Adrian MonckAdrian MonckJournalism versus the world - a journalism professor's take on media news. Articles
The benefits of less journalism
2008-04-03 20:50:00 There is an upside to the downturn in newsgathering budgets if you believe some people. Take the US presidential campaign:What we need less of, as any consumer will tell you if you ask, is slavish coverage of poll numbers and obsession with campaign gaffes and missteps, and that’s what I hope we’ll get less of as news organizations pull back. (Yes, there are political junkies who thrive on this stuff, but there are also more comprehensive sources for it than most local newspapers.)The truth is you have to hang out with politicians during campaigns to report. The problem is that 99% of what you get is of zero value to news consumers. You can put it online, but it really doesn’t get a whole lot better. More About: Journalism , Benefits
Britain’s public diplomacy: BBC Arabic
2008-03-07 10:35:00 The BBC is about to launch its new Foreign Office funded, 12-hour Arabic channel. This exchange between Asharq al-Awsat’s Faisal Abbas and the BBC’s Nigel Chapman sums up my feelings exactly. Reporting the status quo is not reporting.Q: You stated that you always strive to be impartial, but don’t you think that what many people are expecting is not impartiality at all but rather the exposure of corruption and conflicts in Arab states and to discuss issues that other channels avoid? Do you agree that in the absence of democracy in many of the states that what is required is a “campaigning broadcaster” not impartial media as such?A: That is a very interesting question. The BBC is not a campaigning broadcaster; it does not have a view about issues in the Middle East or anywhere else. BBC’s job is to report them fairly and accurately and to reflect the relevant points of view in relation to them. More About: Public , Diplomacy
The visual display of information: bus tickets [del.icio.us]
2008-03-07 10:12:00 Edward Tufte eat your heart out... More About: Information , Visual , Display , Tickets
Journalism not to blame for newspapers’ decline 2
2008-03-07 01:01:00 Reading this piece from the Chicago Daily Observer, I just wanted to pick out a couple of points to reinforce my claim that journalism is not to blame for the decline of newspapers. (Yes, I know poorly resourced newspapers tend to produce lousy journalism, but you’re missing the point.)The Daily News ... couldn’t survive the triple whammy of social, economic and demographic change. The sales of afternoon dailies declined with the rise of television and the movement of its readers to the suburbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people commuting to night-shift jobs, long the main readers of afternoon newspapers.With the continued exodus of the Daily News’ readership to the suburbs, distribution efforts were increasingly dependent on long ribbons of concrete that grew more and more congested, making it ever more difficult to deliver newspaper in a timely manner.Former News staffer Alan Mutter was quoted: I would have to say there is nothin... More About: Journalism , Blame
Chicago Daily Observer | On the Daily News’ Demise [del.icio.us]
2008-03-06 23:26:00 The sales of afternoon dailies declined with the rise of television and the movement of its readers to the suburbs. By the 1970s, with the decline of heavy industry, there were not as many people commuting to night-shift jobs, long the main readers of aft More About: Daily , Chicago , Observer
Q & A with BBC World Service Director, Nigel Chapman (Asharq Alawsat Ne
2008-03-06 22:51:00 Do you agree that in the absence of democracy in many of the states that what is required is a "campaigning broadcaster" not impartial media as such? More About: World , Service , Chapman , Director , Nigel
Al Jazeera English: management shake-up
2008-03-06 18:10:00 I try not to pass on every rumour I hear, but on at least two separate occasions recently strong hints have been dropped to me that suggest a management shake up is coming soon at Al Jazeera English . This is code for someone replacing CEO Nigel Parsons.Parsons has survived much longer than I would have predicted - given the delays launching the channel - but now that it has been running for a while it needs to move on, and Parsons might well feel the same.If there’s a problem with AJE for me, it’s that it doesn’t have an editorial voice, and it doesn’t get talked about (except when David Frost forgot to ask Benazir Bhutto if OBL really was dead). Ultimately, that editorial voice needs to emanate from the Middle East, rather than from the mineral depths of a glass of Chablis.Someone Middle Eastern, with a serious editorial background and who understands Washington might be a good choice. Who might that be? More About: Management , Al-Jazeera
Showbusiness survivor Grade is getting it right - Telegraph [del.icio.us]
2008-03-05 18:01:00 The proof? He lured unemployed execs Fincham and Airey to ITV. Tough job... More About: Survivor
News at Ten struggling [del.icio.us]
2008-03-05 16:03:00 News at Ten inherited 3.1 million viewers from the football just before 10pm, but its audience fell to 2 million and then 1.6 million over the 40 minutes it was on air, which included regional news. More About: News
DNA 2008
2008-03-04 22:30:00 Just returned from DNA 2008 in Brussels. Much joy to the new Ebbsfleet connection. Home to Brussels in just two and a half hours. Lots of interesting stuff (Robin Hamann did a nice turn).And around the back of the hall, conspiracy theorists were noting darkly just who had most to gain from the Harry story breaking on Drudge. And at which Kabul-anchoring news broadcast were the conspiratorial fingers pointing?
Prince Harry: how news travels
2008-02-28 22:31:00 On 7 January, 2008, an Australian magazine reports:Prince Harry has joined his regiment on a covert mission to Afghanistan and his unit has already seen front line action.Not seen in public since the middle of December, New Idea can exclusively reveal that despite opposition from senior members of the British government and the royal family itself, Harry now joins his uncle Prince Andrew as a royal who has been to war.As one commenter said on 10 January, 2008: It seems that a ‘hot’ news story is more important than the secrecy needed to protect lives. Shame on you!New Idea is only read by a couple of million people. Luckily, if you believe the publishers, they are celebrity-obsessed Australian women. Who said they can’t keep secrets?Harry’s deployment was also safely laid out on the Internet, free from the attention of Al Qaeda assassins (Brisbane chapter). See above.And then...this happened. Yes, an American webpage for news junkies gave everyone permission to do what an Au... More About: News , Travels
Studying User Generated Content - the need for speed
2008-02-28 13:41:00 You know when people are being mean. They always say use a title. Telegraph communities ed Shane Richmond takes issue with Neil Thurman’s - make that Mr Thurman’s - study on UGC, which is available here. He calls it flawed. It isn’t flawed, of course.It was done at a certain point in time and things, understandably perhaps, have moved on. Call me a pedant, but I’d say a flaw implied a failure in methodology not a failure in time.But Mr Richmond - maybe I should say Shane - has a point. Most of the work on this study was done between 2004-6. The dates are all scrupulously recorded. The delay is not because Neil works at snails pace, it’s because the work was done for submission to an academic journal, and academic publishing is a slow old business. If it had been commissioned by the Telegraph, it would have been available rather more swiftly.Academics who want research careers need academic publication in peer-reviewed journals. People will often talk to academics only on t... More About: Content , User , Speed , Studying
How to save local news...
2008-02-27 13:07:00 Community is just another way of expressing shared interest. In the media those shared interests can cross political and state boundaries (for example business news, some sports and pornography). But where they can’t cross those boundaries is in politics itself. If you want to get people interested in politics you have to create a shared interest and an opportunity to express that interest.That has implications for journalism and it’s a theme take up by Simon Jenkins: Of all nationalisations in British history, none has been so corrosive of the public good as the nationalisation of social responsibility.I am not starry eyed about the vigour of local democracy abroad. It is messy, bureaucratic and often corrupt. But it appears to yield communities more able to discipline themselves and their young, and more satisfied at the delivery of their public services. They do not throw nearly so many people in jail.Local newspapers are not, as in Britain, filled with impotent whinges again... More About: News , Save
The barriers to user-generated content
2008-02-27 11:51:00 My colleague at City University, Neil Thurman, has published his latest study on user-generated content (UGC). You can read a pre-press version on his webpage. The headlines?UGC is being held back by: 1. Legal liabilities - publish and be damned.2. Moderation costs - “80 per cent of the user generated content initiatives launched by the publications surveyed for the study were edited or pre-moderated. These costs have not yet been fully off-set by the revenues generated.”3. Low participation - not enough users actually generating content.4. Insularity - the narrowness of some UGC. More About: Content , User
Defenestrating Denton
2008-02-26 18:22:00 Like anyone in education, I never procrastinate today over what I can vacillate about tomorrow. And so it is with my estimation of Nick Denton , Gawker’s own Marquis de Sard.I admire Denton’s blog empire, and his hard-headed approach to posting ($7.50 per 1,000 views), and yet it’s obvious too that his own role in Gawker largely allows him to pursue the kind of aimless, idiosyncratic nonsense best left to blogs - well - like this one.Bobbie Johnson does an excellent post totting up Denton’s numbers and concludes:19 of his posts - that’s nearly 21%, stat fans - didn’t even break the hallowed 1,000 pageview threshold… meaning they weren’t even worth a measly $7.50 in Gawker’s pay-per-view model.Admittedly, he’s got his own nano-empire to run as well as the site, but Gawker does say “edited by Nick Denton” under the masthead. You’ve got to add some value, right? Looks like his obsessions with Barry Diller and the Manhattan media scene aren’t performing well e...
Nick Denton - the Marquis de Sard [del.icio.us]
2008-02-26 17:20:00 Can Denton live by his own rules on posting? Bobbie Johnson calls him to account... More About: Nick , Marquis , Sard
WaPo's John Kelly unpicks a survey story [del.icio.us]
2008-02-25 23:09:00 Let me retroactively apologize for my blog post of a few weeks ago where I criticized British newspapers for printing questionable stories based on self-serving research (last item). I didn't include any specific examples. I knew, though, that one would c More About: Story , Survey , John , Kelly
The Telegraph style guide. [del.icio.us]
2008-02-25 21:26:00 Write like Simon Heffer. Sort of. More About: Style , Guide , The Telegraph
Destruction. Creative, or just destructive?
2008-02-25 18:36:00 Three things had me thinking, as I re-read Old Media Seek To Know Google Not Just Fear It: The genius of Google has been to couple search and advertising more effectively than anyone else. Its key word and contextual ad placements - mimicked by other Internet companies - have been nibbling away at the revenue base of traditional print and broadcast media as advertisers shift more of their budgets online.And then: In seeking to balance efficiency with targeted reach, advertisers will turn to niche ad networks ... helping agencies reaggregate fractured audiences while not sacrificing targeted environments."Advertisers are going to look for filters that say what's good and what to trust and not to trust..."And finally, I thought of something I originally read in the old, bathroom friendly New Yorker (none of whose ads - alas - mean anything to me), by Michael Specter :“We have to be careful not to rush from denial to despair,” John Elkington told me ... He believes there is a dan... More About: Creative , Destruction
A minor peril of auto-generated news [del.icio.us]
2008-02-25 16:37:00 How Green was my Silicon Valley More About: News , Auto , Minor
Lawyers: the necessary brake on media innovation?
2008-02-24 01:09:00 Marc Andreessen remarked recently a propos the internet and the media, that most car companies didn’t emerge from horse carriage making. Admittedly that summary misrepresents the long period of development of a whole host of automobile-related technologies: fuel processing, engine development, machine tools.Reuters boss - and former lawyer - Tom Glocer has another take, that I would subscribe to: When you think of innovations in the music industry like the original Napster or Kazaa or the phenomenal rise of YouTube, one understands why it is not Universal Music or NBC which blazes the trail.In the content world, it must be admitted that a fair number of start-ups adopt a legal position that could be best described as “we will worry about copyright infringement when we are successful.” Indeed, that is precisely what is going on now as Google is regularizing YouTube’s content relationships. Since I practised law for many years I offer this defence of my former colleagues: don... More About: Media , Lawyers , Innovation
What the Medill uproar is really about [del.icio.us]
2008-02-24 00:55:00 In the future we need great editors who can act as -- gasp -- the chief marketing officers, content strategists, and product leaders of their journalistic organizations. This will require a mastery of tools and techniques not taught in a 1970-style report
No Country for Old Newspapers
2008-02-23 14:20:00 The Albuquerque Tribune shut down today. As its own report of its demise mournfully notes: The Trib’s daily circulation in January was about 9,600...In 1988, the newspaper sold about 42,000 copies a day.It was founded by a muckraker who came up with the motto for the Scripps newspaper chain: “Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.” They certainly found their way to illumination somewhere other than newspaper stands.The Tribune had 38 editorial employees. On average that means they were each producing content for about 250 people.Has Albuquerque been shrinking? Nope. In 1990 the population was around 385,000. Today it stands at 455,000. So the Tribune has lost circulation in a town where there were more potential readers.To generate some more heat a few years ago it hired a conservative columnist. This was probably considered an innovation. It didn’t work.Newspaper decline is not - as I’ve argued before - a content thing. Journalistically, the Tribune is probabl... More About: Country , Newspapers
So Ya Wanna Be A Cameraman? [del.icio.us]
2008-02-23 13:51:00 • Want to be a cameraman, learn Final Cut Pro. These guys and gals live on it. They know every shortcut key and all of the bells and whistles. • There are cameramen that are technicians and others that are artists. Rarely will you find one that is bo
Newspapers - slow and in denial
2008-02-23 13:26:00 I am a sucker for defunct browser maker Marc Andreessen’s hip-shooting style. Here he is giving both barrels to the New York Times. [HT: sans serif] Andreessen: Take the New York Times. They are slow and they are in denial. After 15 years of the Internet, their online division - though it has been very aggressive and well run compared to its peers - still represents only about 10 per cent of the company’s total revenue. And it’s not enough. The core of the business is collapsing.What’s going to happen is that print subscriptions will decline to a point where it’s no longer economically feasible to keep the printing plants operating. They will be shut down. So will the distribution networks.When that happens, the only thing left will be revenues from the online divisions. That won’t be enough to cover newsroom costs. There is no way that they have a transition strategy from point A to point B.SPIEGEL: What would you do differently?Andreessen: Well, if the newspaper compan... More About: Newspapers , Slow , Denial
SPIEGEL Interview with Marc Andreessen: 'The Internet Is Becoming the Main
2008-02-23 13:25:00 Newspapers with declining circulations can complain all they want about their readers and even say they have no taste. But you will still go out of business over time. A newspaper is not a public trust-it has a business model that either works or doesn't. More About: Internet , Interview , Main , The Internet , Marc
A dot on the BBC map of the world
2008-02-22 13:43:00 Enterprising young BBC journo Stuart Pinfold has produced a nice map showing how impressively broad is the BBC’s network of international coverage. Correspondents, reporters and stringers show up on the map as little dots and triangles.So what does it feel like to be a dot on the map: Funny that my name is on the list of stringers. But I haven’t been a BBC stringer for nearly a year. The BBC does not have a stringer in Angola now. The country is ‘covered’ (up) by one of the bigger bureaux - just like a whole lot of other countries which don’t really matter unless another war breaks out or a drought leading to famine occurs or some other reportable disaster easily-enough digestible for the minds of BBC ‘news managers’.I would like to see, not a map of bureaux, correspondents & stringers, but a corresponding map of how the BBC values those people. You see, one of the things the BBC does supremely well is boasting to the world about how many reporters and journalists it h... More About: World , The World
A video guide to video strategy by andydickinson.net [del.icio.us]
2008-02-22 12:43:00 quick guides to a the quality and point-and-shoot video strategy. More About: Video , Strategy , Guide
ABSW: New Scientist for sale [del.icio.us]
More articles from this author:2008-02-22 09:40:00 Reed seems to have realised that it does not have a clue about running magazines, with their sordid need to attract advertising, as opposed to expensive journals that just lift money out of university budgets. More About: For Sale , Scientist , Sale 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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