Twitter

I went to an American Society of Journalist and Author's conference this past weekend and it was all about Twitter. The message was that all journalists should be out there with their blog, their website, their Facebook and their Linked In and then they should be linking all the thing with tweets.
Tweets are 140 character messages that you send to your friends or "followers." It's the kind of technology that many of us over 30 might dismiss as the latest fad. But what it is is another means of getting your message (whatever that message is) out to the general public. Here's a full explaination on Tweeternet.
That means all of us unemployed, semi-employed and under-employed journalists have to not only send out tweets into the ethernet but also make them witty and well-written and interesting, all in 140 characters. Not an easy task for the long-winded among us (myself included).
Columbia Journalism Professor Sree Sreenivasan introduced us to Twitter by showing a world map with little birds where people were Twittering in Japan, Russia and all over the world.
I wanted to know why my friends would want to know that I was currently eating a pastrami sandwich. Sreenivasan replied that they wouldn't want to know I was eating a pastrami sandwich but they would want to know that I was eating a pastrami sandwich at the same deli where a famous editor eats and they would want to know any other interesting tidbits I might pass along.
He also had a couple of examples of the importance of Twitter, including the story of a young man who was arrested in Greece and wrote a one-word tweet that just said "arrest" and promptly got him out of jail. Another woman posted a suicide threat to actress Demi Moore and Moore was able to somehow connect back to her to get her help.
For most of us, Twitter probably won't save lives but maybe it could save our professional lives. There's certainly enough of us drowning. Many journalists (myself included) also wanted to know how we're supposed to find time for all this. Sreenivasan advised us to target our technology wisely and use it to promote ourselves. So sometime soon look for my tweets. I promise not to write about pastrami sandwiches.

Will charging for content save newspapers?

The Associated Press is taking a stand that Web site users and Internet companies that use their work should get their permission and share the money with them. If they don't, they are threatening legal action.

I want to applaud this action but it's so late in the day that it also makes me want to throw my hands up in disgust. Can they stop a trend that record producers and nearly everybody else in the universe has found impossible to control? It seems almost impossible. They let the genie out of the bottle when they offered it free to begin with and it's always hard to get that genie back into the bottle later on.

As the Newsosaur blog points out, the hunt for offenders could turn into a ridiculous and futile chase that he compares to the Keystone cops. That's because there's no good way to find offenders and punish them. It may come down to the kind of enforcement effort seen in the music publishing industry that made examples of several illegal downloads, including some children, but did not nothing to stave the unending flow of illegal downloads.

On the other hand, newspapers and news organizations have to find a way to make money on the Internet or they most assuredly are doomed. Since the Associated Press is owned by newspapers, it could be one way to get more revenue. The New York Times tried a paid service years ago and I was one of those people shelling out 99 cents per article. But it apparently never made money.

The new policy seems to be aimed mostly at Google which is both the angel that brings people to news sites and the devil that may be profiting from the hard work of all those reporters and editors out there.

I want it to work. I really do. I want something to work. I'm just not sure this is the answer.

Hyperlocal blogs continued

To continue my discussion about hyperlocal media, Placeblogger has a post reporting on the idea that hyperlocal blogs could take the place of the Boston Globe. The New York Times Co. has threatened to close the Globe if unions don't make $20 million in concessions.
The post refers to another blogger, Rick Burnes, of Cambridge, who suggests "we shouldn't be asking how to save The Globe, we should be asking how we'll build its replacement. He goes on to suggest that The Boston Foundation should fund a community news experiment similar to the Knight Foundation.
I think it's unlikely that community bloggers will take the place of a national institution like The Globe and the 340 people on its news staff and apparently many people in the community, including bloggers, agree, according to a New York Times article. Supporters of The Globe are also suggesting that it be taken over by a community foundation.
Obviously there will have to be drastic changes in how newspapers are financed if they are to survive. Maybe hyperlocal blogs will eventually replace newspapers (although it's unclear how they will make money too) but I don't think they will ever replace the kind of depth of coverage you find in a newspaper like The Globe. So, let's say a little media prayer for them and for all of us present and former reporters.

Hyperlocal Media

Is the future of news going to be in hyperlocal media websites? Apparently, several entrepreneurs think so. There are a number of sites springing up that can give you news about what's happening in your little plot of the world, according to a recent New York Times article.
These include OutsideIn, Placeblogger and Patch. The Knight Foundation is backing several local web experiments. I guess I should be cheering any attempt at bringing news to more people and people do seem to want local news. I can see having some centralized spots where people can blog about their communities.
I guess my cranky reaction to all this stems from the fact that I don't see blogs replacing local reporters. That is, I don't think blogs offer the same objective reporting you can find in newspapers and I don't care so much about what the guy down the street thinks about my little patch of the world. But to be fair, maybe I would turn to these sites if they were all that was on offer. (We have two small weeklies in town so it isn't) and if they expanded enough to really offer some interesting perspectives.
The sites I looked at also didn't have anything on Princeton, N.J. This isn't surprising since Princeton isn't exactly a major city but I'm a little less interested in reading about South Orange or Newark. Of the few sites I looked at, Patch seems to have the most content. Surprise, surprise, Patch, which was stated and funded by the new AOL Chief Tim Armstrong, has reporters working out of its New York office.
Most of the sites seem to rely on local newspapers for content and obviously that will be a problem if those newspapers go out of business. So that brings us back to square one and the demise of the newspapers again.
The article also points out that the hyperlocal sites have the same problem as newspapers: finding a way to fund their sites. They can try to get local businesses and I guess they can pick up the local businesses from newspapers if they die. (I was going to say when they die but it was too depressing).
One ofthe sites, Placeblogger, can connect you to bloggers all over the world: Milan, Paris etc. and has a link to a New Jersey political blog, politicsnj, as well as a blog about Livestock and something called The Jersey Exile.

Young people and newspapers

Only 43 percent of all Americans say that losing their local newspapers would hurt their community "a lot,"  according to a recent Pew poll and only  33 percent say they would miss the newspaper if it were gone. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1147/newspapers-struggle-public-not-concerned

Those numbers go up with regular newspapers, 56 percent of whom say that the loss of the newspaper would hurt the community and 55 percent of whom say they would miss their newspapers. But even those numbers are astonishingly low.

I used the poll in my journalism class and asked two students to represent newspaper readers and non-readers. Sadly, there were a lot more non-readers than readers although several students said they read the newspaper online.

The young woman representing non-readers is a sassy and smart young woman in my class who wants to go into magazine journalism.  She just came right out and said that newspapers are boring and that she is a visual person and she sees all those gray columns as really boring. She also said that she's not that concerned about news that doesn't affect her.

I was heartened that the other students questioned her closely about her news consumption. They asked her if she reads blogs? No. Does she watch TV news? No. One young woman even asked, "How can you make informed decisions as a citizen if you're not informed yourself?" Thank you! 

The young man representing newspaper readers didn't put up the greatest defense of newspapers. He said he reads them because he has poor vision and can't read them online. But it was clear he does keep informed on all the news.

A few days later I talked to them about how disturbed I was by the young woman's comments.  I told the students I would like them to find some way to engage with the news, whether it's the radio or TV or blogs.

"What do you do to get your news?" the same young woman asked. I told them I read The New York Times and listen to NPR and I also watch the Today Show and Jon Stewart.  So I'm not a good example of a local newspaper subscriber either unless you count the weekly. I stopped subscribing to the local daily, The Trenton Times, when they dropped my column.

I don't know how to get young people to read the newspaper. I give them quizzes, I have them do weekly briefings on the news. But many of them clearly still aren't paying much attention to the news and clearly a few of them are paying no attention at all.  As for getting them to read the newspaper, it's a losing battle. They can't afford to subscribe to the newspaper and even the best of them get their newspapers online.

So it seems that both the poll and our informal class discussion underlines once again how very bleak the future of newspapers is if future journalists aren't reading the newspaper. Clearly, the next generation will be getting their news online if they're even getting the news. That makes me sad but it seems that fighting that trend is a battle that can't be won.