When people were asked where they found out about news stories in a new Pew Research Center project, their answer was old media, predominantly newspapers. This is the headline table:

There are a number of potential flaws in this research (self-reporting, the selection of the stories monitored, the lack of distinction between news organisations’ online and offline presence, vested interests of the research organisation), but the gist of the results can’t be ignored. Even if these potential flaws meant new media was under-represented by 500%, it would still lag way behind print. People might find out about breaking stories online, but when they want more information, they don’t do a twitter search or find a relevant blog, they go to the old, trusted sources.

This might be expected to upset or disquiet a new media evangelist like myself. But it doesn’t. I am unsurprised by the figures. To me, it’s obvious:

• Online news is largely unfunded or underfunded or makes use of the resources put into creating offline products.
• Online is very good for niche topics that you won’t find in printed publications – badgers, anyone? Less good for generalist news, outside the online offerings provided by major news organisations as an adjunct to the main product.
• Online journalists don’t get the same access to sources or resources that established old media hacks do.

For most people, twitter and blog feeds, etc are a filter for news information – they point me towards interesting or important stories so I don’t have to do the heavy-lifting of reading all the stuff that isn’t relevant to me to find the nugget that is. That’s really valuable, but a different kind of value to that created by news organisations, a value that we’re still very cautious about putting a price on (hence the lack of investment, etc). Remember when that plane crashed into the Hudson river? And everyone marvelled at how the guy on an impromptu rescue ferry twitpiced his arrival on the scene? But, even if a re-tweet of that tweet was how you learned of the accident, what did you do then to find out more? I’m guessing here, but I don’t think it was a Google Blog Search.

picture credit: DRB62

I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers — readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs.

[ABC — the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership ‘charts’ for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe’s work in the online world, but their cost means they’re only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site’s readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.]

While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution.

And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals — they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users.

I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS — they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think).

All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future.

I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007.

Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication.

What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers.

Do join us.

My staff writer at NMK — Tim Hoang — works for the PR company, Rainier, as well. That’s always something we’ve made very clear. I was (and remain I’ve calmed down now — and DW was very charming.) absolutely furious to learn that he has been banned from using the Response Source service today on account of his PR background.

For those who don’t know, Response Source allows journalists to poll PR agencies for help — “do you know any experts on mobile apps?”, “got any case studies on businesses making successful use of MySpace?”; that sort of thing, in our case.

One of our key anxieties in the initial decision to employ Tim — who is a paid & taxed employee of the University of Westminster in this role — was making sure that his PR job would not infringe on his duties as a reporter for NMK. It’s an issue we’ve discussed and thought about for a long time, believe me. There are clearly opportunities for abuse, but they’re ones that Tim and I are very well-aware of and perfectly able to execute professional judgement over. Of the dozens of sources he’s used over the last two months, two were Rainier clients — to add differentiation and substance to stories, when he couldn’t find other people keen to comment. (Ironically, getting more of these other voices was one of the reasons he used Response Source). I agonised about both of them for a little while — I edit all his stories — but concluded that the extra comment had justifiable merit. In both cases, Tim informed me freely of the connection; we were transparent about the connection in the stories; and I approved it. After all, I have very little compunction about using people I’ve met in previous roles as sources: that’s what you do as a reporter.

The reason for the ban isn’t known to me in full and was not disclosed, but RS has apparently perceived a conflict of interests, in response to complaints from some other PR agency(ies).

How exactly would this work? Tim polls other PR agencies for input into a story, and that would be a problem for them for what reason? Do they think that he wouldn’t include input from competitors? So why ask the question in the first place? That he would sneak questions like ‘fancy a new agency?’ into his interviews? I think the yellow-pages might be a better source.

One more thing annoys me about this. I am the editor and publisher of NMK. Why didn’t anyone take whatever concerns they have to me, rather than a third-party? Or to my boss, the director of NMK?

F**king infantile. I will not use Response Source again while this situation continues. I have forwarded this info@dwpub.com — if anyone has a better contact, let me know.

Me (to attendees from the Times and the BBC): You don’t link out to other people’s sites.

Times chap: Yes, we do, all the time.

BBC women: Yes, we do, all the time.

Me: Oh, okay…

Me (8 hours later at home): how do you explain this and this, then? (These are the top stories on the technology sections of their sites right now. Between the two of them, they manage to link to two sites. Both of them corporate websites. I don’t find any links to any blogs or CJ sites on any tech news stories right now).

Meh.

I’ve also learned the marvellous expression ‘Hammersmithing’. Say you’ve got two photos of the same two people, taken moments after each other. In the first, the first guy has his eyes closed. In the second, the other guy is blinking. What do you do? Neither picture is usable as it is. The editor might ask you to ‘Hammersmith’ the two shots — which means take the open-eyed head from one photo and stick it on the neck of the closed-eye portrait in the other shot. End result — usable photo with everyone’s eyes open.

Why’s it called ‘Hammersmithing’? Because the first organ transplant operations were conducted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I didn’t know and I thought it was really cute.

‘Hammersmithing’ was robustly defended as basically the same as editing. It’s one of the things news media do to help create stories that are worth something. No-one wants pictures of people with their eyes closed, neither reader nor publisher. The time and energy that goes into retouching photos is one of the things we pay for when we stump up the cash for a quality paper or broadcaster.

The very existence of the term and admission that it’s common practice resulted in gasps of shock in some quarters. But not here.

The ongoing ‘regaining trust in media’ agenda, as various mainstream channels are found to have falsified all sorts of things, goes too far a lot of the time. We need our stories crafted into edible chunks. That’s called editing. Imagine the cookery show where you have to wait 90 minutes before Nigella can pull out her perfect roast and serve it to her perfect friends. The showdancing competition where you wait 20 minutes for set changes between the acts. The press news story that interviews every possible person with any interest in the story whatsoever. A little leger de main is part of what we pay newspaper and broadcast people to do. It makes their stuff more entertaining and consumable. They filter the news so we don’t have to, because filtering is a full-time job and more. It’s only when stories are falsified or deliberately slanted, or when people are conned out of their voting cash, that anyone should become concerned.

First a round-up:

Social media press releases are designed to give journalists and bloggers the elements of a release in a mix-and-match format. You get the key facts, a selection of quotes and pictures and contact details. The release itself acts a little like a blog post, with its own feed, comments and trackbacks.

It’s generally felt to be a good thing because (a) EVERYBODY hates traditional press releases; (b) email, post and fax are all broken and © their format is inappropriate to the online, interactive news environment that has developed over the last couple of years.

Steve Rubel — announces StoryCrafter and the idea behind it. He says: “Most importantly, every press release gets feeds, tags, del.icio.us/digg buttons, trackbacks and comments”.

Edelman — publishes its press release about the product using the StoryCrafter service itself as the vehicle.

PRSquared — notes that the product is for Edelman clients only, which he finds disappointing. Also that StoryCrafter isn’t a million miles away from the (currently free) PRX Builder or indeed the Shift Communications template. [Comments I’ve seen elsewhere have included the words ‘blatant rip-off’.]

The Bivings Report — hopes this won’t lead to floods of haphazard releases and wonders why companies don’t just stick their press releases on their own site.

Tony Hung — hopes companies don’t think this is some sort of magic bullet for getting attention from the social web and is particularly concerned about the ‘digg’ button which rather encourages companies to spam digg.

From my own perspective, there are pros and cons. First of all, when I get a traditional press release, it’s the same as reading any other news item. It needs to grab my attention. I get about 20 a day. Most of them get marked ‘read’ and forgotten, even though I didn’t read beyond the first paragraph. I’ll pay attention if either (a) the item fits in with something I’m already writing about or planning to write about, or (b) it tells a compelling story in itself which I want to pass on. The ones I like, I put a flag on and come back and try to find it when it’s time to put the news together. It’s not a great system from anyone’s perspective: there are constant interruptions, messages go unread, get lost, cause me hassle.

So there are some great positives here in this approach. For example, one difficulty with the traditional press release is that the facts are normally wrapped up in a bunch of hyperbole about some ‘unique, world-leading and innovative product/service’. I have to strip out all that guff to work with the story (I’ll also attempt to get some more information — I’m not that lazy). This format works the other way round. They give me the facts, and I put the meat on it.

I also like it that the template shows companies what ingredients journalists are going to ask for — you need the key facts and links to more; you need a selection of pictures, ideally at different resolutions; you want quotations, and not just from the CEO saying how wonderful it all is.

Lastly, I’m really into the idea of subscribing to RSS feeds instead of having releases pushed at me. If I could reliably set up a Google Alert Feed (or similar) on the keywords ‘education IT release UK’ I could consign most email releases to the spam bin. Plus, they’d be a lot less likely to be lost in my inbox somewhere come press week.

However, the wrapping around the story is not always a bad thing. When it’s done right and the release’s writers have thought through why you and your readers would be interested, it helps journalists to see the news angle. ‘X releases new widget’ is not news. Click — delete. ‘New Widget Could Reverse Global Warming’ might be. Click — flag. Since I get around thirty times as many releases as I can actually write about, it’s obviously the ones that stand out as best fitting my news agenda that get through.

That shows a potential problem with the StoryCrafter format. If you send me a bag of flour, butter, onions and beef chunks, and tell me that I can make whatever I like with it, then I might get stuck if I haven’t got a recipe, and end up chucking the whole lot in the bin. If I’m busy, I might have preferred it if you sent me a steak pie ready for me to stick in the oven. Sure, there’s lots of times when I’ll make my own, but who knows, you might have a better recipe than me, or a great idea for a different dish I could make with those things.

Two last thoughts.. sorry this is a bit random…

Journalists and publications are competitive. I don’t want the same ingredients as my competitor. I want some special herbs and spices that will make my story better than theirs. In other words, just as the traditional press release doesn’t give journalists everything they need, nor does the social media version.

Very lastly. The submit to del.icio.us and digg buttons in the Edelman service don’t seem like a good idea. If you’re saying these new-style releases are some of the ingredients of a news story, why are you also treating it as though it’s a finished piece? Press releases aren’t the same as news pieces, though they may share many elements. And as Tony says in his comments (linked above), it smells strongly of spam when such releases are put onto these systems. But it also points to another issue. There’s no obvious way to find the releases in the first place. The problem with it being a proprietary solution rather than a centralised co-operative venture called prdel.icio.us or something is that if you deal with a 100 different agencies, each with their own service and a different feed, finding these releases is going to be as random and inefficient as the bad old days.

It emerges, however, that actually it’s not digg that is directly responsible, that’s just a trendy hook for the story. It’s being on the Internet as opposed to a (paper) newspaper. Statistics packages can provide some pretty harsh feedback for news writers that you’d never get for filing unpopular stories back in olden times. They can also supply golden information on the types of story that ‘work’. But does this ability to supply stuff people actually want to read mean that journalists aren’t doing their duty by covering the unpopular truth that no-one wants to hear?

The job of a journalist is to lobby and report stories that he or she covers, or better yet, uncovers. In this way, the story is forced upon readers. At a newspaper that’s more easily done because an editor can’t point directly to a story’s ranking and say, “Look son, no one wants to read about that. Go cover something else.” But now he or she can.

This ability to judge popularity is normally viewed as a good thing, of course. If your readership’s engagement with stories can be measured then you can find out what your audience wants and do more of it. You can discover that nobody likes this or that topic and drop it.

But does this threaten to put a stop to investigative journalism that doesn’t suit a hedonistic, irresponsible public, as Kostigen says? Well, top of digg right now is a story about a man who was tasered, clubbed and committed by the police as a result of his epilepsy. In fact, pretty much all the top ‘world and business’ stories at the moment are about political scandals, anti-war, and anti-establishment news stories. If you use digg as the barometer of what the public really wants, then the front page of MarketWatch might look a bit different.

Once upon a time, television was full of national moments: mass audiences of 10 million or more tuning in and wanting to follow through the next day. But now that audience — fragmented across hundreds of channels — has virtually ceased to exist. Most of the time, any review of any show can only be valuable to a relatively small percentage of readers. Soaps? An exception, perhaps: you can catch up with them in the Saturday supplements. But through-the-week reviews have lost their relevance, just like television’s dominance of mass entertainment. (Goodnight ITV!) Use the space for more listings and previews, then, if you must. But recognise that the world has moved on.

I trust the bearing of this on the topic of this blog is pretty clear, even though I’ve never commented on broadcast TV. The role of ‘official opinion former’ seems, at least for the time being, to be something of an anachronism as almost every member of the audience is able to create a platform for their own opinions and to challenge those of others. Despite the fact that’s it’s a disgraceful Tory rag, the Daily Mail has actually done more than many traditional media owners in breaking down barriers between journalists and audience. Already, readers can comment on any story, even the front page headlines. Their recognition of a new reality when it comes to op/ed — that I and other readers feel as qualified to dive into the discussion as a seasoned hack. Editors become moderators and talent scouts as that discussion evolves.

Earlier this month, Jeff Jarvis noted that Guardian Online has taken similar steps with its arts and entertainment coverage, throwing its columnists into a conversation with other critics — the former audience. (More: another paper bins its critics)

a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new technology as on the way people are beginning to use existing technology…

Quite a reasonable way to begin to describe these new sites and services, I would say. A certain degree of vagueness is almost inevitable given the breadth of quite different services that are described with the 2.0 label.

There’s also a certain amount of conventional wisdom in place, I felt. The idea, for example, that because certain properties have raised a lot of money then we are definitely in bubble 2.0 conditions. The ‘huge amounts of money’ ‘thrown at’ web startups nowadays are often fairly small compared to the hundreds of millions raised for dotcoms in the late nineties:

From the business point of view, the defining feature of this new goldrush is that established companies are throwing huge amounts of money at upstarts who have three things in common: they have grown from nowhere with astonishing speed; they have no revenue stream to speak of; and most of their content is provided by their users.

He goes on to divide this new wave into two rough categories. There are collective sites — such as digg and Wikipedia — and personal sites, focusing on ‘me media’, such as MySpace, del.icio.us and flickr. He allows that there is a lot of blurring between the two. Flickr, for example, is not just a gallery of your photos, but of everybody else’s. The distinction is reasonably useful, though, and allows for an excellent gag:

One way of putting it is to say that collective sites are useful (except when they’re not) and personal sites are interesting (except when they’re not).

The piece continues to describe the ‘800-pound gorilla’ that is MySpace. I got the feeling that Lanchester fundamentally dislikes MySpace and other social networks, though its size means that it’s certainly a subject of some awe: “if it were a country it would be the 10th biggest in the world, just behind Mexico”.

The piece ends on a melancholy note. For Lanchester, the social networking phenomenon is symptomatic of loneliness rather than the celebration of connection that others might see:

Sit someone at a computer screen and let it sink in that they are fully, definitively alone; then watch what happens. They will reach out for other people; but only part of the way. They will have “friends”, which are not the same thing as friends, and a lively online life, which is not the same thing as a social life; they will feel more connected, but they will be just as alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is alone. Everybody sitting at a computer screen is at the centre of the world. Everybody sitting at a computer screen, increasingly, wants everything to be all about them.

If you’ve got the morning off, check out the interviews and profiles with some key players: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Craig Newmark & Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), David Sifry (Technorati), Caterina Fake & Stuart Butterfield (flickr), Evan Williams (Blogger/Odeo), Joshua Schacter (del.icio.us), Tariq Krim (Netvibes), Martin Stiksel (last.fm), Kevin Rose (digg), Sam Schillace (Writely) and Michael and Xochi Birch (bebo).

I think these stories are largely based on tenets gleaned from wishful thinking and accepted wisdom, plumped up with an anecdote or two:

(a) big, successful things are bound to fail sooner or later;

(b) teens are so fickle, always looking for the next big thing.

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month. […]

Right, so setting up your MySpace profile is quite time-consuming. Maintaining it is not.

“They’re not loyal,” Ben Bajarin, a market analyst for Creative Strategies Inc., said of the youth demographic. Young audiences search for innovative and new features. They’re constantly looking for new ways to communicate and share content they find or create, and because of that group mentality, friends shift from service to service in blocs.

Not exactly scientific, eh? nor is the remaining ‘evidence’. Personally, I think a lot of journalists and media analysts are the ones always looking for the next big thing. Valleywag seems to agree.

Madeline Dell’Aria, another high school junior, has fallen in and out of love with a number of sites. In middle school she started avidly blogging on Xanga. Last year, after most of her friends abandoned Xanga and migrated to MySpace, she followed. “No one was using Xanga anymore,” she said.

Initially, MySpace drew her in, and she spent lots of time looking at her friend’s photos or leaving comments on their pages, she said. Now, only a year or so later, ennui is setting in. She spends a lot less time on the site, instead listening to music or talking on the phone, she said. […]

So it’s become one among a number of communications media used by this person. No real surprises there. The MySpace spokeswoman seems to offer some conflicting information:

“There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don’t,” a spokeswoman for the site said, but the site is adding an average of 320,000 new profiles every day and continuing to go mainstream. In the past year it launched new services such as mobile and video channels, and expanded internationally.

This is what I think. MySpace remains massive, ten times bigger than any competing network. At the same time, there is a lot of churn –the 100mn+ profiles on the system are nowhere near all in use. A lot of them might have been created by curious adults, for example. Others belong to users who have migrated elsewhere but haven’t deleted their profiles, perhaps because they still use MySpace for music and for certain friends.