Tag Archives: New York Times

But first the news…

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Scott Karp has an inter­est­ing sug­ges­tion for news­pa­pers online. Put news first.

[L]et’s look at the New York Times. It’s homepage is arranged, like most tra­di­tional media brand sites, by what is most important.

Here’s the prob­lem — if you visit the New York Times through­out the day, and no import­ant news has broken, the homepage remains largely unchanged, static, like a print newspaper.

Organ­iz­ing news by import­ance as the default makes sense when you’re only deliv­er­ing the news once a day (and the “default” is all you get). But when news pub­lish­ing is con­tinu­ous, it’s not the best way to server fre­quent news consumers.

The prob­lem remains — as it does for blogs — draw­ing atten­tion to your archive mater­ial. Do you just have to leave it to search engines…

How to argue in circles

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Writing in the FT, Pablo Eis­en­berg provides a great example of fuzzy think­ing on journ­al­ism. And also a les­son in how to write in circles.

For a dec­ade, the print media have been the only effect­ive mech­an­ism for keep­ing non-profit organ­isa­tions open and account­able. The out­stand­ing invest­ig­at­ive work of the Boston Globe, the Wash­ing­ton Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and many other papers has uncovered hun­dreds of found­a­tions and char­it­ies guilty of inap­pro­pri­ate expendit­ure, cor­rup­tion, self-dealing, con­flicts of interest and excess­ive compensation.

This cov­er­age has had impress­ive res­ults: con­gres­sional hear­ings and legis­lat­ive activ­ity; more effect­ive fed­eral and state reg­u­la­tions; increased scru­tiny by state attorneys-general; bet­ter audit­ing and enforce­ment pro­ced­ures by the Internal Rev­enue Ser­vice; and more self-reform efforts by non-profit organisations.

Yet without con­tin­ued media focus on the non-profit sec­tor, char­it­ies and found­a­tions are likely to revert to old habits. Scand­als, inap­pro­pri­ate beha­viour and excess­ive compens­ation are still a regret­table part of our non-profit world.

So what has driven news­pa­pers away from such invest­ig­a­tions, accord­ing to Eis­en­berg? Why the pur­suit of profit.

Twenty years ago a news­pa­per was happy to make a profit of 10–15 per cent. Even though daily news­pa­pers today earn between 10 and 20 per cent in pre-tax profits, that is no longer good enough for Wall Street and investors, who demand much more, no mat­ter what the cost to journ­al­istic integ­rity. Busi­ness interests have trumped the pub­lic interest.

Is there any hope for a resur­gence of high-quality, mission-oriented journ­al­ism? Non-profit own­er­ship of select daily news­pa­pers could offer a prom­ising new begin­ning, and phil­an­thropy could make it happen.

I like it. Non-profit own­er­ship as the solu­tion for news­pa­pers fail­ing to provide invest­ig­at­ive scru­tiny of non-profits? A com­plete circle. (And have you noticed how things were always bet­ter twenty years ago? There must a twenty year rule: another post, another time)

Online video on UK news sites

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Here’s a piece I wrote recently for the BBC’s Col­lege of Journ­al­ism site. Andy Dickin­son has some inter­est­ing — and more extens­ive — posts on the same topic.

Approach­ing the Tele­graph’s clean, attract­ive new web­site video jumps straight out at you and starts play­ing. It’s a couple of comedi­ans. They’re hav­ing a laugh. On behalf of Apple.

The ad, a shame­less rip-off clever re-purposing of Apple’s US cam­paign with Justin Long and John Hodg­man, is simple. Two sim­il­arly con­figured Brit­ish comedi­ans are shot against a white back­ground. Clean, unfussy, simple. Not only has Apple’s advert­ising concept crossed con­tin­ents, it can cross plat­forms and go on dis­play, radio, TV and online. (The WaPo’s cool-looking but concept-lacking onBe­ing site shoots similarly.)

But news stor­ies lack the longev­ity, the expense or the con­cep­tual sim­pli­city of advertising.

So where does video as journ­al­ism cur­rently stand on the UK web? News­pa­pers have at long last got to grips with the issue of what they read like on the web. Butt hey still don’t seem to know what they sound like or what they watch like.

Given how unim­port­ant news is these days to news­pa­pers, it’s strange to see how much of their video offer­ing is ori­ented towards news.

Take the Mir­ror for example. It car­ries a white-label video news ser­vice from AP (com­plete with Amer­ican voice-overs) that is squarely based on the late 20th cen­tury portal prin­ciple. Over at the Tele­graph they’ve brought in an English-accented ITN white-label video news ser­vice. The Bel­fast Tele­graph has gone the same route with the indie team that pro­duces GMTV’s break­fast bulletins.

The Sun has been din­ing out on hits gen­er­ated by its ‘cock­pit video’ coup, but as far back as Bruce Grob­be­laar ‘Sun video’ tags have appeared on our screens. Now the Sun’s occa­sional piece of video has a home. But it remains a side­bar to their newsgathering.

Nowhere is news­pa­pers’ ingénue atti­tude to pic­ture more appar­ent than at the Mail. Its web­site pre­faces some video of a New Zea­l­and sky­diver sur­viv­ing a fall after his chute half-opened with the tag ‘the most dra­matic video on the Inter­net.’ Pace the excel­lent Seamus McCauley, the Mail guys must be liv­ing behind some fire­wall. Video drama comes from sound and pictures.

If the A10 cock­pit video hadn’t included the pilots’ talk­back, it would have mer­ited only a screen­grab. The sky­diver pic­tures ought to have been dra­matic, but because there’s no com­ment­ary (under­stand­ably) they’re actu­ally just like watch­ing any para­chute head­cam pic­tures you’ve ever seen, except the final second of des­cent is replaced by black as the cam­era hits the grass. The calm, ser­i­ous beha­viour of the skydiver’s com­pan­ion drains any drop of hys­teria or drama from the pic­tures. In TV news, we call these pic­tures ‘rushes.’ To make them dra­matic requires con­text and that requires nar­rat­ive structure.

So on news­pa­per sites agency wraps com­pete with an unlikely blend of home video hor­ror and hilarity.

How does this com­pare with the BBC’s own online news site? The BBC is awash with audio and video mater­ial but rather mod­estly, it hides these jew­els away. TV news bul­let­ins are decon­struc­ted pack­age by pack­age, some longer cov­er­age is gaffed and fil­leted. BBC text is unex­cited by the pos­sib­il­it­ies of serifs and glyphs that occu­pied the New York Times on its relaunch last April (the NYT’s online font is Geor­gia, since you ask). Yet the BBC’s online com­mis­sion­ing power seems over­whelm­ingly text-based. Its ‘Magazine’ sec­tion rein­vents the Listener, com­plete with Lynne Truss and Clive James. Where are the bite-size video innov­a­tions offered by sites like www.meettheauthor.co.uk? (Irony alert – the site’s run by ex-BBC radio producer.)

We know that people will watch short video clips online, but the con­ven­tional TV news piece is no longer the way to hack it.

Because I now real­ize the import­ance of brand­ing, I have a few banal obser­va­tions to pass on that I will be repack­aging as Monck’s Max­ims® of video news online:

  1. No news­casters. News anchor­ing is a present­a­tional trope borne of the com­plex organ­iz­a­tional demands of ana­logue TV stu­dios. The news­cast is to online as Top of the Pops is to You­Tube.

  2. Make sense. Report­ers need to deliver their own intros/lead-ins, to cam­era or over pic­ture or graph­ics. Images and clips need labelling if they’re raw. The most import­ant thing video clips online require is stan­dalone coherence.

  3. Stick to your part of the story. Report­ers shouldn’t try and tell the tale in one giant wrap. Text, graph­ics and other sources can carry a lot of the extra con­text and nar­rat­ive required.

  4. Get graph­ics. Voice and video aren’t the only ways to skin the cat.

Neces­sity may be invention’s mother, but the lousy com­mis­sion­ing budget is the care home of creativity.

For all the hub-a-hubba and news­room redesigns, news­pa­per power online resides with news­pa­per people, the younger of whom now ‘get’ online. But, if you look at where video journ­al­ism could be head­ing, the present­a­tional equi­val­ents of con­tent vis­ion­ar­ies like Adrian Holovaty haven’t yet stormed the exec­ut­ive barricades.

So, a quick review of video online tells you news­pa­per guys are still in charge of news­pa­pers, and TV and radio people at the BBC con­trol the com­mis­sion­ing strings for the con­tent that ends up online.

If com­pan­ies are ser­i­ous about video innov­a­tion, then we need a faster, less destruct­ive and less threat­en­ing route than mana­gerial régime change. And a ser­i­ous com­mis­sion­ing budget for online video to go with it.

Oddly enough that lead could come via the BBC, which as we all know, doesn’t have to make com­mer­cial sense. But would that kick­start the online video journ­al­ism revolu­tion com­mer­cially — or kill it off? Therein lies the rub.