News business evolving, not dying: author

Newspapers are dying but journalism is evolving, an acclaimed science writer told a gathering of the techno-hip at South By South West Interactive Festival on Friday.

Steven Johnson equated newspapers to old growth forests, saying that under the canopy of that aged ecosystem blogging, citizen journalism, Twittering and other Internet-age information sharing is taking root.

"I'm bullish on the future of news," Johnson said.

"I am not bullish on what is happening in the newspaper industry; it is ugly and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists are going to lose their jobs and cities are going to lose their newspapers."

The shift was foreseeable but ignored, resulting in changes that should have happened gradually over a decade being crammed into a year or two with some pressure from the global economic meltdown, according to Johnson.

"There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses," Johnson said.

"Then there is panic that crucial information is going to disappear along with them. We spend so much time figuring out how to keep the old model on life support that we don't figure out how to build the new one."

News organizations should stop wasting resources on information freely available online, he added. And, they should stop killing trees.

"The business model sure seems easier to support if the printing goes away," Johnson said. "They don't have the print costs."

Breitbart.com: Journalism evolving, not dying: science author

The next 10 major newspapers to fold, or go digital

Per 24/7 Wall Street, quoted in Time:

1. The Philadelphia Daily News
2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune
3. The Miami Herald
4. The Detroit News
5. The Boston Globe
6. The San Francisco Chronicle
7. The Chicago Sun Times
8. NY Daily News
9. The Fort Worth Star Telegram
10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer

The 10 Major Newspapers That Will Either Fold Or Go Digital Next (Time via Yahoo! News)

Related: How To Save Your Newspaper (Time cover story, Walter Isaacson)

Chronic call

This is the year, y'all... we're gonna see a lot of this:

Signaling the newspaper industry's deterioration from malaise to crisis, Hearst Corp. said it may close the San Francisco Chronicle unless it can quickly slash costs at the money-losing daily.

Hearst said it will seek "critical cost-saving measures," including a steep reduction in the Chronicle's work force, which numbers about 1,500. If it can't reach its cost-saving target "within weeks," Hearst said it will seek a new owner for the Chronicle. And -- at a time when few investors are willing to shell out money for large newspapers -- the company said it will close the paper if it can't find a buyer.

The possible closure of the Chronicle, the 12th-largest U.S. paper and Northern California's largest daily, illustrates the accelerating decline across the newspaper industry.

Advertising revenue is dropping faster than publishers can slash staff, stock dividends and other costs. Department stores, auto dealers and other local businesses have further curtailed ad spending after the holidays, pushing already struggling papers closer to the edge. Two publishers filed for bankruptcy protection last weekend, and few metropolitan dailies are on a healthy footing.

Observers have been waiting to see which major U.S. city will be the first to go without a major daily newspaper, and San Francisco is a front-runner for the role. Unlike many big newspaper chains, Hearst has a healthy balance sheet, but the privately owned company says the Chronicle has posted significant losses since 2001, including a loss of more than $50 million last year.

Hearst Plans To Slash, Sell or Shut Paper in Bay Area (Wall Street Journal, 25 Feb 2009)

Of course, the San Francisco Bay area is also one of the most wired places on the planet...

Alternative career paths for journalists

Carrie notes: Don't disrespect the Bing.

(For non-fans of The Sopranos, explanation for "disrespecting the Bing": The BaDa Bing! is the fictional North Jersey strip club that serves as the headquarters for Tony Soprano's crime family. In one memorable episode, a particularly psychotic member of the crew gets mad and murders an employee of the strip club, on club property. He is punished rather thoroughly for this egregious lapse of etiquette. Committing second-degree murder was bad enough, but "disrespecting the Bing" by doing so on Bing property was almost unforgivable.)

How journalism can re-invent itself

Some interesting thoughts here.  I particularly like Number 11:

Kris Kristofferson got it backwards: nothing left to lose is just another word for "freedom." Don't hold back.

Detroit Free Press on the automobile bailout

Coverage by the Detroit Free Press of the auto bailout legislation, which passed the House tonight and is headed into the Senate, is some of the best I've seen.

Unsurprisingly.

Turn out the lights, the party's over

James Fallows:

On the first night in the [Newark NJ airport-vicinity] hotel, dragging in late from the PEK-EWR flight, I see... a single copy of the New York Times in the hotel gift shop! I snap it up. Second day, leave in a rush before dawn, back late in the afternoon and see there is still one copy of the NYT left. Snap that up too. Just now, day three (nearing the end of the adventure), on my way in to breakfast I see that again I've had the luck to get the last copy of the paper.

I remark on my good fortune to the woman at the news stand. She says, "Oh, sir, we only get the one."

Oof.

Our American Media Landscape (James Fallows, 23 July 2008)

Google News adds comments... for subjects of articles only

Beginning this week, Google News will start posting user comments, but only from people actually featured in news stories. Newspapers that were unhappy about Google News using snippets of their articles will probably be even less pleased to see the new feature deployed, since Google could become an even more formidable player when it starts hosting original content.

Here's how the new system will work: people or organizations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments—unedited—alongside the Google News links to those stories.

The new system will at first be deployed only within the US, but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well.

Freedom from the press: Google News lets newsmakers comment on stories (ArsTechnica)

Reactions from (the) Wall Street (Journal)

“It’s sad,” said a veteran reporter at one of the domestic bureaus, who did not want to be named because of concerns over his career. “We held a wake. We stood around a pile of Journals and drank whiskey.”

Whack-a-mole

Spike a column in your own paper, and the next day it's all over the blogosphere... and the day after that, your competitors are writing about it. The LA Times just found that out.

“The bug at the bottom of the Calendar front in today’s Los Angeles Times says columnist Patrick Goldstein is on assignment,” began a July 24 item on the Web site L.A. Observed. “Not true. His The Big Picture column for Tuesday was killed.”

The site ran the 1,450-word column, which “fell into our hands,” in its entirety. In it, Mr. Goldstein proposed that his newspaper promote itself by following the lead of The Mail on Sunday in Britain, which inserted Prince’s latest CD into 2.9 million copies, and also give away music.

“While the Times still is a profitable business, our revenue was down 10 percent in the second quarter while our cash flow was down, as our publisher put it the other day, a ‘whopping 27 percent, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced,’ ” Mr. Goldstein wrote. “Times are so hard at the Times that the publisher has proposed putting ads on the front page to generate new revenue.”

New Life on the Web for a Killed Newspaper Column (New York Times, 30 July 2007)

Related: The actual, original column can be read here: LA Observed: Goldstein's Killed Column