Turning the Page on the News

The future of journalism is in Las Vegas-or at least that’s what Rob Curley, multimedia extraordinaire and tech consultant for The Las Vegas Sun, imbued into a large group of entrepreneurs and media folks at Stanford business school Tuesday night.

“What if a newspaper could start over?” he began his presentation by asking.

Ten minutes later, it appeared the audience believed the Sun had.

The presentation was nothing less than Vegas pizzazz. The Sun’s new partner site, Las Vegas Weekly, is promoting the news in an engaging, er, pleasing way.

Strippers telling the day’s weather; Michael Winslow talking to tourists on the street; even videos of the UNLV basketball team recreating plays from previous games, just for the site.

The first comment following the presentation came from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, who was “sold” on Curley's "pitch" and was eager to invest.

The conversation quickly changed to the woes of the industry across the board, with future revenue streams taking main issue.

“As a Libertarian, myself, I’m more interested in kindle, than watching newspapers” become funded through taxes, admitted Heather A. Harde, the event's moderator and CEO of TechCrunch.

The lone journalist on the panel, Larry Magid, a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, felt that journalists are being asked to do too much, citing examples of journalists facing pressure to report, capture audio and video, and then edit the footage, also.

He believes that government funding of news organizations, at least partially, is not inherently bad.

Ann Grimes, acting Director of Stanford’s School of Journalism, said that “people are pushing every lever available to them,” and encouraged entrepreneurs in the crowd to look at the problems facing the industry and innovate accordingly.

The event was hosted by the Stanford Venture Lab, a joint program between the University and MIT. The program hosts monthly events promoting innovation and collaboration on high tech ventures.

Great Multimedia

This is good stuff. Where can we find this in the news?

http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/

Presidential Election 2009 - Street Party Videos - San Francisco

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View Barack Obama Election 2008 Night San Francisco in a larger map

(Re)training a journalist

This is an excerpt from a much much longer post on multimedia reporting by Frédéric Filloux on his blog MondayNote:

"Five things should be considered when training journalists, whether in schools or in companies.

1. Production skills. Scripting, staging a story are now key elements in modern journalistic storytelling. It is about designing mockups, showing how the story will unfold, finding the best viewer interactions, the type of media that will be more appropriate at what time, etc. I say this to my students at Sciences Po: train yourself on PowerPoint; it can be a great tool to pre-design rich multimedia stories or even to complete a simple but clever one for a blog. Many easy-to-use tools dedicated for multimedia productions such as SoundSlides are also helpful.
2. Dealing with complexity, handling datasets, from public statistics to GIS. These are key instruments to spread knowledge in an increasingly visual society. Pr. Hans Rowling’s video with its mind-blowing use of statistics on global development has been viewed about 200.000 times. His talent was mainly to convert sets of complex stats into an attractive format, using a program (Gapminder), that is now available as a widget on Google Apps.
3. Enroll pure technologies competences. Journalists need to learn how to deal with techies. Cross-pollination between the two is crucial.
4. Encourage nerdy tendencies among students or rookies journalists. In doing so, they will dramatically increase their employability.
5. Teach them how to sell their work, skills, passion. This ranges from setting pro-like blogs to — yes — creating their own tiny company, the commercial vehicle for rising above the crowd and monetizing their work.

This is what I’m saying to the aspiring journalists I coach. I’m even able to convince some that, in fact, these troubled times in the media bear great opportunities to develop the storytelling techniques of the future."

Dealerships Close, Newspapers/Broadcasters Stand to Lose Revenue

Above, a map shows the local Chrysler dealerships scheduled to close.


Recent news of dealership closures by Chyrsler and GM have people wondering aloud how the closures will effect the already troubled journalism industry. Some have taken this news and begun detailing the corollary effects of the closures to the newspaper industry.

In the Bay Area, five dealerships are slated to close next month. It is unclear how the revenues of local publications will be changed by these five closures.

Alan Mutter, veteran journalist and blogger linked above, cites the following figures:

"Auto classified advertising in newspapers fell 29% in 2008 to a 25-year low of $2.3 billion, representing less than half of the $5 billion in car ads sold by publishers as recently as 2004.

Based on data from the NADA showing how auto dealers historically have allocated their marketing budgets, it is possible to estimate that the drop in the number of dealers could reduce newspaper revenues by as much as $140 million this year.

This 6% decline would come on top of whatever additional spending cuts are undertaken by the auto dealers who remain in business. The survivors may trim their spending to cut operating expenses, boost profits or because they no longer feel they have to compete with dealers selling the same brand in their markets who have gone out of business...

Auto classified advertising in 2008 represented only 6% of the sales for the newspaper industry as a whole. Anecdotally, broadcasters say that auto advertising can represent up to 20% of the revenue for certain metro radio formats and up to 30% of sales for a metro television station."

How much revenue Chrysler dealerships provide to local publication is unknown, but the losses will most certainly have an impact.

Bay Area Radio and Television broadcasters potentially effected by the closures.