An article in Advertising Age reminds newspaper publishers that they might want to be careful about how high they build their pay walls, because online advertising revenue is still climbing. “Digital ad revenue won’t replace the print revenue newspapers used to wring out of near monopolies, but digital ad spending at newspaper sites won’t keep falling beyond next year,” according to the article.
Author: Andrew Chavez
Andrew Chavez is a Web specialist at the Dallas Morning News. Before joining the News, he worked at the Austin American-Statesman and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
TED Talks just posted a video of Clay Shirky speaking to participants at a conference at the State Department where he discusses how social media are changing how we communicate. “Where the phone gave us the one-to-one pattern, and television, magazines, radio and books gave us the one-to-many pattern, the Internet gives us the many-to-many pattern,” he says. Shirky uses global news events, such as the earthquakes in China and President Obama’s campaign, to illustrate how citizens are becoming involved in citizen journalism. His observations have some interesting implications, even for community newspapers, as these social media technologies continue to spread.
Mike Orren, founder of Pegasus News, talks to The Convergence Newsletter about the operation and how they’re using data and citizen journalism to run what they call a local news portal. Pegasus is pretty popular here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it’s worth checking out if you’ve never done so before. Pegasus runs on some high-end software on the back end, but there are certainly some concepts that community newspapers could employ using free online tools.
Leah Betancourt of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has some advice on Mashable for journalists on how to best use social media. Her piece summarizes several policies that have been set by major metros, but also offers some practical tips that might be useful for to community journalists.
The Newport Daily News is trying an interesting experiment in online news. They’re using a tiered subscription model, with the most expensive tier being a $345-a-year electronic edition.
Alan Mutter (the same person who’s pitching an industry-owned ad venture) has an interesting analysis of newspapers’ cost structure on his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur, and points out that changing that cost structure could be the key to the industry’s comeback. Mutter is advocating a hybrid printed product that involves targeted, niche products combined with innovative online products. His plan is certainly easier to implement for small, community newspapers.
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Advertising spending down 12%
Compared to the first quarter of 2008, advertising spending is down 12 percent, according to Nielsen. That’s a decrease of $3.8 billion, the company reported today. Local newspapers are down 14.3 percent, according to the company’s findings.
Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen are reporting on a report from Moody’s Investors Service that takes newspapers to task over their cost structures. The report notes that 70 percent of newspaper costs are tied up in printing — not the best cost structure in the online era.
Ann Handley has an great how-to about using journalistic writing skills on Twitter. “… news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter,” she writes.
This story from American Journalism Review shows how some have a desire for news about the communities they live in that can’t be met by most metro news organizations. “Larger dailies, which are closing down and/or going to online versions, will not cover the news, community events and announcements of small towns,” the paper’s editor says. “We have to do it ourselves. It is the only way we’ll stay informed and connected. Whether it is in print or online, community journalism is still of value.”