(Editor & Publisher) Staffers at The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday were given a newly compiled list of rules for “professional conduct,” which included a lengthy guide for use of online outlets, noting cautions for activities on social networking sites…
- Don’t recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work.
- Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts who may need to be treated as confidential sources. Openly “friending” sources is akin to publicly publishing your Rolodex.
- Don’t [...] aggressively promote your coverage.
- Avoid giving highly-tailored, specific advice to any individual on Dow Jones sites. Phrases such as “Travel agents are saying the best deals are X and Y…” are acceptable while counseling a reader “You should choose X…” is not. Giving generalized advice is the best approach.
- Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter. Common sense should prevail, but if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.
- Keep reading…
– by Esther Wojcicki, journalism teacher and newspaper adviser at Palo Alto High School
(Fortune) Reading the newspaper these days makes me sad about journalism. “The American Press on Suicide Watch” was the headline of Frank Rich’s New York Times column this past Sunday. “Legendary brands from the Los Angeles Times to the Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering,” Rich said, adding that the New York Times Co. (NYT) might shutter the Boston Globe. Maureen Dowd riffed too about “The Future of Journalism” — which was the title of last week’s Congressional hearing chaired by Senator John Kerry. Journalists, Kerry said, are “an endangered species.”
The crisis isn’t simply that consumers are no longer willing to pay real money to support real journalism. Consumers truly don’t care enough about the product. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that 42% of readers said they wouldn’t miss their city paper. Most of these readers, as you might guess, were under 40 years old.
I care a lot because I teach journalism at Palo Alto High School, in California. I’ve been teaching high school journalism for 25 years. Starting with 19 students, I’ve built our journalism program into the largest high school journalism program in the country, with six publications, four journalism teachers, and about 400 students. In the advanced journalism class, I teach 70 juniors and seniors. I also teach freshman English.
I decided to poll my journalism students: “How do you prefer to get your news, online or in print format?” …
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- We will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content.
- We will begin differentiating our sites from the newspaper and focus on strategies designed to reach younger audiences and extend our reach. The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product.
- We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces. This site will be focused on a younger audience as well as other targeted audiences based on demographics which are attractive to our current and potential advertisers.
- We will initially focus on five or six niche vertical content channels to support targeted advertising opportunities (many of which have reverse publishing opportunities).
- New tiered circulation pricing strategies will be considered as part of, and tied to, the above online strategies.
- READ THE MEMO
(FT.com) News Corp is planning to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal’s website this year, in a milestone in the news industry’s race to find better online business models.
“A sophisticated micro-payments service” will launch this autumn, Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told the Financial Times. [...] Pricing for individual articles and for premium subscriptions had yet to be decided, he said, but would be “rightfully high.” … READ IT
(Technology Review / Jason Pontin) [...] For 300 years, two related sources of revenues sustained publications: subscriptions and advertising. The system worked imperfectly. Most readers of newspapers and magazines were freeloaders, borrowing copies someone else had bought; and because no one really knew how many people read publications, or how advertisements influenced readers’ purchasing, advertisers spent their monies inefficiently.
But so long as subscription and advertising revenues grew, the system did work. In turn, the business of publishing supported the profession of journalism, which was, when all is said and done, a useful thing. In open societies, magazines and newspapers were the most important exchanges in the free marketplace of ideas. Publications informed, instructed, diverted, and delighted.
But the Internet taught readers they might read stories whenever they liked without charge, and it offered companies more-efficient ways to advertise. Both parties spent less. As a consequence, today the business of media is sickly… Keep reading…