I’m not going to waste your time over the specifics, but if you have had half an eye on the media industry lately, you can see the debate heating up over what is the next step. No matter what the verdict is about the role the Web will have, journalists are often are avoiding the elephant in the room. How are we going to pay for all of this?

I spent two or three days writing down every idea I came across/thought of.  Feel free to add, debate, or mock the following:

1. QR codes
2. Sell some T-shirts
   
3. Update your honor boxes
4. Update the way you advertise and display your videos (I’d follow Revision 3)
5. Don’t buy ridiculously expensive cameras for tiny Internet video (Mindy’s thoughts).
6. If you are in a smaller market, or one caught in between two big cities, start a nightly newscast.
7. Automate your shovelware publishing to the Web using XML and InDesign.  Free up the Web people to produce content instead of managing it.
8. Start a community driven niche site
9. Keep costs down by giving every writer a Linux box for writing instead of bloated PCs with tons of money spent on licenses.
10. Don’t be afraid of new ad placements in the print version.
11. Serve content to location aware GPS mobile devices, then serve location based ads.  Don’t think it can be done?  Philly does.
12. Metrics.  The internet allows for most detailed info about readers that a newspaper could have.  Use this info effectively to not waste money on projects and multimedia features that no one will watch.
13. Understand that some of the old topics newspapers covered are better left to niche magazines and Web sites.
14. I’m pretty sure blaming people wont pay the bills.

I, like many other media-folk, nodded quietly to myself while reading the book The Long Tail.  Just to recap: the basic premise of the book is that in the pre-Internet world there was only so much shelf space, so many media outlets, and only so many genres.  With the Internet making “store size” limitless, so are the products.  Therefore, you can find that obscure record you always wanted on eBay, but never in Walmart.

In terms of media, the Web was also supposed to put the barriers of entry so low that any kind of publication or media outlet could be conceived, thus creating an unlimited capacity for niches.  Beyond the surface level I don’t think this is true. There is only one real niche on the Web.  I suppose what I really mean, is that there is only one profitable niche: Nerds.

With only a few exceptions, the only demographic that can generate substantial traffic on the Web is nerd.  Gadget loving, Web 2.0 nerds.   Let’s look at the head of The Long Tail.

As of July 10th, the first 50 of the Technorati Top 100 currently looks like this:

*Numbers may be wacky because I was a journalism major.

The top blogs at Bloglines and Google Reader (older, but still indicative) have a similar outlook. I would venture a guess that all of these blogs are profitable or could be profitable (blogs like Post Secret have no ads on purpose).

When one shifts away from the written word and to video the results are the same.  How many IPTV networks can you name?  I can only name Revision 3, which caters to the “Internet, on-demand generation.”  The most successful audio podcast network after NPR is most likely the TWIT network which features an all tech-related lineup.

The top podcasts in iTunes are nearly all mainstream media outlets.  The iTunes store has no way of looking past the first 100, but it shows how hard it is for the everyman to have a widely dispersed podcast (Also, I believe the top 100 podcasts section only measures a few weeks of activity and not overall subscription levels – so this is a hard barometer to believe).

Now, this theory has a very obvious bias: I fall into said nerd demographic.  But I associate myself with, you know, non-techie people.  I don’t know many people that are watching non-man-gets-hit-in-the-nuts quality YouTube videos or downloading independent podcasts.  My mom doesn’t subscribe to RSS feeds, and less than a small handful of my friends use Web 2.0 services like Twitter.

This makes it particularly hard for nich online-only media.  Just by cracking open my Writer’s Market I see trade publications like The Fruit Growers News, The Cruise Industry News, and Reunions Magazine (covering reunions of all types!).  Are farmers subscribing to RSS feeds?  Is a cruise ship captain perusing blogs?  I’d guess no, yet they all have there own trade publications with highly targeted advertising.

In the blog world most people automate their advertising via AdSense, text links, and other ad services.  While these services offering contextual ads, the premium is not comparable to “old media”.  Take the fruit growers publication for instance.  With a circulation of 16,000 they charge over $2000 for a 1/3 page four color ad (media kit).  If I started a blog on fruit growing do you think I’m making 2k a month with AdSense?  I’m well aware with that expenses for a print publication are higher, but do you think I would have the same profit margin?

Despite what we would like to think, the online medium is not nearly as ubiquitous as we would all like it to be.  This, of course, puts newspapers in a precarious state.  They can’t maintain serving the shrinking non-wired generation with high production costs forever.  Nor can they devote gobs of money to an online market that is still catching up in advertising.

The point is that while the barriers to create content are lower, the perceptions of advertisers and the general public is lagging behind.  Until this gap is closed, those residing in the long tail of ad-supported content driven sites will be only scraping by.  Or worse, they won’t have sufficient money to remain open very long.

I posit this theroy not because I want it to be true, I share this because I want someone to prove me wrong.  Please do.

Many have argued against this concept of repackaging material for the Web, with the general tenet that the industry is not doing anything new, and is simply repackaging old content. While I agree somewhat, the biggest problem is that the process is not automated.

Workflow matters. With the right flows in place the amount of work that goes into posting content on Web can be minimal. Just look at products such as Tumblr. Now most news outlets need a more sophisticated model than Tumbler, but the idea is the same. If you make the delivery of the content painless, there is more room for innovation and more time to improve the quality of that content.

Currently, I’d bet that most newspapers have a chain reaction goes something like this:

1. A Web editor must spend hours repackaging, tagging, uploading content.
2. Stuff goes wrong with said process.
3. Web editor plays clean up
4. Web editor doesn’t have much time for anything else.
5. Time for the next issue.

Too often the Web department is comprised of talented programmers and journalists who have to spend more time maintaining the Web presence instead of improving on it. This creates the illusion that Web departments are understaffed, when in reality their processes just suck. It is for this reason we see job ads for computer jesus types. Instead of trying to innovate the flow of information, most companies are just throwing more bodies at the problem hoping for the best.  This also hurts in hiring “wired” journalists who spend more time maintaining content than creating it.

There are a few new technologies such as XML tagging that shoot to make the InDesign/Quark copy-and-paste-fest a little less arduous. But the company who first can offer a news agency a seamless way to quickly transfer all of there print content will rake it in.

The Web is meant to streamline the delivery of content. That is why a group of guys can cover the tech industry better than whole corporations. But most print media seem to satisfied with sticking a few people in the back room and have them deal with the problem instead of addressing the core issue: until we build a solid foundation on which to innovate on, we’ll never do anything exciting. Until that all changes, the little guys will forever have the advantage, and will continue to eat your lunch.

One would think that with young people flocking from their medium, newspapers and other mainstream media outlets would at least take a second to look at how they cover their hemorrhaging demographic. But instead, we see the same recycled stories with no real depth. Allow me to save them the trouble of thinking of “new” story ideas by presenting every story ever written about young people:

1. LOL! they use text speak in paperz! Imagine the horror! Slang and abbreviations are creeping their way into more “formal” ways of writing. While I would agree that this is happening, do we really need to hear about it all the freakin’ time? Or if we are going to hear about it, can we get past the traditional format:

Step 1: Mention how this generation is “different”
Step 2: Quote some teacher/boss/position of authority giving an anecdote: “I couldn’t believe it, they actually wrote LOL”
Step 3: Mention something about cell phones, and instant messaging
Step 4: Write “Generation Y” for the 8th time
Step 5: Drink some prune juice and take a nap

2. Aw, look at the cute kids, they are voting now. With global warming activism increasing, as well as the phenomena of political campaigns like Barack Obama’s, younger people are getting more credit than ever for getting involved.

3. We worship at the alter of Jon Stewart. Most people I know that watch the Daily Show are well informed before they begin watching. Also there is something to be said for the way Stewart and company cut through a lot of the fluff of broadcast news. I wanted to applaud when he looked John McCain in the eye and called him out for pandering (at about 5:40).

4. We are a bunch of pampered babies. This is especially a favorite of business magazines. Apparently my generation doesn’t see work as the end-all, and likes to wear flip flops. To live up to the stereotype for a moment, I don’t think its fair to toss a generation problems like global warming, debt, lack of pensions, and social security and then call them spoiled.

Which leads me to why I don’t get my news from traditional outlets in first place. I’m constantly disgusted by some of the stories I see and read. Stories like “8 reasons why this is the dumbest generation“, or constant coverage of stories like the Jeremiah Wright speech. It seems that neary every interview on any cable news network is two journalists talking to each other. Or, even worse, fake pundits. As a good man once said, maybe its the journalism that has gotten media in trouble up to this point.

• The Philadelphia Inquirer has become using Twitter.   They are doing more than just regurgitating headlines, but *gasp* actually responding to followers.  Although this may be labor intensive I think they are doing it right.  Follow them at: http://twitter.com/PhillyInquirer.  Follow me at http://twitter.com/blandanomics
  
• 37 signals has released a case study about a small Chicago volunteer news organization using Basecamp for collaboration.  Stories like this make me think that newspapers are too bloated.
• Mr Greg Linch, does a great job at musing over the equipment options for a newspaper.

Good luck to all of you students out there!

Hate to say it, but multimedia is just another way of telling stories, but not another way of making money. In fact, I’d guess that after training and equipment, many multimedia ventures are mostly funded by other parts of the newspaper. But that doesn’t mean that the internet is good for nothing. However, it will appear that way until the following two things happen: widespread use of mobile devices and “the algorithm”.

Mobile Devices:

The real problem with the media industry is that it is currently supporting the old form of distribution while trying to get ready for the new. It can be reasoned that there are several reasons why the industry has one foot in each camp. Not everyone has a computer, some still prefer the paper version, etc. Meanwhile, the business is stretched technologically, financially, and structurally as it scrambles to fill both print and online needs, without really being able to fully comprehend the final outcome.

The cure for this is the inception of mobile reading. Not the text based browsing I get on my crappy Samsung phone, I mean the “real” internet. Something where I can read complete articles comfortably on the subway. Of course the device and the plan would need to be as cheap as some of the cheaper phones now. Cell phone costs are always dropping, and that magic moment will happen when an affordable mobile device and a data plan mix with a media company who can deliver complete mobile distribution. And whoever does it first will make a killing.

There are several reasons most younger people don’t buy newspapers, but one of the main reasons is the convenience factor. Hell, I can’t even buy a newspaper without having change in my pocket.

I get most of my news in the morning from NPR’s hourly news podcast and Philadelphia’s free tabloid, the Metro. It’s free, on the way to the subway, and is a quick read. If I was able to afford a cell phone that had the top stories sent to it every morning, I wouldn’t need to pick up the Metro. I could sit on the train and page through my headlines.

“The algorithm”:

The biggest knock on online media is that people can be very self-selecting in the news they read about. That is, if I wanted to only read about sports, I can do that. Were I a newspaper subscriber, I would usually thumb through every section and learn a few things about topics I hadn’t considered myself interested in.

Online distribution (and the mobile distribution I mentioned above) needs a versatile and reliable recommendation engine (“The algorithm”). Not a simple one based on tags, or headline titles, but something that takes all of the articles I have read in the aggregate, and presents me with things I may have not considered I was interested in. I think whoever perfects this process will do what Google did to search engines.

Now, imagine if the computerized recommendations could be mixed with social ones. Currently, I discover new content when it receives a nod in the media outlet I am reading. For example, if a blog I read mentions another, I am likely to at least give that site a once over. But what if a newspaper site had a built in engine for recommending links to friends, and tracked the topics of those recommendations? From those two formulas alone, you could tell a lot about each user and could even drive your content and (gasp) advertising based on that data.

Of course the above changes are easier to write in a blog post than to be implemented, but I see both of these occurances slowly taking shape. And the day they are realized is the day we all can breathe a little easier. And maybe, just maybe, interns will be paid.

The whole “new media” thing is usually a problem when looking for a journalism job.

As highlighted in a recent post here, as well as in a Mindy McAdams post, most newspapers don’t quite know what they are looking for. Many also have unrealistic expectations of their potential hires.

But one comment on Mindy’s post struck me.  It was by a commenter named “Nick”. Without a last name or Web site link, I can’t vouch for who this fella is, but his comment was:

Isn’t it funny (well not to me, Mr. Dedicated Journalist), that these sorts of jobs would pay $30,000 at a newspaper but pay at least 2 times that in other parts of the real world.

This is something that has bothered me. First, I have to state that I’m aware nobody gets into journalism for the money, and that this profession is first and foremost a labor of love. However, that was a reasonable sacrifice with the traditional demands on a journalist and journalism student. That is, your job was to gather information and then sit down and write it. Not getting paid top dollar for this work was not as big a concern, as writing jobs in general don’t pay much.

Fast forward to current day, and we are being told we should know how to edit video, audio, and maybe have some sort of Web production skill. But the problem lies that if I go into any of these fields, I may be able to make up to three times what an entry level journalist makes. For example one journalism job posting for a position in Wyoming is paying $15,000 – $20,000 a year. A quick calculation (20,000 / 50 weeks / 40 hours) shows that that is ten dollars per hour at best. I made that being a picker at a Delaware warehouse in the summer after my freshman year.

Okay, that’s Wyoming where the cost of living is low and in a small town where the “do everything” types are necessary. In California, a similar posting has a salary ceiling of $30,000. Given the drastic difference in cost of living the “actual salary” is pretty even with the ceiling of the Wyoming job being comparable to the ceiling of the California job. In Pennsylvania (where I currently live) the average is a similar $31,000.

Keep in mind, these are not editor positions but reporting ones. Now, lets say someone took their multimedia skills and chose a job more traditional to that skill. For example, if I can code HTML/CSS, I could be a full time Web designer. Could I make more than $30,000 dollars after one year? By my second? With one $500 site a week, I could equal my potential newspaper salary.

Now the point of all this is not to shed light on how poorly paid journalists are, but to show that the demands on new hires have increased. Yet salaries are not matching the educational demands placed on new hires. These days it seems you have to know more just to earn the same salary that would have been standard even 10 years ago (inflation aside).

This scares me, because as long as these conditions are true, newspapers will never attract the best and brightest new media minds. If I am a talented video editor there are many more appealing options in front of me than newspapers and journalism in general. I would essentially be asked to take my valeable skill to a place that would pay me less while having little job security.  Plus there is the sticky issue that most newspapers still don’t know how relaible something like video is to their business model. In other words, it is very possible newspapers (or any publication) will one day decide video is too costly and ax the concept all together. Suddenly an idealistic video editor will be stung, and will surely tell any peers with similar skills to get out of the journalism market.

Until jouralism becomes more appealing, it can never break out of the downward cycle it is in. This goes beyond just simply money, but all the factors of a good job such as job security and benefits. Both are areas that journalism is not exactly known for these days.  How can an industry have declining job quality, yet ratchet up its demands on new (and old) employees?

So I ask given two options: a low paying job in a shaky market where your talent may not be needed in a few years, or a more “traditional” job for your skillset that can pay 1.5 times as much (a modest estimate) and, depending on the company, offer benefits as well. Most people will choose door number two.

Which leads me to ask, how the hell is journalism to compete with this?

Sources: How to be a Rockstar Freelancer, CNN Money, Journalism Jobs, Monster.com, PayScale.com, a left brain

With many predictions swirling around for what 2008 will hold, allow me to continue the gimmick.

I believe that 2008 will be the beginning of a movement in journalism where graduates will opt to carve their own path rather than be another layoff at a slow adopting newspaper or magazine.

What do I mean by “carve their own path”? In short, the Internet and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I think some young journalists are growing increasingly frustrated with playing by someone else’s rules. Rules that require innovation to shoot up the corporate hierarchy and back down again. Thus making someone’s bright idea in January old news by February. These rules still play by the old concepts of distribution. And these rules have journalism students busting their asses for an internship that pays nothing, when a well-written blog can pull in enough to at least pay for

One, “Generation-Y” (I absolutely hate that term, but thats most likely another blog post) features a large number of entrepreneurs. Enough that Inc magazine declares “may well be on its way to becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in our nation’s history”. The article rightly states that we saw many of our parents that were laid off or outsourced, and we want avoid that fate.

And two, our generation is increasingly becoming disgruntled with larger national trends such as paying into Social Security that we will never see, the decrease of medical benefits, and the loss of pensions from the job market. To me, this takes nearly every advantage away from being part of a large corporation. I’m aware that the increase in individual student loan debt might counteract this, but I feel that we more than any other generation literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Perhaps I am being short sighted, and I know that nearly every writer would like to start their own magazine someday but never before that the resources been so cheap and so readily available. And never before has the “traditional path” looked less appealing.

I believe that it takes a very strong following for an individual to carry a blog based on their wit or observations alone. Most successful blogs are topic driven, not personality driven.

Are there exceptions? Probably, but more often that not a columnist writing about random issues will not attract a substantial audience.

(This is the second in a indefinite series.)

If you have a pulse and a feed reader, you probably have heard of (or subscribed to) Boing Boing. Recently they posted an LA Times article about how striking writers are exploring their own start ups.

This got me thinking, here are skilled workers who realize that they may be able to get along fine without their employers. In the past, the main reason a writer needed the studio was to help distribute their work. But now as Internet distribution evolves, there is more than one way to get art to the masses.

Flip this to journalism. In the past a reporter and writer needed the newspaper or magazine to distribute their work. They also needed a company to give them benefits and the occasional pension. Well, as pensions and health care become exceedingly rare (not exclusive to journalism), and with the ability to distribute the written word as easy as ever, why do we need large companies?

Why can’t we do it ourselves? Would a loose union of journalists posting stories online eliminate the need for cooperations such as Gannett?

I’m starting to think yes. Maybe the real future of media isn’t in the technologies we deliver news in, but the way news organizations are structured. We have already seen blogs run by a handful of people cover niches better than any magazine ever did. And sometimes those “handful” of people can be only one person. With several company’s automating advertising such as Google or Text Link Ads, do we really need hordes of advertising representatives? If distribution in online production is nothing but a webmaster how much money is saved?

Maybe the writers have something here. The Internet has allowed many industries such as film makers, musicians, and designers to avoid the middle man. Maybe it’s time media outlets became more streamlined.