years. I’ve quite lost my appetite for them.
But I agree with Jack Shafer of Slate who thoroughly debunks the notion of legislation to benefit newspapers. [...]
Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review takes a look at newspaper advertising in 2009 which is expected to collapse to $31.6 billion, or just below 1993 levels. When he adjusts for inflation the situation gets far worse:
You have to go back to 1965 to find a year with revenue [...]
(Continued from last week when I first considered enlisting because I was broke.)
Although I had forgotten completely about the Navy and journalism, chance intervened. My mother’s birthday is in February and I went over to visit her one day. While I was in her kitchen the phone rang. It [...]
My first job in journalism was for the U.S. Navy. How that came to be takes me back to the winter of 1973 when I dropped out of New York University. I was about 19 and barely getting by as a waiter at a restaurant when I got laid off. [...]
I read an article in Wired that was scary — from the POV of the beleaguered newspaper industry. It explains how Google uses auctions to price advertisements. I understood it not all too well which was the scariest part. They have implemented an auction-based approach to selling and they [...]
(An edited version of an essay that appeared in April)Â
Doug Millison mashes up a 1979 B&W graphic by Josh Gosfield
In this final essay in a series let me explain why I accuse mass media of dereliction of duty for helping mislead the nation into [...]
it’s been more than 15 years since the newspaper industry knew how to compete for circulation or revenues
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In 2006 the now-defunct magazine Business 2.0 effused over the profit-potential of blogging with a story based on a handful of money-making sites. After an instructive anecdote about BoingBoing (which took about 15 years to become an [...]
(A repost that first appeared April 1.)
Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications
In Hollywood everyone has a screenplay. In New York the unpublished novel is the thing. In Silicon Valley, which I’ve covered for most of the last 16 years, it’s all about inventions. [...]
(originally posted March 30th; reposted without change.)
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Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications
My name is Tom Abate and I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter since 1992. I was 37 when I got my first daily job after I reinvented myself out of the typesetting industry, a [...]
This is the outline for a presentation to be delivered at the Fall 2008 conference of the National Association of Science Writers, at a panel titled: Geeks, Freaks & Deadlines: Writing about technology and the humans who love it.
Discussion
Who:
are you are you writing for are you writing aboutWhat:
are your interests and [...]Scholars and lawyers working with under the aegis of the Communication School at American University have compiled a “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.” That title might lead videographers, amateur film-makers and digital activists to conclude that the PDF will teach them how much copyrighte material they can legally snip and [...]
The Senate may be nearing a vote on the Free Flow of Information Act of 2007, which has already cleared the House of Representatives. This bill, with its Orwellian title, is ostensibly designed to “shield” reporters from having to disclose the identity of anonymous sources when hauled into court [...]
How did tiny Denmark become one of the world’s leading exporters of pork products? And why raise that question in a media blog?
To answer to the first question, about 120 years ago Danish farmers created producer cooperatives that combined the best attributes of big and small enterprises. The cooperatively-owned slaughterhouse [...]
In 1984, when Rush Limbaugh was finding his voice on radio station KFBKÂ in Sacramento, California, I had several in-laws who were initially charmed by his bombast, though they ceased to be fans after he moved to New York in 1988.
Since then Limbaugh has arguably become the nation’s demagogue in chief. [...]
Some time back I read an article by MediaPost editor Joe Mandese which postulates, and I think correctly, that the current slump in mass media revenues owes not merely to an economic slowdown but to an accelerating shift away from newspapers and broadcast to online. Economists call these secular [...]
Legal, non-violent, direct action can succeed where Congress has failed
The U.S. Senate seems poised to pass an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act that will retroactively protect telephone companies that made illegal wiretaps for Bush Administration. Senators Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd have filibustered [...]
Socrates swallowed poison rather than humble pie
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Charlotte Yee wants to change the perception that federal employees have a cushy jobs. She used to be an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics until a male superior chased her around a file cabinet last year. She [...]
The Federal Communications Commission seems poised to tighten the rules regarding products that are scripted into television shows as a guerrilla form of advertising. United Press International reports that advertisers put 26,000 “product placement” messages into the top 10 television shows in 2007. [...]
With that pithy quote (see headline) former suburban newspaper publisher Tom Noonan encapsulates his message that serious media blogs need a business plan. And his article, “Cracking the local market” offers sensible tips on how to design an editorial product and sell it to advertisers. Noonan writes:
People advertise for [...]
The workplace as epicenter of consumption
The polling firm BIGResearch says advertising to workers on the job is the smartest way to reach consumers most likely to have money, and then spread buzz. A summary of the findings notes that:
With rising pump prices and busy schedules, [...]
Rob Snell wrote the book on starting a Yahoo! store
(Yesterday’s item about the a House subcommittee hearing, “The Impact of Online Advertising on Small Firms,” drew a comment from invited witness Rob Snell, who sent me a link to the prepared testimony he [...]
A subcommittee of the House of Representatives will holding hearings Wednesday on “The Impact of Online Advertising on Small Firms.” Texas Democrat Charlie Gonzalez of San Antonio chairs the Subcommittee on Regulations, Healthcare and Trade that will conduct the hearings on Wednesday, June 25, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. The [...]
A year ago, in a fit of political petulance, former Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher ordered state websites to block access to certain political blogs after Mark Nickolas, author of BluegrassReport.org, criticized Fletcher in remarks reported in the New York Times.
Last week the administration of new Kentucky Governor Steve [...]
Two important whistleblower protection bills were signed into law last year (for defense contractors and
ground transportation security whistleblowers) and two more reform bills are awaiting legislative action. They will be the focus of a conference convened today by the Government Accountability Project. According to the press release:
Coleen [...]
“It’s the debt, stupid,” says Poynter Institute business commentator Rick Edmonds, who chides newspaper chains that grew through debt-financed acquisitions, such as McClatchy, Media News and the new Sam Zell empire. They will have a hard time in this downturn as they try to pay huge interest charges with [...]
My posting yesterday naively assumed that it would be “fair use” to quote at least a 75-word chunk of an Associated Press article, or other any other copyrighted work, because that was what I recall from various journalism classes.
Now science fiction writer Nielsen Hayden proves me wrong by 71 [...]
To a considerable extent blogs have fed off mainstream media, repeating and commenting, supplementing and contradicting, but more often than not using some news article as their starting point. Now two developments, noticed by contributors to this blog, show how professional and citizen media groups are trying to coexist.
Der Cuz [...]
Pro-union vote in eastern region of SF Bay
Editorial employees at seven newspapers in the San Francisco East Bay voted 104-92 to certify the Newspaper Guild as their bargaining agent with MediaNews Group. The San Francisco Chronicle and the MediaNews papers wrote short articles (see [...]
Former newspaper analyst turned professor Lauren Rich Fine attended the Florida Press Association meeting where the Tribune Company announced its new 50-50 ratio between advertising and editorial copy. She writes
there is a relatively new sense of urgency among participants to find and discuss solutions to the current economic [...]
Yesterday I created a new personal web site, TomAbate.com, or more accurately Tim Bishop whipped it together while I watched and did the small stuff. Tim also activated a new email contact, tom (at) tomabate (dot) com. I was long overdue for a central place to establish my identity [...]
What’s up with the newspaper industry? Surprisingly, readership is up in developing nations where globalization is raising incomes, according to the World Association of Newspapers which recently unveiled its exhaustive summary of the print news industry in 2007. A WAN press release offers detailed results [...]
American households get an average of 118.6 channels of television but watched only 16 according to Nielsen’s annual “Television Audience” report. In summarizing the report MediaPost editor Joe Mandese writes:
“The finding suggests that while the supply of media options is expanding, consumer attention may have [...]
The National Conference on Media Reform is being held this weekend in Minneapolis and while the gathering is largely being ignored by the corporate media that are the intended targets of reformers, the organizers offer plenty of ways to listen in to the speeches. The local alternative paper, [...]
Charlotte Yee writes in her Government Accountability blog that the Project on Governmental Oversight is prodding House and Senate leaders to reconcile some minor differences in their respective bills to give people more legal protection against retaliation when they step forward to expose government wrongdoing.
Yee, who is currently contesting [...]
My friend Tim Bishop points me to some reality checks today, suggesting that the Washington Post’s much-touted experiment in hyperlocal web publishing has lost its leader and perhaps its way. Rob Curley is one of the newspaper industry’s new media and I have lauded in this blog about 10 [...]
Industry e-zine Paid Content celebrates its sixth birthday this week by biting the hand that feeds it. Deals and the rumors of deals are its stock in trade so kudos to the Content-meisters for touting the New Yorker’s skeptical assessment of CBS’s acquisition of CNet. Financial columnist James Surowiecki uses [...]
Blogging may be a mild form of self-therapy in which we make ourselves happier or at least blow off steam in a way that improves our mental heath. That was my takeaway from a summary, written by the Poynter Institute’s Barb Iverson, of an article in Scientific American (behind a registration wall). In [...]
Pricewaterhousecoopers recently analyzed Internet advertising in 2007 which rose 26 percent to $21.2 billion in a year-over-comparison to 2006. A summary of its findings reveal that:
Search revenue accounted for 41 percent of 2007 full year revenues, up from the 40 percent for the full year 2006. Display advertising, [...]
Here’s a story that Corporate Media would rather you didn’t read, hear or see. Three U.S. senators have asked the General Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress, to investigate how media mergers affect public discourse.
The [...]
I am not an early adopter of technologies but I have many friends and professional associates who fit that description and they have made me aware of the Twitter service that allows one to blast out 140 character messages to anyone who follows your address. I once signed up for [...]
Once upon an elitist time the now-deceased journalist Walter Lippmann argued that Joe and Jane Average needed the guidance of their betters to run the world. They needed gatekeepers in professional media to filter the news, expose the public to some issues but shielding them from stuff that went [...]
Cisco blog touts 1960s TV show!
Our most powerful modern myth is the notion of “progress” as defined by an every-expanding galaxy of consumer choices provided by that bubbling caudlron of double-double toil and trouble that is the global economy. And consumption is of course tightly tethered to advertising and branding, [...]
Bleak financial reports from some of the nation’s leading publicly traded newspaper corporations reveal that print advertising is eroding faster than news websites gained online revenues. Job cuts continue.
I must be a bit bonkers over product placement. The term describes how broadcasters drop branded items, as if serendipitously, in entertainment media. Of course this is advertising in disguise and I have been an aficionado of this guerrilla marketing tactic ever since I saw the thoroughly silly movie called, [...]
FreePress.org reports that the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to overturn a Federal Communications Commission decision that would let media companies own newspapers and television station in the same cities. The FCC decided to lift the so-called cross ownership rules in December to permit further consolidation on the argument that [...]
I continue to be impressed with the signals that favor specialty media over mass or homogeneous media. For instance I only recently noticed the TNS Media Intelligence U.S. advertising summary for 2007. Overall the U.S. advertising market was flat with a 0.2 rounding error increase over the 2006 figures to [...]
While camping by the Santa Barbara coast I played hookey for a while at a wirless hot spot and picked up a copy of the local six-day-a-week paper, the Daily Sound. The Sound is a 2-year-old rival to the self-wounded Santa Barbara News-Press. To summarize that story, Wendy McCaw, owner of the News-Press precipitated a [...]
I have been feeling not so well and less energetic than usual but have not forgotten that I left unfinished last week the essay, “Learning to think like a molecule.” I don’t quite muster the enthusiasm to finish it today but I do want to share a few squibs to [...]
Frog, lily, pond. Media, center, community.
Reformers want to create community media to serve neighborhoods or affinity groups who fall through the cracks of mass media. There was much talk of community media at the Journalism that Matters conference I attended last week. The focus was [...]
It’s back to the newsroom today after spending the last four days immersed in a gathering of about 150 journalists, technologists, educators and entrepreneurs at the Journalism that Matters (JTM) conference held in Silicon Valley. Chris Peck, a newspaper editor from Tennessee and one of the conveners of [...]
I foolishly started a two-part blog posting Wednesday before I plunged into a four day conference that has left me no time to finish the thought I started in “Learning to think like a molecule.” But I will come back to the idea and with a better sense of how [...]
In 16 years as a daily newspaper reporter I’ve covered some mind-expanding stories including the race to map the human genome which revealed nothing so much as our stunning ignorance of the baffling complexity of the smallest, dumbest purposeful thing in the universe, the organic macromolecule.
Molecules, you will recall, [...]
The market research firm Borrell Associates predicts today that online display advertising and search advertising are both poised to peak in a few years. The report, excerpted in Paid Content, says:
“The real growth story in internet marketing expenditures is going to be increasingly focused on online promotions.”
That neatly corroborates [...]
One of my daily newspaper colleagues wrote a story Sunday whose headline should serve as a wake up call to the beleaguered media industry: “Dollar’s fall forces new standard of frugality.” It’s a good piece that notes what may seem obvious — the probable recession, the mortgage bust, the [...]
Next week I will be among the 200 or so people who will meet in Silicon Valley for the New Tools 2008 conference meant to foster “innovation, democracy and a new ecology of news.”
My first assignment for that event is to introduce fellow participant Tom Stites, who interviewed me [...]
Shield law divides journalists, bloggers? by Douglas Millison
The Justice Department is lobbying the U.S. Senate to amend a proposed reporters shield law to exclude bloggers from the limited protections that it would give paid reporters against the forced disclosure of confidential sources. The House passed [...]
Online Journalism Review is trying to gather “examples of journalists and news organizations using online crowdsourcing in their news reporting.”
Crowdsourcing is the term coined by Wired Magazine to describe the use of interactive media to harvest [...]
Sea of Faces by Livefunky and Jessica Torrant
Jim Manzi of Lotus fame has a new interest in the reinvention of media. Below are excerpts from an an essay, (The End of the Literary Industrial Complex) that he published at [...]
William Dean Singleton, chief executive of the Media News Group is the publisher who controls the ink in the East and South Bay portions of the San Francisco metropolitan area. He is also apparently the chairman of the Associated Press, which is a producer cooperative formed about 160 [...]
Let me pause today to thank the people who have helped me spell out the problems with professional news-gathering and suggest the blog- and people-centred approach that makes better ethical and business sense.
The professional journalist of the [...]
Jane Tillman Irving, top left, with some of us oldsters of ‘91
I spent several days in New York City last week with fellow alumni of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (class of 1991). Other one or [...]
Doug Millison mashes up a 1979 B&W graphic by Josh Gosfield
In this final essay in a series let me explain why I accuse mass media of dereliction of duty for helping mislead the nation into war, for uncritically swallowing the sensational and for [...]
Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications
In 2006 the now-defunct magazine Business 2.0 effused over the profit-potential of blogging with a story based on a handful of money-making sites. After an instructive anecdote about BoingBoing (which took about 15 years to [...]
Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications
In Hollywood everyone has a screenplay. In New York the unpublished novel is the thing. In Silicon Valley, which I’ve covered for most of the last 16 years, it’s all about inventions. So at the risk of sounding [...]
Collage by Doug Millison of NonHuman Communications
My name is Tom Abate and I’ve been a daily newspaper reporter since 1992. I was 37 when I got my first daily job after I reinvented myself out of the typesetting industry, a craft that was then [...]
Some folks have rocks in their head; big rocks
(I’m camping out at Joshua Tree National Park on a soul-searching expedition in preparation for some future writings. This previously-published blog entry is indicative of my line of thought.)
* * *
Bumper sticks were handed out in the newsroom yesterday: [...]
To Eric Brazil who told me of the beauty of the desert bloom
(I’m still at Joshua Tree National Park pondering the future of the Fourth Estate and my role in it. This prior posting is suggestive of my line of thought.)
* * *
The great hope of hard-pressed newspapers has been that their online [...]
To start my mind a-wandering
(I’m at Joshua Tree National Park dreaming up some future blog postings. This is a rerunn of a previously-written post that is suggestive of my thinking.)
* * *
Tsk, tsk on Paid Content today for taking a snarky potshot at Yahoo’s Hot Zone, the series in [...]
Nothing like nothing to clear the mind
(I’m doing some thinking in preparation for some future blog postings. This is a rerunn of a previously-written post that is suggestive of my thinking. FYI the person shown is Lindsay Fincher who I don’t know but I liked the picture.)
* * *
Let me briefly introduce two items [...]
Myrna Loy, Fredric March & Teresa Wright
They sure don’t make ‘em like they used to, movies, marriages, jobs. Take the 1946 film classic, “The Best Years of our Lives,” the story of three returning World War II veterans who meet by chance on the way home and whose lives become entangled. [...]
Edwin R. Newman says: use your words (carefully) journalists
In his 1974 book, Strictly Speaking, former NBC newscaster Edwin R. Newman warned that mass media were polluting public discourse with “banalities, cliches, pomposities, redundancies and catchphrases.” Alas his warnings fall on deaf ears. Fast forward three [...]
I recently visited a web site called AngryJournalist.com. I had read about it in a commentary from a prestigious journalism think-tank, the Poynter Institute. At first I thought it was a joke, then I got angry, because its welcome screen read:
“Tell us what’s making you upset at your journalism job. Anonymity guaranteed. One rule: [...]
I was supposed to pick up a thread I left dangling yesterday, but I am not so full of myself as usual and had no thoughts to fill this space. So let me share this picture of the homestead where I set my mind to wandering.
addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fminimediaguy.org%2F2008%2F03%2F11%2Ftaking-time-to-smell-the-redwoods%2F'; addthis_title = 'Taking+time+to+smell+the+Redwoods'; [...]
Were the Nickelodeons YouTube 1.0?
Before World War I when newspapers were reaching new readers as rising literacy and the rapid offset press created a mass audience for news, Joseph Medill Patterson co-edited the Chicago Tribune with his cousin, Robert R. McCormick. Patterson, who left Chicago and went “over [...]
Kevin Kelly has a lovely and encouraging idea for creative people wondering how to make a living from their talent or craft. It only takes 1,000 True Fans – people willing to spend $100 a year on your stuff – to gross $100,000. Back out some expenses and that’s enough to make a modest living or renumerative hobby. [...]
“For the most part, magazine staffers are not personally worried about their own jobs,” reports Paid Content’s David Kaplan in summarizing a job survey by Folio managine. For those in some other part of the job-losing communications industry who wonder whether the grass is greener [...]
The U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been on the books since 1966 to establish the public’s right to get government documents. In that time its powers have repeatedly waxed and waned. On New Year’s Eve, President Bush signed a law that amended FOIA. An unbylined Associated Press article that ran in USA Today said:
“The [...]
“The internet is a copy machine,” Kevin Kelly says in “Better than Free“ an essay in which he paints the net as a “super-distribution system.” It churns out copies so “super abundant they become worthless.” Kelly advises creative people to invent new ways to make money because it is no longer possible [...]
Last week I excerpted an Editor & Publisher column that chided mainstream media for ignoring the lawsuit brought by the independent weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2004 the Guardian charged that the rival San Francisco Weekly had used deep-pocket support from its corporate parent, Village Voice Media, to lower advertising prices in an alleged effort by the chain [...]
If you’re in the news business online guru Kevin Kelly has news for you. Forget how you used to make your living delivering scoops. Make yourself valuable in new and more personal ways or else perish he suggests in Better than Free.
With that in mind Paid Content reports that the Financial Times has created a $3,300-a-year [...]
Editor & Publisher columnist Mark Fitzgerald writes that:
“Bay Area mainstream media are studiously ignoring the courtroom action in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s “predatory pricing” lawsuit against Village Voice Media (VVM) . . . the Bay Guardian is suing SF Weekly and VVM under a California [...]
“We read newspapers, watch news on television and listen to news on the radio, but how is it decided what is news? How is it decided what are the important events of the day? What makes news?”
That question animates the syllabus for a media literacy training class developed by Maria Byck and published by KQED, [...]
More than 140 million Americans watched 10 billion online videos in December says a report from comscore Video Metrix. That’s about 72 videos per viewer. Video Metrix said the average video was 2.8 minutes. Over the course of a month the average viewer spent three hours and twenty minutes enjoying [...]
We haven’t heard much of late about the so-called federal shield law. Maybe that’s because reporters have finally read the bill and realized that its main beneficiary would be Steve Jobs of Apple.
In December 2004, Apple sued two web sites that had published details of some hush-hush Apple products. The information was a trade secret, like the formula for Coke, said Apple, which also wanted [...]
News media are losing jobs; but Ad Age says marketing broke an employment record in November
If you’re in the news business maybe you ought to slide over into marketing.
An analysis of federal jobs statistics by Advertising Age magazine says media jobs — newspapers, broadcast and cable TV, radio, magazines [...]
Chez Pazienza
The New York Times reports that CNN fired senior producer Chez Pazienza after he was told that he had violated a company policy by failing to get permission to do outside writing. Pazienza maintains a personal blog, DeusExMalcontent, and has apparently also contributed to the Huffington Post. CNN [...]
Romulus & Remus are suckled by a wolf
Small websites have similar trouble finding nourishment
Advertising is the mother’s milk of media but so far momma has played favorites online. A 2005 report said 96 percent of advertising revenues went to the top 50 online destinations (details). That doesn’t leave much for the millions of other sites [...]
Marsha Friedman says: relax
So you’ve got your 15 minutes of fame and you are about to represent yourself, your company or your cause on a television interview. No pressure! Wrong. It will be unnerving and pass quickly. Study the tips suggested by publicist Marsha Friedman. Be [...]
Interactive media invite change
I was arguing with another blogger over the weekend over the best way to make a difference as a writer, and it finally occurred to me that that writing and journalism are too timid for the times, and out of step with the technolgy. Writing is about [...]
If I, as the reader-and-citizen-journalist suspected that a particular story originated from a press release, how could I verify this, and find out what group put out the press release? (and, in an ideal world, see the original press release?)
It should be quite easy to answer this question [...]
A detail from a float celebrating the diversity of San Jose, California, where 130 languages and/ dialects are spoken in the school district.
A newly-released survey from BigResearch drawing on a panels nearly 16,000 respondents suggests that one in four Americans blogs “regularly or occasionally” and that this blogging community is more ethnically diverse [...]
Crowdsourcing is the term coined to describe using an audience to generate some form of content, from simple feedback to fully fledged stories or artistic creations.
CNN is now poised to put its broadcast — and online — muscle behind an experiment in crowdsourcing as MediaWeek reports:
“Time Warner’s CNN this week will [...]
Do you have something cushier?
I collect items about niche media businesses for ideas or inspiration. Here are a few.
David Eun
The Google vice president who deals with print and broadcast media recently admitted that his firm cooperates with content companies, it doesn’t compete with them.
“We don’t produce or own content,” David Eun told interviewer Patrick Phillips. “What they do as a company — with journalists, news bureaus, thinking about [...]
Dina Rasor, co-author, Betraying our Troops
Dina Rasor is a Northern California woman who has been investigating waste and fraud in the Pentagon for going on 25 years. Most recently she is the co-author of “Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War.” The book argues that an incredible [...]
