newspapers

In my PublishAsia presentation in Macau I walked through a general business case for social networking as an integrated feature of a news website.

The argument goes like this: We have an audience problem. We can fix our sales incentives, train our people, tune our pricing and our packaging, and replace leadership as necessary. But at the end of the day we're going to hit a very hard wall. That wall is available advertising inventory that meets the advertisers' needs.

From Pew Research: "The financial crisis facing news organizations is so grave that it is now overshadowing concerns about the quality of news coverage, the flagging credibility of the news media, and other problems that have been very much on the minds of journalists over the past decade."

Laid-off sports columnist Paul Oberjuerge, cut loose from the San Berdardino Sun, has had some time to mull it over and has produced a beautifully written and spot-on accurate list of "Tips on Keeping Your Print Journalism Job." It's so well done that I read it aloud to my (non-journalist) wife.

I won't spoil the experience by listing the 10 bullet points, but note that "embrace the Web" is Number One.

We're restarting our search at Morris DigitalWorks for a director of audience growth. This is a senior management position with significant responsibility. It involves working with all levels of leadership at the 13 daily Morris Publishing Group newspapers from Florida to Alaska, and some travel is required.

Earlier today I and a lot of other folks got an email from Vikki Porter, who's leading a Knight Digital Media Center conference for editorial page editors. "We are urging them to build credibility with their users by having the courage to send users elsewhere for info when they can't meet the need. As expected they are appalled. They want hard data to take home to convince their legacy managers this is a good idea."

A new report from polling firm Zogby International has troubling signals for conventional media of all types:

70% of Americans think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities.
67% think traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.
32% said Internet sites are their most trusted source for news and information.
22% said newspapers are the most trusted.
21% said television is the most trusted.
15% said radio is the most trusted.

Mark Potts runs through the details of Philly.com's reborn commenting system, which takes a good-enough approach to the complex problem of encouraging conversation in a world where an unfortunate percentage of us are idiots. As I've said previously, pseudonymity is a reasonable Middle Way.