Something Ugly To Ponder For Those Soon To Graduate Into The Media World

AdAge charts the top 100 media companies in the country by revenue and finds that 2007 growth was the slowest it’s been in six years. As Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider points out, if it’s this slow in 2007, imagine how horrific it will be for 2008 and 2009?

AdAge found that overall media growth rose 4.7%, with Digital contributing the greatest at 10.7% and cable networks kicking in 10.6%. Newspapers dropped the most, losing 6.8% in revenue. All in all, media companies pulled in $299.1 billion. This list appears to be AdAge’s version of the Forbe’s 400:

The Media 100 offers a bottom-up view of media by tallying revenue from an array of products and services. This includes traditional media, internet services, cable providers and movies. Revenue sources include advertising, subscriptions, sales of movie tickets and DVDs, and fees from TV production/licensing.

The most important question: What’s this mean for me? It means when I graduate into the world with a piping hot journalism degree, ready to report, I might be screwed. On the plus side, this year will be slightly buoyed by the Olympics and the elections, so ad spending might remain slightly steady to just a tad off. Then again, come December when I’m done with school, I might be in big trouble.

Did you know I left undergrad in May 2002, when the economy went in the tank after September 11th? Now I’m getting my second degree a few months after the financial system blows up. I have impeccable timing.

UPDATE: It’s only getting worse.

MediaDailyNews, “found that the percentage of advertising budgets that are expected to increase over the next six months fell to 33% during the April/May period that its most recent survey was conducted, an eight percentage point drop from the Spring of 2007.”

A Newspaper Teeters On The Edge Of Collapse

Image via Wikipedia

The New York Sun, a seven year old newspaper, is on the cusp of shutting down its operations. According to the New York Post, the company has never posted a profit in its recent history and it is losing twelve million dollars annually. Unsurprisingly, the company can’t scrape together enough capital from investors to save itself.

As a result, the reporters are now working day-to-day, expecting the paper to close down at any moment. Portfolio called the paper’s managing editor, and part-owner, Ira Stoll to find out if the company would be closed by day’s end. Stoll sounded less than convincing when he said, “Ah…I think there will be,” an issue printed tomorrow, later adding, “I’m one of the owners. The paper may be closing, but it may not be.”

This news saddens those who hate watching newspapers die off, though it comes as no surprise. The paper tried to revive the New York Sun brand right when the internet became ubiquitous, leading to a change in people’s consumption patterns. Had the Sun launched as a Slate or Salon type of publication, its fate might have been different.

Many news companies, often in the form of blogs, are launching at a regular clip nowadays. These operations are lower cost, higher velocity, more reliant on analysis and aggregation, but no less informative or useful. Granted, launching into the crowded blog world is akin to the Sun’s launch into the crowded New York newspaper market, but somehow it makes more sense.

On average I read more than 20 news sites every day. I’ve never seen a single person carrying 20 different newspapers with them. When reaching for a newspaper in the morning, too many customers grabbed the Post, the Daily News, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal instead of the Sun.

The New York Sun’s demise should be a wake up call–not that they need it–to other newspapers, as well as other media companies, that in this economy, it is time to tighten up and focus on the bottom line. As Howard Lindzon tweeted over the weekend, “This is THE BEST time to start a business as your dumb ideas will be questioned and you will be focused on survival – REVENUE.”

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Brilliance

The Blogger’s Challenge

Earlier this week Sarah Lacy had–a story? post? column?–something on BusinessWeek’s website, where she writes:

…Increasingly there’s a sense that the blogosphere lost a lot on the way to getting big…Jason Calacanis, one of the first to make serious money off blogging (when he sold his Weblogs to AOL for a reported $30 million), recently announced his “retirement.” “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it”…Robert Scoble, who made his name blogging, lamented that tech blogs had let readers down…

I, too, am asking some of these same questions. After seeing my own blog readership swell in a short time to about 40,000 per month, I have misgivings about seeing sarahlacy.com grow much more. Bigger audiences mean trolls and spammers and a general breakdown in community and the high-level conversation I find so rewarding…

The problem with Lacy’s thing is that she, along with Scoble and Calacanis are established. They have made plenty of money through blogging. They can lament the problems with blogging and deride their large audiences because it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t need the page views or the unique visitors, because they aren’t trying to establish themselves as professional bloggers or reporters.

Many people say it’s an exciting time to be a journalist, especially a young journalist because it’s easier than ever to start your own site or blog. But that’s not true. It’s just as hard as ever to be a young reporter. Maybe even harder than in the past because you have really gloomy people in the industry lamenting the death of journalism.

When someone like Lacy says she’d like to keep her blog free of ads, with fewer visitors, it’s like Radiohead giving away their record and people saying “the music industry is changed forever.” Radiohead gave away their record because they were Radiohead. They were a band with a monstrous following that was still going to get reguolar royalty checks from their ex-label as well as cash from well attended concerts. Try starting a band tomorrow and announcing to the world they can pay what ever they like for it. What do you think the answer will be?

An Interview With Times Columnist David Carr

To obtain an approximation of the truth when writing his memoir, Night Of The Gun, David Carr spent years interviewing and recording the people from his past. He did this with $800 worth of video and audio equipment he picked up from Best Buy.

When he finished writing his book, he considered throwing all the material he gathered on the internet. However, after closely looking through some of the assembled information he thought better of it.

He sifted through and created an impressive, if not overwhelming, website that provides people with access to the source materials he used for his memoir. On the site are narrated videos, as well as unedited footage from interviews in addition to photographs and police and medical records.

Producing a site of this scope would scare many newsmen, but David is no stranger to the web or multimedia. In his day job as a columnist for the New York Times, Carr has blogged and filmed video segments in addition to  mashing a keyboard for his weekly column on media. His extensive work can be accessed here.

I spoke with him over the phone about the process of filming and recording his subjects, as well as the website for his book.

When you set out to report your book, why did you decide to bring a camera and audio equipment?

I did it because the stuff was cheap. It created layers of redundancy built into the reporting with video, audio, typing created efficacious reporting. It would give me the most sort of flexibility. What I wanted to do was create a website. I would have the data from my reporting. I didn’t have a good idea of what it would be.

What was the process in deciding what would be text or video when creating the project?

The book was there from the start. I sold a proposal, so it was always going to be a book. I found I had put everything on this hard drive, I asked myself and others what that should be. There were a lot of iterations. I could throw the whole database on the website, but going through the tapes I discovered libel and slander and other shit I didn’t put in book. An unedited database would be a disaster.

I interviewed a bunch of people, I worked with Nick Bilton at the Times who has experience with story telling, we organized the site around a few questions. We used text, audio, video to answer those questions. It became apparent that video would take some narration. I  did a day long shoot in my garage and worked with  Jigar Mehat from the Times.

I’m proud of the site, though it didn’t work out how I thought it would. I think having twelve videos produced,that stretches people’s interest, it’s not the smartest thing. I thought it would be a bigger deal than it turned out to be. I didn’t get a lot of coverage about the website. There has not been a lot of feedback, one thing the website did or is doing is providing a point of entry for young people, people in [their early to mid twenties], who sampled main stream media, and used the web as secondary source. They were converted, they liked the website and they would come.

Now that the book is out there, we’re seeing traffic go up, but I thought it would be a significant point of entry for people buying the book.

When I looked at the site, I found it to be overwhelming, and it was unlike a Chris Anderson site, where it’s a blog that’s pretty simple.

I blog a bit at work and I didn’t want to get locked into blog about the book, which is just blogging about me. I’m a pretty healthy narcissist,  but I couldn’t sustain that. But I understand what your saying about it being overwhelming in this age of simple user interface. At the site, you open up all these tiles, you go what is this?

It may or may not have been a good judgment, like the navigation will re-array depending on what button you push, the timeline–which I didn’t understand why Nick wanted to do that, it didn’t make sense to me–sustains interest. It has its own gloriousness. I don’t know if community works, it hooks to a forum on Simon and Schuster but it is pretty moribund. There’s a lot more activity on the blog for Amazon. I built a separate Facebook page, too.

Is that a failure of Simon and Schuster? Are people uninterested in going to a publisher’s site as opposed to Amazon or Facebook?

No, it’s not their fault, it’s ours. We made the community element a small button on a dense site. The gesture of participation was authentic. The website has as much DNA from documentary film as from web stuff and as such–as glorious as it is–and really well done, I don’t know if it comports with web, which is hilarious because Nick Bilton is so good at designing in the bit, snack, meal interface, but we probably served up too much of a meal.

People aren’t compelled by the narrative, but by the raw data. We put up six more of the just interviews from my raw footage.  People love that shit, they love it.

For what we’re working on, and I believe it is becoming the standard for web video journalism, it involves filming five shots of the person as they work and then interviewing them afterward and weaving it all together. Do you think this will continue into the future or will it be more of the one-on-one dead-on talking head style?

I was more concerned with what the truth is, so having a single person being filmed indifferent to aesthetic, no special sound, gives it some kind of vibe of authenticity, you get a peek at the real shit.

I know what you mean, with overlaying audio. It’s how people really learn stories. Audio based overlay on more interesting visuals has extreme value, but one is portrait, which you’re doing. Mine is raw reporting. They’re different sort of activities. I’m not telling you about this person, they’re telling me about me.

The thing is, I told Simon and Schuster this website was going to be a big deal so they funded it. It’s not a huge, significant amount of money for a website. I dont think it was or is that big of a deal. I posted a question in the on the book’s forum: Does the website matter? It’s only 25 responses, the site hasn’t gone really viral.

My book was very well covered, I got every break in the world, but one of the coolest best pieces was a hurry up piece that Abcnews.com did, it jammed so much info into that, its like 90 seconds and really good. It’s me talking and then some found images in there.

Do you find people act differently when you put a camera in their face as opposed to just reporting with a notepad and a recorder?

People are fully assimilated to cameras, people leap toward and embrace being on camera. Everybody is always ready, they don’t care what you are doing. When I’m filming the carpetbagger, I could tell them I’m shooting for Danish TV and they wouldn’t care. If you shoot at night and have a light on the camera, people will come like moths to a lamp. They just want to say, “I was on the thing,” a lot don’t even really ask what its for, the transaction is complete, they don’t even need to see it.

Of course for the book, did people act differently? I think it went away after awhile, people seem pretty natural. What I don’t like about filiming as journalist, is I’m about observed reporting, and you get none of that with a camera. You have an 800 pound pencil, you become the center of attention.

With the Oscars, dealing with famous people, the camera is not a help with them because they have a character when there’s a camera light on them, the more used to a camera a person is the more different they’ll act on it.

A lot of what I’m hearing and being told is that reporters should be able to do video, do podcasts, do typing, but in my experience it seems like there is a video crew and there are reporters. They may work together, but it’s almost siloed with each doing its thing. Do you think this will continue, or will there be a convergence with reporters doing both?

At the Times I feel videographers rolling towards me, but if there is breaking news we let videographers go and do their own stories. I do a seasonal blog about the Oscars and we’ll do a weekly video with producer and editor. In that case, I’m talent. I’m just acting goofy, jumping in front of camera. For the daily videos I’m waving around and it’s usually just me working the video.

When I make a video of the family, a home movie, I’m constantly annotating and commenting from behind the camera and I see that being valuable going forward, but thats all I would be doing, that would be a story, you can weild the camera and write the asides.

Thirty years ago I worked at a paper and  I got assigned to take both the photo and story, but they’d never both turn out. Either one would turn out or the other, you get story or the picture or you don’t get both. That part of convergence will be difficult to negotiate. You’ll be coming out of school with different skill set, but its fucking hard. When I go to Sundance, I do a lot of video, but there is no reporting when the camera is around, I’m talent not a reporter.

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Why Do You Think It’s Safe For Me To Put This Camera In Your Face?

If you dislike navel gazing blog posts, then turn away, because it’s going to get ugly.

I am enrolled in a multimedia reporting class. The largest responsibility for the class is filming our subjects for short videos that we will put on our own blogs. I’ve felt a tightness in the chest ever since I learned I was going to take this class. As a matter of fact, when it was first announced to my class, I booed. What can I say, I lived in Philadelphia for five years.

I feel a slight sense of panic at the prospect of the class because I don’t understand why people would want to talk to me, let alone have me film them. What makes a person trust me with getting their story correct? What drives them to hand over their life to me? I have serious trepidation and doubt about a person giving up their valuable time to let me film them, only to have it posted on a hardly read blog that will be accessible for years on the Internet.

“I still haven’t reconciled this idea,” says one like minded classmate, though she is in the minority. Most classmates seem to be filled with bravado and confidence.

“No, people will trust you. They’ll let you take control and tell their story, they’ll be willing to put themselves in your hands,” said one classmate. Sure enough I saw him a few days later and he had gathered a number of interviews with people. After only speaking to him for a few minutes, I could see how he managed to get those interviews. He has an easy going, calm personality, whereas I was hyperventilating and freaking out about the assignment. (Note to future employers, I have a tendency to freak out–at least initially–all the time. I always get the work done, and done well.)

Choosing the subject matter will of course, affect the chances of success. Initially I intended to focus on the collapse of the commercial real estate industry as prices fall off a cliff and the credit markets tighten. My hope was to track down someone that had property, but couldn’t obtain financing to build on that property. It’s a dangerous idea to manufacture a subject for non-fiction, as I learned. It’s even more dangerous to ask people to talk about their failures, I was warned. While I don’t think that not getting financing in this credit environment is a failure, I understand if people don’t want to go on the Internet and say, “I’m sort of screwed.”

At the same time, I think people should want to air their grievances, especially if they’ve been smacked by bad timing. These market conditions are not their fault, yet they have to suffer. This could be a compelling story. Ultimately, I think this is the reason people will talk. They have a compelling story to tell and I can be their bullhorn. Or as a classmate put it in this pithy response (over G-Chat), “ppl like to talk.”

“I guess people are always flattered to have someone ask what they think about something,” said a recent graduate of my program, adding “And people like to tell their stories…it seems almost like a reflex, not something that people really consider rationally.”

I was beginning to feel okay about my chances of getting someone on tape. Then I asked this classmate, but what about being filmed? The response was a little less assuring, “Yeah, video is a little different. I think I would run away from a camera.” He quickly added, “But probably some people get turned on by the thought of strangers admiring them and listening to them talk.”

A Tale Of Two NYUs

After reading an exceedingly lengthy blog post by Mark Glaser I am left scratching my head and rubbing my eyes. In 2300 (!) words, Glaser, a media critic for PBS, details the kerfuffle that ensued when a NYU undergrad, Alana Taylor wrote about her disappointment in the university’s comprehension of new media.

I disagree whole heartedly with Taylor and I have doubts about Glaser’s assertions.

Taylor set off alarm bells at NYU by essentially called her professor an old fogey, because the professor wasn’t aware of many trends in technology and blogging The professor, who forces Taylor to bring a physical copy of the Times to class, read the blog post, felt it was intrusive and banned Taylor from any further blogging about what happens in the class.

I take issue with Taylor’s attack. A large part of the reason that I have this blog is because of New York University, where I am enrolled in the graduate journalism program. For the course I’m taking we must have a blog. We were required to blog last fall, also. We’re only required to produce 2 posts a week, hardly a rigorous, true blogging experience. When I interned at Silicon Alley Insider, an internship I wouldn’t have gotten without NYU’s backing, I saw the authors there posting 10 times a day.

Regardless, the important thing to take away is that we were forced from day one to reconcile the medium of blogging. And well we should, it is not a fringe element. Look at Dealbook on the New York Times website or All Things D as part of the Wall Street Journal’s network. Those are thoroughly reported news sources, as well as places of useful aggregation. My exposure to this medium and those sites can be very easily traced to education I received in journalism courses at NYU.

Glaser’s post doesn’t take a stance on the quality of new journalism education, but rather the hypocrisy of encouraging blogging, then banning it all together. I take issue with this stance as well.

When Glaser defends Taylor’s right to post anything she hears, he throws out basic reporting principles. One of the first things I was taught at school, was to establish the ground rules for an interview with a source before talking. Is this on background, on record, or not for attribution? We have dozens of speakers come in from the Financial Times, Forbes, The Journal and they all say, “this is on background, I don’t want this to appear on your personal blog.” And no one complains. Its part of being a reporter.

I will not pretend I fully grasp the complex laws that control free speech, but I understand common decency in reporting. Taylor’s blog post followed in the tradition of many reporters who report from inside, such as Michael Lewis and his brilliant Liar’s Poker, though he did additional reporting beyond mere memoir writing. It also follows in the less admirable style of Gawker, often picking a fight for the sake of it. When Taylor took her shots at the teacher in a very public way, she didn’t bother asking for comment from the teacher or even the department.

The issue Taylor laments–is journalism school adequately preparing students for the current media landscape–is worthy of debate. However, just spouting off from her perspective does little to enhance the conversation. It polarizes the university’s faculty and students, while also causing some people to cast aspersions at blogging, deriding it as navel gazing unrelated to reporting.

Obviously, blogging is reporting. Since I learned that at NYU, I’ve got to wonder where exactly Taylor goes to school.

People Aren’t Using 3G As Much As AT&T Envisioned

SAI’s Dan Frommer reports that “AT&T says iPhone 3G users are using less bandwidth than they anticipated…The carrier expected a 5x growth in data consumption over the old iPhone, but it’s been closer to a 3x jump.” He speculates on why people are not using the 3G service:

In our experience, AT&T’s 3G service for the iPhone has been anything but impressive — so slow and unreliable that we’ve found ourselves forcing the phone to use AT&T’s slower “EDGE” network just to keep a steady Internet connection. Add to that the legions of iPhone 3G owners who’ve turned 3G off to keep the phone’s battery life at acceptable levels — and the vast number of people who live outside AT&T’s 3G network area — and it’s easy to see how iPhone 3G data usage has been underwhelming.

All good points, though I’ve had less trouble in the past week since the 2.1 software was released.

What’s more interesting to me, which is not explored in Frommer’s post, nor in the Mocconews post he got the information from, is what the increase in 3G reliance means to AT&T’s network and profits. The AT&T exec said they are working on improving their 3G infrastructure, presumably to handle the incoming deluge of bandwidth traffic from the increasingly data centric smartphones. Is the company ready for a 5X, a 7X increase in data usage? Will this whack out their margins? Will it overload the network?

Suddenly The Veep Pick Is Less Important…

From The Business Sheet: Hank Paulson says he will not be the Treasury Secretary next year. Who could blame him? He and his crew have worked every day for the past 5 weeks trying to sort out this mess. Some of his staff are working 20 hour days and the Wall Street Journal reports one employee, recently moved to Washington from Texas, has only seen his family once since taking on his job alongside Paulson.

When Paulson hands the reins over to the next Secretary, that person will be facing a whole new set of responsibilities thanks to the government’s newfound taste for toxic assets and insistence on greater regulatory power. So, it’s kinda important to know who might get the nod if McCain wins or if Obama wins. Maybe even more important than the Vice Presidential pick that got so much attention a few weeks ago.

Today, New York Magazine’s Intel blog floated the idea of Merrill seller, John Thain joining the McCain camp. After all, Thain is a bundler that raised $32,700 for McCain and he was already rumored to be in the running for a possible Treasury job. Of course, Thain is the same guy that couldn’t turn Merrill around, opting instead to sell it. Not exactly the best credential for someone looking to tackle this economy. Phil Gramm was rumored to be in the running until he screwed up and said Americans are suffering from a mental recession. Carly Fiorina was also in the running, until she said Sarah Palin could run Hewlett-Packard, and now her status in the McCain camp is in jeopardy.

At the end of August, Deal Book, a Wall Street Journal blog assessed who might be in line to become secretary if Obama won. Timothy Geithner, the New York Fed president, who has been Paulson’s point man in the past week, was atop their list of people Obama was rumored to be interested in. The other names suggested were Jaime Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, and Jon Corzine, former Goldman CEO and current New Jersey governor.

Each of the rumored Obama picks appears to be a great choice, and he should try to exploit this advantage, before McCain pulls out a personably quirky economic advisor from an iceberg and excites the nation.

Being Trapped In The Apple Eco-System Is Fine For Now

Dan Lyons first column for Newsweek went up this Saturday and its about (what else?) Apple. He calls out the company for acting like a monopolist. Ryan Block has posted a rebuttal to Lyons’ column here.

I agree that Apple has much too much power now, but I am one of the people wrapped into the Apple eco-system. I have an iPhone, an iBook and an iPod shuffle. All three of which I use for 10 hours every day. I am not one of the people that think Apple’s OS is miles above Windows. I’ve used Windows and I’ve used Mac and I find the difference between the two to be negligible. I use Apple products because they work better than the other products I’ve seen.

The iPhone for all its faults and flaws is a vastly better phone for my uses. I can read the New York Times and Bloomberg on the subway with the phone. I can also read saved articles through Instapaper, not to mention the fact that I can do crossword puzzles, connect four, Super Monkey Ball or any number of other time wasters. While the BlackBerry or the Instinct are great phones, for my needs they aren’t as good as the iPhone. This is ultimately the power of Apple.

It is an oversimplification, but it is true that Apple makes better stuff. Their phone is better. Their mp3 player is better (though only slightly.) Their laptops are equal to rivals, perhaps even worse in some cases, but they run smoothly and work very well in conjunction with the aforementioned devices.

Apple’s run of great products can’t last forever, but who is really competing with them? Until a company comes out with a better piece of hardware, I’ll remain locked into the Apple eco-system.