WesHanson.com

Blogging vs. Journalism

There are real differences between journalists and bloggers. Just ask Felix Salmon, the longtime financial writer, who operates successfully in both worlds. Here he is in all his glory: [http://bit.ly/salmonblogging]

“In my experience, j-school graduates tend to be quite earnest people who care a lot about the important role that journalism plays in a democracy while being less good at throwing caution to the wind and making mistakes. But as I like to say, if you’re never wrong, you’re never interesting.”

“All too often, I fear, a “formal training in journalism” just means that journalists self-censor the good and funny bits of stories that bloggers naturally latch on to. What’s more, bloggers have a much more natural voice and personality than journalists do. So it’s only natural that bloggers will get more of a “following” than some guy who writes straight-down-the-line stories for the local newspaper.”

“Then, of course, there’s the very germane fact that many highly successful bloggers didn’t get a formal training in journalism because they were too busy getting a formal training in the thing they’re writing about — business, finance, economics. The likes of Yves Smith or Brad DeLong or Simon Johnson or John Hempton are popular partly because these people know what they’re talking about and actually do it; it’s surely an advantage to be able to use first-hand rather than second-hand knowledge when you’re writing about something.”

“Journalists are often very competitive and feel that if anybody else is writing about what they’re writing about, that’s probably bad for them — especially if the rival outlet is very popular. But blogging doesn’t work like that: most of the time, when it’s done well, it’s full of external links, often to original journalism. Blogs are a great way for good journalism to get noticed, instead of being buried and ignored on page B7.”

“Overall, my feeling is that if mainstream business outlets embrace the blogosphere, they’ll do well. If they shun it, however — and paywalls are one good way to do that — then they’ll have a much harder time of things.”

Trying to Make Journalism Pay

The upcoming New York Times Magazine features interesting examination into the entrepreneurial exploits of Apple. Not that Apple. Sam Apple. The journalism entrepreneur.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Journalism-t.html?ref=business

With traditional media outlets facing bankruptcy and yet plenty of people wanting to be professional journalists, Mr. Apple smelled opportunity. The 34-year-old former interactive media director launched The Faster Times last July. The idea was to counter the proliferation of amateurishly produced blogs with a staff of trained journalists paid not in salary but by 75 percent of the revenues from the advertisements placed next to their articles. Contributors to this capitalist collective would profit according to the market’s value assessment of their individual work.

Of course, in this set-up, who covering Bolivia would turn out to be less lucrative than covering (or uncovering) Jessica Simpson.

American journalism has always relied on advertising (80 percent of revenues for newspapers). The thought was that vast online audiences would deliver vast advertising sums. It didn’t work out that way, because there is vastly more content competition online and ads sell for a small fraction of their print cousins.

True/Slant. five employees and 300 part-time contributors delivering “entrepreneurial journalism” to a million readers a month,

True/Slant reduces costs by eliminating old fashioned editorial hierarchies and making its contributors the sole “programmers” of their content. “Newsrooms today are high-cost, inefficient content-creation operations that will not be supported by advertising revenues in the digital world,” Dvorkin tells the Times. “It just won’t happen.”

True/Slant’s low-cost newsroom churns out around 125 pieces of content a day, hoping to pick up pennies and nickels from online PPC advertisers.

Other revenue models: a generous benefactor like The Daily Beast has in Barry Diller; NPR’s nonprofit model; Politico’s paper version. And that old standby, subscriptions – which so far only the online Wall Street Journal and Financial Times are working with success. (The New York Times has just announced a paywall going up in Januay 2011.)

Examiner.com, owned by the billionaire Philip Anschutz, generates more than 3,000 items per day from 36,000 local contributors, who are paid about 1 cent per page view.

The Huffington Post, the most successful of the new breed, boasts 70 salaried editorial staff members and 6,000 uncompensated bloggers who churn out 500 items a day. According to Nielsen Online, it gets more hits than the online Washington Post and is among the top 10 current-affairs sites,

True/Slant contributors are paid a monthly retainer and bonuses based on how many people read their articles. Most writers make a few hundred dollars a month if they hit their traffic targets, and a few big names like Matt Taibbi make more. The company isn’t profitable yet: An individual article is worth only $10 to its bottom line.

Started in July 2009 at a cost of $20,000. It soon had a monthly audience of around 200,000 readers, according to the tracking site Quantcast. Revenues that were coming in from Google AdSense, gave writers $5 to $75. Pretty crappy, in other words. No wonder then that many of the original FT contributors moved on. Mr. Apple continues to experiment with payment models.

Web start-ups have a failure rate between 70 and 90 percent. But even with those Darwinian stats, a sustainable business models is likely to emerge.

Swag for Cred

Mothers writing on the Internet about products they like tend to be trusted by other mothers. That’s why marketing and PR agencies try mightily to convert these key influencers into becoming “brand ambassadors” with product samples, contests and the like.

Flattered or grateful, many blogging mommies will go so far as to place advertisers’ banner ads for free on their sites. But because they want to be paid for such activites, some bloggers are becoming more vocal about the stupidity of their fellow bloggers getting nothing but swag or links in exchange for promotional posts. [PRNewser, 5/13/10].

Mom Central CEO Stacy DeBroff says moms blogging for free stuff was not as common as people may think. But she told PR Newser, “The minute you become too commercial, you lose your audience, and when you lose your audience you lose your influence.”

Giving Offense, Getting Noticed

I used to work as a public affairs director at a large mental health organization. Not the kind of place that would get a kick out of a recent Burger King commercial.

A man in a surreally oversized plastic “king” head with a creepy grin is running through an office building pursued by a man dressed in a white lab coat who yells, “Stop that King, he’s crazy!”

It seems the meat sovereign is insane to be “giving away” sandwiches for $3.99.

There is so much stigma assigned to mental illness that this kind of stuff puts people on edge. But as advertising, it works. I remembered it, and it garnered a lot of press notice.

When Rahm Emmanuel, Obama’s hot-tempered chief of staff, criticized somebody’s stupid move as “retarded,” the uproar commenced. Sarah Palin, who has a young son with Down’s Syndrome, seized the opportunity to call for Emmanual’s dismissal. Proving once again that one person’s/organization’s bad P.R. is another’s opportunity.

Media Roil Call

These are perilous times for traditional media.

Things are changing so rapidly that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone predicts “there won’t be any newspapers in two years,” according to BusinessWeek magazine (Poynter.org, 4/27/10).  Never one to resist a dig at rivals, the cantankerous Redstone says his rival Rupert Murdoch “lives in ink, and I live in movies and television. Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.”

If one thing is clear, however, there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to technology.

Consider that some 800,000 U.S. households cut the cord to cable and satellite TV in favor of such alternatives as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes in the past two years, according to the Convergence Consulting Group, which predicts the number to reach 1.6 million by the end of 2011. [TechCrunch, 4/13/10, http://tcrn.ch/cordcutters]

Last year, 12 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watched at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online; this year the number is 17 percent and next year it’s expected to be 21 percent. There are clearly changes in store for the $84 billion cable/satellite TV access industry, although there are forces at work to slow the progression of programming to the web (such as the $34 billion that cable companies paid last year in programming fees).

Meanwhile, newsprint, as Redstone gleefully noted, is fast dissolving into memory. Newspaper companies are falling into bankruptcy (13 major ones at last count), while commentators of all stripes welcome the destruction of old media fortresses; leftists slam them for their “reactionary” institutional and corporate bias and right-wingers for the perceived “liberalism” of their staff. The more politically agnostic simply feel newspapers just don’t “get it” — that is, they don’t know how to price their products correctly and stay ahead of technology. The current consensus of the technorati seems to be that online newspapers should be either free or, if they go to the paywall model, unbundle their content – following the Internet or Apple’s revolutionizing the music business.

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ADDENDUM: Happy to see that the NY Times paywall seems to be working … it would seem that some people ARE indeed willing to pay something for that priceless (yet costly to produce) product called journalism.