I’ve been thinking about the future of newspapers a fair bit over the last few weeks, because we’ve been preparing a panel event on just that topic. It’s involved a range of reading and on-record and off-record conversations with a load of people involved with newspapers - readers, editors, pundits and the man on the Clapham Omnibus.

Newspapers, particularly quality papers, look screwed at first view. Only the Sun and the free-sheets did remotely well in the latest ABCs.

[ABC - the Audit Bureau of Circulation creates readership 'charts' for newspapers and magazines. Its sister operation ABCe's work in the online world, but their cost means they're only used by a minority of online publications, such as newspapers. While they provide a reliable measure of an individual site's readership, the lack of competitor data might be perceived as a weakness. National newspapers all subscribe to the ABCe scheme, though.]

While online figures continue to soar for the quality papers, those figures are not, sadly, indicative of revenues. Internet advertising costs less than print advertising, by a long way. In other terms, a drop of 5000 on the printed publication might require a hike upwards of 500,000 readers online to make up the same amount of contribution.

And those online readers aren’t especially useful, sometimes. If you have a UK advertising campaign, then the 75% of your readers who come from outside the UK, in the case of many Nationals’ websites, are not contributing. Their ‘hits’ on those websites aren’t helping to fulfil any advertising deals - they’re simply a ‘hit’ on the paper’s resources. Most advertising agencies don’t have any international briefs, just for UK people, so when they buy a million impressions, they don’t mean any old million, they mean a million UK users.

I talk to digital professionals, and all they use is Google and RSS - they haven’t bought newspapers in years, except when they take a flight or a train ride with no wireless. They’re also the most likely people to bring up points about newspapers’ effect on the environment (short version: v.bad; but maybe not as bad as you think).

All doom and gloom, so far. But then I talk to my step-mother, and she’s not having it. She doesn’t want to read a frickin’ screen. I talk to my sister and she says the same thing. I ask my mum, and it turns out she still gets a daily delivery. Once you look outside this digital world of RSS and Google, the demand for mainstream, normal stuff is actually pretty high. I’m pretty fond of papers myself, and if I, as a digital media person and every member of my family I asked, want newspapers (as newspapers), then surely that means a future.

I like to think about the many predictions that have been made over the years about the death of cinema. Televisions, VHS videos, DVDs, wide-screen televisions and now Blu-Ray have all allegedly spelled the end of the cinema age. Yet, surprise, box-office takings were at an all-time high in 2007.

Media don’t die upon the arrival of a new alternative: they adapt and survive. The arrival of urban freesheets in the past few years is evidence of that in the newspaper space. They may not be the model that we’d necessarily hope for as journalists or news consumers, but they’re certainly evidence of innovation and adaptation. Let’s hope that examples more conducive to quality reporting also bear fruit. The appearance of ShortList this year, offering decent-quality content at a freesheet price may be one indication.

What I hope comes out of our debate on the 28th October is not a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the future of newspapers, but some ideas about the type and extent of change and adaptation that is likely to be needed to ensure the future existence of quality journalism and, dare I say it, quality newspapers.

Do join us.

Me (to attendees from the Times and the BBC): You don’t link out to other people’s sites.

Times chap: Yes, we do, all the time.

BBC women: Yes, we do, all the time.

Me: Oh, okay…

Me (8 hours later at home): how do you explain this and this, then? (These are the top stories on the technology sections of their sites right now. Between the two of them, they manage to link to two sites. Both of them corporate websites. I don’t find any links to any blogs or CJ sites on any tech news stories right now).

Meh.

I’ve also learned the marvellous expression ‘Hammersmithing’. Say you’ve got two photos of the same two people, taken moments after each other. In the first, the first guy has his eyes closed. In the second, the other guy is blinking. What do you do? Neither picture is usable as it is. The editor might ask you to ‘Hammersmith’ the two shots - which means take the open-eyed head from one photo and stick it on the neck of the closed-eye portrait in the other shot. End result - usable photo with everyone’s eyes open.

Why’s it called ‘Hammersmithing’? Because the first organ transplant operations were conducted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I didn’t know and I thought it was really cute.

‘Hammersmithing’ was robustly defended as basically the same as editing. It’s one of the things news media do to help create stories that are worth something. No-one wants pictures of people with their eyes closed, neither reader nor publisher. The time and energy that goes into retouching photos is one of the things we pay for when we stump up the cash for a quality paper or broadcaster.

The very existence of the term and admission that it’s common practice resulted in gasps of shock in some quarters. But not here.

The ongoing ‘regaining trust in media’ agenda, as various mainstream channels are found to have falsified all sorts of things, goes too far a lot of the time. We need our stories crafted into edible chunks. That’s called editing. Imagine the cookery show where you have to wait 90 minutes before Nigella can pull out her perfect roast and serve it to her perfect friends. The showdancing competition where you wait 20 minutes for set changes between the acts. The press news story that interviews every possible person with any interest in the story whatsoever. A little leger de main is part of what we pay newspaper and broadcast people to do. It makes their stuff more entertaining and consumable. They filter the news so we don’t have to, because filtering is a full-time job and more. It’s only when stories are falsified or deliberately slanted, or when people are conned out of their voting cash, that anyone should become concerned.

This amounts to the aggregation of 2316 different feeds - though individual author feeds for the Guardian’s Comment is Free admittedly account for 1968 of these. A CiF-less version with 348 feeds is also available.

So what?, you might think, I can’t keep up with 50 or so feeds I already subscribe to.

This is the value. Open a new Bloglines or Google Reader account, import the feeds, and you’ve got a searchable database of the whole UK press any time you want it. If there’s a subject or a person or a business or a brand you care about, then finding out about news stories about them can be done in moments. For free.

via Cybersoc

The hard porn lurking on teenage blog sites says their story today in the paper edition.

The vast majority of blogs on top social websites contain potentially offensive material, a study shows.

The pages on sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Google’s blogger.com are a hit among children but can hold porn or adult language.

The popularity of blogging has exploded in the past 12 months with the number doubling to 70million.

But some of the most popular sites are shamelessly devoted to sex such as ‘Belle de Jour, diary of a London call girl’ and ‘Girl with a one-track mind, diary of a sex fiend’.

Needless to say, it’s based on “research” (PDF file) by an outfit called Scansafe, who make errm web filtering software for business and for paranoid parents. If you look at the PDF, which the Metro clearly didn’t bother doing, you’ll find there’s absolutely no substantiation of these claims whatsoever. Who’da thunk it?

So what? you may well ask. Well, it will apparently allow companies to very swiftly measure the impact of any release because any links to them in the blogosphere will be catalogued automatically. Compare this to what you might do using Google - “link: twopointouch.com/some_article_page” doesn’t produce the results chronologically and can’t follow email or RSS distribution. It’s similar to embedding an RFID chip into a press release. You can tell where it is at all times. No-one’s mentioned it, but it seems very much like a competing service to Technorati’s other big PR deal over the last couple of months, Edelman’s Story-Maker-Upper Social Media Release engine.

I’m not an enormous fan of either Technorati or PR Newswire, to be honest, but I think this is a great move. It’s strange: I was talking to Mike Butcher just the other day and we were discussing how citizen journalism has made professional journalism a lot tougher than it was in the days of print. Cut-and-paste from a press release and change a few words? (You know you’ve been there, old school hacks). Busted in seconds thanks to this sort of service. Great stuff. Now you have to do proper reporting and phone the guy up. And the other guy who disagrees with him. And then write your copy from scratch. It’s good news for journalism as a profession. The upshot is that the public get better news. You can turn round to your publisher or editor and say, “I need an original take on this story - otherwise it’s useless”. In an era where the production of ‘content’ is viewed as easy and cheap by many publishers, and where civilians are producing stuff that’s just as good (and better) than many of the pros, I’m hoping that the production of valuable content starts to become recognised once more as time-consuming, tricky and requiring a certain amount of training and skill. There is no longer any way to ‘fake it’.

In a deeply ironic twist, PRNewswire.com uses frames and so I can’t directly link to their press release. (doh!) Consequently, I’ve cut and pasted it below.

NEW YORK, Jan. 15 /PRNewswire/ — PR Newswire, the global leader in commercial news distribution, and Technorati, the authority for citizen media, today announced that for the first time readers of press releases can track online conversations in the blogosphere directly from press releases on http://www.prnewswire.com/.

This marks the first time Technorati has entered into a partnership with a commercial news distribution company, and will help to establish a strong link between two of the most important tools in the communications mix — announcements via press releases and reactions from bloggers.

All individual press releases distributed through PR Newswire will now include a ‘Technorati’ button, linking readers to a search result page hosted by Technorati that will display a list of blogs discussing and linking to the news release, and relevant excerpts from those blogs. Once on the search result page, the reader can set up an automatic watch list on Technorati to notify them when any new blog posts are published.

“Press releases have the power to initiate and inform important conversations in the blogosphere, while many bloggers are great accelerators and influencers of public conversation and opinion,” said Dave Armon, chief operating officer of PR Newswire. “This partnership joins together two leaders in the communications industry to offer an unparalleled service to both issuers of news and the readers who follow them. Issuers now have a means to track direct blog response to their press release using the most established and innovative blog search facility available, while readers of these news releases will gain broader context for the news by reading how these public influencers are responding to it.”

The Technorati link is available when viewing press releases from PR Newswire’s public Web site, http://www.prnewswire.com/, which receives more than 1.2 million unique visitors a month. All PR Newswire releases will carry the Technorati link at no additional cost. Technorati is a free service, requiring only registration by users.

“Often, the kernel of any robust conversation on the Live Web is a press release in which something significant or interesting is announced,” said David L. Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati. “By using the new Technorati button on PR Newswire, folks can instantly see both immediate reaction to announcements and the accelerating conversation, all in real time.”

Visitors to any press release on PR Newswire’s public Web site can also access RSS feeds of press releases categorized by industry and subject, and post press releases to both del.icio.us and digg, two influential social networks.

Mr. Dagres begins: Web 2.0 is a bubble for 3 reasons: 1) There is far too much money chasing Web 2.0 deals. Too much money means too many companies getting funded at higher valuations. 2) There are virtually no barriers to entry in Web 2.0 and therefore the ability to develop a unique solution and sustain a competitive advantage is virtually nil. Therefore, it’s difficult for Web 2.0 companies to build long term value. 3) There is very little liquidity in the market for Web 2.0 companies. The Dow was recently at a high and still no liquidity. Without liquidity, Web 2.0 companies must rely on acquisitions to achieve liquidity and this will put a lid on the potential exit options and ultimate valuations of these companies. In short, they will be playing a musical chairs game in which there are far too many players and too few chairs.

There are some similarities between the current “bubble” and the last one that burst in 2000: Lots of incomplete and under-experienced teams, business models based more on eyeballs than cash flow, and a rash of incremental and “me too” deals.

Mr. Hornik responds: I do not believe that the existence of too much venture capital money chasing too few interesting ideas constitutes a bubble. The Web 1.0 bubble inflated because the public markets were willing to bet on unproven ideas. Public markets are ill suited to evaluating such risks. On the other hand, the venture capital community exists precisely to take on that risk. While many Web 2.0 companies will fail, they will not likely fail in significantly greater proportions than has been the case with other venture investments historically. So it is hard to imagine how this so-called bubble will over-inflate. Venture capitalists will rationally stop investing in ideas that don’t bear fruit. Those that do bear fruit will gain traction and either be acquired or go public. Those are the traits of a rational market in my mind.

[...]

Mr. Dagres: I agree that there will be interesting companies coming out of the Web 2.0 wave. Every wave has its winners and losers. The notion of a bubble, however, is that a particular market gets overdone, i.e. over-hyped, over-invested, and ultimately experiences a high mortality rate. I think the Web 2.0 space will have a higher mortality rate than other segments of the overall media and technology industries. There are far too many MySpace and YouTube genetically challenged clones. All but a few will fail. The winners are generally the ones that get in early and out before the bubble bursts. There are rare examples of bubble companies making it through the bust and going on to become successful and valuable companies. By the way, the combined cash flow of Spot Runner, LinkedIn and Facebook is less than that of one Costco store.

The debate continues here…

Also note the following table from the TNL.net blog which shows that while there have been some enormous deals (MySpace, YouTube), the average Web 2.0 acquisition is somewhat more modest.

Once upon a time, television was full of national moments: mass audiences of 10 million or more tuning in and wanting to follow through the next day. But now that audience - fragmented across hundreds of channels - has virtually ceased to exist. Most of the time, any review of any show can only be valuable to a relatively small percentage of readers. Soaps? An exception, perhaps: you can catch up with them in the Saturday supplements. But through-the-week reviews have lost their relevance, just like television’s dominance of mass entertainment. (Goodnight ITV!) Use the space for more listings and previews, then, if you must. But recognise that the world has moved on.

I trust the bearing of this on the topic of this blog is pretty clear, even though I’ve never commented on broadcast TV. The role of ‘official opinion former’ seems, at least for the time being, to be something of an anachronism as almost every member of the audience is able to create a platform for their own opinions and to challenge those of others. Despite the fact that’s it’s a disgraceful Tory rag, the Daily Mail has actually done more than many traditional media owners in breaking down barriers between journalists and audience. Already, readers can comment on any story, even the front page headlines. Their recognition of a new reality when it comes to op/ed - that I and other readers feel as qualified to dive into the discussion as a seasoned hack. Editors become moderators and talent scouts as that discussion evolves.

Earlier this month, Jeff Jarvis noted that Guardian Online has taken similar steps with its arts and entertainment coverage, throwing its columnists into a conversation with other critics - the former audience. (More: another paper bins its critics)

Seasoned googlers, of whom there is already a vast tribe, are nerds, anoraks and braces-wearers of the worst sort who spend every working moment searching the infernal engine for other people’s blogs.

They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of the bleeding obvious who in a more primitive era used to fool around with the office photocopier, circulating allegedly humorous material (”In these days of equal rights, why is Manchester not known as Personchester”) faxed or posted to them by fellow-nerds who in turn had painfully copied the stuff from a parish magazine.

The world is now their oyster - or their lobster as they would say, stealing the joke without acknowledgment.

They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.

Googlers and bloggers do not have an original thought between them. Their ruminations on tax reform, Europe, immigration, Iraq, security, education and the rest have already been googled ten times over by fellow bloggers copying their source material from some other blogger’s googling diatribe to the local newspaper.

Hopefully, they will google themselves out of steam, replacing their hobby with games of draughts or snakes and ladders.

I stole this story from The Register. To which it was contributed by TechDigest. What nonsense! (*cough*)