Hear what MyReporter.com is all about (4:44)
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this. Photo illustration by Rob Fisher
Vaughn Hagerty is not out to save newspapers.
As the Web development manager for the Star-News in Wilmington, Hagerty hasn’t spent his days proselytizing about the impending death of print or lamenting the vampirism of sites like Google.
What interests Hagerty are good ideas. And he thinks he’s got one.
In mid May, the staff at the Star-News launched MyReporter.com, a site that solicits questions from regular readers and answers them using traditional reporting.
The underlying concept, Hagerty says, is a simple one.
“I think all newspapers are trying to find our place in this new world. ‘What are the jobs that we’re doing?’ is sort of a central theme,” Hagerty said. “One of the things that came up was this help desk concept, like how could we provide this sort of information.”
That initial concept, which stemmed from a formal conversation among the newsroom staff, led to a Q&A format facilitated not by experts, but by journalists whose task it is to answer the question as completely as they would in a traditional news story. read more…
As a follow up to Tuesday’s post, I contacted John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record, to get his thoughts on the fact that 75 percent of the N.C. Press Association’s newsroom leaders are at least thinking about charging for online content.
Robinson has fully embraced social media. He sports about 800 followers on Twitter and frequently uses the microblogging service to create a dialogue with his community as well as fellow journalists. I figured that makes his opinions particularly salient, since I feel like its social media that will be impacted by a news organization’s decision to placed their content behind a pay wall.
Robinson agreed to answer a few questions via e-mail about his perception of pay walls and the future of online content for the News & Record. read more…
Pay walls will solve all our problems!
The North Carolina Press Association just released the results of its May survey on charging for online content. Although the response rate was 86, the group was mostly made up of publishers, editors and general managers.
It seems the talk of shoring up pay walls to keep the Internet Huns at bay is beginning to influence some of the state’s newsroom leaders. More than 75 percent say they’re at least thinking about charging for their news content online. read more…
Following talk of the clandestine Chicago meeting of the nation’s most powerful newspaper editors, the folks over a the Nieman Journalism Lab got ahold of the presentation from Steve Brill on a new venture called Journalism Online.
In short, it would allow member organizations to charge for their online content through a single system, meaning you won’t have to whip out your credit card to pay for an L.A. Times article and go through the same steps to read a N.Y. Times article 5 minutes later.
Ingenious, even down to the revolutionary name.
Exhausted sarcasm aside, they’re hoping to keep 88 percent of their page views and completely avoid doing anything revolutionary with their content — like make it better, for instance.
I thought it would be interesting to plug the text of the presentation into word cloud generator Wordle (absent a few of the scenario slides). The result is above.
Granted, this presentation was directly pitched to news businessmen. But I think it’s rather telling that words like “publishers” and “revenue” loom so much larger than “readers.” I also like how “staffed” and “invest” are almost nonexistent.
It’s a silly exercise, I know, but interesting nonetheless.
There are, however, a few words and phrases that make me very uncomfortable and don’t appear in the word cloud.
- “we will restore the value proposition of the print medium by eliminating the fully free online alternative” (creating artificial value by choking alternatives?)
- “Restoring a Balance of Power” (seriously?)
- “Think premium CPMs and focusing on most engaged readers” (what happens to the least engaged readers?)
- “Negotiating power improves with intermediaries through the combination of multiple publishers” (antitrust anyone?)
Something tells me this might be one rocky summer.
Photo by Ali A under Creative Commons license
I’m going to follow up Wednesday’s gushing over Greensboro News & Record Editor John Robinson with a little more gushing.
The News & Record was one of the few papers in the country that decided not run Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court on the front page.
That was for a few reasons. First, the story broke as most people were fishing their papers out of the puddles in their front lawns Tuesday (seriously, it was rainy that day). By the time the N&R staff began, it was old news. Second, the staff had no unique angle — Robinson’s conclusion was that his paper had nothing to add.
That decision was an admirable one — a refusal to replicate what’s being said over and over again in most papers and cable news channels and a conscious choice to use that valuable real estate for unique local stories no one else had.
But recognizing the controversy, Robinson asked via Twitter whether his decision was the right one, then published the resulting conversation. read more…
My name is Tyler Dukes. I'm a journalist from Raleigh, N.C., who gets way too excited about science, technology, beer and news. Not necessarily in that order.
