The AllYourtv.com Local News Blog

Minnpost.com has a column from a former Star-Tribune writer and editor. In it, she recounts her declining financial fortune, as she moves from middle-class living to having $10 in the bank.
Until 23 months ago, I”d never been unemployed. When I took a buyout at the Star Tribune on June 15, 2007, I was sure I”d find another job quickly, although my entire career has been in newspapers — which, as you may know, are not doing a lot of hiring these days. Still, writing and editing are valuable assets to many businesses. What I hadn”t counted on was the total tanking of the economy.

I know there are thousands of Minnesotans coping with unemployment. I write this for them as much as for me. As an occasional freelance writer for MinnPost, I have a voice and a vehicle for letting our fellow citizens know what is happening. Many of them don”t.

One thing my situation has instilled in me is humility. I no longer hesitate to ask for help when I need it; false pride is gone forever. Heck, here I am baring my soul to anyone who reads MinnPost.com. So I say to those in my shoes, those who may not have had to seek help before: Forget pride and go to the county for help. 

I was laid-off from my journalism job a year ago, and it’’s not an easy road to travel. While I would still like to find something full-time, I”ve learned to combine freelance and contract work with my own web sites and build at least a modest financial stream. But it’’s much longer hours, with no benefits or perks. I feel for anyone who’’s having to go through it.

The blog “The Root Of The Matter” has a nice accounting of a free lecture given by Emily Bell, head of digital content at Guardian News And Media.

Unlike a lot of people, she doesn”t believe print journalism is dead. She believes it has a future, but that it might not be the primary journalism outlet.

She outlined a number of characteristics journalism will have in ten years, and while you should definately read the entire long post, here is the part that  found the most compelling:

2. Journalism will be networked, not siloed. Journalists will need to act as hubs, rather than destinations. They will need to create communities around themselves, linking and pointing to other stories, and connecting readers and viewers with other interesting people and information, not necessarily from their own organisation. This means getting involved in conversations with readers and viewers, rather than just publishing once and be done with it. 

That’’s really the approach I”ve taken here with this blog and with my television and media site AllYourTV.com. The modern definition of a journalist includes a variety of skills, from aggregation to traditional reporting. It’’s a skill that can be used by one stand-alone journalist, or it can be utilized by a traditional local news site.

Chicago Sun-Times newsroom employees represented by the Newspaper Guild voted Tuesday night to accept a temporary 9 percent pay cut and other proposals, as parent Sun-Times Media Group operates under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and seeks a buyer.

In addition to the 9 percent pay cut, the reduction package accepted by columnists, reporters, editors and photographers at the flagship Sun-Times includes retention of severance pay but at post-concession wage levels. Employees will have five unpaid days off by the end of July. The Guild receives a credit toward the 15 percent target for the company not making pension contributions for the first half of 2009.

“Metropolitan newspapers are increasingly like mainframe computers in a world of networked PCs.”

-Steve Yelvington

There are a lot of good reasons why a TV station should do more with a story than simply posting the TV script (slightly re-written) on the web.

This piece from the Twin Cities Fox affiliate is a good example of what not to do.

The headline of the story is great: “What To Do After A Layoff?”

While you might expect some specific hints or perhaps pointers to some local resources, what readers get is a muddled story that manages to never quite say much of anything.

MinnPost.com is an interesting experiment in journalism. When cynics talk about whether its possible to cobble together enough financing and ad revenue to make a “traditional” local news site feasable, I point them to MinnPost as one fascinating work in progress.

Founder and Editor Joel Kramer has assembled an impressive mix of donations, ad revenue and other non-for-profit money and has shown a willingness to try a variety of funding options. The latest is an attempt to encourage visitors to become “microsponsors” of Minnpost’s “BrauBlog,” a blog written by media reporter David Brauer. He’s encouraging readers to contribute either $10 or $25, and has found someone to match the donations until $10,000 is raised.

MinnPost is a national leader in building a new economic model for high-quality local journalism on the Internet. This is not easy to do. Our traffic is growing dramatically — we’ve tripled our page views in one year — but revenues from sponsors, advertisers, and our nearly 1,300 members currently cover only about 60% of our very lean spending.

So we’ve decided to try this concept out with BrauBlog, since it’s our most popular feature on MinnPost, other than the home page itself. This is an experiment. If it works, we’ll brag about it all over the country, and pay some of our bills, too.

I’m fascinated to see if this experiement works, and if its a model that work for political or others arts reporting.

BusinessWeek.com takes a look at some ideas it think could help struggling newspapers to survive and even thrive in this difficult economic period. Ideas profiled include The Bakerfield Californian’s social network Bakoptopia.com; Kachingle and the Yahoo Newspaper Ad Consortium.

If you follow the local news space, you’re probably already familiar with most of this ideas. What the piece does show–if nothing else–is that there won’t be any silver bullet that saves the newspaper industry or even the local broadcast TV business. It’s going to get down to working out what mix of ideas works best in each city.

Unfortunately, that kind of weaning through of ideas might require more time than many local news outlets have left before the doors close forever.

Santa Barbara Independent writer Jerry Roberts offers some keen insights about the problems plaguing the San Francisco Chronicle and the newspaper industry in general. Roberts spent a quarter century at the paper, the last five years as the paper’’s managing editor. So he isn”t just some guy writing about the Chronicle. He has an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by anyone trying to keep the paper a viable business.

News organizations, regardless of platform, should concentrate intensely on three fundamental value propositions:

c) Intelligent aggregation and synthesis that brings clarity to the vast mass of daily information that pounds each of us all day, every day, by discovering and highlighting the most important and revealing online reporting and commentary (with models that RealClearPolitics, Huffpost and Daily Beast, among others, are in the process of developing hourly).

I don’t usually quote the entire post from someone, and as I do this, I want to remind you that you should be reading Seth Goldin’s blog on a regular basis.

But he has a description of why the telephone defeated the telegraph that meshes perfectly for the battle of newspapers vs. the Internet. Yes, there are lots of things that online news still doesn’t do as well as print. But the online news space has solved some other customer needs so well that the shortcomings don’t matter to many people:

The telephone destroyed the telegraph.

If the telephone guys had set out to make something that did what the telegraph does, but better, they probably would have failed. Instead, they solved a different problem, in such an overwhelmingly useful way that they eliminated the feature set of the competition.

Ed Koehler at The Deets has a great investigative piece in which he accuses Village Voice Media of organizing a ring of people to try and run anorganized reciprical link campaign on Digg.

I admire the amount of work Koehler put into the piece, and I wish I could comment on it specifically. But given the fact that I interviewed for the web manager job at CityPages.com, I don’t think I can say much without feeling as if I’m breaking confidentiality.

But aside from what VVM may or may not be doing, it’s not uncommon for media companies to spend a lot of time trying to game social media sites. The problem is that those efforts can bring some traffic increases, but it’s difficult to replicate on a long-term basis. The traffic also isn’t as valuable as “normal” visitors, both for advertisers and for the sites themselves.