Bloggasm

The Recovering Journalist has an interesting thought scenario that he illustrates with an imaginary newspaper called the the Whoville Bugle and its imminent demise: What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?

(yes, I know “unprofessionalism” isn’t a real word)

So there’s supposedly a new daily paper launching in the LA area. Rather than being transparent about their operations, they’ve been posting “writers wanted” ads in Craigslist without identifying themselves and who their backers are.

A recently laid-off LA Times reporter emailed them with the simple question, “Who are you?” Here was their ultra-professional reply:

right now we are the asking the questions - you are the 1500th respondent…

Sounds like the editor of a defunct non-paying webzine fancies himself a business man. These are the kind of people that start up companies and then don’t answer phone calls or emails asking why employee pay checks haven’t been sent out in two weeks, followed by a quick round of civil lawsuits and bankruptcy.

So send in those resumes!

Steve Outing asserts that Craigslist is not the enemy. He says this despite the fact that his new site, Reinventing Classifieds, is focused on reversing trends that Craigslist and its ilk have caused.

“Enemy? No, I wouldn’t use that word,” Outing said in a phone interview today. “If Craig [Newmark] wouldn’t have come along with this idea then someone else would have. The nature of what the internet makes possible meant that all this was going to happen no matter what. Newspapers just need to adapt to a new reality and it’s as simple as that.”

Regardless of how you frame the free classifieds site’s relationship to newspapers, its effects on revenue cannot be ignored. According to the Newspaper Association of America, newspaper classified buys declined by 16.5% between 2006 and 2007 — a drop of nearly $3 billion. Scarcely a publisher exists who can say the word “Craigslist” without the underlying tone of doom and contempt.

Outing, for his part, is not sitting idly by to watch. The web guru wrote for a number of newspapers until the early ’90s and later left to cover new media and consult with various companies about the intersection of the internet and journalism. He’s been writing a column on the subject for Editor and Publisher for years.

A web startup Outing had been working on hadn’t quite panned out, and as it was closing shop last year he began doing consulting work with Christopher Ryan, the creator of Future of News, a site that allows advertisers to place ads in newspapers without human interaction. “[Chris] has this idea that he’s working on…The product is going to be called Ad Everywhere,” Outing said. “It’s going to be a distributed web strategy for getting back classified revenues…We came up with this idea to do a separate site that was not part of that effort that would be a venue or a clearing house to help folks think through this issue. Both of us feel strongly that the traditional model doesn’t work and we really need to come up with something totally different and nobody seems to have done it. Newspapers continue to bleed staff. Things are not pretty right now. Both of us came out of the newspaper industry and we feel strongly that there’s still a lot of value in saving that kind of journalism.”

Reinventing Classifieds, the result of these discussions, will combine case studies, solicited media columns, and the mining of crowd wisdom to live up to its name. Outing has already released an online survey that tries to pinpoint innovative methods that individual publishers are using to reverse the dire trends. “We’ll probably devote a lot of the site to highlighting success stories that various businesses have had,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll certainly come out with some kind of written documented solution that publishers can adopt on their own.”

Behind the scenes of all this is Christopher Ryan’s new advertising platform he’ll be working on in the coming months. Outing explained that Reinventing Classifieds wasn’t necessarily created as a marketing tool for the new platform, but rather the site is more of a separate semi-altruistic endeavor to save a threatened form of media. “I think [Chris] has a pretty clear vision of what he wants and I’m kind of adding my two cents as an outside consultant,” he said. “Regardless of the information that comes through the site he has an idea of what he wants. But I think what happens on the site will influence him as he develops it. It’s a great way to come up with a solution or platform that meets a lot of the needs for potential customers.”

But does Outing really believe that he can not only stop the bleeding advertising dollars but also reverse the trend?

“Yeah I do because I think newspapers still have huge brand recognition within local communities,” he said. “And I definitely do not feel like it’s lost yet. But without doing something radical sometime soon, the industry doesn’t have much hope.”

And proving that it’s not only politics that makes strange bedfellows, Outing has lined up a rather interesting guest writer who will pen a post for the site within the next few weeks: Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist.

Objectivism in journalism is dead. In fact it never really existed, and the unrealistic expectations we’ve had of journalists has led to a distrust of the media because those expectations are almost never met. While many still manage to decry the “liberal bias” in the mainstream media and the New York Times, there’s a growing number of media critics who are arguing that it’s time for the New York Times to embrace its liberal bias, that doing so will give it its voice. In previous years, when ad sales were booming, it could afford to shroud itself in the Objectivity Myth, but no more.

I definitely fall in the latter camp. You can be liberal and report the news, and assuming otherwise is to engage in the logical fallacy that all opinions are created equal. As Stephen Colbert would say, reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So this is why I was heartened to see an article this morning titled A Subdued Clinton, and a Subdued Audience. In it, you’ll find all kinds of journalistic violations that you’d never see in your average newspaper.

Let’s start with the lede. Rather than going with the boring, top-down inverse pyramid approach, the writer goes with metaphor:

On the day Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed by the governor of North Carolina, a supporter gave her a three-foot-long balloon replica of herself, complete with blond hair, black pantsuit and wide pink smile, which Mrs. Clinton promptly took on her plane and laughingly showed off to reporters.

On Thursday, little more than two weeks later, the doll lay on the sofa by her seat on the plane, shriveled and deflated.

After later injecting a funny quote from David Letterman, she writes this:

It has always been difficult for Mrs. Clinton to compete against an opponent who once received thunderous applause for blowing his nose. But as Mr. Obama seized nearly every headline in the last several days, Mrs. Clinton appeared zapped of her usual enthusiasm.

See, that’s what I call voice! This is the stuff that will attract readers’ eyes as the paper faces increasing competition from blogs and other online news sites.

Over the past year or so there has been no shortage of media critics who have theorized on how to save the floundering newspaper industry. Though many of these ideas focus on utilizing the web and Web 2.0 technology, there has also been a few of what I’ll call “no more free meal ticket” schemes.

Basically, the person tries to find some organization or company that has been benefiting from newspapers and journalism for free all these years and announces that it may be time for it to pay up.

Case in point: A writer for the Columbia Journalism Review recently penned a piece arguing that since the public benefits from the watchdog nature of journalism, then it’s time for the government to begin subsidizing news organizations — an idea that wasn’t exactly enthusiastically embraced by editors and publishers.

Today, I came across an article published by the Century Foundation that has supposedly pinpointed another group that has gotten off Scott free: internet providers and cell phone companies, among others:

Consider that the consumers are paying for broadband, cell phone service, and satellites, plus the cost of the lap-tops, PDAs, televisions, and iPods. The monthly bill for all the delivery is easily a couple of hundred dollars. Mac laptops start at $1,099. Good Dell laptops start at $999. There are cheap cell phones but the kind that offer news and entertainment are still pricey as is the service that supports them. My household monthly tab for two cell phones (a Blackberry and an iPhone), a premium cable package, broadband, and two desktops computers, is about $675. Obviously, we use these devices for a great many things and, in today’s world, they are probably indispensable.

He says that, by contrast, “the New York Times subscription delivered to our door by hand is $5.10 per week. Around the country, the Orlando Sentinel is $19.50 for thirteen weeks; Atlanta Journal-Constitution is $10.99 a month; the Minneapolis Star Tribune is $42.25 for thirteen weeks.”

He concludes that the “Googles” and “Verizons” should therefore start paying for the content that has helped make their companies so popular in the first place.

The author fails to understand, however, that he would have to compare the costs of subscriptions of every newspaper available on the web to really begin to compare it to the internet’s offerings. Simply adding up your subscription costs for the NY Times and a few others just doesn’t cut it.

Adding in both an Iphone and a Blackberry doesn’t necessarily reflect the gadgets found in most households — he’s artificially inflating the cost of all this gadgetry to try and make it seem like these companies are making a killing off your content.

It should be noted that at least one cable/internet company is already subsidizing the news business — Comcast. After all, they are offering wire stories on their website. I think we’ll see similar instances of this kind of online syndication of content from major corporations.

However silly his idea is, at least it’s better than accusing God of having a free meal ticket. Mike Koehler, deputy sports editor at The Oklahoman, has started a new website called prayerforpapers.com, in which he enlists the help of invisible sky fairies to save the industry. Talk about last resort.

Well, I got linked to today by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin and never have I seen such vitriolic hateful email. I feel sorry for political bloggers who get linked by her regularly.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. A sports blogger who up until recently used a pseudonym outed himself as a Washington Post reporter. He was promptly fired.

2. Here’s a step by step list on how to make your own Judd Apatow movie. If this formula is correct, then he only has about five more movies left before he has run out of Freaks and Geeks cast members to star in his films.

3. While much of the news coverage of Craigslist has focused on the damage it has caused to the newspaper industry, another competitor has decided that it won’t take it sitting down — Ebay has filed a lawsuit against the free classifieds site.

4. Every time you think cable news couldn’t get any worse, you come across a news clip like this one and realize that there is no limit to its vapidity.

Anybody who has spent considerable time on the internet knows that one downside to online life is how easy it is to get caught up reading (and possibly participating in) an internet flame war. What’s most frustrating about this tendency is the fact that once you snap out of it and force yourself to stop, you come to this self-realization that you’ve just completely wasted an hour of your life performing an utterly inconsequential task. Despite the fact that you’ve spent the entire time reading, you haven’t learned anything new and chances are you’ve managed to get yourself annoyed with anonymous people, most of whom never even bothered giving their real names.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because that’s my excuse for why I have so few links for you today. So here are (a small number) of media-related links for your amusement.

1. This year’s Pulitzers have been announced. Given that these link lists always result in me having to post news a day or two late and just about every media blog out there has already reported this news, I’m boring myself right now just by linking to it. Okay okay, here’s a link to Gawker trashing the Pulitzers and calling them worthless. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a little red meat, did you?

2. Now here’s the real news. It turns out that the Huffington Post has surpassed The Drudge Report in unique visitors. I have long despised Drudge, not for his politics but because I could never for the life of me understand why he became so popular. He had an absolutely ugly site and most of the links he posts are to mainstream news sources. I could easily do his job for him by just subscribing to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites. Every now and then he publishes his own scoop, but they’re usually factually inaccurate and relatively rare. In fact, the only time I ever visited his website was when I was reading some news feature about how Drudge rules our world. Then I almost had to visit the site just to confirm, in my head, “You mean that Drudge?”

3. A new study released recently shows that news readers and newspaper editors widely disagree on how comments should be moderated on news websites. It brings up the good point that if editors are expected to avoid anonymous sources unless absolutely necessary, then anonymous commenting should be similarly shunned. I’m not necessarily against anonymous commenting, but I rarely, if ever, engage in it myself.

4. Will Feminism and porn ever be compatible? I explored this issue a long time ago over here. I think the problem with trying to remain PC when making porn is the fact that a lot of sexual turn-ons are non-PC. I’m not an expert on sexual theory, but I would think there’s some (dark) correlation between what is forbidden and what turns us on. This provides a dilemma for pornographers.