It is now decided to appoint CEO for Samyukta Karnataka. The Board of Trustees (BoT) is of the opinion that such a post is necessary to face the fierce competition.
The editor is always pre-occupied with the content. The administration and new projects are the added areas for the editor who cannot handle them simultaneously. This argument brought the BoT to a logical end to appoint the CEO.
CEO will be above the editor, in the editorial hierarchy
A few names have been in the list. And finally one name will be okayed.
Can you guess, who will be the new CEO of Samyukta Karnataka?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Thumb rule : Rumours rule
Top ten rumours in Kannada media today has generated a lot of interest among bloggers. In 24 hours, Chitragupta received about 198 comments and finally selected or filtered 74 comments only.
Some of the comments were highly vituperative, caustic, personal and mud-slinging in nature and Chitragupta had his gruesome hours to reject them with no options.
It is unbelivable in the blog world that one post had evoked so much interest and provoked journos to indulging in a heated debate.
Most of the participants are from the Kannada newspapers who are reluctant to reveal their identity for the reasons best known to them.
It is gratifying that Kannada journos have come up for blogging these days enthusiastically.
Some of the comments were highly vituperative, caustic, personal and mud-slinging in nature and Chitragupta had his gruesome hours to reject them with no options.
It is unbelivable in the blog world that one post had evoked so much interest and provoked journos to indulging in a heated debate.
Most of the participants are from the Kannada newspapers who are reluctant to reveal their identity for the reasons best known to them.
It is gratifying that Kannada journos have come up for blogging these days enthusiastically.
Rai doesn't don Garva
Muthappa Rai said enough is enough. He told the editor of Garva to remove his name from the imprint. So in the next issue, his name "Gaurava Sampadaka" will not be there.
However he will write his life story under the name Muthappa 'Rai'tes (Writes) every week.
Rai was very much annoyed by a story pertaining to one Padma Bhat. She approached Rai and expressed her sorrow and anguish. She strongly protested the way in which the entire article has been fabricated to malign her. Rai was also upset about the story.
This prompted him to withdraw from his latest avatar. Yet he will continue to support the paper.
However he will write his life story under the name Muthappa 'Rai'tes (Writes) every week.
Rai was very much annoyed by a story pertaining to one Padma Bhat. She approached Rai and expressed her sorrow and anguish. She strongly protested the way in which the entire article has been fabricated to malign her. Rai was also upset about the story.
This prompted him to withdraw from his latest avatar. Yet he will continue to support the paper.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Top ten rumours in Kannada media today
1. Ashok Kheny, MD, Nandi Corridor is buying Indrajit Lankesh's "Lankesh Patrike" shortly.
2. Rajiv Chandrashekhar, Rajya Sabha member, is relaunching defunct "Suryodaya" shortly.
3. Vishweshwar Bhat, editor, Vijay Karnataka is becoming the editor of Prajavani. He had an interaction with K.N.Tilak Kumar, the new editor-in-chief, on 23 February at PV,DH office.
4. Vishweshwar Bhat is joining Kumaraswamy's "Kannada Kasturi" TV Channel as CEO.
5. Vijay Sankeshwar, former publisher of Vijay Karnataka, is starting a newspaper yet again shortly.
6. CEO will be appointed for Samyukta Karnataka above the editor.
7. If Vishweshwar Bhat declines to join Kumaraswamy's TV channel,Ranganath, editor, Kannada Prabha will opt for it. It is said that Bhat is buying some more time.
8. Ravi Belagere,editor, Hai Bangalore, is trying to buy FM Radio station.
9. Anand Sankeshwar is starting his TV chennel.
10. Sun TV will launch a Kannada daily shortly.
2. Rajiv Chandrashekhar, Rajya Sabha member, is relaunching defunct "Suryodaya" shortly.
3. Vishweshwar Bhat, editor, Vijay Karnataka is becoming the editor of Prajavani. He had an interaction with K.N.Tilak Kumar, the new editor-in-chief, on 23 February at PV,DH office.
4. Vishweshwar Bhat is joining Kumaraswamy's "Kannada Kasturi" TV Channel as CEO.
5. Vijay Sankeshwar, former publisher of Vijay Karnataka, is starting a newspaper yet again shortly.
6. CEO will be appointed for Samyukta Karnataka above the editor.
7. If Vishweshwar Bhat declines to join Kumaraswamy's TV channel,Ranganath, editor, Kannada Prabha will opt for it. It is said that Bhat is buying some more time.
8. Ravi Belagere,editor, Hai Bangalore, is trying to buy FM Radio station.
9. Anand Sankeshwar is starting his TV chennel.
10. Sun TV will launch a Kannada daily shortly.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Ten reasons why Krishna Prasad left Vijay Times
Why Krishna Prasad left Vijay Times as its editor?
There are 10 reasons which are being discussed.
1. He was not into daily journalism and basically he worked for many years in weekly. He lost touch with the daily news gathering and he felt totally fish out of water.
2. He tried to do his best in VT. But with the kind of staff, he was convinced, that he cannot sail through. He said good bye.
3. He didnot like the kind of journalism being practiced by The Times Group.
4. He hated to be called the editor of tabloid, Bangalore Mirror, would be avatar of Vijay Times.
5. He felt he cannot do much and convinced that his steam has already started leaking.
6. He anticipated the fate of Bangalore Mirror and didnot want to take the blame.
7. He didnot want to repeat the Mumbai Mirror experiment as he hardly gets to do something different from it as The Times Group believes in branding and expects him to just copy Mumbai Mirror which he didnot like.
8. Despite the price slash, VT could not gain much circulation. He thought he may not fit into this kind of journalism.
9. He is not a fighter. He is a cool guy and a piggy rider.
10. He is basically a blogger and he enjoyed the blogging. He feels every journo must have his blog. He thought his freedom of blogging may be curtailed if he takes up a new challenge.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Suddigara in Kannada Prabha
Suddigara is in news!
Kannada Prabha has devoted more than half a page for this blog. In its Sunday supplement - Saptahika Prabha - dated 25 February 2007, Jogi has written a cover page story - Blog KannaDigara Cauvery KaLakaLi.
He begins the story with the discussions which has been generating in this blog. Also he questions the debate which has been going on in for this post. The whole article is so directionless that it will end up in telling the readers that how to start your own blog, how to take action against bloggers etc. He also interviewed couple of people supporting his views. Jogi has given list of a few good blogs.
Chitragupta comments : Jogi, sensible writer, should understand blog is a wider cyber platform. Here every opinion is respected however critical it is. While appreciating the attempts by the Kannada Prabha to drive home the point in Cauvery dispute coverage, Suddigara said it was not necessary to scream from the roof top when nothing has been happening. That's all.
The article should have been on how to start your own blog instead of one published in KP.
Anyway, I must thank Kannada Prabha for taking this blog very seriously.
Kannada Prabha has devoted more than half a page for this blog. In its Sunday supplement - Saptahika Prabha - dated 25 February 2007, Jogi has written a cover page story - Blog KannaDigara Cauvery KaLakaLi.
He begins the story with the discussions which has been generating in this blog. Also he questions the debate which has been going on in for this post. The whole article is so directionless that it will end up in telling the readers that how to start your own blog, how to take action against bloggers etc. He also interviewed couple of people supporting his views. Jogi has given list of a few good blogs.
Chitragupta comments : Jogi, sensible writer, should understand blog is a wider cyber platform. Here every opinion is respected however critical it is. While appreciating the attempts by the Kannada Prabha to drive home the point in Cauvery dispute coverage, Suddigara said it was not necessary to scream from the roof top when nothing has been happening. That's all.
The article should have been on how to start your own blog instead of one published in KP.
Anyway, I must thank Kannada Prabha for taking this blog very seriously.
Cake Walk in Vijay Times!
It has written on the wall, Vijay Times will be closed shortly. The Times management waiting for the next bride to be readied.In all probability, the new avatar of VT - Bangalore Mirror - will be launched by the first week of April. Meanwhile, many journalists are deserting VT in seacrh of better work environs. The job uncertainity is lingering in the minds of VTians. Everyday cake is being cut to send him/her off. It is a sweet gesture on the part of collegues but it has become the order of the day.
It is a sweet time for the management to send those who are unlikely to be retained in the new set up, without resorting to any measures.
Mai Don Nahin, Editor Hoon Editor !!
Yes, one time underworld don or a reformed underworld kingpin Mutthappa Rai is in a new garb. He is the Honorary Editor of Garva, a weekly tabloid. The latest and relaunched edition is in the market with Rai at the helm. He is assisted by bomb or bombed cop Girish Mattennavar.
In fact the Garva was started by a team of young journalists like Sudheendra Kanchitota, Chakravarthy Soolibele, Sudheendra Kumar and others. But it didnot survive the fierce competition despite the good content.
Later the team sold the masthead to Mutthappa Rai who was looking for some umbrella to hide from the police. Garva has come in handy. He purchased the paper after clearing small dues.
In an interesting development, another reformed don Agni Shreedhar who relinquished the editorship of Agni, a weekly tabloid started by him nine years ago. But the paper will continue under the leadership of one Basavaraj.
Too much court cases which expose him to outer world, must have prompted Shreedhar to take this step, it is believed.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
New editor for Vikrama
Sudheendra Kanchitota has been appointed as the new editor for Vikrama, a weekly tabloid known as the RSS mouthpiece. Before assuming this responsibility he was working as the editor, Garva, a weekly.
Kanchitota has made some bold moves when he was in Garva. It survived for little over six months and later it failed miserably. He didnot get requisite support from his team. Otherwise paper was highly readable.
Brief stint at Garva must have prompted the RSS top brass to consider Kanchitota for this post. Garva had carried many pro-Hindutva stories close to the hearts of RSS leadership.
Whether Kanchitota would give a new direction to ailing weekly which was vibrant once when B.S.N.Mallya was its editor is to be watched.
Kanchitota began his journalistic venture in Vijay Karnataka as the trainee sub editor and later promoted as the Chief Sub Editor beforing launching his tabloid Garva.
Kanchitota has made some bold moves when he was in Garva. It survived for little over six months and later it failed miserably. He didnot get requisite support from his team. Otherwise paper was highly readable.
Brief stint at Garva must have prompted the RSS top brass to consider Kanchitota for this post. Garva had carried many pro-Hindutva stories close to the hearts of RSS leadership.
Whether Kanchitota would give a new direction to ailing weekly which was vibrant once when B.S.N.Mallya was its editor is to be watched.
Kanchitota began his journalistic venture in Vijay Karnataka as the trainee sub editor and later promoted as the Chief Sub Editor beforing launching his tabloid Garva.
Joke Falls Flat with Readers
To comment briefly on editorials, call 215-854-5060.
The Editorial Board members will roll their eyes and chuckle at your remarks.
(a parody of the real line accidentally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer)
An Oxymoron?
Bombing ceremony peaceful
(over a story in Bowling Green, Kentucky's Daily News on a ceremony remembering victims of the Oklahoma City bombing)
Cliché Challenged
Two Candidates Throw Hat in Ring, Endorse Dole
(over a Louisiana State University Daily Reveille story about Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes throwing in their respective towels)
The Editorial Board members will roll their eyes and chuckle at your remarks.
(a parody of the real line accidentally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer)
An Oxymoron?
Bombing ceremony peaceful
(over a story in Bowling Green, Kentucky's Daily News on a ceremony remembering victims of the Oklahoma City bombing)
Cliché Challenged
Two Candidates Throw Hat in Ring, Endorse Dole
(over a Louisiana State University Daily Reveille story about Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes throwing in their respective towels)
Challenging Times
Protected by family ownership, the New York Times Co. plots its future without retreating from ambitious journalism at its flagship paper, despite the wailing on Wall Street about the company’s sluggish financial performance. It’s bolstering its digital presence and unleashing its futurist-in-residence in a time of wrenching transformation in the industry writes Rachel Smolkin.
For full article :http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4262
For full article :http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4262
A few changes are imminent in PV, DH
K.N.Tilak Kumar is a many to be watched at the backdrop of the speed with which he is going in the last five days is any indication.
Soon after taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of Prajavani and Deccan Herald, he has decided to make many changes particularly in the editorial department. He has been handling Circulation and Marketing for many years and he has a total control over the men and matters in these departments. But he is yet to get into the editorial.
Tilak Kumar has already given enough indications in this regard and openly expressed before his close associates in the organisation to bring in some changes in the editorial section.
After Tilak Kumar took over the Circulation and Marketing a few years ago, the results were quite encouraging. But the same has not been replicated in the editorial dept for which he was not responsible.
This is one of the reasons, it is believed, for the sudden change at the helm of PV and DH.
The speculations have already been doing rounds in M.G.Road where the newspapers have been situated, that the top brass will be spruced up to take on the fierce competition.
Only the time will unfold many things in the days to come.
Soon after taking over as the Editor-in-Chief of Prajavani and Deccan Herald, he has decided to make many changes particularly in the editorial department. He has been handling Circulation and Marketing for many years and he has a total control over the men and matters in these departments. But he is yet to get into the editorial.
Tilak Kumar has already given enough indications in this regard and openly expressed before his close associates in the organisation to bring in some changes in the editorial section.
After Tilak Kumar took over the Circulation and Marketing a few years ago, the results were quite encouraging. But the same has not been replicated in the editorial dept for which he was not responsible.
This is one of the reasons, it is believed, for the sudden change at the helm of PV and DH.
The speculations have already been doing rounds in M.G.Road where the newspapers have been situated, that the top brass will be spruced up to take on the fierce competition.
Only the time will unfold many things in the days to come.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Tilak is the man in need
G.N.Mohan was in Prajavani before joining his current assignment in ETV. He pens down his association with K.N.Tilak Kumar, the new Editor-in-Chief, Prajavani amd Deccan Herald who replaced his younger brother K.N.Shanta Kumar on 15 February.
I have worked closely with K N Tilak Kumar for almost three years when I was preparing ground for Gulbarga edition of Prajavani and Deccan Herald.
Among Kumar trio many dont know much about Tilak. He is down to earth, has clear knowledge about market games, straight and outspoken.
I have seen him going to knock and corner of Karnataka meeting the paper agents, getting feed back from readers. He is strict desciplinarian and uncompromising.
I feel the change may bring a new direction to the Herald group. Atleast Tilak will not make his paper to sit beside Chief Minister to “mudde OOta’
Tilak whether he wins the race or not he will not surrender his paper to anybody’s “charana’s.
I have worked closely with K N Tilak Kumar for almost three years when I was preparing ground for Gulbarga edition of Prajavani and Deccan Herald.
Among Kumar trio many dont know much about Tilak. He is down to earth, has clear knowledge about market games, straight and outspoken.
I have seen him going to knock and corner of Karnataka meeting the paper agents, getting feed back from readers. He is strict desciplinarian and uncompromising.
I feel the change may bring a new direction to the Herald group. Atleast Tilak will not make his paper to sit beside Chief Minister to “mudde OOta’
Tilak whether he wins the race or not he will not surrender his paper to anybody’s “charana’s.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Shanta Kumar, We miss you!
K.N.Shanta Kumar's sudden exit from the editorship of Prajavani and Deccan Herald has generated intense discussion and speculation in the Bangalore media circle.
Shanta Kumar was known for his soft, humble and rather friendly behaviour. These qualities enabled him to take his staffers into confidence, though he was novice to the written world. He was a good Photo Journalist, who covered national and international sports events including Olympics.
Shanta Kumar was never a journalist. But he is a good human being. He won his staffers and section of readers with this quality.
The management all these years maintained a steady distance from the staffers. But Shanta Kumar bridged the gap between the management and staff.
Shanta Kumar became the darling of his staffers soon after he took over as the editor.
He indeed succeeded in sprucing up the otherwise conservative newspapers hesitatingly. But he has failed to provide leadership in the editorial front. With his all out efforts, he could not take on formidable Vijay Karnataka.
After VK was aquired by the Times Group, the management of PV and DH was scared of fierce competition.
Perhaps this must have led to this development.
Shanta Kumar was known for his soft, humble and rather friendly behaviour. These qualities enabled him to take his staffers into confidence, though he was novice to the written world. He was a good Photo Journalist, who covered national and international sports events including Olympics.
Shanta Kumar was never a journalist. But he is a good human being. He won his staffers and section of readers with this quality.
The management all these years maintained a steady distance from the staffers. But Shanta Kumar bridged the gap between the management and staff.
Shanta Kumar became the darling of his staffers soon after he took over as the editor.
He indeed succeeded in sprucing up the otherwise conservative newspapers hesitatingly. But he has failed to provide leadership in the editorial front. With his all out efforts, he could not take on formidable Vijay Karnataka.
After VK was aquired by the Times Group, the management of PV and DH was scared of fierce competition.
Perhaps this must have led to this development.
Tilak Kumar for Prajavani, Deccan Herald
K.N.Tilak Kumar will succeed K.N.Shanta Kumar as the Editor-in-Chief, Prajavani and Deccan Herald from 15 February.
In a swift move, the management of Mysore Printers Limited which owns these two dailies, has decided to install Tilak Kumar as the new editor.
Known for his dynamism, Tilak Kumar was hitherto handling the Circulation of both the newspapers. He was responsible for the growth of Prajavani in some rural pockets. But he couldnot make a substantial inroads into the much vibrant Vijay Karnataka, the No.1 Kannada daily.
For the last three and half years, Shanta Kumar had made significant changes in both the newspapers with regard to content and design. But he could not pose any serious challenge to the competitors.
The sudden change of gaurd at the helm of PV and DH has raised many eyebrows in the industry including in the Times Group.
In a swift move, the management of Mysore Printers Limited which owns these two dailies, has decided to install Tilak Kumar as the new editor.
Known for his dynamism, Tilak Kumar was hitherto handling the Circulation of both the newspapers. He was responsible for the growth of Prajavani in some rural pockets. But he couldnot make a substantial inroads into the much vibrant Vijay Karnataka, the No.1 Kannada daily.
For the last three and half years, Shanta Kumar had made significant changes in both the newspapers with regard to content and design. But he could not pose any serious challenge to the competitors.
The sudden change of gaurd at the helm of PV and DH has raised many eyebrows in the industry including in the Times Group.
Monday, February 12, 2007
When Kannada Prabha goes hysterical
Are you reading Kannada Prabha for the last one week, especially after the Cauvery Water Tribul gave the final verdict? It is really shocking to see its coverage.
Kannada Prabha is coming up with lead story everyday with exaggerated and make belief moods of the Kannadigas. What is the necessity to play up the story when the people of the State maintaining absolute peace. Kannada Prabha has been provoking the readers with headlines - Kudiyuttide, Sididedda Kannadigaru.
Eventually the newspaper became the laughing stock before its own readers. On the next day of the verdict (6 February 2007), the newspaper's half page was covered with screaming headline _ Anyaaya.
It was a general feeling that it was not necessary to go in such a big way about it. Why KP is going hysterical about Cauvery? Does it give the same coverage for Krishna, Tungabhadra, Karanja or Malaprabha?
Other newspapers have been surprisingly maintaining the steady balance in its reportage on Cauvery.
Interestingly the venerable Prajavani is in its deep somber!
Kannada Prabha is coming up with lead story everyday with exaggerated and make belief moods of the Kannadigas. What is the necessity to play up the story when the people of the State maintaining absolute peace. Kannada Prabha has been provoking the readers with headlines - Kudiyuttide, Sididedda Kannadigaru.
Eventually the newspaper became the laughing stock before its own readers. On the next day of the verdict (6 February 2007), the newspaper's half page was covered with screaming headline _ Anyaaya.
It was a general feeling that it was not necessary to go in such a big way about it. Why KP is going hysterical about Cauvery? Does it give the same coverage for Krishna, Tungabhadra, Karanja or Malaprabha?
Other newspapers have been surprisingly maintaining the steady balance in its reportage on Cauvery.
Interestingly the venerable Prajavani is in its deep somber!
Lost Innocence
The media have a right and a duty to investigate into and comment on the integrity and efficiency of police investigation of crime. They have no right to usurp the functions of the court and pronounce on the suspect's guilt. That is contempt of court and a violation of his right to a free trial; a competing, but overriding, right and public interest says A.G.Noorani.
For full article read :http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1729104,00120001.htm
For full article read :http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1729104,00120001.htm
English Journos, Please Listen
Martin Cutts, Research Director of the UK's Plain Language Commission,is of the view that Indian journalists have a key role in improving the use of English in the country "because newspaper and broadcast English sets the standard for most of the population.
"In his foreword to Jyoti Sanyal's latest book - Indlish, Cutts gives piece of his mind to Indian English journalists.
He insists that our journalists should do four things: One, dump the Victorian verbosity.
Two, "Regularly write about the incoherent language of the law, government officials and companies, and show how it damages the interests of consumers and businesses." How will that help? "Public derision is a powerful weapon," Cutts reminds the doubters.
Three, "Spend at least an hour a week reading quality dailies of the UK, imbibing their often fresh phrasing and clarity of expression." This must be easy, more frequently than Cutts suggests, with the help of the Net.
Lastly, abandon your love of cliché and "tap into those sources of vivid, precise description that exist in the creative writing of India's regional languages."
"In his foreword to Jyoti Sanyal's latest book - Indlish, Cutts gives piece of his mind to Indian English journalists.
He insists that our journalists should do four things: One, dump the Victorian verbosity.
Two, "Regularly write about the incoherent language of the law, government officials and companies, and show how it damages the interests of consumers and businesses." How will that help? "Public derision is a powerful weapon," Cutts reminds the doubters.
Three, "Spend at least an hour a week reading quality dailies of the UK, imbibing their often fresh phrasing and clarity of expression." This must be easy, more frequently than Cutts suggests, with the help of the Net.
Lastly, abandon your love of cliché and "tap into those sources of vivid, precise description that exist in the creative writing of India's regional languages."
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Why We Still Need Serious Journalism
Phillip Knightley
I tried for years to get on to Fleet Street and nearly gave up. Then, with one of those strokes of luck which all journalists need, in 1965 I wiggled my way on to the Sunday Times. I'd done one story for it as a freelance and had been given a spare desk and a telephone.
The next week I went in and sat at the vacant desk. After a day or two, someone noticed me and gave me another story to do. One week led to another and bang, there I was, a reporter on one of the world's great newspapers as it entered its finest years. The Sunday Times had 350 editorial staff to produce a 48- or 64-page two-section quality broadsheet every week. It was so overstaffed that some journalists went weeks without getting anything published in the paper.
In fact, some of them were not even SEEN for weeks. It spent money like water on investigative journalism - two million pounds on legal costs alone fighting for its right to publish the story about the thalidomide scandal. It was scared of no one. It averaged a libel writ a week.
The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job - defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly, exposing corruption, making a difference to the lives of ordinary citizens. Here was a paper that believed in something, which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for its editorial integrity.
One day, the owner of the paper, a Canadian called Lord Thomson, knocked on the editor's door while the morning news conference was in progress, said "hello", and then rather tentatively asked: "Say boys, would it be possible to squeeze in the Canadian ice hockey results each Sunday?" There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the deputy editor, Hugo Young, said, "Lord Thomson, this is an editorial news conference to which you've not been invited. If you'd like to put your suggestion in writing, I'm sure that the sports editor will be willing to consider it." And next morning there was a note to the editor from Lord Thomson apologising for attempting to influence the paper's editorial policy. So this is my benchmark. It's against this golden age that I plan to measure the performance of the media today, especially newspapers - because I know more about them - and especially in the field of investigative reporting. Now, everybody who has anything to do with newspapers - either as a producer or a consumer - has been aware for years now that something big has been going on in the industry, a sea change as deep and as radical as the arrival of the new technology in the 1980s. Newspaper circulations are declining all over the Western world. I emphasise "Western".
In India, for example, they are soaring. Again, in the West, viewing figures for news and current affairs are down. There is general public contempt for journalists. In the last five years half a million AB readers - educated top income group readers - have deserted the British quality press. OK, so they just changed papers, found the tabloids a quicker juicer read. I'm afraid not. They disappeared. It is an extraordinary fact that of the 11 million AB adults in Britain, the 11 million educated high-earners, about one-third do not read any daily newspaper whatsoever. All over the English-speaking world, many young people in all socio-economic classes have got out of the habit of reading newspapers. I
n any other industry, if customers were vanishing at this rate there would be panic. But in the media industry it is only recently that hard questions are at last being asked. Le Monde, announcing an English-language version of Le Monde Diplomatique, turned on its own. "We all know that the media can no longer be trusted, that their performance is incompetent ... that they broadcast blatant lies as if they were manifest truths." Is the media, particularly TV, in the business of "the mass production of ignorance"? Is it possible that the more TV news we watch, the less we know? There is a case to answer on both counts. If it is the media's job to interpret the world for us, why has the total output of factual programs on developing countries dropped by 50% in the past ten years - 50%!
Perhaps this has been due to the death of the old-fashioned foreign correspondent. You remember them, the expert in his or her area who had the language, knowledge and background not only to report on what was happening, but to explain why it was happening. Professor Virgil Hawkins of Osaka University suggests that technology has killed them off.
He says that the process goes like this: greater competition among media giants leads to budget cuts, so resources for newsgathering are diverted to buying and maintaining hi-tech equipment. This means foreign correspondents are expected to cover larger areas of the globe, and in the process lose their specialist expertise. "They race from one humanitarian disaster to another, with little time or background knowledge to grasp the issues behind the conflicts they cover". This tends to produce highly emotional firsthand accounts, described by Claudio Monteiro of Leicester University in her analysis of the Portuguese media coverage of East Timor, as "good cause journalism ... journalism of affection", with the journalist as the hero of his or her own story. Now, while all this has been happening, government interest in the media has intensified. It is as if governments realised, even before the TV and newspaper bosses, that the power, reach and influence of the modern media are enormous. The CNN News group is available to 800 million people across the globe, BBC World can be viewed in more than 167 million homes across 200 countries, al-Jazeera reaches at least 75 million viewers in the Muslim world alone. For any political party, the ability to 'handle the media' is these days seen as an essential element in gaining power and then, once in government, in maintaining it and carrying out policy.
The old-fashioned government 'press officer' has gone. Governments now have a 'director of communications and strategy', whose job it is to manage the media and manipulate public perception of government actions. The United States underpins its "hard" power - its awe-inspiring military capacity - with "soft" power - its ability to achieve its goals through the media; and its practitioners speak of a different world of journalism in which "global media strategy" and "international perception management" use journalists as pawns in the new "great game". In its updated foreign policy, Washington talks of "full-spectrum dominance": the US should aim to be top dog in all spheres - military, economic production, business, culture and, significantly, information. In an ideal world, a free press and a curious, sceptical army of campaigning journalists should keep democracies and their leaders in line, especially today.
And, almost as important, it should act as a check to the increasing power of corporations, especially international ones. So what's stopping these journalists? What's gone wrong? The list is lengthy. Government propaganda and pressure. Pressure from corporations, including those which own newspapers and television stations. (Why didn't we realise earlier that the corporate world, so often the target for journalists, would one day find ways of fighting back.) Legal pressure. Social pressure. And professional self-pressure, for journalists themselves are not entirely without blame for the state of the media today. Let's deal with these pressures one by one.
Those in power who think about these things, have always been puzzled by this question: "If we can so successfully manage the media in wartime, why can't we do the same in peacetime?" There is no trouble doing so in autocratic regimes. The media tells the public what the government wants it to know. End of story. Newspapers and broadcasting stations that do not toe the line lose their licences, or their editors go to jail, or - in some extreme cases - are shot. This does not happen in democratic countries, but there are nevertheless ways open to governments to exercise some control of the media.
The first and most often used is an appeal to 'the national interest'. In the United States, the events of September 11 have been used as an argument to deter journalists who dared to criticise or question their home country. When three times in July 2002 the New York Times printed excerpts of secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration accused the newspaper of "reckless reporting", "putting American lives at risk" and even "treason".
But the distinguished journalist academic, our colleague Bill Kovach, says that it is precisely at times like these that journalists need to be even more diligent in the pursuit of truth: "A journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day". At other times, the media has been willing to censor itself at the government's request. In 1986 the Washington Post editor, Benjamin C Bradlee, announced that in the first five months of that year the Post had, at the government's request, withheld information from stories a dozen times on the grounds of a risk to national security. There are other ways of managing the media without using the "risk to national security" approach.
The government of India adopts a carrot and stick tactic. The carrot can include subsidised housing in so-called "journalists' colonies", a government-paid trip abroad, a seat on an important government or semi-government committee, and even a posting as an ambassador. As the Pioneer newspaper of New Delhi says, "With rewards like these, who would want to needlessly antagonise the government?" Those who do find that the income tax inspector is suddenly paying close attention to the journalist's tax returns and taxation officers may even raid their homes and offices. All this is calculated to intimidate them.
Now the battle between government and the media is not new - it has gone on since the late 19th century when a rise in literacy created millions of new readers for newspapers and magazines, and made those in power worry whether this could cost them control of the electorate. What is new and worrying is the rise of legal pressure on the media to desist from subjecting both governments and corporations to investigation and public scrutiny.
High defamation damages have a knock-on effect in the way they inhibit investigative reporting. Chuck Lewis has told us the battle that the Center for Public Integrity and the ICIJ has to obtain libel insurance and fight off threat of what could be crippling libel actions. Just to remind you, many American insurance companies have a rule that if the insured media organisation has three libel actions pending against it - irrespective of the merit of those actions - its insurance policy becomes void. Without defamation insurance, the Center could not risk continuing its function - its insurance company has already paid out over US$1m in legal fees defending one case, which its lawyers say will eventually be thrown out of court. Lawyers, of course, know the 'three libel writs and you're out' rule. If they want to stop a story, one of the first things they do is to see how many writs a media organisation has outstanding, and if it is two, then they launch another one themselves knowing that, frivolous or not, this will effectively shut down the story.
American law firms, always keen to push the law to the limits to deter investigative journalists, have come up with new ploys that many consider even more effective than an action for defamation. They offer corporations and individuals 'pre-emptive strikes' against troublesome media. Their advice is along these lines: "when you learn that journalists are making enquiries about you, or when journalists approach you, do not wait until the news item is published or broadcast and then sue for defamation. The damage is already done. Hit back immediately and stop the item before it is published. We know ways of doing this." The "ways" include examining the financial structure of the media organisation to see if pressure can be applied through a parent or associated company, analysing the advertising revenue of the company to see if a major advertiser can be persuaded to apply pressure, and compiling a dossier on the personal background of the investigating reporter to see if he or she can be intimidated into dropping the story.
Let's move on to professional self-pressure. The new technology drew attention to the cost of gathering news - as distinct from the cost of producing a newspaper or running a TV programme. The accountants - the people who now really run the media industry - moved to slash news-gathering budgets. All over the world, overseas news bureaux were closed, foreign correspondents called home.
All over the Western world, journalists, who should have been up in arms about the downgrading of foreign news, were seduced. Some became highly-paid columnists, celebrities in their own right, pushing their opinions rather than gathering facts. Or writers about lifestyle, relationships, gossip, travel, beauty, fashion, gardening and do-it-yourself which, although sometimes interesting in themselves, can hardly compare in importance with examining the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century, which is what serious journalists try to do. One British proprietor has gone so far as to say he doesn't really need journalists on his newspapers. OK he admitted he needed a few to shovel the news into his papers and a celebrity writer or two.
But the news itself he would 'buy in' from outside sources. Money spent on journalism, he said, was wasted. There was no way of measuring what difference extra editorial expenditure had on circulation. On the other hand, he boasted, you could measure exactly the difference made by spending more money on promotion. Spend half a million dollars on marketing and give away a free movie DVD with every copy of the paper and you could see how many extra copies you sold. It seems to be working because his last balance sheet revealed he was paying himself nearly $2m a week. We are not complacent. We are prepared to look at our performance and try to do better.
"Reporting the World", a project run by the Conflict and Peace Forums of Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, has spent a lot of time and effort in getting around a conference table those journalists who have reported major conflicts and crises in recent years, and encouraging them to criticise each other's work in a constructive manner. More than 200 editors, writers, producers, and reporters helped to produce a practical check-list upholding the values of balance, fairness and responsibility in their coverage of international affairs. Most of these meetings were arranged by the European Centre of the Freedom Forum based in London. The centre's parent body, the Freedom Association of Arlington, Virginia, is a non-partisan foundation, a successor to one started in 1935 by publisher Frank E Gannett with the slogan: "a free press, free speech and free spirit for all people".
The London centre was a beacon for journalists of all colours, creeds and political beliefs, united by their concern that journalism should remain more than celebrity lifestyle, trivialisation, confessions and comic book stories. Now for the irony. Six weeks after 9/11, the parent body in the United States closed it down, saying that they needed the money for a news museum in downtown Washington! So investigative journalism is not dead yet.
Let's run through what we should be doing. We have to convince news organisations that there is more to journalism than profits and share price, that slick accountancy, cost cutting and spending money on promotion are not going to win an editor or a proprietor a place in the history books. We need a public interest defence in all legal actions brought against the media. Journalists should be able to defend a story by showing that what it revealed was so important to the public that everything else was irrelevant - something that, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights, the Sunday Times succeeded in doing in the thalidomide case.
I mean, if a drug company is aggressively marketing a drug that deforms unborn babies, then how the journalist got the story and whether it defamed drug company executives - and even whether publication would damage that elusive concept, "the national interest" - has just got to take second place to informing the people. We can support media that does investigative journalism, and stop buying media that does not. We can seek other sources of funding for our own investigations.
And, if everything else fails, we can take the Jan Mayman path and somehow finance ourselves. We are not without power.
I tried for years to get on to Fleet Street and nearly gave up. Then, with one of those strokes of luck which all journalists need, in 1965 I wiggled my way on to the Sunday Times. I'd done one story for it as a freelance and had been given a spare desk and a telephone.
The next week I went in and sat at the vacant desk. After a day or two, someone noticed me and gave me another story to do. One week led to another and bang, there I was, a reporter on one of the world's great newspapers as it entered its finest years. The Sunday Times had 350 editorial staff to produce a 48- or 64-page two-section quality broadsheet every week. It was so overstaffed that some journalists went weeks without getting anything published in the paper.
In fact, some of them were not even SEEN for weeks. It spent money like water on investigative journalism - two million pounds on legal costs alone fighting for its right to publish the story about the thalidomide scandal. It was scared of no one. It averaged a libel writ a week.
The editor, Harold Evans, was unhappy if a libel writ had not arrived by Tuesday, because he felt that the paper had not been doing its job - defending people without power from those who wielded it unfairly, exposing corruption, making a difference to the lives of ordinary citizens. Here was a paper that believed in something, which took enormous pains to get things right, and which fought for its editorial integrity.
One day, the owner of the paper, a Canadian called Lord Thomson, knocked on the editor's door while the morning news conference was in progress, said "hello", and then rather tentatively asked: "Say boys, would it be possible to squeeze in the Canadian ice hockey results each Sunday?" There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the deputy editor, Hugo Young, said, "Lord Thomson, this is an editorial news conference to which you've not been invited. If you'd like to put your suggestion in writing, I'm sure that the sports editor will be willing to consider it." And next morning there was a note to the editor from Lord Thomson apologising for attempting to influence the paper's editorial policy. So this is my benchmark. It's against this golden age that I plan to measure the performance of the media today, especially newspapers - because I know more about them - and especially in the field of investigative reporting. Now, everybody who has anything to do with newspapers - either as a producer or a consumer - has been aware for years now that something big has been going on in the industry, a sea change as deep and as radical as the arrival of the new technology in the 1980s. Newspaper circulations are declining all over the Western world. I emphasise "Western".
In India, for example, they are soaring. Again, in the West, viewing figures for news and current affairs are down. There is general public contempt for journalists. In the last five years half a million AB readers - educated top income group readers - have deserted the British quality press. OK, so they just changed papers, found the tabloids a quicker juicer read. I'm afraid not. They disappeared. It is an extraordinary fact that of the 11 million AB adults in Britain, the 11 million educated high-earners, about one-third do not read any daily newspaper whatsoever. All over the English-speaking world, many young people in all socio-economic classes have got out of the habit of reading newspapers. I
n any other industry, if customers were vanishing at this rate there would be panic. But in the media industry it is only recently that hard questions are at last being asked. Le Monde, announcing an English-language version of Le Monde Diplomatique, turned on its own. "We all know that the media can no longer be trusted, that their performance is incompetent ... that they broadcast blatant lies as if they were manifest truths." Is the media, particularly TV, in the business of "the mass production of ignorance"? Is it possible that the more TV news we watch, the less we know? There is a case to answer on both counts. If it is the media's job to interpret the world for us, why has the total output of factual programs on developing countries dropped by 50% in the past ten years - 50%!
Perhaps this has been due to the death of the old-fashioned foreign correspondent. You remember them, the expert in his or her area who had the language, knowledge and background not only to report on what was happening, but to explain why it was happening. Professor Virgil Hawkins of Osaka University suggests that technology has killed them off.
He says that the process goes like this: greater competition among media giants leads to budget cuts, so resources for newsgathering are diverted to buying and maintaining hi-tech equipment. This means foreign correspondents are expected to cover larger areas of the globe, and in the process lose their specialist expertise. "They race from one humanitarian disaster to another, with little time or background knowledge to grasp the issues behind the conflicts they cover". This tends to produce highly emotional firsthand accounts, described by Claudio Monteiro of Leicester University in her analysis of the Portuguese media coverage of East Timor, as "good cause journalism ... journalism of affection", with the journalist as the hero of his or her own story. Now, while all this has been happening, government interest in the media has intensified. It is as if governments realised, even before the TV and newspaper bosses, that the power, reach and influence of the modern media are enormous. The CNN News group is available to 800 million people across the globe, BBC World can be viewed in more than 167 million homes across 200 countries, al-Jazeera reaches at least 75 million viewers in the Muslim world alone. For any political party, the ability to 'handle the media' is these days seen as an essential element in gaining power and then, once in government, in maintaining it and carrying out policy.
The old-fashioned government 'press officer' has gone. Governments now have a 'director of communications and strategy', whose job it is to manage the media and manipulate public perception of government actions. The United States underpins its "hard" power - its awe-inspiring military capacity - with "soft" power - its ability to achieve its goals through the media; and its practitioners speak of a different world of journalism in which "global media strategy" and "international perception management" use journalists as pawns in the new "great game". In its updated foreign policy, Washington talks of "full-spectrum dominance": the US should aim to be top dog in all spheres - military, economic production, business, culture and, significantly, information. In an ideal world, a free press and a curious, sceptical army of campaigning journalists should keep democracies and their leaders in line, especially today.
And, almost as important, it should act as a check to the increasing power of corporations, especially international ones. So what's stopping these journalists? What's gone wrong? The list is lengthy. Government propaganda and pressure. Pressure from corporations, including those which own newspapers and television stations. (Why didn't we realise earlier that the corporate world, so often the target for journalists, would one day find ways of fighting back.) Legal pressure. Social pressure. And professional self-pressure, for journalists themselves are not entirely without blame for the state of the media today. Let's deal with these pressures one by one.
Those in power who think about these things, have always been puzzled by this question: "If we can so successfully manage the media in wartime, why can't we do the same in peacetime?" There is no trouble doing so in autocratic regimes. The media tells the public what the government wants it to know. End of story. Newspapers and broadcasting stations that do not toe the line lose their licences, or their editors go to jail, or - in some extreme cases - are shot. This does not happen in democratic countries, but there are nevertheless ways open to governments to exercise some control of the media.
The first and most often used is an appeal to 'the national interest'. In the United States, the events of September 11 have been used as an argument to deter journalists who dared to criticise or question their home country. When three times in July 2002 the New York Times printed excerpts of secret Pentagon plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration accused the newspaper of "reckless reporting", "putting American lives at risk" and even "treason".
But the distinguished journalist academic, our colleague Bill Kovach, says that it is precisely at times like these that journalists need to be even more diligent in the pursuit of truth: "A journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day". At other times, the media has been willing to censor itself at the government's request. In 1986 the Washington Post editor, Benjamin C Bradlee, announced that in the first five months of that year the Post had, at the government's request, withheld information from stories a dozen times on the grounds of a risk to national security. There are other ways of managing the media without using the "risk to national security" approach.
The government of India adopts a carrot and stick tactic. The carrot can include subsidised housing in so-called "journalists' colonies", a government-paid trip abroad, a seat on an important government or semi-government committee, and even a posting as an ambassador. As the Pioneer newspaper of New Delhi says, "With rewards like these, who would want to needlessly antagonise the government?" Those who do find that the income tax inspector is suddenly paying close attention to the journalist's tax returns and taxation officers may even raid their homes and offices. All this is calculated to intimidate them.
Now the battle between government and the media is not new - it has gone on since the late 19th century when a rise in literacy created millions of new readers for newspapers and magazines, and made those in power worry whether this could cost them control of the electorate. What is new and worrying is the rise of legal pressure on the media to desist from subjecting both governments and corporations to investigation and public scrutiny.
High defamation damages have a knock-on effect in the way they inhibit investigative reporting. Chuck Lewis has told us the battle that the Center for Public Integrity and the ICIJ has to obtain libel insurance and fight off threat of what could be crippling libel actions. Just to remind you, many American insurance companies have a rule that if the insured media organisation has three libel actions pending against it - irrespective of the merit of those actions - its insurance policy becomes void. Without defamation insurance, the Center could not risk continuing its function - its insurance company has already paid out over US$1m in legal fees defending one case, which its lawyers say will eventually be thrown out of court. Lawyers, of course, know the 'three libel writs and you're out' rule. If they want to stop a story, one of the first things they do is to see how many writs a media organisation has outstanding, and if it is two, then they launch another one themselves knowing that, frivolous or not, this will effectively shut down the story.
American law firms, always keen to push the law to the limits to deter investigative journalists, have come up with new ploys that many consider even more effective than an action for defamation. They offer corporations and individuals 'pre-emptive strikes' against troublesome media. Their advice is along these lines: "when you learn that journalists are making enquiries about you, or when journalists approach you, do not wait until the news item is published or broadcast and then sue for defamation. The damage is already done. Hit back immediately and stop the item before it is published. We know ways of doing this." The "ways" include examining the financial structure of the media organisation to see if pressure can be applied through a parent or associated company, analysing the advertising revenue of the company to see if a major advertiser can be persuaded to apply pressure, and compiling a dossier on the personal background of the investigating reporter to see if he or she can be intimidated into dropping the story.
Let's move on to professional self-pressure. The new technology drew attention to the cost of gathering news - as distinct from the cost of producing a newspaper or running a TV programme. The accountants - the people who now really run the media industry - moved to slash news-gathering budgets. All over the world, overseas news bureaux were closed, foreign correspondents called home.
All over the Western world, journalists, who should have been up in arms about the downgrading of foreign news, were seduced. Some became highly-paid columnists, celebrities in their own right, pushing their opinions rather than gathering facts. Or writers about lifestyle, relationships, gossip, travel, beauty, fashion, gardening and do-it-yourself which, although sometimes interesting in themselves, can hardly compare in importance with examining the human condition at the beginning of the 21st century, which is what serious journalists try to do. One British proprietor has gone so far as to say he doesn't really need journalists on his newspapers. OK he admitted he needed a few to shovel the news into his papers and a celebrity writer or two.
But the news itself he would 'buy in' from outside sources. Money spent on journalism, he said, was wasted. There was no way of measuring what difference extra editorial expenditure had on circulation. On the other hand, he boasted, you could measure exactly the difference made by spending more money on promotion. Spend half a million dollars on marketing and give away a free movie DVD with every copy of the paper and you could see how many extra copies you sold. It seems to be working because his last balance sheet revealed he was paying himself nearly $2m a week. We are not complacent. We are prepared to look at our performance and try to do better.
"Reporting the World", a project run by the Conflict and Peace Forums of Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire, has spent a lot of time and effort in getting around a conference table those journalists who have reported major conflicts and crises in recent years, and encouraging them to criticise each other's work in a constructive manner. More than 200 editors, writers, producers, and reporters helped to produce a practical check-list upholding the values of balance, fairness and responsibility in their coverage of international affairs. Most of these meetings were arranged by the European Centre of the Freedom Forum based in London. The centre's parent body, the Freedom Association of Arlington, Virginia, is a non-partisan foundation, a successor to one started in 1935 by publisher Frank E Gannett with the slogan: "a free press, free speech and free spirit for all people".
The London centre was a beacon for journalists of all colours, creeds and political beliefs, united by their concern that journalism should remain more than celebrity lifestyle, trivialisation, confessions and comic book stories. Now for the irony. Six weeks after 9/11, the parent body in the United States closed it down, saying that they needed the money for a news museum in downtown Washington! So investigative journalism is not dead yet.
Let's run through what we should be doing. We have to convince news organisations that there is more to journalism than profits and share price, that slick accountancy, cost cutting and spending money on promotion are not going to win an editor or a proprietor a place in the history books. We need a public interest defence in all legal actions brought against the media. Journalists should be able to defend a story by showing that what it revealed was so important to the public that everything else was irrelevant - something that, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights, the Sunday Times succeeded in doing in the thalidomide case.
I mean, if a drug company is aggressively marketing a drug that deforms unborn babies, then how the journalist got the story and whether it defamed drug company executives - and even whether publication would damage that elusive concept, "the national interest" - has just got to take second place to informing the people. We can support media that does investigative journalism, and stop buying media that does not. We can seek other sources of funding for our own investigations.
And, if everything else fails, we can take the Jan Mayman path and somehow finance ourselves. We are not without power.
How to save the face of a venerable news organisation
Reuters had to act quickly when bloggers noticed that two photographs of Israeli military action had been doctored. Raymond Snoddy gets the full story from its new editor-in-chief .
It was vigilant bloggers who first raised questions about the validity of two Reuters photographs of Israeli military action in Lebanon published last summer. In one, wisps of smoke rising over Beirut seemed identical, as if extra smoke had been added to enhance the image. In the other the accusation was that the number of flares being dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter had been increased by digital means to make the picture look more dramatic.
For full text read :
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2259498.ece
It was vigilant bloggers who first raised questions about the validity of two Reuters photographs of Israeli military action in Lebanon published last summer. In one, wisps of smoke rising over Beirut seemed identical, as if extra smoke had been added to enhance the image. In the other the accusation was that the number of flares being dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter had been increased by digital means to make the picture look more dramatic.
For full text read :
http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article2259498.ece
Nonprofit Journalism?
Daniel Akst
When newsgathering isn't tied into company profits, does journalism—and the public—benefit?
In the media cacophony that is New York, whoever heard of Gotham Gazette? Apparently lots of people. The web site, devoted to news of the city and its neighborhoods, gets more than 105,000 unique visitors per month. "In May [2005]," says Sara Stuart, Gotham's director of marketing and communications, "when you Googled 'New York City politics,' Gotham Gazette was the first of 26 million results." National Public Radio (NPR), by contrast, is a household name.
In the early 1980s it had only two million weekly listeners, but since then what was once the province of a band of self-selected cognoscenti has grown into nothing short of a mass phenomenon. NPR now reports 26 million weekly listeners--a figure that has doubled in just the past decade. NPR programming reaches listeners on more than 780 independent public radio stations blanketing the country, not to mention on the Internet.
Gotham Gazette and NPR are both fast-growing media organizations, but they have something more interesting in common: they are both private, not-for-profit organizations. In fact, at a time of growing concern over whether quality journalism and high profit margins can continue to coexist in the traditional media, nonprofit journalism is flourishing. From individual bloggers to influential public affairs magazines, from community newspapers to broadcasting outlets, nonprofit media are multiplying in number, increasing their audiences and stretching the boundaries of journalism itself.
Thanks to the Internet, barriers to entry into the news business may well be lower than at any time since wandering minstrels carried news from place to place in verse. And while nonprofits can't ignore markets any more than they can ignore budgets, a news organization that hopes only to break even can focus less on what will sell and more on the kinds of coverage it believes society needs. Thus, while for-profit broadcasters appear to have scaled back their commitment to news, NPR has been adding journalists and ramping up coverage.
Of course, profit and excellence in the media are hardly mutually exclusive. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, which deploy masses of relatively well-paid professional journalists and maintain the highest standards, are all profit-seeking enterprises that also produce enormous social good. Princeton University sociologist and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Starr, in his 2004 study, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books), is clear-eyed about the role of profit in all this, observing that, in general, "Markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it."
But in some situations the market mechanism--pressured by cultural, social and political changes--may not always be adequate, and some thoughtful people are suggesting that this is the case with respect to the profit-oriented media that dominate the American news landscape.
The traditional postwar mainstays of American news--the big three television networks and the many daily newspapers that provide most local coverage--seem to be caught in a dispiriting cycle of cutbacks and declining audiences that they lack the ability to break. At the same time, consolidation and the decline of family ownership have left media organizations subject to the same profit pressures as other publicly traded companies--despite the special mission media companies have always claimed for themselves. Under the circumstances, it's fair to ask whether the news organizations of today--and tomorrow--are up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends. "I think there is a fundamental role for nonprofit entities in our media system," says Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded a nonprofit organization of his own (freepress.org) to advocate media reform.
To critics like McChesney, the problem is a consequence of concentration and the obligations public companies of all kinds have to their shareholders. McChesney argues that the current system "is set up to maximize profit for a relative handful of large companies. The system works well for them, but it is a disaster for the communication needs of a healthy and self-governing society."James T. Hamilton, an economist and political scientist at Duke University whose works include All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton University Press, 2003), advocates outright nonprofit ownership as one of several means to generate more hard news coverage.
"One way to increase the attention reporters pay to politics and government is to shift the objectives of some owners away from profit maximization," he writes. "A foundation concerned with the quantity and quality of public affairs coverage might decide to purchase or run a news outlet that emphasized hard news."Sometimes when markets fail, the path is clear for government intervention and in fact, some advocates of a greater role for nonprofits support changes in tax and other public policies to promote this form of media ownership. In other advanced nations, after all, government plays a much bigger role, particularly in funding public broadcasting.
In America, by contrast, the federal government only provides about fifteen percent of what is spent on public broadcasting, an amount roughly matched by the states. McChesney, for one, believes the most cost-effective way for nonprofits to improve the media is by focusing on government policy. He cites as a precedent the original Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, underwritten by Carnegie Corporation of New York during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. The Commission's landmark report led to the creation of the U.S. public broadcasting system in 1967. But there are times when markets fail and government can't fill the gap, particularly in the wary and decentralized American tradition, which makes even modest government funding for the arts controversial, let alone the kind of national television tax that pays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Often, in such circumstances, private, nonprofit organizations can step effectively into the breach--and the seeming marketplace shortfall in quality journalism may be just the kind of breach they can ably help to fill. A shortage of quality television for kids was addressed in just this way when Carnegie Corporation commissioned the feasibility study (by Joan Ganz Cooney) that led to the birth of the children's Television Workshop--creator of Sesame Street.Nonprofits have succeeded in other complex, costly and socially critical ventures, including most notably higher education.
America's colleges and universities are decentralized, overwhelmingly not-for-profit, dependent on a mix of funding sources--and despite a little grade inflation, the envy of the world. What they supply is both vital and, with some rare exceptions, unavailable from profit-making businesses.
In the media, "the nonprofit sector shows promise," affirms University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer, who wrote a book called The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism In The Information Age (University of Missouri Press, 2004). He observes that, rather than being left entirely to a competitive marketplace, news coverage in this country has long been buttressed by various kinds of charitable or government benefits. McChesney points out that low postal rates, broadcast licenses, local cable monopolies and even the nature of copyright protections are among the many government policies that subsidize and shape the American media outside the free market system. Nonprofits can also help fill an important coverage gap inherent in the structure of America's advertising-driven media business model.
Since daily newspapers, for example, get four-fifths of their revenue from advertising, the places that need coverage most--places where people don't have a lot of money--typically get it least. This is why newspapers in some places have dropped the names of their older, struggling host cities from their names--the better to follow their affluent readers to the suburbs. At the same time, papers "covering" entertainment, home design and restaurants have proliferated, all of them appealing to the affluent and many carrying nothing like news. Nonprofit media could pay more attention to the Americans who don't shop or eat out quite so much.
When newsgathering isn't tied into company profits, does journalism—and the public—benefit?
In the media cacophony that is New York, whoever heard of Gotham Gazette? Apparently lots of people. The web site, devoted to news of the city and its neighborhoods, gets more than 105,000 unique visitors per month. "In May [2005]," says Sara Stuart, Gotham's director of marketing and communications, "when you Googled 'New York City politics,' Gotham Gazette was the first of 26 million results." National Public Radio (NPR), by contrast, is a household name.
In the early 1980s it had only two million weekly listeners, but since then what was once the province of a band of self-selected cognoscenti has grown into nothing short of a mass phenomenon. NPR now reports 26 million weekly listeners--a figure that has doubled in just the past decade. NPR programming reaches listeners on more than 780 independent public radio stations blanketing the country, not to mention on the Internet.
Gotham Gazette and NPR are both fast-growing media organizations, but they have something more interesting in common: they are both private, not-for-profit organizations. In fact, at a time of growing concern over whether quality journalism and high profit margins can continue to coexist in the traditional media, nonprofit journalism is flourishing. From individual bloggers to influential public affairs magazines, from community newspapers to broadcasting outlets, nonprofit media are multiplying in number, increasing their audiences and stretching the boundaries of journalism itself.
Thanks to the Internet, barriers to entry into the news business may well be lower than at any time since wandering minstrels carried news from place to place in verse. And while nonprofits can't ignore markets any more than they can ignore budgets, a news organization that hopes only to break even can focus less on what will sell and more on the kinds of coverage it believes society needs. Thus, while for-profit broadcasters appear to have scaled back their commitment to news, NPR has been adding journalists and ramping up coverage.
Of course, profit and excellence in the media are hardly mutually exclusive. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, which deploy masses of relatively well-paid professional journalists and maintain the highest standards, are all profit-seeking enterprises that also produce enormous social good. Princeton University sociologist and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Starr, in his 2004 study, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books), is clear-eyed about the role of profit in all this, observing that, in general, "Markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it."
But in some situations the market mechanism--pressured by cultural, social and political changes--may not always be adequate, and some thoughtful people are suggesting that this is the case with respect to the profit-oriented media that dominate the American news landscape.
The traditional postwar mainstays of American news--the big three television networks and the many daily newspapers that provide most local coverage--seem to be caught in a dispiriting cycle of cutbacks and declining audiences that they lack the ability to break. At the same time, consolidation and the decline of family ownership have left media organizations subject to the same profit pressures as other publicly traded companies--despite the special mission media companies have always claimed for themselves. Under the circumstances, it's fair to ask whether the news organizations of today--and tomorrow--are up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends. "I think there is a fundamental role for nonprofit entities in our media system," says Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded a nonprofit organization of his own (freepress.org) to advocate media reform.
To critics like McChesney, the problem is a consequence of concentration and the obligations public companies of all kinds have to their shareholders. McChesney argues that the current system "is set up to maximize profit for a relative handful of large companies. The system works well for them, but it is a disaster for the communication needs of a healthy and self-governing society."James T. Hamilton, an economist and political scientist at Duke University whose works include All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton University Press, 2003), advocates outright nonprofit ownership as one of several means to generate more hard news coverage.
"One way to increase the attention reporters pay to politics and government is to shift the objectives of some owners away from profit maximization," he writes. "A foundation concerned with the quantity and quality of public affairs coverage might decide to purchase or run a news outlet that emphasized hard news."Sometimes when markets fail, the path is clear for government intervention and in fact, some advocates of a greater role for nonprofits support changes in tax and other public policies to promote this form of media ownership. In other advanced nations, after all, government plays a much bigger role, particularly in funding public broadcasting.
In America, by contrast, the federal government only provides about fifteen percent of what is spent on public broadcasting, an amount roughly matched by the states. McChesney, for one, believes the most cost-effective way for nonprofits to improve the media is by focusing on government policy. He cites as a precedent the original Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, underwritten by Carnegie Corporation of New York during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. The Commission's landmark report led to the creation of the U.S. public broadcasting system in 1967. But there are times when markets fail and government can't fill the gap, particularly in the wary and decentralized American tradition, which makes even modest government funding for the arts controversial, let alone the kind of national television tax that pays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Often, in such circumstances, private, nonprofit organizations can step effectively into the breach--and the seeming marketplace shortfall in quality journalism may be just the kind of breach they can ably help to fill. A shortage of quality television for kids was addressed in just this way when Carnegie Corporation commissioned the feasibility study (by Joan Ganz Cooney) that led to the birth of the children's Television Workshop--creator of Sesame Street.Nonprofits have succeeded in other complex, costly and socially critical ventures, including most notably higher education.
America's colleges and universities are decentralized, overwhelmingly not-for-profit, dependent on a mix of funding sources--and despite a little grade inflation, the envy of the world. What they supply is both vital and, with some rare exceptions, unavailable from profit-making businesses.
In the media, "the nonprofit sector shows promise," affirms University of North Carolina journalism professor Philip Meyer, who wrote a book called The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism In The Information Age (University of Missouri Press, 2004). He observes that, rather than being left entirely to a competitive marketplace, news coverage in this country has long been buttressed by various kinds of charitable or government benefits. McChesney points out that low postal rates, broadcast licenses, local cable monopolies and even the nature of copyright protections are among the many government policies that subsidize and shape the American media outside the free market system. Nonprofits can also help fill an important coverage gap inherent in the structure of America's advertising-driven media business model.
Since daily newspapers, for example, get four-fifths of their revenue from advertising, the places that need coverage most--places where people don't have a lot of money--typically get it least. This is why newspapers in some places have dropped the names of their older, struggling host cities from their names--the better to follow their affluent readers to the suburbs. At the same time, papers "covering" entertainment, home design and restaurants have proliferated, all of them appealing to the affluent and many carrying nothing like news. Nonprofit media could pay more attention to the Americans who don't shop or eat out quite so much.
More media, Less news
Newspapers are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded
THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own.
Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits.
News of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out how the Norwegians have done it. “Otherwise we'd get several visits every month,” he says.
The company has used its established newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses such as Sesam, a search engine that competes with Google, and FINN.no, a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was the company's best ever for revenues and profits.
Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending.
Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.
Newspapers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested.
In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.
Set in print
At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else's website.
Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand's prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at La Stampa, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper's internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.
For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet. At its most basic, that means reporting stories using cameras and microphones as well as print. The results can be encouraging. America's Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has introduced a new Emmy award for news and documentaries on the internet, mobile phones and personal media players. Five of the seven nominations for this September have gone to reports by nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com.
It also means being more imaginative. In the late 1990s, the early years of the Wall Street Journal's website, one of the paper's journalists came up with the novel idea of posting online a 573-page document that backed up an article. “It wasn't the most compelling content,” remembers Neil Budde, its founding editor and now general manager of news at Yahoo!, an internet portal. But it was a start. Now newspapers have a better idea of what works online. This is not always traditional journalism as taught in journalism school. Brian Tierney, who became owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer after Knight Ridder sold it last year, noticed that a popular item on the paper's website has been a video of Mentos mints causing a 2-litre bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. “We should do more of that,” he says.
More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. “Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet,” says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, “but now we know we've got to use our very best.” Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. “It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations,” says Oscar Bronner, publisher of Der Standard, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.
Running to stand still
How impressive are the results of these online experiments? At lots of newspaper companies, internet advertising is growing by at least 30% a year, and often more. At la Repubblica in Italy, for instance, the paper's website gets about 1m visitors a day, nearly double the circulation of the printed paper.
The value of online ads grew by 70% in the first half of 2006. For the first three months of 2006, the Newspaper Association of America announced that advertising for all the country's newspaper websites grew by 35% from the same period in 2005, to a total of $613m. But to put that in perspective, print and online ads together grew by only 1.8%, to $11 billion, because print advertising was flat. At almost all newspapers the internet brings in less than a tenth of revenues and profits.
At this point, says Mr Chisholm, “newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online.”
The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a “haphazard and fragmented way”. Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader.
Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online. But even that is a daunting multiple.
Newspapers today concentrate on only two parts of the market for internet advertising. They earn little or nothing from internet search, which is bigger than either display or classified ads. Especially in America, newspapers rely heavily on classified ads online and have fewer display ads, says Mr Crosbie. Elsewhere, the pattern may be reversed, but newspapers still lack a broad base of internet-advertising revenue; for instance, Juan Luis Cebrián, chief executive of Grupo PRISA, the owner of El Pais, says the Spanish newspaper is enjoying strong growth in display advertising, but has few online classified ads.
On the other hand, newspapers' websites have higher profit margins than print does, because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. The Wall Street Journal is one of the few papers that charges for its content online. Others may follow suit, especially if growth in advertising slows. The online business model is still in flux, argues Richard Zannino, chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The average price of ad space in the printed paper is now only three times higher than on Wall Street Journal Online, says Mr Zannino, compared with six to seven times for the industry as a whole in America. He expects the relative price of an internet ad to rise.
The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.
The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious—having excellent websites and selling ad space on them—may not be enough. The papers with the best chance of seeing their revenues grow are those experimenting with entirely new businesses online and off.
Some are launching profitable new ventures that are only indirectly related to journalism. Schibsted, for instance, has started an online slimming club, called Viktklubben.se, using its Aftonbladet newspaper brand. Viktklubben.se charges its 54,000 members €50 each every three months. The Telegraph Group in Britain uses the Daily Telegraph to sell readers everything from goose-down pillows to Valentine's Day topiary baskets to insurance. The division now contributes close to a third of the firm's total profits, according to an executive at the company. “Newspapers will have to get into new businesses and extract more value from their audience,” says Paul Zwillenberg, global head of media and entertainment at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. Examples like these are fairly rare, though. Most newspaper companies still insist that producing high-quality journalism and distributing it in new ways will be enough to keep them growing.
It's the journalism, stupid
Consultants advising newspaper groups argue that they need to adjust their output. Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic.
On the internet, especially, says Mr Chisholm, they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities—the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments. Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next.
This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.
Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos”—mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs. Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, recently launched a new home-delivered free paper for Bluffton, a fast-growing area of Beaufort, South Carolina, called Bluffton Today, with a page of national news, one of international and the rest “hyper-local”.
Its website has pictures and blogs from readers and detailed community information. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call ‘chicken-dinner news’—the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing,” says Will Morris, the firm's president. “But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers.”
The more adventurous newspaper companies, like Morris Communications, are showing themselves willing to embrace content and opinions from readers. Rather like OhmyNews, a Korean “citizen-journalism” operation that many people think heralds the future for news-gathering, Schibsted exhorts its readers to send information and photographs. When a mentally disturbed man ran amok and killed people on a tram in Oslo in 2004, it was a reader with a mobile-phone camera who sent VG its front-page picture of the arrest. At Zero Hora, a Brazilian paper owned by RBS Group, the circulation department asks 120 readers what they think of the paper every day and Marcelo Rech, the editor, receives a report at 1pm. “They usually want more of our supplements on cooking and houses and less of Hizbullah and earthquakes,” says Mr Rech.
Still more changes to the content and form of newspapers are likely as businesspeople gain power at newspaper firms. “You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial,” says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the Wall Street Journal, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time. For the moment, the trend towards greater commercialism is most evident in America, but is likely to spread elsewhere as newspaper companies struggle financially.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr Tierney, a former advertising executive, shocked people by announcing that he would bring in an advertising person to redesign the paper—traditionally a task strictly for editorial. In future, businesspeople are likely to insist that newspapers adopt practices that are already standard in other industries. Mr Tierney, for instance, says it is unreasonable to expect everyone from the age of 18 to 88 to buy the same product. The industry needs to sell papers for different age and demographic groups, he says.
The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people. Roughly 28m copies of free newspapers are now printed daily, according to Metro International, a Swedish firm that pioneered them in 1995. In markets where they are published, they account for 8% of daily circulation on average, according to iMedia. That share is rising.
In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180. Metro's papers reach young, affluent readers and are even able to charge a premium for advertising in some markets compared with paid-for papers.
“The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time,” says Pelle Törnberg, Metro's chief executive.
Mr Törnberg says the only way that paid-for papers will prosper is by becoming more specialised, raising their prices and investing in better editorial. People read freesheets in their millions, on the other hand, because Metro and others reach them on their journey to work, when they have time to read, and spare them the hassle of having to hand over change to a newsagent.
Some traditional newspaper firms dismiss free papers, saying they are not profitable. Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of la Repubblica, for instance, says that Metro loses money in Italy and that other freesheets are struggling. Globally, however, Metro has just become profitable.
Consultants say that lots of traditional newspaper companies are planning to hold their noses and launch free dailies. In France, for instance, Le Monde is planning a new free daily, and Mr Murdoch's News International is preparing a new free afternoon paper for London, to be launched next month. Deciding whether or not to start a freesheet, indeed, perfectly encapsulates the unpalatable choice that faces the paid-for newspaper industry today as it attempts to find a future for itself.
Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach—or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.
Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition
THE first thing to greet a visitor to the Oslo headquarters of Schibsted, a Norwegian newspaper firm, is its original, hand-operated printing press from 1856, now so clean and polished it looks more like a sculpture than a machine. Christian Schibsted, the firm's founder, bought it to print someone else's newspaper, but when the contract moved elsewhere he decided to start his own.
Although Schibsted gives pride of place to its antique machinery, the company is in fact running away from its printed past as fast as it can. Having made a loss five years ago, Schibsted's activities on the internet contributed 35% of last year's operating profits.
News of Schibsted's success online has spread far in the newspaper industry. Every year, says Sverre Munck, the executive vice-president of its international business, Schibsted has to turn away delegations of foreign newspaper bosses seeking to find out how the Norwegians have done it. “Otherwise we'd get several visits every month,” he says.
The company has used its established newspaper brands to build websites that rank first and second in Scandinavia for visitors. It has also created new internet businesses such as Sesam, a search engine that competes with Google, and FINN.no, a portal for classified advertising. As a result, 2005 was the company's best ever for revenues and profits.
Unfortunately for the newspaper industry, Schibsted is a rare exception. For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending.
Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.
Even the most confident of newspaper bosses now agree that they will survive in the long term only if, like Schibsted, they can reinvent themselves on the internet and on other new-media platforms such as mobile phones and portable electronic devices. Most have been slow to grasp the changes affecting their industry—“remarkably, unaccountably complacent,” as Rupert Murdoch put it in a speech last year—but now they are making a big push to catch up. Internet advertising is growing rapidly for many and is beginning to offset some of the decline in print.
Newspapers' complacency is perhaps not as remarkable as Mr Murdoch suggested.
In many developed countries their owners have for decades enjoyed near monopolies, fat profit margins, and returns on capital above those of other industries. In the past, newspaper companies saw little need to experiment or to change and spent little or nothing on research and development.
Set in print
At first, from the late 1990s until around 2002, newspaper companies simply replicated their print editions online. Yet the internet offers so many specialised sources of information and entertainment that readers can pick exactly what they want from different websites. As a result, people visited newspaper sites infrequently, looked at a few pages and then vanished off to someone else's website.
Another early mistake was for papers to save their best journalists for print. This meant that the quality of new online editions was often poor. Websites hired younger, cheaper staff. The brand's prestige stayed with the old medium, which encouraged print journalists to defend their turf. Still today at La Stampa, an Italian daily paper owned by the Fiat Group, says Anna Masera, the paper's internet chief, print journalists hesitate to give her their stories for fear that the website will cannibalise the newspaper.
For the past couple of years, however, newspapers have been thinking more boldly about what to do on the internet. At its most basic, that means reporting stories using cameras and microphones as well as print. The results can be encouraging. America's Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has introduced a new Emmy award for news and documentaries on the internet, mobile phones and personal media players. Five of the seven nominations for this September have gone to reports by nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com.
It also means being more imaginative. In the late 1990s, the early years of the Wall Street Journal's website, one of the paper's journalists came up with the novel idea of posting online a 573-page document that backed up an article. “It wasn't the most compelling content,” remembers Neil Budde, its founding editor and now general manager of news at Yahoo!, an internet portal. But it was a start. Now newspapers have a better idea of what works online. This is not always traditional journalism as taught in journalism school. Brian Tierney, who became owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer after Knight Ridder sold it last year, noticed that a popular item on the paper's website has been a video of Mentos mints causing a 2-litre bottle of Diet Coke to explode into the air. “We should do more of that,” he says.
More newspaper companies are likely to treat their websites as a priority these days. “Before, newspapers used their second- and third-rate journalists for the internet,” says Edward Roussel, online editorial director at Britain's Telegraph Group, “but now we know we've got to use our very best.” Many companies are putting print journalists in the same room as those who work online, so that print writers are working for the website and vice versa. Some insist that this is a mistake. “It is completely wrong not to separate web and paper operations,” says Oscar Bronner, publisher of Der Standard, a daily paper in Austria. Print journalists don't have time to reflect and analyse properly if they also have to work for the website, he argues.
Running to stand still
How impressive are the results of these online experiments? At lots of newspaper companies, internet advertising is growing by at least 30% a year, and often more. At la Repubblica in Italy, for instance, the paper's website gets about 1m visitors a day, nearly double the circulation of the printed paper.
The value of online ads grew by 70% in the first half of 2006. For the first three months of 2006, the Newspaper Association of America announced that advertising for all the country's newspaper websites grew by 35% from the same period in 2005, to a total of $613m. But to put that in perspective, print and online ads together grew by only 1.8%, to $11 billion, because print advertising was flat. At almost all newspapers the internet brings in less than a tenth of revenues and profits.
At this point, says Mr Chisholm, “newspapers are halfway to realising an audience on the internet and about a tenth of the way to building a business online.”
The big problem is that readers online bring in nowhere near the revenues that print readers do. All but a handful of papers offer their content free online, so they immediately surrender the cover price of a print copy. People look at fewer pages online than they do in print, which makes web editions less valuable to advertisers. Gavin O'Reilly, president of the World Association of Newspapers in Paris, says that print readers are much more valuable than online readers, who use newspaper websites in a “haphazard and fragmented way”. Vin Crosbie, of Digital Deliverance, a consulting firm, recently estimated that newspapers need between 20 and 100 readers online to make up for losing just one print reader.
Many newspaper bosses would say this is too pessimistic: one British paper, for instance, reckons that one print reader is worth ten online. But even that is a daunting multiple.
Newspapers today concentrate on only two parts of the market for internet advertising. They earn little or nothing from internet search, which is bigger than either display or classified ads. Especially in America, newspapers rely heavily on classified ads online and have fewer display ads, says Mr Crosbie. Elsewhere, the pattern may be reversed, but newspapers still lack a broad base of internet-advertising revenue; for instance, Juan Luis Cebrián, chief executive of Grupo PRISA, the owner of El Pais, says the Spanish newspaper is enjoying strong growth in display advertising, but has few online classified ads.
On the other hand, newspapers' websites have higher profit margins than print does, because they have no newsprint or distribution to pay for. The Wall Street Journal is one of the few papers that charges for its content online. Others may follow suit, especially if growth in advertising slows. The online business model is still in flux, argues Richard Zannino, chief executive of Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The average price of ad space in the printed paper is now only three times higher than on Wall Street Journal Online, says Mr Zannino, compared with six to seven times for the industry as a whole in America. He expects the relative price of an internet ad to rise.
The secret of making money online, according to Schibsted, is not to rely on news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!. Three-quarters of traffic to the websites for Schibsted's VG and Aftonbladet comes through their own home-pages and only a quarter from other websites. “If visitors come from Google to stories deep in the paper and then leave,” explains Mr Munck, “Google gets the dollars and we get only cents, but if we can bring them in through the front page we can charge €19,000 [$25,000] for a 24-hour banner ad.” In spite of this, most newspapers still depend on news aggregators.
The danger for newspapers is that all their efforts on the internet may only slow their decline. Doing the obvious—having excellent websites and selling ad space on them—may not be enough. The papers with the best chance of seeing their revenues grow are those experimenting with entirely new businesses online and off.
Some are launching profitable new ventures that are only indirectly related to journalism. Schibsted, for instance, has started an online slimming club, called Viktklubben.se, using its Aftonbladet newspaper brand. Viktklubben.se charges its 54,000 members €50 each every three months. The Telegraph Group in Britain uses the Daily Telegraph to sell readers everything from goose-down pillows to Valentine's Day topiary baskets to insurance. The division now contributes close to a third of the firm's total profits, according to an executive at the company. “Newspapers will have to get into new businesses and extract more value from their audience,” says Paul Zwillenberg, global head of media and entertainment at OC&C Strategy Consultants in London. Examples like these are fairly rare, though. Most newspaper companies still insist that producing high-quality journalism and distributing it in new ways will be enough to keep them growing.
It's the journalism, stupid
Consultants advising newspaper groups argue that they need to adjust their output. Research into the tastes of mainstream newspaper readers has long shown that people like short stories and news that is relevant to them: local reporting, sports, entertainment, weather and traffic.
On the internet, especially, says Mr Chisholm, they are looking to enhance their way of life. Long pieces about foreign affairs are low on readers' priorities—the more so now that the internet enables people to scan international news headlines in moments. Coverage of national and international news is in any case a commodity often almost indistinguishable from one newspaper to the next.
This impression is exacerbated as papers seek to save money by sacking reporters and taking copy from agencies such as Reuters. “Our research shows that people are looking for more utility from newspapers,” says Sammy Papert, chief executive of Belden Associates, a firm that specialises in research for American newspapers. People want their paper to tell them how to get richer, and what they might do in the evening.
Few newspaper companies like to hear this and they tend to ignore the research they have paid for. Most journalists, after all, would rather cover Afghanistan than personal finance. But some are starting to listen. Gannett, the world's biggest newspaper group, is trying to make its journalism more local. It has invested in “mojos”—mobile journalists with wireless laptops who permanently work out of the office encamped in community hubs. Morris Communications, based in Augusta, Georgia, recently launched a new home-delivered free paper for Bluffton, a fast-growing area of Beaufort, South Carolina, called Bluffton Today, with a page of national news, one of international and the rest “hyper-local”.
Its website has pictures and blogs from readers and detailed community information. “Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call ‘chicken-dinner news’—the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing,” says Will Morris, the firm's president. “But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers.”
The more adventurous newspaper companies, like Morris Communications, are showing themselves willing to embrace content and opinions from readers. Rather like OhmyNews, a Korean “citizen-journalism” operation that many people think heralds the future for news-gathering, Schibsted exhorts its readers to send information and photographs. When a mentally disturbed man ran amok and killed people on a tram in Oslo in 2004, it was a reader with a mobile-phone camera who sent VG its front-page picture of the arrest. At Zero Hora, a Brazilian paper owned by RBS Group, the circulation department asks 120 readers what they think of the paper every day and Marcelo Rech, the editor, receives a report at 1pm. “They usually want more of our supplements on cooking and houses and less of Hizbullah and earthquakes,” says Mr Rech.
Still more changes to the content and form of newspapers are likely as businesspeople gain power at newspaper firms. “You won't be able to have many sacred cows...Newspaper companies will have to become more commercial,” says Henrik Poppe, a partner in McKinsey. Some leading titles, including the Wall Street Journal, have recently decided to put advertisements on the front page for the first time. For the moment, the trend towards greater commercialism is most evident in America, but is likely to spread elsewhere as newspaper companies struggle financially.
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Mr Tierney, a former advertising executive, shocked people by announcing that he would bring in an advertising person to redesign the paper—traditionally a task strictly for editorial. In future, businesspeople are likely to insist that newspapers adopt practices that are already standard in other industries. Mr Tierney, for instance, says it is unreasonable to expect everyone from the age of 18 to 88 to buy the same product. The industry needs to sell papers for different age and demographic groups, he says.
The most shocking development for traditional newspapers has been the wild success of free dailies, which like the internet have proved enormously popular with young people. Roughly 28m copies of free newspapers are now printed daily, according to Metro International, a Swedish firm that pioneered them in 1995. In markets where they are published, they account for 8% of daily circulation on average, according to iMedia. That share is rising.
In Europe they make up 16% of daily circulation. Metro calculates that it spends half the proportion of its total costs on editorial that paid-for papers do. In practice that means a freesheet with a circulation of about 100,000 employing 20 journalists, whereas a paid-for paper would have around 180. Metro's papers reach young, affluent readers and are even able to charge a premium for advertising in some markets compared with paid-for papers.
“The biggest enemy of paid-for newspapers is time,” says Pelle Törnberg, Metro's chief executive.
Mr Törnberg says the only way that paid-for papers will prosper is by becoming more specialised, raising their prices and investing in better editorial. People read freesheets in their millions, on the other hand, because Metro and others reach them on their journey to work, when they have time to read, and spare them the hassle of having to hand over change to a newsagent.
Some traditional newspaper firms dismiss free papers, saying they are not profitable. Carlo De Benedetti, chairman of Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, publisher of la Repubblica, for instance, says that Metro loses money in Italy and that other freesheets are struggling. Globally, however, Metro has just become profitable.
Consultants say that lots of traditional newspaper companies are planning to hold their noses and launch free dailies. In France, for instance, Le Monde is planning a new free daily, and Mr Murdoch's News International is preparing a new free afternoon paper for London, to be launched next month. Deciding whether or not to start a freesheet, indeed, perfectly encapsulates the unpalatable choice that faces the paid-for newspaper industry today as it attempts to find a future for itself.
Over the next few years it must decide whether to compromise on its notion of “fine journalism” and take a more innovative, more businesslike approach—or risk becoming a beautiful old museum piece.
Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition
The future of newspapers
Who killed the newspaper?
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline.
In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent.
Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic
“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).
Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline.
In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.
Up to a podcast, Lord Copper?
Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent.
Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Getting away with murder
In future, as newspapers fade and change, will politicians therefore burgle their opponents' offices with impunity, and corporate villains whoop as they trample over their victims? Journalism schools and think-tanks, especially in America, are worried about the effect of a crumbling Fourth Estate. Are today's news organisations “up to the task of sustaining the informed citizenry on which democracy depends?” asked a recent report about newspapers from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a charitable research foundation.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.
In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.
For hard-news reporting—as opposed to comment—the results of net journalism have admittedly been limited. Most bloggers operate from their armchairs, not the frontline, and citizen journalists tend to stick to local matters. But it is still early days. New online models will spring up as papers retreat. One non-profit group, NewAssignment.Net, plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the internet. Aptly, $10,000 of cash for the project has come from Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, a group of free classified-advertisement websites that has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income.
In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organisations. Already, a few respected news organisations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller's national conversation will be louder than ever.
Aug 24th 2006From The Economist print edition
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