What Skills Will Future Journalists Need?

• A multitasker, juggling various responsibilities and roles, many which may have nothing to do with "traditional" journalism.
• Technologically savvy, having at least a basic understanding of programming, web tools, and web culture.
• A gatekeeper for a particular beat, directing readers to the most current and trustworthy news, regardless of who wrote it or where it's housed.
• A versatile storyteller, who knows how to present a story online in various formats.
• A brand and a community manager, who cultivates a constant and interactive conversation with their readership.

 

The best quotes 

ये सभी कोट्स अमेरिका से हैं क्योंकि हमारे भारत में विश्वविद्यालयों के पत्रकारिता विभाग गई-गुजरी फैकल्टीज के हवाले हैं और उनमें यह औकात नहीं कि वे पत्रकारिता को दिशा दे सकें। यह स्थिति बहुत दुखद है लेकिन वास्तविकता यही है।

"I think it's very important for journalists to look at what is happening in the real world, and try to find ways where their skills can be used to meet real market needs. If you can have your own baseline business of clientele and services that you offer, you can still have another job. When they lay you off or fire you -- and they will, that's the way that business is -- you don't want to be stuck scrambling. You will be in a much better position to guide your own career and take the work that you want, if you can be in business for yourself." -- Amy Gahran, info-provocateur, media consultant, and former writer for Poynter's E-Media Tidbits

"My major concern with the emerging class of journalism students [is that] ... a lot of them see what's going on in the industry, not just newspapers, but broadcast and radio as well, and they don't want to be a part of it anymore. What kind of message is being sent to the next generation of journalists right now? It's really sad to see. So, you just wonder who's going to step up and be there?" -- Adam Chadwick, a filmmaker currently working on "Fit to Print," a documentary exploring the decline of the U.S. newspaper industry

"We are trying to be a lot more welcoming ... we are trying to encourage more dialogue than we did in years gone by. I think that's helping not only do the job that we are called to do, but its going be something that rescues the press." -- Michael Ray Smith, professor of communication studies, Campbell University

"I think the question becomes how much of a role do journalists have with regards to the future of journalism. In my opinion, they hold all the cards at this point ... journalism and reporting are still the same. That has not changed one bit. The tools that we use to do it, that's what is changing so rapidly." -- Bill Handy, visiting professor, Oklahoma State University

"You have too many people that are old, or my age, that are moaning ... and they are really missing the tidal wave. My students are riding the crest of that tidal wave. As a matter of fact, they don't even know it's a tidal wave ... that they are in a digital tsunami. They are just having fun in the water, and guys my age are on the beach and seeing this tsunami and running like hell." -- Benjamin A. Davis, former producer at MSNBC.com and NPR, and current instructor at Rutgers University

"A great deal is the same. The job is still is try to figure out what is significant and interesting and go report on it, and tell stories, and try to disperse that as best you can, to the public. Of course all of those steps have changed along the way. What is significant and interesting has changed, how you report is changing somewhat, and how we disperse it is changing a lot. But the basic tools are still reporting and storytelling." -- Mike Hoyt, executive editor of Columbia Journalism Review

understanding the content...what reader needs

Very good article and good discussion on it. I am posting it here for our journalists...

Future of Local News About More Than Paid Content

by Chris O’Brien 

During an otherwise mundane story about Microsoft's recent decision to offer a free, web-based version of its Office suite of products, I was struck by this sentence in an Associated Press story:

With Office 2010, Microsoft must decide how much software it can give away online without undermining its lucrative desktop software business. If it doesn't make the right calculation, the software maker could find itself in the same position as newspapers that gave online content away and now are struggling to replace print revenue.

That second line is almost a throwaway, written with no attribution. That means that the notion has officially entered into conventional wisdom: Local newspapers screwed up by giving away for free the content everyone used to pay to consume.

Conventional wisdom, yes. And untrue.

Correcting this fundamental error is about more than just debating the past. Because this mistaken assumption is driving the debate about new business models for news.

I want to explain why I think this mistaken assumption is causing people to ask the wrong question about the future of local news. And what I think the right questions are. I want to try to reframe the discussion about business models to focus on where true opportunity and solutions might be found for journalism entrepreneurs to pursue.

First, let me address the first half of the assumption about "newspapers that gave away content." This assumes that people once paid for journalism.

THE MYTH OF PAYING FOR JOURNALISM

Let's correct that right now: When it comes to local newspapers, people never paid for journalism.

Believing that they did represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what a local newspaper was, or is. Especially when it comes to the business of a local newspaper. And it's a tragic misreading that I hear repeated on all sides of the paid content debate, whether they're for or against charging for news online. (The equation is a bit different for national newspapers like the New York Times or USA Today. But I'll leave that for another time.)

Let's review the actual business of a local newspaper, at least as it used to be. Back in February, when I was attending a Knight Digital Media Center workshop at the University of California at Berkeley, we heard a presentation from Lauren Rich Fine, a former newspaper analyst for Merrill Lynch and a presenter at Kent State University.

Fine broke down the historic revenues of newspapers. Across the industry, the money people paid to subscribe accounted for, on average, about 20 percent of a newspaper's revenue. Classifieds, on the other hand, typically brought in 50 percent of the revenue, and 70 percent of profits on average, according to Fine.

So let's reflect on that: The consumer was only paying about one-fifth the cost of the product. But what were they getting for that money?

Again, the mistaken notion here is that the primary product of the newspaper is journalism. That's the conceit of journalists, but it's also the general misinterpretation by those seeking to re-invent news from the outside.

THE CONSUMER VIEW

Let's look at a newspaper not from the newsroom-centric view, which assumes the whole value is the journalism. Let's look at the newspaper from the eyes of the consumer.

From that view, a newspaper is a product that, at least at its peak, provided about 50 different services for people. It helped people figure out where to shop. It delivered a boatload of coupons every Sunday. It helped them plan their weekend. It entertained them with comics and puzzles. It let them know what was on the school lunch menu. And along the way, it also delivered journalism.

Anyone who has worked at a newspaper long enough will tell you that what provokes more outrage from readers than anything else is messing with the comics or puzzles.

Just this week, I was eating lunch with a chief executive who had been in Silicon Valley for 30 years. Toward the end of our lunch, he said he had read the print version of my newspaper for 30 years, and still does. But he was frustrated that we now run the puzzles on a different page every day. He's not alone. About two years ago, when my newspaper all but eliminated the features section, the outpouring of emails from readers were primarily expressing outrage that the puzzles and comics were being moved.

You can shake your head, but that's as important a part of the newspaper for many people as the journalism is. For their monthly bill, which only represented 20 percent of revenue, consumers were getting a product that did many things, only one of which was the journalism. Did journalism have a higher social value? Certainly. But it wasn't the core of the business. For the reader, an ad telling them about a sale or a new store might be just as important in their lives.

LOSING THE COMMUNITY MARKETPLACE

So if journalism isn't the business of a newspaper, what is?

Pull back the lens. At their peak, local newspapers did two things: They created community. And they provided the local marketplace for goods and services. These services were so profitable, that they subsidized the civic good of journalism.

The reason newspapers are in trouble today is because they have lost their dominant position on both of these fronts. Classifieds have evaporated, blowing a massive hole in newspaper revenue.

People know this, yet they somehow forget that this was a completely non-journalistic function.

When it came to community, the sum of news and information in a newspaper created a shared base of knowledge, set the conversations about civic life, and provided a bond that created a sense of place. Today, as newspapers have shrunk, and as the audience has splintered, the newspaper no longer serves as community hub.

Having lost all of these things, all that is left is the journalism. And on its own, we're discovering this is not something people will pay for.

GETTING BEYOND PAID CONTENT

So the solution that's carrying the day is to start charging for content. I don't favor this approach, but I think it's too late to stop the train. If paid content succeeds, local newspapers wouldn't be getting people to pay for journalism again. They'd be getting them to pay for the first time.

Once the paid content strategy comes and goes, it'll be time to look for other solutions. I don't believe, as some have written, that we've tried everything and should simply give up. In my view, there is still enormous opportunity to create business models that support local newsrooms if journalism entrepreneurs ask the right questions:

Let's stop asking how to get people to pay for content, because they never did.

Let's stop asking: How do we reinvent journalism? Opportunity abounds here. The new digital tools are allowing us to create deeper, richer journalism than ever. And more people than ever are reading my journalism. Journalism is doing fine.

Instead, newsrooms need to ask:

> How do we reinvent local community on the web?

> And how do we reinvent the local marketplace online?

By no means are these puzzles solved. I don't believe that Craigslist represents the last, best way people in a community will buy and sell things. Yelp, while growing in traffic, continues to have reputation issues with local merchants.

The discussion over paid content and tweaking the advertising model is too limited. Solve those two bigger challenges of community and the local marketplace, and you'll create a business that will support smart, multi-platform newsrooms. These newsrooms won't be dominant, as they were in the past. They'll exist as part of local news ecosystem.

But create community, help people succeed in business, and you'll find a way back to re-igniting the passion for a local news organization.

What Journalism Can Learn From Adult Entertainment

One more interesting article, i found on net....written by Andy Medici on poynter

Let's role-play for a second.

Imagine you are working in an industry that has been battered by the recent recession and rapid advances in technology. Instead of paying for teams of professionals, people are going online to find new content like yours or create their own. The Internet has opened the door to thousands of competitors, all offering content that appeals to just about any niche or taste.

Meanwhile, your legacy company is burdened with an outdated distribution system and is trying desperately to adjust to a new world in which having a local monopoly is not an option.

Sound familiar? Well if you have been working in the adult entertainment industry for the last few years, then this isn't really news.

In normal times, journalism and the adult entertainment industry would make strange bedfellows. After all, the first is tasked with upholding our democracy and the second is ... well, sometimes literally about strange bedfellows.

The two industries share many of the same problems, and a lot of the handwringing can easily be copy and pasted from one to the other. At XBIZ LA, an event offering seminars on the future of the adult entertainment industry, it's easy to see the anxiety.

Jeff Mullen, founder of adult studio X-Play and an adult-industry marketing expert, echoed a journalism industry refrain.

"We have one product to sell, yet we collectively give it away," Mullen said.

In a MarketResearch.com study titled "The Future of Online Adult Entertainment: Surging Demand, the Rise of Free Porn and the Emergence of New Business Models," the company laid out some of the key challenges threatening the industry.

Here are some key tidbits.

• 
  
  
  
  
  "Consumer consumption of adult content has shifted from physical media to the web, while online usage is changing rapidly as technological advancements allow the deployment of more advanced and interactive multimedia services."
• The wide range of content available for free will continue to have a negative impact on premium providers' ability to attract and retain fee-paying clients.

This all sounds so familiar. I think some people in the news media have debated this whole concept of "free content" versus "paid content."
Here, here, here, and the list goes on and on and on.

In a press release in January of 2009, Hustler founder Larry Flynt said that DVD sales and rentals had fallen more than 22 percent, as people have turned more to the Internet for content.

What contributes to the plummeting revenue? Part of the blame falls on the meteoric rise of free content. And just like the journalism industry, that content is coming in niche form, custom-made for the user.

Stephen Yagielowicz is both a writer for Adult Entertainment News Site XBIZ.com and a homegrown purveyor of adult content since 1993. He sees the growing amount of free content as a generational issue -- younger people just aren't willing to pay for what they can get for free.

He said there are still opportunities to sell content, either through mobile phones or by selling videos for a much lower price (think iTunes and its .99 cent price point). But he still thinks that paid and free can exist side by side as long as adult Web outlets begin to focus on marketing their content, building a loyalty base and offering new products in a variety of formats.

"The bottled water guys sell you water all day long even though you have a tap in the house," Yagielowicz said. "They find a way."

One adult entertainment company used the market downturn as a chance to reorient its business. Pink Visual saw traditional DVD sales plummet in 2004 by about 50 percent. That forced the company to revisit how it attracted customers, and it helped focus the company's attention on the Internet and mobile market.

Now more than 40 percent of Pink Visual's 800,000 daily unique visitors are coming in on mobile platforms, and Quentin Boyer, the director of public relations for the company, said that they try to adopt new technology as early as possible. He said they are "practically camped out on technology blogs" looking for the next mobile platform or tablet coming out on the market.

Pink Visual was one of the first adult entertainment companies on the iPad, taking advantage of its large screen to show its wares.

Boyer said that as readers become used to incredible amounts of content, they are less willing to pay for the content itself. He said that users are more willing to pay for formats that work better on their mobile phones or tablets.

"People are not so much paying for content as they are paying for convenience and ease of use," Boyer said.

He said that Pink Visual has rebounded over the last few years, and is now almost at its pre-2004 levels. He is not sure where Pink Visual will be next, but he has no doubt that as mobile technology evolves, the company's unique brand of content will evolve with it. The journalism industry should take a lesson from this playbook, and be a part of cutting edge technology, not racing to catch up.

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -3

CONTINUED....

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Where Journalism Fits 

This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists,  as I describe in my book “What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism.” We have been trained for many good reasons to shy away from it in the presentation of news. But we see our audience drawn to it. And we do not even have a way of discussing which uses of emotion are misleading or manipulative and which actually can help people understand their world. 

The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them. They explain, for example, why the immediate crowds out the important. Why bad news attracts attention more than good news does. They can show us how emotion interacts with the human brain’s inherent mental shortcuts to lead us systematically to erroneous conclusions. They can point us to the ways in which search algorithms interact with emotions and these mental shortcuts to mislead people about the relative importance of various pieces of information. They can even help us understand the way our ability and impulse to read other people’s minds draws us to a story and light up other secrets of how and why narrative works. 

It should be clear by now that the challenge for journalists from here forward is not only the steadfast adherence to the values of accuracy and independence and the social responsibility to provide a civic education but also the development of new ways of thinking and talking about how to advance the social mission of journalism in a radically and rapidly evolving environment. The answer is not to figure out how to transport 20th century news presentation into 21st century delivery mechanisms but rather to create a new rhetoric of news that can get through to the changed and changing news audience. 

To conclude where I began, the audience will determine the future of news. Serious journalists must understand to the very essence the minds that make up this audience in order to know how to persuade people to assimilate the significant and demand the accurate. Anything less is the neglect of our most important social responsibility. 
THE END

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -2

JUNE 15 POST CONTINUED....

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

Emotional Heat 

My struggle with this question led me to the science of how the brain processes information, especially the way emotion directs attention. Of course, it did not take the rise of modern neuroscience to prove that emotion holds an audience. Sophocles knew that when he wrote his drama of incest and violence, “Oedipus Rex.” So do the editors of supermarket tabloids. Count on fear and sex to attract the eye.

Evolution provides the reason: Our ancestors became our ancestors by being able to spot danger and the opportunity to mate. So it was inevitable that as competition for attention exploded with the revolutionary information technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, message senders raised the emotional volume. Serious journalists tended to decry this as infotainment or worse. Perhaps they never themselves quite lived up to the professional ideal of utter disinterest and detachment, but they did learn to draw back from raw emotional appeals.

The audience did not. This baffled many of us. How could people be taken in by screaming commentators (on everything from health care to basketball), by celebrity gossip, by reports characterized at best by truthiness rather than the rigors of verification? 

Here is where the implications of the rapidly developing science of the mind help. It turns out that certain kinds of cognitive challenges (challenges to our thinking) produce emotional arousal. And an emotionally aroused brain is drawn to things that are emotionally charged. 

Give normal humans a tricky anagram or a long division problem involving two numbers out to six decimal points, and they will begin to show emotional arousal—think of it as stress. Give them a strict time limit, and their level of arousal will rise. Throw new information at them (some of it useful, some irrelevant, some just wrong) while they are working on the problem, and their emotional temperature will go up even more. Then distract them (say by calling their names or having their smartphones signal that somebody is trying to reach them), and their arousal level will soar. 

If that sounds familiar, it is. All too familiar. Information overload, time pressure, and distraction characterize our era. The very nature of the information environment in which we all live creates emotional arousal. We are available every moment to everyone we know, and an enormous number of people we do not know. We continuously receive messages: messages of a particular sort—the kind that are directed specifically to us. They come from people who know us personally or from people or institutions that have learned something about what interests us. 

In effect, these ubiquitous messages call out our names. Consequently we live in a continuous state of interruption and distraction. Time pressure is enormous. Even after leaving the Tribune Company to write books, I discovered that people expected me to respond to e-mails within a couple of hours, if not a couple of minutes, and were offended if I did not. 

So not only has the explosion of competition among suppliers of information—news, advertising and entertainment—caused producers to increase the emotional temperature, the recipients of information have become more attracted to emotional heat. This helps explain why heavy news seekers turn to the intensity of Fox News or MSNBC and away from CNN. (It also explains why the once rather restrained National Geographic channel has so many shows about predator species that prey on humans—species that include Homo sapiens themselves.) 


CONT>>>

Harvard University Nieman reports (Summer 2010 Issue) -1

हार्वर्ड यूनिवर्सिटी नीमैन रिपोर्ट का समर 2010 इश्यू जारी हो चुका है। यह इश्यू केंद्रित है कि न्यूज में आगे क्या पर...इसमें तमाम तरह के लोगों ने कंट्रीब्यूट किया है। हालांकि यह रिपोर्ट मुख्य तौर पर अमेरिकन पत्रकारिता के परिप्रेक्ष्य में ही है लेकिन इससे हम अपने यहां की पत्रकारिता और उसमें टेक्नोलाजी व इकोनोमिक्स की वजह से चल रहे ट्रांजिशन को समझने और दृष्टि विकसित करने में मदद ले सकते हैं। मैंने अभी इस रिपोर्ट को सरसरी निगाह से देखा है और यहां पर इसका वह आलेख अंग्रेजी मूल में ही दे रहा हूं जो मूल बात को उठा रहा है। मैं जल्द ही इस रिपोर्ट का सार हिंदी में यहां पोस्ट करूंगा - रामू

Feeling the Heat: The Brain Holds Clues for Journalism

‘This rise in emotional intensity poses a real problem for serious journalists … . The sciences of the mind offer a lot of help if we are willing to learn from them.’

By Jack Fuller, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, was editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune and president of Tribune Publishing Company. His book, “What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism,” is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Here is the deepest and, to many serious journalists, most disturbing truth about the future of news: The audience will control it. They will get the kind of news they choose to get. Not the kind they say they want, but the kind they actually choose. 

To the extent that news needs to produce profits, the demand ultimately will shape the supply. But even if unlimited nonprofit funding for serious journalism were suddenly to appear, demand would still control. That is because, no matter what its business model might be, journalism will fail to deliver to the broad public the civic education our society requires unless it can persuade large numbers of people to pay attention to it. So the choice is not between giving people what they want or what they need. The challenge is to induce people to want what they need. 

How to do that with everything in constant motion? New technologies, new services, new competitors seem to arise every day. All this activity can mask a more important trend—the audience itself is changing rapidly. As a consequence, the disciplined, professional presentation of news perfected over the 20th century no longer commands the widespread respect it once did. The influence of undisciplined news voices grows. 

Journalists know all about responding to the next new thing. We leap like dalmatians at the sound of the fire bell. But to understand what is happening to the news audience today we need to get beyond the clang of the alarm. We have to get past the immediacy of each hot new idea and begin with something deeper and more durable. We need to understand what the transformation of our information environment has done at the most fundamental level to the way people take in news. (cont...)

It may change the economic dynamics of media

By RAMU

UK’s The Times is getting ready to make its online content paid. It is Rupert Murdoch’s move. He has been advocating for it since long time. He is dead against free for all.

Of course it is going to be a bold decision which may change the economic dynamics of media.

I don’t know whether he is taking a right decision but he is very passionate about newspaper business and very fond of taking big risks…

Rupert Murdoch on iPad and Steve Jobs

Content Is King! Rest In Peace, Content

by Paul Carr 
“Can Tim Armstrong make AOL king of content by 2010?” –Blog headline

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” – Macbeth

There’s something about the idea of “New York Internet Week” that I’ve always found inherently funny; like “Saudi Arabia Bring Your Daughter To Work Day”, or Greenland being called Greenland.

Ironically for a city that’s always been so adept at branding itself, New York has always struggled to articulate its place in the worldwide web, and Internet Week is the clearest manifestation of that identity crisis. Name an industry that the Internet is disrupting: newspapers, publishing, advertising, banking – and you’ll find its heart in Manhattan. Despite the best efforts of Mayor Bloomberg and, uh, Dennis Crowley to paint New York as the place to do business in Web 3.0, the fact is that billions of advertising and investment dollars continue to flood west, never to return. And yet New York, bless it, continues to try to stay relevant – for one week a year at least – to the industry that’s bleeding it dry.

read complete post http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/13/new-york-internet-weak/

NYT bans 'tweet', 'tweeting' and 'tweeted' from its pages in new style guide ruling

With paywalls and the row over Google's use of newspaper property, journalism seems to be waging a never-ending war with the internet. In the latest skirmish, the notebook-and-pen brigade took another swipe at the technophiles with the decision of the New York Times to ban the word "tweet" from its pages.

Phil Corbett, the standards editor and pedant-in-chief at the US paper, has decreed that "tweet" – the universally accepted verb-noun derived from Twitter – is to be barred, for the heinous crimes of colloquialism, neologism and jargon. Corbett's thinking is simple:

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favour established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.
One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don't; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to 'tweets' or 'tweeting'."

(Paleolithic? That's not a term in regular employment either.) His suggestion is to instead employ "deft, English alternatives", such as "write something on twitter" or "post a twitter update". While neatly suggesting that "tweet" is a word from some unknown language, this suggestion throws up a twillion problems of its own.

For starters, it's just simpler to use one word instead of four. How does "post something on Twitter" sit with the Strunk and White's rules of 1918 on succinct and concise sentence construction? Moreover, if your reader knows what Twitter is, they are almost certainly going to be familiar with tweets.

The New York Times uses Twitter, and with close to 2.5 million followers, it surely appreciates the power of its tweets – sorry – messages posted on Twitter – to their followers. It also uses Tweetdeck to post the majority of their updates. "Tweet"deck, eh?

Imagine the headache that re-tweets are going to cause for the paper's journalists too. Imagine "the post on Twitter regarding Obama's new haircut is estimated to have been posted again by followers more than 10,000 times."

The Guardian style guide ruling on the subject of Twitter is more up to date. "Twitter" and "Twittering" are both upper case, while the low case option is preferred when using "tweets" and "tweeting".

"Someday, 'tweet' may be as common as 'email'," notes Corbett. Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion".

Well let's hope, for Corbett's sake, that the former doesn't come true. The New York Times readers wouldn't have a clue what their writers were twittering on about.

COURTESY : guardian.co.uk

FIFA WORLD CUP : WHAT ARE WE GIVING TO OUR READERS

These are front pages of India's top english newspapers...

TOI gave a package on fifa world cup...but heading is very poor...will toi editors tell... what they want to communicate to their readers?

Same is the case with HT!

And Hindi newspapers are pathetic...

If one reads Hindustan's (India's number three newspaper readershipwise) masthead package, will find unconfirmed informations and filthy backgrounders and bogus design!

Bhaskar (India's number two newspaper) just put the info.

And number ONE Jagran....number one bogus meaningless headline!!!!

BIG QUESTION....

Is fifa world cup such a big news....editors were forced to sideline the big story of the day. Only Hindu and Bhaskar gave it proper weightage...

Even UK's newspapers did not give such enormous space on front page to fifa world cup....but our newspapers are so aggressive as if indians are still living in 20th century....