http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html

His discussions of local reporting and the potential future of investigative journalism are quite insightful. He argues that tech folks were early adopters of the web, so tech news is the most mature example of web journalism we have. Johnson says all news will be covered this way in the future, and I tend to agree. (Also, here is a Guardian commentator who discusses the Johnson’s speech: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/17/mediabusiness-internet)

There must be something in the air — here’s a piece about the topics we’ve been discussing at DailyKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/5/17/732381/-Clinging-to-a-dead-biz-model-for-dear-life

http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/03/the-following-is-a-speech-i-gave-yesterday-at-the-south-by-southwest-interactive-festival-in-austiniif-you-happened-to-being.html

I especially like his discussions of neighborhood blogging in New York City and the future of investigative journalism, and his insight that we’re living in a thriving rain forest of news on the web, when 20 years ago we were confined to a desert.

One of the things I really wish newspapers could do right online would be to develop communities of readers and writers who can provide insights and — frankly — corrections right on the same pages as their stories. While you’re right, many of the links on sites like Slashdot are links to media stories, the value of that community and their input is what makes going there worth it to me. Newspapers don’t generally do this, in part because IMHO it undermines their authority as lords of the news. I would much rather have a correction posted in an up-moderated comment below the story that to have to wait and hope the reporter or editor will provide one in response to an email.

Another pet peeve of mine is newspapers who don’t link to relevant content or referenced sites in the stories they publish on the web. I don’t know the philosophy behind this, but it may be something to do with either not wanting to drive traffic away from their own site. It’s just annoying, though.

Defining tech news as not really news anyway is a nice trick, just like saying classifieds weren’t really ads and naturally Craigslist can do those better. Start down that road and you can slowly write off each news subject as journalists move their operations to web, something papers should be careful not to do. Stephen Berlin Johnson says in the linked-to speech, technology news is so well covered by the web because web coverage of it has been around so long. Early adopters of the web were interested in tech news. Slashdot actually has a premium membership, BTW, that gives access to posts sooner — a potential way for papers to make money from their content.

Keep in mind that what you are getting on Slashdot/Digg/YCombinator/Reddit isn’t reporting, btw, but commentary. There is a reason why there is almost _no_ original journalism on those aggregation sites (Possible exception being PG’s essays on ycombinator) – It’s hard work. Harping away (as we are here) is easy in comparison.

I’ll agree that NYT screwed up in the runup to the Iraq War. Absolutely horrible, and a blemish on their record which will take decades (if they last that long) to recover from; particularly as their major writers were acting as little more than propaganda arms for the administration.

FiveThirtyEight outperformed most of the major traditional outlets in Election Commentary, but, once again – commentary, not really original journalism for the most part (there were exceptions – and I expect to see more awesome work from FiveThirtyEight in the future)

As to why newspapers need to wall off content – pretty much for the same reason why Apple feels the need to charge for its computers – the product is high quality, and requires a lot of work to create. Advertising revenue off the Web doesn’t come close to covering the costs of highly skilled journalists who may need to work full time for the better part of two weeks, traveling all over the world, to get the story. Find me a blogger willing to do that.

The market has spoken in that free is more successful than $15/month – I’m not sure about better.

I agree with your statement about distributing/delegating the effort on reporting on stories – It may be that we see a hybrid approach in the future – trusted editorial bodies like Wikipedia (Much of the value in Wikipedia comes from a core body of about 1500 administrators who keep the vandalism under control and the standards such as NPOV in the forefront) and some yet-to-be-created journalism outlet that manages to channel citizen journalists from around the world into some comprehensible format.

I’ve spent four hours today reading the NYT, as I do on most Saturday/Sundays- and I don’t think there are any non-traditional sources that can compare with it. Yet.

That, to me, is proof that it _does_ make sense to do for free. Pay-for-classifieds don’t make a much sense in the internet era, when distribution (the primary value-add of Classifieds in the pre-internet era) is close to free. Craigslist (like wikipedia) is successful because their model works well.

I sadly agree with everything else you say though, though I’m hoping the NYT and WSJ somehow come up with a model that will save traditional journalism. I’ve spent two+ hours today with the Times Reader ($3.45/week subscription), and really don’t look forward to a day when this excellent journalism (for the most part) falls by the wayside.

Here’s my nightmare scenario for the Sulzbergers: news organizations will adjust to the realities of web publication and learn to live within their mean using ad revenue for their funding. What will papers look like? No physical plant, few full-time staff, bloggers will cover local news, as some are doing now.

These new news organizations will be run by the bloggers that rise to the fore in each area of expertise — technology, foreign policy, and so on. These expert bloggers will become the sources for news in their areas. They will provide leadership to some small portion of the soon-to-be-unemployed mass of journalists (and stringers abroad) who can do the legwork for pennies on the dollar compared to the care and feeding of a traditional stable of hacks. The experts and the communities they cultivate will write the stories and engage in thoughful discussions of them, some of which you and I might want to participate in.

What about commentary? Hot air is free — no legwork needed.

Did I miss anything?

I’m going to play devil’s advocate here, again. My experience of professional reporting in recent years has been that it is generally of poor quality and that reporters, even at the Geriatric Grey Lady, tend toward the hack end of the spectrum.

Take technology reporting. A story from the traditional media will get introduced and linked to in a post on slashdot.org. Within minutes, generally, highly knowledgeable folks will provide thoughful and informative commentary which I often find FAR superior to the reporting in the original story.

How does this happen? Community — slashdot has built a community where ordinary folks and experts come for information, and also come to contribute to the community’s understanding of it. The people who provide the most salient comments clearly have expertise that no reporter could get, simply because they spend their time working in the field that the story discusses, not doing reporting.

I have also found the traditional media company’s coverage of vital matters of state, government and international affairs to be generally rather poor. I don’t want to go into partisan politics here, but most people can agree that there were serious failures of the US press in its coverage of the runup to the Iraq War. Yet, we have outstanding analyis, commentary, and even some reporting from bloggers on such matters. Matt Drudge is always dragged out, but what about fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver’s outstanding site analyzing political polling data? I think we’ll see more of these sorts of sites that become the gold standard in a particular area of expertise, rather than sprawling beaurocracies like the traditional media companies that cover everything, but nothing well.

I would like to turn the statement around — why do newspapers and traditional media feel entitled to wall off and charge extra for content they’re already getting ad revenue from? Sounds like a personal problem, or, more likely, a personnel problem (sorry, bad pun). They’re too big. They need to get bloggers who live in other parts of the world to contribute stories on hurricanes and floods, rather than financing travel and upkeep for a bunch of surly hacks with a misplaced sense of entitlement to their jobs, and, let’s not deny it, the special place they used to have as chroniclers of our time.

The market has spoken: free is always better than $15 per month.

I have around 20 Blogs/Websites in my daily crawl through the web, but 19 of them (techcrunch, alleyinsider, huffingtonpost, ycombinator, even Salon) _pale_ in comparison to the content that a single day of Times Reader provides. Sometimes even a _single_ well reported and written story outweighs the value of everything in every other blog I’ll come across.

I think long term the content of the major news sources will slowly return to a subscription model, and when that happens, a lot of the aggregators out there will slowly start to drop off – their value, to a great degree today, comes from leaching off of, or commenting on, the value created by the primary sources.

Some models make more sense free (Google, Wikipedia, craigslist, almost every-non-financial blog in existence) and some make almost no sense for free (NYT, WSJ)

It’s true that free paper’s that rely on advertising for revenue cannot charge readers for their content. However, those that have relied on the advertising and subscription model will find new innovative ways to monetize services.

What I don’t understand is why many people think they’re entitled. And if you find value in the information you read then why wouldn’t you support the writers for their hard work.

I’ll be the first to say that journalism is not dead. And it never will be. As the flow of information evolves journalists will become more entrepreneurial. Journalism will evolve in many different forms, which we’ve seen already with blogs.

Speaking of blogs, many people subscribe to hundreds of blogs. Many of which aggregate the same content and then link right back to the originating article. And seriously, a blogger who copies and pastes an article to their blog is not a journalist. They’re a thief.

This is not to say there aren’t very valuable blogs with original content out there. My point is that there are very few when scaled with the amount of blogs available.

I think what the NYT did with Reader 2.0 is innovative. Many people have to remember that news organizations, especially newspapers pay big bucks for surveys and research to provide an accurate picture of their readership. With that information comes products like Reader 2.0.

I for one enjoy reading newspapers. Do I subscribe to any of them? No. Why? Because I can read them for free online. However, If my local daily offered something like the Times Reader 2.0 I’d subscribe. And I will probably keep my monthly subscription to the NYTimes’ Reader because I value their product and the work of their writers.

Lastly, I asked this before and I’ll ask it again: Why do people feel like they’re entitled?

Kindle, anybody?

For some, the benefits outlined above will be worth the subscription price, for others it won’t. In either case we welcome any and all feedback on the application.

John/Adobe