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Washington Post VP: Save American journalism with non-profit reform
The future of news depends on non-profit organizations. That was the message from Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor and vice president at large of The Washington Post. He gave the final keynote speech to a thinning crowd of business journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual convention Sunday.
Downie discussed the many types of news organizations that have emerged in the wake of newspapers’ decline, focusing mostly on non-profit models, and then outlined his recommendations to help these new ventures survive. He based much of his speech on a massive report he recently co-wrote wrote, The Reconstruction of American Journalism.
Here’s a video of Downie discussing his recommendations. After the video is a list of the innovative news models he identified.
Cutting-edge journalism: new ecosystems
In one of the more cerebral talks of the convention, the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Dan Gillmor, talked about some of the latest innovations in multimedia interactive reporting.
Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
The session was titled “Turning passive users into active ones.” Gillmor didn’t give many concrete tips to engage an audience, but went through some of the latest trends and ideas. Here are a few:
CUNY gets a nod from top NYT exec
New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s collaborative blog The Local was one of his paper’s most innovative projects. He was giving a keynote speech at the annual convention of Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Watch it here:
The Local is run by students and faculty of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, in collaboration with The New York Times. Editors at the Times provide supervision to assure that the blog remains impartial, reporting-based, thorough and rooted in Times standards.
Sulzberger ready for WSJ New York
- A new marketing campaign by the Times tells advertisers it has a better readership.
PHOENIX — Finally, he acknowledges his new neighbor. But Arthur Sulzberger Jr. won’t be inviting Rupert Murdoch out for dinner anytime soon.
When The Wall Street Journal opens its New York section next month the Times will be ready to compete, said Sulzberger, New York Times Co. Chairman, at a convention of journalists Saturday. Before that, Times Co. executives had said very little about their new competitor beyond a veiled advertising campaign against the Journal.
“We don’t shy away from competition,” Sulzberger said in a keynote speech at the annual convention of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Phoenix.
Murdoch’s News Corp. is spending about $15 million on the expansion into the New York Market, where the Times courts high-end readers and advertisers. The Journal reporters will cover local politics, business, culture and sports.
“We believe that in its pursuit of journalism prizes and a national reputation, a certain other New York daily has essentially stopped covering the city the way it once did,” Murdoch said in speech earlier this month.
Panel Says It's More Important to Be Right than First in Online Writing.
PHOENIX — While good writing is good writing no matter the medium, web writing is not the same as writing for print, according to a panel on “better business writing online.”
Writing for the web requires speed. But it is better to be right than to be first, according to Lex Harris, managing editor of CNN Money.
“Don’t be too obsessed with getting beat,” said Harris. “When you’re wrong, it just dogs you for so long a period. It’s just not worth it.”
The panelists, who also included Marty Wolk, the executive business editor of MSBNC.com, offered no absolute directives on how to balance accuracy with speed.
They also recommended other key points to keep in mind:
- Writing for the internet does not have to be short.
- You have to be responsible for creating conversation. If you ask a question, you can control and focus that conversation.
- De-complicate.
- Utilize social networking sites.
- Don’t just use the web as a dumping ground for pieces that do not fit into your print publications.
NYT's Pay Wall Will Go Up, But Where?
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. spoke at the SABEW's annual convetion (Photo: Mike Reicher)
PHOENIX -
The New York Times is building a metered pay wall debuting in 2011, but still figuring out where to put it.
The pay wall will allow readers free access to stories initially, but after a certain number of page views or another metric, readers will have to pay. The Times decided that another stream of revenue was needed as they continue to develop their digital advertising model.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the paper, speaking at the annual Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference, said the strategy was designed for the nytimes site, given its national and international reach. But he didn’t recommend it for other newspapers, including the Boston globe, a sister publication, because of its local focus.
Figuring out how to quantify reader’s usage is difficult. Readers don’t see 10 clicks on a photo slideshow as similar to 10 different page views, Sulzberger said, and neither should the paper. He’s also uncertain on how the more than 60 blogs on the site will be monitored as well, including CUNY’s Local and NYU’s upcoming East Village site.
Sulzberger explained that the success of the new project is “inextricably connected to the promise of quality journalism.” The Times research and development department, which was started to explore digital initiatives, is spearheading the transition.
That translation decided against a possible “iTunes model,” where consumers buy songs for around a dollar. That model would do the same per story, but unlike music, readers are unlikely to enjoy a story over and over again, Sulzberger said.
He avoided forecasts on how successful the pay wall will be, focusing on the current environment, saying “It’s what the Times needs to do today,” and added “It will take time to get this right.”
The paper expects to lose some traffic from people who refuse to pay, but are confident loyalists will continue to support the paper. News on the iPhone app will continue to be free.
The Times has started an ad campaign for its New York coverage as the paper will be competing with the Wall Street Journal’s New York edition which debuts next month.
Panelists Disagree about Future of Commercial Real Estate
Ilyce Glink, media entrepreneur and consultant, leads a panel on commercial real estate. (Photo: Chris Prentice)
PHOENIX — Panelists could not agree on commercial real estate’s future in a seminar on “how to tell if the real estate recovery is real in your community” at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference in Phoenix, Ariz.
“We’re teetering on the brink, and we don’t know which way it’s going,” panel moderator and real estate columnist Ilyce Glink said afterward.
Glink said the U.S. could enter a “double dip” recession, partially thanks to commercial real estate losses. The country is still losing jobs and tax revenues. If consumers cannot spend, retailers cannot afford their rents, and the recession cycle could start again, according to Glink.
But panel contributors James Woodwell, Senior Director of Research and Business Development at the Mortgage Bankers Association, and Pete Bolton, executive vice president and managing director of Grubb and Ellis’s Phoenix office, tried to emphasize the difference between commercial and residential real estate.
“These are businesses,” said Woodwell. “We’ve seen dropping values of businesses nationwide.”
Property value for commercial real estate is directly linked to a business’s income, they said. As retail businesses suffer, so does commercial real estate.
There was no bubble in commercial real estate, Bolton said.
He attributed the decline to investors’ hesitation and made comparisons with what he called the “RTC days” in the 1980s when the federal government created the Resolution Trust Corporation to liquidate insolvent assets during the savings and loan crisis. The current situation just a reaction to other economic issues.
Still, the panelists still could not get past the simple truth: things are bad out there. “Commercial mortgages are clearly under stress,” Woodwell said.
They also did not know if the commercial real estate market had bottomed out.
Glink concluded with some tips for real estate journalists to make sense of the real estate chaos:
- Keep it local.
- The American Institute of Architects publishes indexes every month.
- Speak with land planner companies and others who do not have a political agenda. Their recovery will indicate overall recovery for commercial real estate.
Next Up for Google: Inference
Google is synonymous with search, but could be onto to something greater: inference. Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and tweaker of Google’s search algorithm since 2001, says search is beyond key words and at the door step of understanding language.
Amit Singhal discusses the future of search at the SABEW conference. (Photo: Chris Prentice)
Singhal speaking at the annual SABEW convention in Phoenix used some examples. If you google “GM cars,” you get General Motors, but if you google “GM food,” you get genetically-modified.
“Search is about matching meaning to what users want,” he said.
Another example, if you google “panasonic lock TV,” you get hits about “parental control.” Singhal says marketers probably didn’t like the word “lock” and went with the nicer “control.” But Google infers the difference. Other interests to journalists:
- Information wants to be free he said, but that doesn’t mean Web sites shouldn’t impose a pay wall, citing that good content costs money. But differentiating that good content from “McContent” – quick, cheap generated content – is difficult since the language between the two is often similar.
- Web content is suppose to be free. And citizens with information are better ones. Singhal sees China inhibiting its best interest by restricting search.
- The Future of web search is still based on the what made google popular: speed. “We are crazy about speed,” Singhal says. He noted that if a users is slowed down by 200 milliseconds, the site will end up losing traffic. Revelvance algorithms are now more important than ever, he said. “As the amount of information has exploded, the importance of relevance has gone through the roof,” he said.
- The kind of information that people seek on phones is much different than what people search for on their computer. Singhal sees a future in location-based advertising.
Mexican billionaire Pliego says U.S. needs to legalize narcotics, change its attitude
Ricardo Salinas Pliego at Arizona State University. (Photo: Mike Reicher)
PHOENIX — Just a day after the local sheriff started an illegal immigration sweep, Mexican billionaire and telecomm magnet Ricardo Salinas Pliego told an audience here Friday that “hysterical voices of racists and isolationists” stood in the way of U.S. – Mexico relations.
Pliego was speaking to journalists at the SABEW conference at Arizona State University. He said that fortifying the border was “a totally mistaken policy” and that the two countries should instead be exploring new economic partnerships.
Also, Pliego suggested that the United States should consider legalizing narcotics in order to neutralize drug violence.
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