If you’re looking for one-stop shopping to get an overview of what’s going on in the world of journalism and new media, we hope, of course, that you’ll come here to the TCCJ site and check out our Around the Web posts, where we try to pre-digest a lot of news and ideas and let you choose what you want to follow up on. But if you’re still hungry for more, go to the site above. You will find all kinds of blogs and sites designed to tell you what’s going on in the world of journalism. So bookmark it, and when you have a few extra minutes, check out one of those sites to find out the latest thinking and happenings in the changing media world.
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A few suggestions for ad growth
Jen from Editor & Publisher has a few suggestions from Ed Strapagiel of Kubas Consultants about how to improve ad sales. Among his suggestions: stop selling in lines and inches. You’ll have to pay for the full report from Kubas, but the snippets shared by Jen are interesting in themselves.
For those of you who don’t have time to come to one of our three-day workshops we’ve got a new option. The Center will now be offering one-day “boot camps” and the first two will tackle topics that always pique the interest of our workshop participants: Photoshop and using the Internet.
Below is a flyer for the first boot camp, which will be led by Broc Sears on August 1. Broc will devote an entire day to Photoshop tricks and best practices. The cost will be $40 for those who pay early and $50 for those who pay upon arrival.
I’ll be leading the second boot camp on August 8, which will tackle how to use the Internet for reporting, and how to use the Internet to engage readers.
I’ll be talking about how to search the Web, what can you do with social media and finish off the day with a rapid fire session where we’ll tackle any question you have related to the World Wide Web and community journalism. And, best of all, it’ll all be done with free tools that you can use straight out of your Web browser — no special software required.
Check out the posters below for more information or click here to register.
Small newspapers aren’t failing
John Cribb of newspaper brokerage Cribb, Greene & Associates. “This is not the financial condition of an industry that is failing. Auto and real estate businesses can be down 40% or more, and many retailers are down 25% – far worse than newspapers,” Cribb writes. “Mid and small newspapers are holding up well considering the intensity of this recession.”
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.
Most newspaper trade magazines and industry Websites are full of reasons that printed newspapers must and should survive. They admit that changes are on the horizon, but they assert that new technologies will only supplement the newspaper, not replace it.
And so frequently, we in the newspaper business ignore the elephant in the room: the possibility that the newspaper we know and love — the ink-on-newsprint product — may not survive. And in the next room, there’s an even bigger elephant: the possibility that the newspaper’s extinction may not be something our children or grandchildren will see, but that it may come in our lifetime … and maybe even in the next decade.
So let me put my cards on the table up front: I love newspapers. I read them every day. I do get news online, but sitting down with a newspaper and a cup of coffee in the morning is a cherished part of my day. And I head up an organization designed to support newspaper journalism, while at the same time encouraging those papers to develop effective online editions.
But I think all of us in newspaper journalism need to listen, and pay close attention to, those voices who claim that the medium we love so much — and earn our living from — may be destined for extinction.
Why must we listen to these prophets of doom? Because they may be right. Why should you get a colonoscopy if you may find out that you have cancer? Because while cancer screenings like this do tell some people that it’s already too late, far more are able to make changes that result in a long life.
The changes may not be those you want to make. They may involve diet and exercise, or even worse, radiation and chemotherapy or surgery. But they are infinitely preferable to the alternative.
The mission of the Texas Center for Community Journalism in these troubling times for newspapers is twofold:
- to look at all the ways we can improve the printed product by more effective writing and editing and photography and design and management and circulation strategies, but also
- to look at the new medium of the Internet to find ways that we can deliver the news in this new medium.
You see, it’s not journalism that’s in trouble. It’s newspapers. What’s the real function of a newspaper? It’s not to put ink on paper; it’s to deliver news and information and images and entertainment to a community, to provide a forum for the community to talk with itself and to examine ideas. For centuries, the most effective way to do that was on the printed page. But times change, and we must face the possibility that newsprint may not survive as a delivery system for community journalism.
Community newspapers are actually the only bright spot in the newspaper industry right now. Community newspapers, especially if you discount problems brought on by our faltering economy, are actually quite healthy. But we know that national trends may reach us slower than they do the big cities, but they reach us nonetheless.
And all the statistics available to us — along with what you observe every day in your own experience – indicate that our readership is aging and that young people are not committed newspaper readers. As TCCJ associate director Jerry Grotta told a community newspaper publisher 30 year ago: Watch the obits every day and reduce your press run by the number of obits you run — because you are not replacing those readers with younger ones.
You see young people with iPods and iPhones and you hear them talking about the time they spend on Facebook or Twittering. We’ve always believed — or is it just hoped — that as they got older and got married and settled down, that they would become newspaper readers. The statistics available on readership, though, show that this isn’t what’s happening.
The most-talked-about piece right now predicting the death of the newspaper was written a couple of months ago by blogger/professor Clay Shirky. Let me urge you to read it; it’s unsettling, but it deserves consideration. A long time ago, philosopher John Stuart Mill said that we should read things that contradict what we believe — because if we’re really right, we will only come away strengthened in our beliefs by reading the other side. Or maybe that opinion, though wrong, contains just one nugget of truth we need to consider. Or just maybe that opinion is right, and we need to consider it honestly.
What we do every day in community journalism is essential for our communities. People need the news and information we bring to make informed decisions. But the essential element here is not ink and paper, but news and information. One hundred years ago, people traveled on horseback and in buggies. Horses and carriages were media to fulfill the important function of transportation. Then cars came along. They did not do away with travel — they just moved it to a different medium and extended it and speeded it up. Now horses are for recreation, not work, and carriages are museum pieces. The work they performed, though, is more important than ever — just performed by the “new” medium of automobiles.
Will newspapers go the way of the horse and buggy? Clay Shirky and many others say yes. Still other observers disagree — they say that newspapers will redefine themselves, much like radio did when TV came along, and keep on going.
Whatever you believe, though, this is not the time to stick our heads in the sand and refuse to think about what could well be the most important issue newspapers have ever encountered: the possibility of their own extinction.
So read Shirky’s article, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, and then respond in the comments. Let us know what you think. And especially let us know what you think the response of Texas community newspapers should be.
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.
Our page design workshop has kicked off in Fort Worth.
The group, led by resident page design guru Broc Sears, began with dinner at the Fort Worth Stockyards and will continue Thursday on the TCU campus with an intense 14 hours of instruction, some hand-on time and group discussions.
Steve Levering, another faculty member at the Schieffer School, will also be teaching a few sessions.
Check out the photos here and on our Facebook page.
The workshop is paid for by the Texas Newspaper Foundation, which covers tuition, lodging and food costs for all of the workshoppers.
Watch this website in the future for announcements about our next workshop. And check out this page for more information about TCCJ workshops.
If an article on high school kids and their yearbooks seems a little off-topic for a forum on community journalism, think again.
What’s happening here? We have a traditional medium – paper and pictures. Something all of us grew up with and looked forward for a year to receiving. But today’s Facebook/Twitter/Websavvy crowd is less and less interested in a medium lots of us thought would never die. It’s not that they don’t care about reading about themselves and their classmates, or seeing their pictures. In fact, they are probably more interested than ever. They’re just getting that in different ways, and a yearbook delivery system for that interest seems archaic to them.
Some day soon, these kids will be our primary target audience. Will kids who have rejected yearbooks have any interest at all in an ink-on-newsprint product? Read about the yearbook trend in this Dallas Morning News story