Digital media zealots are confused: they mistake news activity for the health of the news business. Unfortunately, the two are not correlated. What they promote as a new kind of journalism carries almost no economic value. As great as they are from a user standpoint, live blogging / tweeting, crowdsourcing and hosting “experts” blogs bring very little money – if any, to the news organization that operates them. Advertising-wise and on a per page basis, these services yield only a fraction of what a premium content fetches. On some markets, a blog page will carry a CPM (Cost per Thousand page views) of one, while premium content will get 10 or 15 (euros or dollars). In net terms, the value can even be negative, as many such contents consume manpower in order to manage, moderate, curate or edit them.
More realistically, these contents also carry some indirect but worthy value: in a powerful way, they connect the brand to the user. Therefore, I still believe news organization should do more, no less of such coverage. But we should not blind ourselves: the economic value isn’t there. It lies in the genuine and unique added value of original journalism deployed by organizations of varying size and scope, ranging from traditional media painfully switching to the new world, to pure online players — all abiding by proven standards.
What’s behind the word standard is another area of disagreement with Jeff Jarvis, as he opposes the notion of standards to what he calls “process”, or “journalism in beta” (see his interesting post Product v. process journalism; The myth of perfection v. beta culture). Personally, I’d rather stick to the quest for perfection rather than embrace the celebration of the “process”. The former is inherently more difficult to reach, more prone to the occasional ridicule (cf. the often quoted list of mishaps by large newspapers). As for the latter, it amounts to shielding behind the comfortable “We say this, but we are not sure; don’t worry, we’ll correct it over time”.
To some extent, such position condones mediocrity. It’s one thing to acknowledge live reporting or covering developing stories bear the risk of factual errors. But it is another to defend inaccuracies as a journalistic genre, as a French site did (until recently): it labeled its content with tags like “Verified”, “Readers’ info”, etc.
Approximation must remain accidental, it should not be advocated as a normal journalistic way.
In the digital world, the rise of the guesstimate is also a byproduct of the structure in which a professional reporter finds himself competing with the compulsive blogger or twitterer. Sometimes, the former will feel direct pressure from the latter (“Hey, Twitter is boiling with XY, could you quickly do something about it? — Not yet, I’m unable to verify… — Look pal, we need to do something, right?). Admittedly, such competition can be a good thing: we’ll never say enough how much the irruption of the reader benefited and stimulated the journalistic crowd.
Unfortunately, the craze of instant “churnalism” tends to accommodate all the trade’s deviances. Today, J-Schools consider following market demands and teaching the use of Twitter or live-blogging at the expense of learning more complex types of journalism. Twenty years ago, we were still hoping the trade of narrative writing could be taught in newsrooms populated with great editors, but this is no longer the case. Now, most of the 30-40 something who plunged into the live digital frenzy have already become unable to produce long form journalism. And the obsessive productivism of digital serfdom won’t make things better (as an illustration, see this tale of a burned-out AOL writer in Faster Times).
The business model will play an important role in solving this problem. Online organizations will soon realize there is little money to be made in “process-journalism”. But, as they find it is a formidable vector to drive traffic and to promote in-depth reporting, they will see it deserves careful strategizing.
Take Twitter. Its extraordinary growth makes it one of the most potent news referral engines. Two weeks ago, at the D9 conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (video here) released a stunning statistic: it took three years to send the first billion tweets; today, one billion tweets are send every six days.
No wonder many high profile journalists or writers enjoy tweeter audiences higher than many news organizations, or became a brand on their own, largely thanks to Twitter. The twice Pulitzer prize winner and NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has 1.1m followers, that is one third of the New York Times’ official Twitter accounts followers. And Nobel Prize economist Paul Kurgman, who also writes for the New York Times, has more than 610,000 followers. Not bad for specialized writing.
In some cases, the journalist will have a larger Twitter audience that the section where he/she writes: again for the NY Times, the business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin has 20 times more followers (370,000) than Dealbook, the sub-site he edits. According to its CEO Arthur Sulzberger, a NY Times story is tweeted every four seconds, and all Times Twitter accounts have four times more followers that any other paper in America. Similarly, the tech writer Kara Swisher has 50 times more Twitter followers (757,000) that her employer, the WSJ tech site AllThingsD .
There are several ways to read this. One can marvel at the power of a personal branding that thrives to the mother ship’s benefit. Then, on the bean counter floor, someone else will object this stream of tweets is an unmonetized waste of time. Others, at the traffic analytic desk, will retort Twitter’s incoming traffic represents a sizable part of the audience, and can therefore be measured in hard currency. Well… your pick.
— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
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- The News Cycle Heartbeat TweetHow do mainstream media and blogs interact? How do they feed each other ? Everyone in the newsmedia would love to get a better view of the mating dance. A few weeks ago, scientists at the Cornell University unveiled a thorough analysis of the relationship between the two universes. Borrowing from genomics techniques, they dug [...]...
- The success story of a technology-enhanced media brand Tweet‘A fan of ours wrote an iPhone application, just for the sake of it.’ How many media companies can make such a bragging statement? One does: NPR, the American National Public Radio. Bradley Flubacher, is a professional programmer who moonlights as a volunteer firefighter in a small Pennsylvania town. A few months ago, Brad decided [...]...
24 Comments
Damn it man, now you have done it. I do NOT “oppose the notion of standards.” How dare you defame me in such a way? Show me where the hell I say that. Give me a link. No, give me a correction and retraction. This is now twice in a row that you willfully mischaracterize and misquote what I say so you can shadowbox with devils of your own imagination. And *you* say you hold up the standards of journalism. Ha!
In fact, show me links to all the alleged sins you cite. I don’t trust your imagination.
Before you go spreading your lies to other sites, correct this one.
For the benefit of your readers, here is what I say in that post: “At my school, we say we teach what we call the eternal verities of journalism. But I also try to make sure the students are open to new worldviews and new methods and means of journalism. Those can come from bloggers and from the public we serve.”
I dare challenge them to find and uphold their journalism to new standards, not just those of traditional zealots.
Jeff, it seems that I’m pissing you off every Sunday night. I’ll stop, I swear.
Problem is you are often switching side within the same post. Granted, in the paragraph mentioned in your response, your are defending standards taught at your J-school.
But one paragraph above, you are a bit derisive with Times Sunday Business Editor Tim O’Brien that criticize lacks of standards plaguing the blogosphere; you say:
“One word: standards. But which standards? Whose standards? The Times’ standards, of course. They set the standard, don’t they? [Then, the Jarvis pendulum swings back] Well, yes, they do, sometimes. Just not all the standards all the time”.
All of the above in the context of a post opposing – you use the Medieval Latin word “versus” – what you call “The beta culture” to the “The myth of perfection”.
And for the benefit of the readers as you say, I will quote you one more time:
“Online, the story, the reporting, the knowledge are never done and never perfect. That doesn’t mean that we revel in imperfection, as is the implication of The Times’ story – that we have no standards. It just means that we do journalism differently, because we can. We have our standards, too, and they include collaboration, transparency, letting readers into the process, and trying to say what we don’t know when we publish – as caveats – rather than afterward – as corrections”.
I can’t disagree more, Jeff, I’m sorry. Overusing the safety net of the perpetual online correction is not going to improve the overall quality of journalism. It encourages approximation.
The public is starting to see the uselessness of the “churnalism” and content farms we face today. I think this is cyclical – liveblogs and TV recaps grow tiresome. Folks in the US are turning off of Facebook. Google is completely useless for search. People are feeling overwhelmed by the fragmentation and superficial breadth of digital information.
This ties into the rise of the Kindle, no? E-readers are single purpose devices that let the users focus (ignoring the new problem of automated wikipedia-sourced books that are apparently filling up the Kindle store). This also ties into the direction we see user interfaces going. The iPad is simple and mostly shows you one thing at a time. Windows Phone 7 is simple and shows you one thing at a time. Apps in Windows 8 and OS X Lion are fullscreen and simple.
The age of digital information is still pretty new, and it’s still a time of major flux. I think that you’re pointing in the right way, Frederic. Amazon gets it too – I think their “Kindle Singles” concept is genius and could lead to a renaissance of long-form journalism. Kindle Singles offer premium content, premium price, and are not too padded to get to a specific arbitrary size like most non-fiction books you find at the airport.
There is a large readership out there that is feeling underserved and overwhelmed by the contemporary digital zoo. It would behoove publishers to quit believing that the only readers out there are the mouth-breathing HuffPo masses, and try to target the folks who are willing to part with a few dollars for quality journalism. The infrastructure is there – people are actually making micropayments today! Remember when nobody thought they would ever work? Now people buy small things from Amazon and Apple without blinking.
The journalism/publishing world is still mired in change, it’s a very exciting time. And as you pointed out, the personalities are more important than their imprints. Andrew Sullivan moved his site from the Atlantic into the auspices of the Daily Beast this year without much apparent loss in readership or quality. Joshua Topolsky left Gizmodo and has built up readership at his new site, which isn’t really even launched yet. The Awl is growing organically. If news organizations and digital publishers want to get with the times, they should find a way to embrace the minor cults of personality.
I think Apple and Amazon are set to revolutionize journalism. The iPad subscription apps are just a sop to the publishers by Apple, the real game will begin when they start publishing directly themselves.
Frederic,
Yes, read that paragraph again. It does NOT say I am against standards. It questions who sets those standards and suggests — gasp! – that that may no longer always be The New York Times. You mischaracterize me. Show me where I say I’m against standards. I am not. I teach them, ferchrissakes. I am arguing that we need to each examine our standards and raise them and not just rely on one body — The Times … or you — to set them.
As for our disagreement over perfection: Show me the perfect article. Show me the article that cannot always be improved. I’m asking for *higher* standards, not settling for the false perfection of the deadline and the newspaper’s fantasy of reaching perfection and being finished. No, sir, the process continues after publication.
As for you pissing me off, yes, indeed, you DO piss me off mightily when you utterly and purposefully mischaracterize me and what I say for your own ends. You lied about me, sir. I do demand a correction — here and elsewhere where this appears. I’m sick of it.
I do NOT think Jeff opposes the notion of standards, but I certainly think it’s fair to say he embraces the idea of posting first and correcting later.
In a column that questions the need for editors (and, to be fair, concludes that we need them), Jarvis says that:
>>>” . . .the community acts as the assignment desk, and the idea of editing every comma seems futile. My blog readers are my editors. Online we tend to publish first, edit later.”
Based on that, I have two questions for Jeff:
First, if you publish first, what standard must published material meet?
Second, if your readers are your editors, are standards determined by them, or by more traditional journalistic values?
Cher M. Filloux,
You have to understand where M. Jarvis is coming from. While on the one hand a person in his position must, alas, from time to time be critical of the Times, that same person must never, ever, burn a possible bridge to the Times since the Times giveth and the Times taketh away, blessed be the name of the Times always, Amen.
In addition, Mr. Jarvis is also a “teacher” of what cannot be taught to students who would have done better for themselves if they had pursued a study of chartered accountancy instead of the generally useless J school. Hence like many others he is haunted by the fact he works in a discipline which is largely useless once he is outside the hallowed halls of professional blather. As a result, he tends to be very thin-skinned since the least little mistake or miscue or misstep can shatter his rise bowl and his status.
It’s a tough job and nobody’s got to do it.
Robert,
Good questions. We are all seeking answers now — new standards for new circumstances — and so the discussion is valuable.
Starting with the second question: As you know, we say at CUNY that we teach the eternal verities: accuracy, completeness, fairness… Those stand. Some include objectivity in that list; I don’t, as unattainable.
Then we add new standards, first among them transparency. It is vital that a journalist become as good at saying what she doesn’t know as what she knows.
Nondigital example: the West Virginia mine disaster, when the celebration behind the camera seemed to confirm the unconfirmed report that 11 of the 12 miners had survived, though it turned out the opposite was true. Should CNN have shut off the camera? No, it’s correspondents needed to share with the audience what they didn’t know: Who had said that 11 survived. They didn’t do such a good job of that, by the way.
In the end, publish first and correct later has *always* been the rule, except now we can publish earlier and correct sooner. That’s the next standard I’ve learned online: a different standard of correction that requires one correct quickly (when was the last time you saw a correction on the nightly news?) and also leave one’s error as corrected for the record.
So I would say that one should be as sure as one *can* be; that has always been the case. What’s missing is the luxury of waiting eight hours for a print deadline. So we report sooner. We can debate the desirability of that but not, I think, the inevitability, when witnesses will also report what they see and journalists must deal with that, verifying, debunking, asking. One must be transparent about how one knows something to be the case. One must use every opportunity to say what is not known and, when appropriate, to ask readers to fill in blanks. When there are conflicts of information that cannot yet be settled, they must be disclosed, sometimes with links.
That’s by no means a complete answer, only a thought process….
Jeff,
That’s all fair. But I think there’s a fine line between ‘going with what you have’ and floating a rumor to see what comes in. Newspapers have always done the first – the good ones set themselves apart partly by admitting when they’re wrong. What I worry about is the second. I sometimes see blogs saying, ‘We’ve heard this – anyone know more about it?’ This can be a good strategy, but do they verify what comes in?
My issue with process journalism is that I’m not sure there’s enough money in it to support serious reporting. In fact, I worry that it can take up resources that might be better spent elsewhere.
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You have to understand where M. Jarvis is coming from. While on the one hand a person in his position must, alas, from time to time be critical of the Times, that same person must never, ever, burn a possible bridge to the Times since the Times giveth and the Times taketh away, blessed be the name of the Times always, Amen.
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If news organizations and digital publishers want to get with the times, they should find a way to embrace the minor cults of personality.
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