future of news – Page 4 – Christopher Wink

Steve Jobs: ‘I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers’ [VIDEO]

In honor of the passing of Steve Jobs, I was trolling through videos of the Apple co-founder. I came across one that was very relevant to the news industry today.

More than a year ago, Steve Jobs spoke about the iPad and Apple’s broad role in touching publishing and journalism, during a broader interview at the D8 conference.

At 1:50 in the below video, watch highlights of Jobs talking about his relationship with news and follow the quote below.

“One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press…. Some of these papers — news and editorial gathering organizations — are really important. I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their news gathering editorial operations in tact, I’m all for. What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. So [the tablet industry] provides us an opportunity to offer something more than just a web page and to start charging something for that. I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they traditionally charged for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content.”

ONA 2011: conferences are good for more than just their sessions [VIDEO]

My colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I learned plenty at the 2011 Online News Association conference in Boston, but we also did more touring and connected more with old friends and colleagues than last year. We even sneaked out to use the city's new bicycle sharing program and visit Fenway Park, among other sights. We were in Boston for the conference from Sept. 22-25. Photo by some lady who took the camera from her elderly father.

Sometimes, if not most times, what happens outside of the sessions can be what’s most valuable about a conference.

I learned plenty the traditional way at the 2011 Online News Association national conference, held in Boston this weekend Sept. 22-25, but I surely got more out of reconnecting with friends and colleagues from other markets, even more than I remember doing at past professional events. It also didn’t hurt that I dove more into Boston than I have while visiting elsewhere for work travel.

ONA has been a national convener among news innovation conversations for more than a decade, and more locally, I’ve been involved with reviving the Philadelphia chapter of the group.

Full disclosure: this year, I was able to attend thanks to the very generous support of the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University and the Wyncote Foundation. I was able to attend last year with similar support from the William Penn Foundation, which has additionally funded the Transparencity reporting project I have led.

After a few years co-running a sustainable niche news site, participating in the online discourse around news innovation and attending events like ONA and others from the Aspen Institute, the University of Missouri and, yes, our own BarCamp NewsInnovation, I felt like attending the event was just as important to talk shop with others doing similar work across the country as it was to catch up on a lot of in-session conversations that felt less relevant to where we are professionally.

Tourism and good, smart friends aside, below I share what I learned in a conference’s traditional way.

Continue reading ONA 2011: conferences are good for more than just their sessions [VIDEO]

Clay Shirky: “News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free”

Academic Clay Shirky tossed down another great post ahead of an undergraduate course he’s teaching at NYU. In the end, he calls for more chaos — more competitive approaches to creating meaning news for citizens, beyond news for consumers.

You ought to read the whole piece, but here are a couple of my favorite parts:

This system was never ideal—out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made—and long before Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington began their reign of terror, Gannett and Scripps were pioneering debt-laden balance sheets, highly paid executives, and short-term profit-chasing. But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared. In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt.

“There are only three things I’m sure of: News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free.”

If we adopt the radical view that what seems to be happening is actually happening, then a crisis in reporting isn’t something that might take place in the future. A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now. Any way of creating news that gets cost below income, however odd, is a good way, and any way that doesn’t, however hallowed, is bad.

Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities: crib notes on the seminal 2009 project

Almost two years later, I read the entire Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities.

Debuted in September 2009, I tackled the 80-page document for “the Hardly. Strictly. Young conference I attended in April at the University of Missouri, which was dedicated to brainstorming alternative recommendations for implementing that report.

Not a journalism-only report at all and backed by a year of conversation, outreach and testimony, I wanted to share my notes and thoughts on diving into the seminal report.

Continue reading Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities: crib notes on the seminal 2009 project

News needs to make more money on the popcorn

A friend recently told me that everyone should have at least one good analogy every few months.

He’s already heard my Journalism needs a catering business spiel, in which I suggest meaningful, public affairs reporting needs to be an audience or reputation grower for something more profitable. That is, if journalism is the low yield equivalent to a coffee shop, to really succeed, it needs a back-end catering service that really supports sustainability.

So I returned to another I tried passing: movie theaters don’t necessarily need more people in the seats, they need more people in the seats buying snacks. Because, the thinking goes (though hell if I actually know this to be true) that snacks and soda are much more profitable than your movie ticket. News needs to make more on the popcorn.

Meaning, simply chasing more eyeballs for more advertising hasn’t felt like a real strategy to me for at least a couple years now. Instead, we should be curating audiences of greater value, who are more engaged and, one way or another, help fund our work.

Technically Philly does about 22,000 unique monthly visitors, which is a fine number but nothing any big player would take notice of. But in that raw number, we are cultivating a community that comes to events [that attract sponsors], hires people within the community [and pays to use our jobs board] and, we think, will be interested in some form of membership that will offer free access to these and other opportunities [that help support the service we provide our engaged community]. In turn, we even fine haven’t an engaged and connected community has brought in some passive advertising [and resulted in actually successful campaigns] and other related funds.

Getting more people in our theater is great — and as we build community that is happening — but a bigger audience isn’t as interesting to us as a more loyal, more engaged audience, preferably one with popcorn.

WHYY: NewsWorks and other thoughts on what the public media org should be

Creating a bold and serious collaborative niche membership network with existing and emerging independent media should be a primary objective of WHYY, the Delaware Valley public media organization.

Highlighted by its six-month-old NewsWorks online news site and hyperlocal news experiment, WHYY has attempted to recast itself as something more than a stodgy PBS TV channel and NPR radio affiliate. While progress has surely been made, WHYY is short of being as fully integrated and networked as the ‘public media’ nomenclature might suggest.

Whereas Philly.com is driven primarily by eyeballs and so its strategy should reflect that by becoming a truly comprehensive portal for the region, WHYY is ‘member-supported public media,’ so its driving focus (and its relationship with Philly.com) should reflect that. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case just yet.

Continue reading WHYY: NewsWorks and other thoughts on what the public media org should be

Do news orgs have a responsibility for action?: Notes from BarCamp NewsInnovation 2011

Do news organizations have responsibility for their outcome?

That became the final and, I think, as yet unanswered close to a discussion I led during the final session of the third national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday April 30 at Temple University and rounding out the inaugural Philly Tech Week. [See past BCNI write ups here.]

Overall I felt this BCNI, with some 150 attendees from startup shops and some serious brands, featured more sessions that embodied that unconference spirit in being less presentation and more dialogue, something I don’t think I felt in the past. I was also interested to see the true step forward past social media and other tools and into sustainability, which I find to be a far more important place to be.

To that end and coming off Philly Tech Week, without preparation, I proposed a session in the day’s final hour: “A conversation on news as a convener.”

Continue reading Do news orgs have a responsibility for action?: Notes from BarCamp NewsInnovation 2011

Hardly Strictly Young roundtable: alternative Knight Commission recommendations

Data, context and engagement were the themes of the Hardly. Strictly. Young. event at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute this week, says Michael Maness, the Knight Foundation Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation.

Also read a Columbia Journalism Review overview from fellow attendee, new friend and total asshole Craig Silverman, who takes the opportunity to poke fun at me. (I forgive him.)

The two-day conference meant for brainstorming alternative recommendations to implement a 2009 Knight Commission report was something of an idea-hackathon.

Though I arrived on Saturday to couchsurf in St. Louis first, the confab kicked off with a welcome dinner Sunday night and was made mostly of rotating groups of us 30 members discussing implementation ideas Monday and presenting those ideas Tuesday. The goal was to create real ideas for implementation.

Continue reading Hardly Strictly Young roundtable: alternative Knight Commission recommendations

Five criteria for the flourishing of news entities of the future

Late at a bar in my neighborhood, a friend asked me: how are you innovative?

His general assessment was that Technically Media, a consultancy, and Technically Philly, a news site, weren’t particularly innovative or interesting for 2011. We’re an online-based startup of 20-somethings creating journalism-fueled content. That might barley bass for envelope-pushing in the late 1990s.

Sure, we think editorial strategy — in which all organizations create content to build audience to have impact — is interesting, and that’s a big part of what we’re doing, but I wasn’t satisfied.

So I’m going to share what I came to: the five criteria of news entities of the future.

Continue reading Five criteria for the flourishing of news entities of the future

Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)

Print is going to last longer than we might think because we can prove print in a way we cannot prove with digital.

Someone recently mentioned to me that in 10 years, we’ll still be predicting the death of newspapers. I think sitting here, in my office, looking at a copy of the Wall Street Journal that I stuffed into my pocket after finding it on a bench at the 2nd Street station in Old City Philadelphia, I believe that to be true.

Let me say something controversial: newspapers mean something more than news sites. Just like printed photographs mean something more than Facebook pictures.

Digital media still should amaze in their flexibility, utility and reach. But their printed counterparts are also still remarkable for all the reasons their future seem limited: they are inflexible, expensive and in-viral.

Continue reading Why print will last so much longer than you think it will (hint: we can feel it)