Knight Foundation | Common Sense Journalism
Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at Knight, didn't hold back in his criticism of the state of journalism education in a speech last week. Although he praised a handful of schools that have revamped their programs to help chart the future of news, he spent a lot of time criticizing "the middle of the bell curve."
With all due respect, journalism and communication education plays at least second chair, and sometimes first chair, in the symphony of slowness. What I mean is the reaction time to new things. Consider this: On one side of campus, engineers are inventing the Internet, browsers and search engines. But the news industry is slow to respond. Then public radio slower still. Foundations even slower. Government slower yet again. Then comes the journalism and communication schools, on the other side of campus from the engineers. And finally, public television.
Who suffers from the symphony of slowness? Students and society.
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CNBC | Forbes
Washington Post Co. chairman Don Graham, who sits on Facebook's board of directors, has added about $31 million to his fortune of $500 million with Friday's IPO. That counts the 770,000 shares of restricted stock he owns outright as of May 1, as reported by Forbes' Jeff Bercovici. When the rest of his shares vest in April 2013, Graham will have 1 million shares; the CNBC live tracker showed the total take-home value of those shares peaking at $41 million Friday then falling to $38,231,800 as the market closed.
Except he's not going to take it home. He told Bercovici:
I won’t sell any Facebook shares as long as I’m on the board. When I leave, all my Facebook shares will be donated to two or three DC education-related charities I’ve supported over the years. Thus, a small portion of Facebook’s success will be shared with low income students in Washington.
It's Jeopardy's "Power Players" week, and J! Archive (which is the type of site that will make you believe in the Internet all over again) has clever interactive recaps of Monday through Wednesday's shows. Fox News anchor Chris Wallace did not win any money for answers in the "Fair and Balanced" category Wednesday night, but he did win for answers in The New York Times' arts category. CNN's Lizzie O'Leary cleaned up in the "Act like a Journalist" category. Chris Matthews correctly identified Dean Acheson by his old cabinet job on Monday, for instance, which sounds impressive until you learn that Robert Gibbs apparently knew Hazel O'Leary's old job off the top of his head. These D.C. people, I tell you! Below, some of the best questions in those first three days, plus who answered them.
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CNN | GigaOm | BuzzFeed | The Atlantic
Facebook's IPO just created a lot of billionaires. Probably not that many of them work in journalism. But journalists, Kristie Lu Stout argues, create part of Facebook's value. "Journalists have been flocking to Facebook to create content and connections on a platform that the company can use for all time," she writes. "Not only that, we're feeding an advertising rival that's only going to get bigger after Friday's IPO."
Facebook's an advertising rival because it's really a media company, Mathew Ingram writes: "Like Twitter, the content within Facebook may be generated entirely by users, but the business model is all about advertising, just like any other media entity."
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This Land Press | The Oklahoman
Scott Cooper, the treasurer-secretary for the Society for Professional Journalists' Oklahoma chapter and director of its Region 8, resigned Wednesday after an inquiry into $40,000 that was missing from the organization's checking account. Holly Wall says emails obtained by This Land Press "reveal that Cooper admitted to withdrawing $18,650 from the organization’s bank account for personal use":
In a resignation letter sent to the board of directors, Cooper said he took money by writing checks—about three dozen, he estimated, varying in amounts from $100 to $2,000—from the chapter’s bank account to himself. He used the money to either gamble at the casino or to cover personal expenses incurred because of gambling.
“There aren't a lot of buyers in the field whose checks will clear. ... Any time we can add properties we like, to management we like, at a price we like, we're ready to go.”
These purchases are not sentimental, said Wally Weitz.
“When it comes to Media General, it's going to be all business,” Weitz said. “As a Berkshire shareholder, I have to assume that he knows more about investing in newspapers than anybody else, and he's had decades of recognition that the business has changed and it's not what it used to be. I would trust him to have made a really good deal.
“Sometimes he does things and you don't figure out why until later.”
Buffett said the dailies are "all doing OK, to varying degrees, and I think they'll do even better when we get our people in there. They're keepers.”
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DigiCareers | eMarketer
A new survey found that more than half of media professionals polled immediately leave a website after encountering a paywall. One-quarter said they were unlikely to return to the site, and 63 percent said that they expect to see no ads after crossing over a paywall.
More than 200 people, whom DigiCareers describes as new media professionals, were surveyed between April 16 and April 23, 2012; the margin of error is 6.9 percent with a confidence level of 95 percent.
The question "What is a reporter?" was written on the white board in the front of the room. Most seemed already to have the answer.
First up on the agenda: a bit of review. Journalism teachers Carol Blair and Cynthia Vickers began by reinforcing an earlier lesson. In unison, as if they were reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, the students and teachers said: "A good journalist uses their brain, eyes, ears, nose and mouth to ask the five W's: who, what, when, where and why."
Los Angeles Times
In an unusual arrangement between a foundation and a for-profit company, the Los Angeles Times announced today that it is receiving a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation with the express purpose of widening its coverage in several areas. James Rainey reports:
A Ford Foundation spokesman said that, as media organizations face challenges funding reporting through advertising and traditional revenue streams, “we and many other funders are experimenting with new approaches to preserve and advance high-quality journalism.”
The Times will use the money to hire -- hire! -- journalists to: "focus on the Vietnamese, Korean and other immigrant communities, the California prison system, the border region and Brazil," Rainey writes. (more...)
Reached by phone, Flock mostly referred me to her tweet announcing her new job. She said the social issues piece would mean writing about race, gender and immigration.
Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton weighed in on Flock's departure in April, saying the paper had failed her. He wrote that he had spoken to other bloggers there.
They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.
Photo editors will curate the best photography from around the Web and point out worthwhile photo exhibits and books.
Newsweek has added another Tumblr to its collection with Picture Dept., a photo blog that provides a second stage for work published in Newsweek and on The Daily Beast and showcases worthwhile photography around the Web.
Images are of course a big part of Picture Dept., but so are posts about photo exhibits and photo books. "We created this Tumblr to participate in the photo community," said Cara Phillips, a photo editor for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. It's meant to be a single destination "where we can share what we think is great out there and what people should be looking at."
Newsweek has a long history with Tumblr (well, old if you consider that the latter's only five years old). Picture Dept. joins a few siblings in the Newsweek/Daily Beast family of Tumblrs:
The original Newsweek Tumblr, described as "Media, pop culture, news, trends, photos, rants + things we like"
Newsweek Archivist, which showcases pages, ads and stories from old issues
Picture Dept. strikes me as a bit of a hybrid between a typical Tumblr and a destination site. Editors will take part in the sharing and reblogging that is core to the Tumblr experience, and of course its posts appear on its followers' dashboards.
But it also has a basic, tag-based navigation that encourages browsing, even by people who still don't quite understand what Tumblr is for: "Found" (posts that point to content found elsewhere on the Web), "Features" (collections of images, presented in slide shows) and "Recommended."
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Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway bought most of Media General's newspapers Thursday, thinks paywalls are one of the few defenses newspapers have against the economic forces that are battering them. In an interview on CNBC in February, Buffett said, "It's expensive to turn out a paper. You start with trees up in Canada and you end up with a kid throwing it."
Newspapers "have been giving away their product at the same time they're selling it," he said, "and that is not a great business model. When they put papers up on the Internet and you get free, you're competing with yourself. And throughout the industry you're seeing a reaction to that problem and an answer to it. ... You shouldn't be giving away a product you're trying to sell."
