Gordon's Republic

Gordon Macmillan

Everyone who works online and has anything to do with publishing should be reading this. A report out today that attempts to map the carnage in publishing and take a guess at the future. Full of good nuggets.

With nods to both the Guardian's Emily Bell ("We are on the brink of two years of carnage for western media") and Roy Greenslade ("Popular newspapers, the mass newspapers, are dying and will die") the starting point and the narrative of the Future of Journalism report produced by the Media Alliance in Australia is the declining fortunes of print and the challenges that disruptive technologies bring in the Australian, UK and US markets.

The starring names of this story are all there as papers like the The Christian Science Monitor fold, as others like the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and CNN rise to the challenge.

No one is immune and while no one is sure exactly what the solutions are, people do know that one thing's for sure: that news media has fundamentally changed and that publishing has to adapt to "the economic and technological landscape".

The companies that will survive and prosper will be those that remember and nurture their core business, which also have the journalists on board who are equipped with the skills to flourish in the new landscape. For the journalists, it is the ones with those skills who will prosper. Hopefully.

The investment question is as important as the question of what content we actually produce.

The report asks a lot of questions about content (it is after all what we do) and provides some answers: where are people going online and what are people doing? It looks at the kinds of content they are consuming and what that tells us.

There are some really good case studies here which offer a pick 'n' mix smorgasbord of options for publishers to choose from and experiment with. Not everything is going to work.

It takes a brief look at CNN's IReport mini-site devoted to user-generated content, which has been a real success for CNN. The news giant has learned well to adapt and ride the Web 2.0 wave like the best. Its success with UGC and other experiments like Twitter offer a lot.

It takes a look at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "where quotas rule".

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution restructured in 2007, targeted older reporters and editors for redundancy and divided those left into two main sections: news and information, with about 170 journalists who break news; and enterprise, with about 50 staff concentrating on features and investigations.

It then imposed controversial quotas on reporters: 60 pieces a year for narrative and profile writers, and 12 for investigative reporters.

The UK is well represented in this report and The Daily Telegraph is billed as the original "newsroom of the future". There is a quote from the paper's digital editor Edward Roussel who is worth repeating with his line that the new era calls for a new type of reporter, with the attributes of a wire journalist or a sports reporter.

"If you imagine the way a football reporter works, filing grabs every few minutes and then turning the whole thing into a story very quickly after the end of the game, that is the way our reporters work now when filing for online."

Roussel is also a believer (and really who isn't) in Jeff Jarvis's belief that success lies in premium content and that we must all live by this maxim: "Do what you do best and link to the rest".

Johnston Press' The Lancashire Evening Post and its "converged newsroom" is here with its newsroom seen as a model as to what regional newspapers can do. Its newsroom has evolved to use Sony HD video cameras, Edirol digital recorders, Soundslide for galleries and Avid Pro Express for editing videos. The Post, and its 65 editorial staff, blossomed into lep.co.uk.

Online content is discussed at every conference. Lep.co.uk publishes stories continuously and most stories appear online first. "We have the market to ourselves as a regional newspaper, so we can control our content, which is a bit different to our national papers," says Post's deputy editor, Mike Hill.

The convergence of journalism and data is looked at in EveryBlock.com. This site is the brainchild of former  Washington Post journalist Adrian Holovaty. Working for the Post in Chicago, he set up chicagocrime.org to analyse daily crime reports from the Chicago Police Department’s website and reorganised the information so people could see what was happening in their neighbourhood. Now with Everyblock no matter where you live you can see what's happening with on your block - it is local news at the micro level and another example of the rise of community sites. Database-inspired journalism is much bigger in the US, but offers untapped opportunities here and elsewhere.

Bloggers on steroids/the rise of community journalism- the community model is seen as the way forward by some and a red herring by others. The report looks at in the journalist-free news operation: Examiner.com.

Examiner.com is owned and run by the Clarity Media Group in Denver, Colorado, and also runs freesheets in cities including San Francisco, Washington and Baltimore. It is owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz and run by former AOL executive Michael Sherrod. The group has domain names for hyperlocal sites in 70 US cities and has officially launched in beta in San Francisco, Chicago, Baltimore, Denver, and Seattle (all markets where the paid for print titles are risk and folding like the San Francisco Chronicle and the late Seattle Post Intelligencer). Almost following the scent of print death.

The idea behind Examiner.com is pure citizen journalism with contributions from examiners paid by numbers of page views and advertising clicks (not unlike the model used by Nick Denton at Gawker Media). The pay starts at $2.50 for every thousand page views and, according to TechCrunch, the median income is $25 a month. Not exactly a future career.

"We are building a community of Examiners to focus on specific topics ranging from sports to tourism to local politics," a post on the website said recently. "Examiners are local experts who have a voice, knowledge and an opinion. Think of an Examiner like a blogger on steroids."

And so to The Washington Post, which has long been seen as a pioneer. The report looks at some of the Post's work on video, which again offers a lot of ideas. The speed and focus is impressive.

Jim Brady, Washingtonpost.com executive editor, says his team were poor relations in the pecking order until recently, but that has all changed.

Brady said the Post had introduced comprehensive training and all reporters could shoot video, which – he said – was "the hot thing now".

"We have a political blogger out there who has a camera mounted on his computer and when a big story breaks he will do the 60 seconds on what this means, and he will push a button on his computer, send it to our computer guys and 10 minutes later there will be a video of him up there reacting to Teddy Kennedy having a brain tumour … it is totally crappy video, it is a webcam, but it gets it out there.

Brady adds: "Production values are not everything – communicating simple information is what matters. You might get 10,000 video streams for something that took 90 seconds to make."

The Washingtonpost.com has six dedicated video journalists who make everything from documentary-style stories to three minute campaign reports. They are part of a team of about 100 dedicated online journalists who prepare copy from the print operation, moderate blogs, produce video and podcasts and produce original stories.

Niche for news junkies. Here the report quotes the American Journalism Review's Philip Meyer who recently envisaged a “smaller, less frequently published version, packed with analysis and investigative reporting and aimed at well-educated news junkies, that may well be a smart survival strategy for the beleaguered old print product".

That sounds like a description of a news magazine as much as it does a newspaper. The model is the same - as long as what you offer is the best in your field representing premium value to advertisers then you will find a market.

Ownership and partnerships are looked at as the report concludes. Both hot topics. Will US newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times become grand old charitable trusts?

What new partners do we need to find, and does this mean looking in areas where you may not have looked before as being 'frenemies' becomes the new norm as companies join rivals in joint ventures, each contributing what they do best.

This report comes in the same week that the World Association of Newspapers had its conference (issued this: Newspaper Circulation Grows Despite Economic Downturn) and both see reasons to be optimistic as they look to the future where many models, new and old, look like they will co-exist. This will doubtless mean that a lot less trees will be needed.

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