Newspaper Soul Searching - Lots of Ideas, No Answers

Opinion: Is multimedia reporting affecting journalism?

A recent article in The New York Observer discussed the changing dimensions of content in news reporting and how multimedia reporting is affecting journalists.  

In an email to the NYO, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, admitted to his surprise that so many important "stories fail to resonate the way they deserve."

The Internet may be largely to blame for this.  It has changed the way we live and the way we receive news and information.  Quick, fast, and short.  As the NYO points out, "hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore."

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Rethinking the structure of online news

At the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) conference in Las Vegas, Google senior advisor Richard Gingras, talked about the future of Google News, its relationship to the newspaper industry and the future of online news content.

According to the study of online traffic flows to websites, around 50% of traffic comes from Google searches, essentially making homepages less significant. Google is able to direct traffic to news sites by crawling around 40,000 news sites globally every ten minutes. 

Google executive Marissa Mayer has presented her "atomic unit" theory to demonstrate the segmentation of online media.  She provided a metaphor using the introduction of the MP3 and how it altered the "atomic unit" of music from albums to songs.  Essentially, what this means for news sites is that its no longer about the site, "it's about the article," Gingras explained.  

In an interview with BNET, Gingras offered the example of Wikipedia as a possible direction for news providers; "Wikipedia is doing living resources and newspapers are continuing to do ephemeral, here-today-gone-tomorrow article pages -- one of the last vestiges of edition-oriented publishing."...

Australia: Newspapers face "death by a thousand cuts"

Juan Senor, partner with the Innovation International Media Consulting Group told the news industry that newspapers needed to "innovate or die," if not they will face "death by a thousand cuts."  Senor focused on the reinvention of newspapers, stating that newspapers need to reinvent the formula of the medium and "rediscover the soul of their business".

Senor compared the newspaper industry to the Ringling Brothers circus, which he said died in 1967 "because television could bring you those elephants up close."  He believes that Cirque du Soleil, established in Montreal in 1984, is an excellent representation of reinventing an industry, "they reinvented the formula completely -- most importantly, they got rid of the elephants."  He uses this comparison to demonstrate the ability of newspapers to reinvent the industry.

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