Add greed to media management stupidity

I've felt for quite a while that a big part of media money problems stems from management stupidity. It wasn't the rank and file that sat back as their viewer/reader base dwindled. It wasn't the copyeditors and reporters who first put news online free. It wasn't the office secretaries who cut the size and quality of news products to the bone.

But it was the rank and file, the copyeditors and reporters and office secretaries who were laid off by the thousands, watched their pay drop and futures mortgaged.

Now comes word that Gannett is facing all staff to take unpaid furlough weeks this year -- but executive bonuses make up for their unpaid furlough weeks. Add greed to stupidity. Gannett, of course, is not alone. How much was that retention bonus Journal Communications paid its CEO a couple of years ago after watching its stock lose 75% of its value?

Strike that tweet!

Showing that even unions (that most despised word in our governor's vocabulary) can adapt to new media, Eric Sass is reporting today that the News Media Guild is urging Associated Press reporters to stop tweeting or posting on Facebook in protest of lack of progress in getting a new contract.

They can keep up social contact, but not use new media to promote their AP stories. It's an interesting concept, and one that bears watching.

New v. Old Media battle continues. Great fun

Whooo boy! I think we're really into one of those great media feuds with both sides hardening their positions and no end in sight. It's the seemingly-neverending new media versus old media debate but the battlelines are growing sharper.

Today's version comes from John McQuaid writing in the Huffington Post. He sums up the flap started by Jeff Bercovici writing about the Internet reports of the Quran burning, and he extends the discussion into the whole role of aggragators -- like Huffington Post.

What may be more fun, even is somewhat less enlightening, is a listing in New York magazine's online site of the Twitter battle between Bercovici and two other writers he's attacked: Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen. (Note: profanity used here.)

Frankly, Bercovici's central premise attributing the report to a student without direction was wrong. The student posted at the request of an old media news agency on that agency with, presumably, editing. But the point about crowdsourcing and ethical considerations is worth making. Anybody can start a blog or a website. It can operate without any ethical consideration at all. This has always been true in old media (go to a bookstore and look at the "current affairs" section or watch Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann or the Sunday morning political shows for totally unsupported, outrageous if not fully false claims), but the Internet allows faster and wider consumption of that drek, so the current discussion is worth following.

When journalism kills

How do we reconcile ethics and journalism 2.0?

Writing in Forbes, Jeff Bercovici discussed how a story filed by a student ended up basically costing more than 30 people their lives. The story recounted the burning of a Quran by an insensitive pastor in Florida.

Bercovici's report prompted some excellent comments (very nice to read thoughtful comments instead of the stupidity associated with most of those showing up in Wisconsin newspapers about the political problems) as he talked about how the story was ignored by "legacy newspapers" before being run by a foreign news agency. It's the story of how the traditional ethics and checks and balances seem lost in this era of "empowered citizen bloggers and crowdsourced reporting."

Sometimes progress hurts -- and journalism can kill.

USA Today may pay bonuses for page views

USA Today reportedly will pay staffers bonuses for page views. It was bound to happen.

Newsroom employees rose last year, but minority numbers fell

Newsroom employees rose last year (only a tiny amount), halting a three-year decline, according to the American Society of News Editors. But minority staffers continued to lose numbers. "The number of professional journalists rose from an estimated 41,500 in 2009 to 41,600 in 2010," the group reported. Minority journalists declined from 5,500 to 5,300.

OK, it's not banner-headline great news, but it is important good news, except for the minority numbers. Those who want newspaper jobs can find them (I'm seeing that with MU journalism grads), but they have to hunt. In good news for minority journalism students, ASNE reported "Minorities represented 19 percent of the journalists hired for their first full-time newsroom job, up from 16 percent last year."

Ad Age looks at changes in AOL content

The future in journalism remains as murky as ever with changes continuing. Advertising Age takes a look at changes in freelancing opportunities at AOL with Arianna Huffington taking change and making big changes. That future might be less murky with a better-written story, but you get the idea of what's happening from this piece.

Ad Age says when everything is done: "The result will be content from two different classes of contributors: full-time employees and unpaid bloggers, in addition to the content AOL regularly aggregates from other sources, such as traditional newspapers."

Sounds a lot like the Huffington Post.

Newspaper chain reworking itself

Meanwhile the owner of 28 newspapers, including the Orange County Register, is reworking itself, building around an iPad link. It's got some innovative advertising ideas.

Good news for news magazines

Good news from the news magazine front. Advertising is growing, the New York Times reports. All of them gained except for Newsweek, which is undergoing a major "reinvention" (the Times' description) under Tina Brown, and is still finding its way.

But pages are up three or four percent at virtually all the other news magazines. And it was the same for most consumer magazines, Eric Sass reports.

Data from tweets at the Daily intriguing

I still don't know how I feel about the wealth of data being spawned by following tweets from the Daily's iPad app. On the one hand, I continue to be troubled by the fact that someone out there is counting everything I do online. On the other, the data is fascinating. Privacy versus data. It's a hard choice we are all going to be making, I guess.

Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Labs reports today on more data (he's got a link to an earlier analysis). Among the more interesting -- not surprising but interesting -- results is a time-of-day study that shows iPad use is similar to old newspaper use, heavy in the morning and late afternoon. There's a lot more in Benton's report.

What digital companies make money?

What digital companies are actually making money? It's a subject that many seem to dodge, but paidcontent.org has come up with its list of the 50 most profitable digital companies. Names at the top are no surprises -- Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix -- but the list contains some surprises, not only some companies you've never thought of doing well, but others doing not so well. It's worth a look.

New media affects college students' eating habits

College students. New media. Food.

Those are words that go together well. OK, maybe not. A survey showed that new media has totally changed the relationship between college students and food. On the good side, social media is being used to get tips, recipes and advice on food choices. On the bad, it's really affecting how students eat. And, yes, they are a lot less likely to be social while eating than in the past.