The Daily Telegraph is devoting almost 20 pages a day to their exclusive scoop (On expense abuses by members of Parliament) and they reaping huge circulation gains as a result.

Data mined from a terabyte of classified data.
Yes this could have been a digital product – but that approach was probably not the way to break the big story. For impact, the rare treat of an exclusive being broke on Page One cannot be matched. Also, it has not been proven that it can be monetized.

What newspapers are capable when breaking a big story is truly amazing. We should not be so prepared to live in world where this perfected craft can provide a swift and profound effect on government power and abuses of public funds.

The old model depends on “eyeball count” to reward advertisers, and leads to popularity (hence, sensationalism) in lieu of good analysis. When information is abundant, there’s no premium in a “scoop” or more of the same hack theatricality.

No doubt, a new business model for journalism will arise. People are pessimistic because their ideas are shaped by what worked in the past, such as pay walls, and the new landscape is different in many ways.

With the collapse of old media, think of journalism as a startup business, with all the uncertainty, challenge and excitement of creating a future rather than researching the past and present.

While we are inventing new business models for journalism, perhaps “Small is truly beautiful” and we don’t require a publisher to make $100 million a year to pay a journalist a pittance.

However, new internet-based business models will continue to be highly problematic as long as internet security remains an oxymoron.

Sam

Old-media journalists: overpaid seat-warmers, cancerous vultures, disgruntled puke screeching in godless fear at e-mail.

Bloggers: Plucky, incorruptible revolutionaries with an unquenchable thirst for answers and an unwavering, lifelong willingness to inform for little or no compensation

Very few people in the new media are going to be able to make a living at it. The career boat sailed and hit an iceberg.

Journalists with hence forward have to compete with hundreds of thousands of new media content producer who are posting content because the want to. Because the topic matters to them. not because they are getting paid.

You can copyright fiction, and you can copyright an exact quote, but you can not now and will never be able to copyright simple information.

If you write something on say veterinary research pertaining to Labrador Retrievers on a website or in a magazine I can take your information, combine it with other information, put my spin on it, and put it out there on in another venue. If I don’t use your words, you can’t do ANYTHING at all about it. Where does that leave you, given that my total cost to post is the internet connection fees I pay every month anyway? If you put up a pay wall, well only one single poster needs to read what you wrote and incorporate the information into something they write. The more people pay for your content, the faster anything unique is going to leave that pay wall.

As many of us have been pointing out for a decade now, and as Clay Shirky stated so well in hit post on Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable – What made newspapers work was the high cost of printing. That isn’t coming back. Ever

As a journalist, publisher, entrepreneur and long-time media observer and critic, I think it is easy to be self-righteous about how journalists work and what they accomplish. Those who point to reporting on Iraq and Madoff as examples of bad reporting over simplify and repeat complaints they’ve heard or read.

Those who complain reporters are simply rewriting news releases ignore the economics of journalism. Simply put, rewriting press releases worked for generations. Now, readers can get the releases online.

The economics of the media are that you need the wealth of a “60 Minutes,” WSJ, NYT or LAT (historically) to employ journalists who know something more than journalism and spend weeks and months on one story.

The other fact of life is that few readers want such reporting. The biggest mistake an editor can make is to publish a series of articles over more than two or three days. People don’t read them. Only panels of judges who grant journalism awards do.

What’s the evidence? How many indepth mags are profitable? How many subscribers do they have? Not many.

So entrepreneurial journalism, which I used in the 1960s, 70s and 80s to make my name and career, is romantic and the ideal, but the market for it is very limited. People who will pay for such reporting and analysis hire highly skilled analysts and consultants to produce such work for a very few eyes.

If you want such “journalism,” you buy a few books on a topic, read widely and do your own reporting and analysis. Few want or need such info. and fewer will pay for it.

Evidence? Look at how few pay for subscriptions to the WSJ, Barron’s and Morningstar.com. How many buy Value Line and its various services? Thousands, not millions.

So I think Jarvis is training his journalism students to work for the government, hedge funds and market research firms, not for the media.

No one in Western Society can afford to give lots of time for free.

Thus the dilema of journalism in the digital age.

For everyone journalist out there today, in the digital age you’ll need MORE blogers etc for journalism to be improved. Them bloggers will need to be on par with the earnings of the journalists they’ve replaced.

Sounds pretty hard from where I’m sat.

get used to it

we suffer a bit

sing the blues

and move on down the line

good stuff

simplify

Journalism is blue collar. We create something that other people sell. Some create better than others. But, if I write a story that causes a 10 percent spike in newsstand sales, do I get a bonus?

No. So the journalists are not the producers. They are the product.

What’s needed is more specialization, and more diverse, ideosynchratic appraoches.

Or….

Are journalists more like doctors or actors?

What is disappointing in the field and another some papers are struggling is that they at times don’t value (and recognize) quality content.