News

Penelope Muse Abernathy of the University of North Carolina has written a paper in anticipation of an upcoming conference on nonprofit media at Duke. Her piece, "A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?", considers four possible nonprofit models for the paper: (1) establishing an endowment (2) support from a foundation (3) purchase by a university, and (4) purchase by a so-called "angel" investor. You can read Abernathy's paper and the New Yorker commentary here…….Continue Reading Reviewing nonprofit models for the NYT

Many different proposals have emerged for how government can help the struggling journalism industry, but one UK blogger has a different perspective: "To draw on an old adage: Government should not only give the hungry industry some fish and ensure that the legislative environment is conducive for fishing – but it should also help the industry build the knowledge to devise new ways of fishing." He proposes that the government should be training journalists in new media, so that the industry can better adapt to the changes. Read the For the Media blog post. — April 28, 2009…….Continue Reading UK Proposal: Government training for journalists

The University of Washington is following the University of Minnesota's lead and forming a Facebook application, joining with Seattle-based company, NewsCloud. In:Site, the new application, will be run by 20 university students who hope to produce at least two original articles per week. The application will focus on interactivity and community-involvement. Read the article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. — April 28, 2009…….Continue Reading Second journalism Facebook application

Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online provides a breakdown of the proposed government intervention in preserving journalism, and adds his checklist of qualifications for any bureaucratic interference. He writes that any proposal, from tax breaks to relaxed antitrust regulations, must preserve editorial independence, promote innovation, and encourage news consumption. He emphasizes that the goal has to be to preserve journalism, not the media companies. You can read Mitchell's article on Poytner here…….Continue Reading A primer on proposals to help media

This week, the Financial Times began asking its readers to contribute to online editoral content. Readers will contribute to the Arena blog, which launches today. The first topic centers on higher taxes. This development is the latest in a trend of crowdsourcing. Earlier this week, the New York Times put out a similar call for contribution from its readers. You can read the article in UK's The Guardian here…….Continue Reading FT turns to its readers for editorial content

The Windsor Star explains some of the reasons that Canada's newspaper industry is performing better than its counterpart in the U.S. Among the reasons are higher readership, less competition for ad revenue and a less devastating economic downturn. This is not to say that Canadian newspapers are not struggling. You read the article in Canada's Windsor Star here…….Continue Reading Canadian newspapers fare better

The Internet has been praised for increasing the level of interaction between the producers of news and its consumers. Yet Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times questions just how valuable the online "Comments" section of articles really is. Using Slate/Washington Post columnist Ann Applebaum as an example, Heffernan notes that this journalist, who has been called one of the "world's most sophisticated thinkers," reguarly receives anti-Semitist, angry, superficial, and just plain irrelevant comments for her pieces. You can read the piece in the New York Times here…….Continue Reading Questioning the value of comments

The Attributor Corp has joined with a group of online publishers to form the Fair Syndication Consortium (FSC), a venture that hopes to gain advertising revenue from sites that reproduce their content. Attributor already works with the AP and the Financial Times to track their content, so that those organizations can request that their work be taken down if used inappropriately. Now, however, the FSC hopes to use that same technology to track the use of their content and persuade the reproducers to share in the advertising revenue. You can read the announcement on the Editors' Weblog here. UPDATE: The……Continue Reading An attempt to get aggregators to pay

Even as their newsrooms contract, local TV news stations are adding time to their broadcasts, totaling on average half an hour per day. In these tough economic times, the local news stations hope that by increasing their news hours, they will remain competitive and vibrant operations. Yet local news remains less profitable than in the past, and the vast majority of stations have had to consolidate and lay off workers. Read the Huffington Post story — April 27, 2009…….Continue Reading Local news adds to its newscast

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a plan that he believes may help newspapers generate more revenue for their content. Google's algorthims will start bringing users the news, adapted to their preferences, without the users even looking for it. Because the news will be personalized and highly targeted, the site can charge for premium ads alongside the stories. Problematically, the content producers will not receive a cut from this additional revenue, but Google says that this will still help the newspapers as they will receive more hits on their sites. You can read the Editors' Weblog Post here…….Continue Reading Google to offer more targeted news