Entries Tagged 'Media' ↓

My friend Craig Silverman has written a post with some great advice for freelance journalists trying to develop their career in difficult economic times: Freelancing the future. He came to this in response to a post by Adrian Monck, who has been making the case recently that journalism is not at fault for the decline in newspapers.

Monck is almost certainly right, and Craig’s advice is really good advice - not just for freelance journalists but for any independent consultant-type person trying to get things going. But it’s the business side of the news media business that has and continues to screw everything up, IMO. When the net came along, they said, “look, blogs are great, everyone wants more opinion and context” and went ahead and gutted their news reporting function in favour of more opinion, more columnists, more of what the blogosphere was doing very well from it’s inception.

The problem is - that was the exact opposite of the bet they should have made. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one - and no one gives a damn if it’s some “journalist” (whose publisher likely sold him/her out long ago) who has written the opinion piece. On any conceivable subject, I can go out into the blogs and find at least one if not a dozen writers with more experience, more context, and more knowledge about a subject than any journalist has.

What we need - and by “we” I mean society at large - is honest, exhaustive, factual reporting. Newspapers should have (and should be) increasing their reporting budgets and decreasing their spend on columnists and opinions. I do want more opinion and context - but the last place I want to go to get it is a newspaper.

The most recent member of the “our archives are more valuable open than closed” group among the traditional media is Sports Illustrated, which has opened the SI Vault. You can now read 54 years of Sports Illustrated history at your leisure.

Like many, I’m pretty skeptical about big network led efforts to bring their TV and other content online, but still kind of optimistic. So it was with interest that I read John Battelle’s post Hulu Is Up at Searchblog. His conclusion? “This is a big step.”

A response, in three screen captures:

Journalist Mark Glaser, host and editor of MediaShift, has published a fantastic post: Traditional Media Ready to Elevate the Conversation Online. It’s all about how the so-called mainstream media has been trying to adapt to a media environment in which discussion and audience commentary is ubiquitous. It turns out there is starting to be a bit of a consensus around best practices, though these are far from universal yet.

What PR People Should Know About Social Media at Like It Matters. Found via Patrick Tanguay.

is that the New York Times will stop charging for TimesSelect, offering the whole paper free online. They say the subscription program was a success, but that they noticed the potential of advertising growth to be greater than subscription growth (which is what most said two years ago, but whatever - better late than never). The key to this, of course, is that the Times still does reporting, unlike most regional or city newspapers that have largely abdicated this function to the wire services.