Frank Michael Russell

Media, Innovation and Current Events | Apple, Nintendo, Netflix

This is the first in a weekly series of short posts on media, innovation and current events.

I was fascinated this week by two New York Times stories about Apple’s manufacturing practices in China.  As Apple has expanded its product lines from Mac computers to iPods, iPhones, and iPads, it has moved its manufacturing from the U.S. to China.  According to the Times, President Barack Obama asked then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs what could be done to bring those jobs back to the U.S.  That wasn’t possible, Jobs replied. The U.S. simply doesn’t have the industrial infrastructure, and there aren’t enough U.S. workers with mid-level training (some college, but not necessarily a four-year degree).  Although the articles were framed as related to the political debate over job creation in the U.S., it offers lessons for media innovators about scalability.  As it expands, a growing business needs to be able to find suppliers that can meet its needs.  In today’s world, those suppliers very well may be offshore.

The Internet, What Went Wrong at the Mercury News, and What Now

The San Jose Mercury News, my employer for more than a decade, was an early innovator in online news.  The Mercury News was online before most newspapers established news websites.  In 1993, the Mercury News launched Mercury Center in a partnership with America Online.  Readers paid $9.95 a month for access to AOL and an expanded menu of news content that wasn’t available in the print newspaper.  Just two years later, after the introduction of the Netscape browser, Mercury Center moved to the Internet.

With its technology-savvy readership in Silicon Valley, the Mercury News should have been a leader in the transition from print to digital news.  A lengthy article this month in the Columbia Journalism Review examined why that didn’t happen—identifying mistakes by management at the Mercury News and the newspaper’s former parent company, Knight Ridder. 

A Business Model for Online News: Draw Readers with Good Content. Sell High-Impact Ads. Profit.

Can pay walls save the news industry?  Pay walls may be a temporary source of revenue for many news sites.  However, subscription revenue typically doesn’t come close to covering the costs of gathering the news.  

In the print model, subscription revenue typically has covered the cost of delivering and perhaps printing the newspaper.  Newsroom expenses, other costs, and the publisher’s profit have come from advertising revenue.  (In some higher-cost markets, subscription fees may not even cover circulation costs, and delivery agents must be subsidized from advertising revenue.)

Aggregation, Storytelling, Missouri Football and the Sunday Team

This post was first published at the Columbia Missourian's The Transition blog.

Our ICE desk editors have been busy this semester creating original aggregated content at the levels of public service and storytelling for the Missourian’s website.

This work fits well with the role and skills of our interactive copy editors. They are knowledgeable about the reported stories on our website. They are curious and can find compelling material on other news sites and elsewhere online.

This work also could fit well on most newspaper copy desks. Copy editors are skilled at distilling information into concise text. A good copy editor can tell a story in a short headline, summary or caption. For print publications, we’ve turned to copy editors to compile packages of news briefs and features such as celebrity columns. For the Web, we can turn to copy editors to create content that can be much more valuable for readers.

At the Missourian, we publish in print five days a week, but our interactive copy editing desk is staffed to update our website seven days a week. Sunday is an online-only production day — and it can be a relatively slow news day. Our interactive copy editors are using that time to create fresh content that has been popular with Sunday evening and Monday morning readers.

The Three Levels of News Aggregation

This post was first published at the Columbia Missourian's The Transition blog.

In the newspaper business, aggregation has a bad name. We blame news aggregators for stealing our original content and contributing to the downfall of our industry.

In truth, aggregation can help news websites as much as it can hurt them. Aggregation exists at three levels, each progressively adding more journalistic value.

Free Expression Online vs. a Free Market?

In the United States, we enjoy fewer government restrictions on our access to information than in many other countries.  While other countries may block online content that contains dissenting political views, Internet users in the United States have a right to freedom of speech  that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.  However, as much as we value free expression in this country, we also value the free market.

As for the news industry, journalist A.J. Liebling once wrote that freedom of the press is limited to those who own one (Brooks & Pinson, 2009).  The infrastructure for print journalism is expensive.  Over many decades, the local newspaper business evolved from a competitive market with multiple publications in cities throughout the country to a monopolistic market with only one metro daily newspaper in most urban areas.  Today, with online media, it’s much less expensive for individuals or organizations to share news or their views.  In the United States, this occurs for the most part without government interference.  However, significant market forces are barriers to entry for those who wish to start an online publication.

Free or Fee? Maybe the Correct Answer is Both Free and Fee

I’m mostly skeptical about the potential of pay walls for newspaper websites.  From a business model perspective, I think it might be better for publishers to build out their news sites as more effective platforms for reaching readers and advertisers.  From a journalist’s perspective, I’d like as many readers as possible to have access to our news stories, and pay walls stand in the way of that goal.  That said, I’m intrigued by the approach The Boston Globe is taking.  The Globe has put most of its content on its free Boston.com site.  However, it recently introduced a new BostonGlobe.com site specifically designed for the newspaper’s most loyal online readers.  The new site has promising technology that adapts the design to the size of the device screen or Web-browser window.  The Globe plans to charge about $4 a week for access to the site starting in mid-October, with free access for print subscribers.  Boston.com, however, will remain a free site with breaking news stories and a selection of content from the newspaper.  It will be interesting to see whether this best-of-both-worlds model can be successful.

Journalists and Digital Media | Order Out of Chaos?

In a July blog post, Clay Shirky described a state of chaos for the “new news environment.”   “Digital dimes,” he contended, won’t replace “analog dollars” because the market correctly values the digital reader as worth less than her analog counterpart.  Moreover, the hodgepodge of advertising, news, and other content once provided by a local monopoly newspaper doesn’t make much sense in a digital era.  Today, consumers can go to specialized sites to buy shoes or cameras, Shirky explained.  (For that matter, readers can go to specialized sites for financial, sports, and entertainment news.)  In such an environment, he wrote, “the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens. ... Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.”

It's Not Just a Copy Desk

This post was first published at the Columbia Missourian's The Transition blog.

It’s not just a copy desk. It’s also a content desk.

One of the strengths of the Missourian’s interactive copy desk is that our editors also have been trained as reporters. They know how to gather information. They know how to write. They understand storytelling.

And Now for the Mobile Revolution | Content and Context

Yikes!  As if newspaper publishers didn’t have enough trouble, Clyde Bentley—citing research from technology industry analyst Gartner—warned in a Reynolds Journalism Institute blog post that they have just three years to prepare for the next big technological shift facing their industry:  Mobile devices will replace personal computers as the most common means worldwide for getting content from the Internet.  Helpfully, Bentley compiled a “hellish but doable” timeline for publishers to implement a mobile strategy in time for the change.

Yikes again!