Have no fear, the walls are still high at the IHT.
Despite the fact that virtually all IHT advertising is currently coming from corporate 'green advertising' or luxury goods/fashion at the moment, Monday's special report on The Business of Green led with an article by the IHT's Eric Pfanner, headlined:
'Green' marketing loses buzz and credibility - here's a taste.
PARIS: At an annual gathering of the advertising industry a year ago in Cannes, the environment was the topic du jour. "Be seen, be green," one agency urged on the invitation to its party at a hillside villa. Al Gore, invited by another agency, flew in to deliver a message linked to "An Inconvenient Truth," his film about climate change: that the ad industry could play an influential role in encouraging business and consumers to change their ways and slow the process of global warming.
The sun was still beating down on the Côte d'Azur last month as advertising executives from all over the world returned for this year's festival. But Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, was nowhere to be found, and the party buzz was about the U.S. presidential elections, the Euro 2008 soccer tournament or even the business of advertising itself. "Green" marketing, while booming, had lost some of its buzz.
The advertising industry is quicker than most to pick up on changing consumer tastes and moods, and experts say many people are growing skeptical about the proliferation of ads with an environmental message.
Over the past year, as if in answer to Gore's plea, marketers around the world have jumped onto the green bandwagon.
But the sheer volume of environmental advertising and the flimsiness of the claims in some of the campaigns show signs of generating an unintended effect. Instead of serving as a call to action or casting brands in a positive light, these ads are generating an increasingly skeptical response.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/06/business/rbogad.php
Given how the special report was packed with those green advertisers, and how this particular piece was given a skybox on the front page to flag up the report, I think we can safely say IHT editors aren't rolling over to have their tummies tickled by 'green advertisers'.
www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com
www.ianwalthew.com
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Washington Post names Marcus Brauchli as top editor
Signaling a generational change at one of the nation's most influential newspapers, the new publisher of The Washington Post on Monday selected an outsider as the paper's top editor.
Marcus Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months.
He will succeed Leonard Downie Jr., 66, who has led The Post's newsroom for 17 years, guiding it to numerous accolades, including six Pulitzer Prizes this year, the most in its history.
But Brauchli (pronounced BROW-klee) and Weymouth take the helm at a time when The Post, like the newspaper industry as a whole, is buffeted by budget cuts, a shrinking newsroom, falling advertising revenue and declining circulation.
"I don't think it's a case of her wanting to shake the place up as much as her having to," said Benjamin Bradlee, a former executive editor who is a vice president of the Washington Post Company. "She feels the urgency to change and adapt, and thank heaven."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/07/business/08cndbrauchli.php
Marcus Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Post on Sept. 8, at a time of great upheaval in the industry. At age 47, he is young enough to remain in place in for many years, working alongside the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, who is 42 and has been in her job for five months.
He will succeed Leonard Downie Jr., 66, who has led The Post's newsroom for 17 years, guiding it to numerous accolades, including six Pulitzer Prizes this year, the most in its history.
But Brauchli (pronounced BROW-klee) and Weymouth take the helm at a time when The Post, like the newspaper industry as a whole, is buffeted by budget cuts, a shrinking newsroom, falling advertising revenue and declining circulation.
"I don't think it's a case of her wanting to shake the place up as much as her having to," said Benjamin Bradlee, a former executive editor who is a vice president of the Washington Post Company. "She feels the urgency to change and adapt, and thank heaven."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/07/business/08cndbrauchli.php
Monday, 7 July 2008
Better to be more or less right, than exactly wrong
"Better to be more or less right, than exactly wrong" was a favourite saying of ex-IHT publisher Peter Goldmark Jnr. As he got the boot when the NYT took over the IHT, I guess he was exactly wrong.
But I think I would apply that analysis to the following interesting piece in the IHT last week, which is worth quoting in full, coming off the back of a couple of recent posts on Think! about newsroom cuts:
NEWSPAPERS AND THE WEB
Save the press
On the lobby wall of the newspaper where I got my first reporting job are the Thomas Jefferson words that U.S. journalists like to trot out as America's Independence Day nears:
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Of course, Jefferson also said the only reliable truths in newspapers were the advertisements, and that he was happiest when not reading the papers.
But as to his iconic quote, it's no secret that we're trending toward the former. And anyone who cheers the collapse of the newspaper industry should consider why Jefferson put aside his distaste for the vitriol and nonsense of the press for the larger principle of healthy democracies needing informed citizens.
Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives.
You read about the great names in American journalism - the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News - as if reading the obituary page. Rich U.S. cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper.
Columnists, reporters, editors, cartoonists and photographers who brought to life the daily narrative of a city or region have been swept aside. What started as layoffs and buyouts is edging toward closures and bankruptcies.
And here's the great paradox: All of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater. The Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, but it's allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.
Those who revel in the life-threatening trauma that newspapers are going through, saying they brought it upon themselves by being too liberal, too sensationalistic, too banal - choose your insult - miss the point. People are not deserting these complex and contradictory summaries of our collective existence. Not by any stretch.
Measured purely by number of readers in all formats, many newspapers have never been more successful.
Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 - a record, and a 12 percent increase over a year ago, according to a Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site. A visitor, it should be noted, is different from a reader, but it's the measurement of choice.
The Web is the future. And yet, because online advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money. In its present form, and even in best-case projections, the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation's biggest papers.
That's the business model crisis, an old story by now, the millstones of capitalism crushing an outdated format. Something new will emerge, a print and Web model.
In the meantime, print reporters strap on the old Webcam, charge up their podcast recorder, grab their notebook and dutifully try to cover a story that now needs to be presented in three formats, or more.
What's the alternative? It's possible that some civic-minded nonprofits will end up owning one or two of the nation's great papers, and operating them as trusts, hands off.
But that's a limited solution, fraught with problems of control and flexibility, and it won't keep reporters at city hall in Sioux Falls or the statehouse in Santa Fe.
Another response is goodbye, and so what. Look at the auto industry numbers from this week, with General Motors slouching toward bankruptcy.
Besides, there's plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post - even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can't produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter.
And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing! "Not our financial model," as the cofounder, Ken Lerer famously said. From low pay to no pay - the New Journalism at a place that calls itself an Internet newspaper.
Yes, the Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo's home page can afford to work for free, but it's un-American, to say the least.
Long ago, I was a member of the steelworkers union, and also a longshoreman. If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they'd laugh in their lunch buckets - then probably shut The Huffington Post down. Doesn't the "progressive" agenda, much touted on their pages, include a living wage?
We could be left with a snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood.
My lament this year as we Americans celebrate Independence Day is to ask readers to see newspapers as not just another casualty in the churn of business. Sure, reporters say stupid things and write idiotic stories. Everyone stumbles. But on its best days, a newspaper is a marvel of style and wit, of small-type discoveries and large-type overstatements, a diary of our deeds.
We may still prove Jefferson's preference wrong: Perhaps a nation can function without newspapers. But it would be a confederacy of dunces.
Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/opinion/edegan.php
All noble stuff, but I want to pick out the key passage here in case you missed it:
The Web is the future. And yet, because online advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money. In its present form, and even in best-case projections, the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation's biggest papers.That's the business model crisis, an old story by now, the millstones of capitalism crushing an outdated format. Something new will emerge, a print and Web model.
The problem is that of course newspaper reach is growing (it's called the internet, stupid, and it's free - as I have written before) but the cost to advertisers per thousand readers/visitors/call it what you will (CPM) is gold bars to peanuts when compared with the CPM for those luxury adverts in the IHT and what www.nytimes.com can charge.
And peanuts don't pay for newsrooms.
So the question is, how do you increase the CPM on the web?
Answer: you can't, in fact it's trending down.
So what do newspapers need to do?
Answer: increase the CPMs on a medium that is trending down.
Problematic, non?
The elephant in the room that no one seems willing to address, is that indeed a new business model is required for newspaper companies, but that is going to require providing, and SELLING, a print product that people, younger people WANT.
They don't, evidently, want what I call Newspaper 1.0.
So someone needs to come up with Newspaper 2.0.
And that's doable.
Question is: will it be the NYT/IHT who show the way? I think they can.
Keep the faith.
But I think I would apply that analysis to the following interesting piece in the IHT last week, which is worth quoting in full, coming off the back of a couple of recent posts on Think! about newsroom cuts:
NEWSPAPERS AND THE WEB
Save the press
On the lobby wall of the newspaper where I got my first reporting job are the Thomas Jefferson words that U.S. journalists like to trot out as America's Independence Day nears:
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
Of course, Jefferson also said the only reliable truths in newspapers were the advertisements, and that he was happiest when not reading the papers.
But as to his iconic quote, it's no secret that we're trending toward the former. And anyone who cheers the collapse of the newspaper industry should consider why Jefferson put aside his distaste for the vitriol and nonsense of the press for the larger principle of healthy democracies needing informed citizens.
Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives.
You read about the great names in American journalism - the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News - as if reading the obituary page. Rich U.S. cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper.
Columnists, reporters, editors, cartoonists and photographers who brought to life the daily narrative of a city or region have been swept aside. What started as layoffs and buyouts is edging toward closures and bankruptcies.
And here's the great paradox: All of this bad news is coming at a time when the audience and reach of many newspapers has never been greater. The Internet may kill the daily newspaper as we know it, but it's allowed some papers to increase their readership by tenfold.
Those who revel in the life-threatening trauma that newspapers are going through, saying they brought it upon themselves by being too liberal, too sensationalistic, too banal - choose your insult - miss the point. People are not deserting these complex and contradictory summaries of our collective existence. Not by any stretch.
Measured purely by number of readers in all formats, many newspapers have never been more successful.
Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 66 million unique visitors in the first quarter of 2008 - a record, and a 12 percent increase over a year ago, according to a Nielsen Online analysis. Forty percent of all Internet users visit a newspaper site. A visitor, it should be noted, is different from a reader, but it's the measurement of choice.
The Web is the future. And yet, because online advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money. In its present form, and even in best-case projections, the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation's biggest papers.
That's the business model crisis, an old story by now, the millstones of capitalism crushing an outdated format. Something new will emerge, a print and Web model.
In the meantime, print reporters strap on the old Webcam, charge up their podcast recorder, grab their notebook and dutifully try to cover a story that now needs to be presented in three formats, or more.
What's the alternative? It's possible that some civic-minded nonprofits will end up owning one or two of the nation's great papers, and operating them as trusts, hands off.
But that's a limited solution, fraught with problems of control and flexibility, and it won't keep reporters at city hall in Sioux Falls or the statehouse in Santa Fe.
Another response is goodbye, and so what. Look at the auto industry numbers from this week, with General Motors slouching toward bankruptcy.
Besides, there's plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post - even though they are built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering. One day soon these Web info-slingers will find that you can't produce journalism without journalists, and a search engine is no replacement for a curious reporter.
And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing! "Not our financial model," as the cofounder, Ken Lerer famously said. From low pay to no pay - the New Journalism at a place that calls itself an Internet newspaper.
Yes, the Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo's home page can afford to work for free, but it's un-American, to say the least.
Long ago, I was a member of the steelworkers union, and also a longshoreman. If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they'd laugh in their lunch buckets - then probably shut The Huffington Post down. Doesn't the "progressive" agenda, much touted on their pages, include a living wage?
We could be left with a snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood.
My lament this year as we Americans celebrate Independence Day is to ask readers to see newspapers as not just another casualty in the churn of business. Sure, reporters say stupid things and write idiotic stories. Everyone stumbles. But on its best days, a newspaper is a marvel of style and wit, of small-type discoveries and large-type overstatements, a diary of our deeds.
We may still prove Jefferson's preference wrong: Perhaps a nation can function without newspapers. But it would be a confederacy of dunces.
Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/opinion/edegan.php
All noble stuff, but I want to pick out the key passage here in case you missed it:
The Web is the future. And yet, because online advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money. In its present form, and even in best-case projections, the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation's biggest papers.That's the business model crisis, an old story by now, the millstones of capitalism crushing an outdated format. Something new will emerge, a print and Web model.
The problem is that of course newspaper reach is growing (it's called the internet, stupid, and it's free - as I have written before) but the cost to advertisers per thousand readers/visitors/call it what you will (CPM) is gold bars to peanuts when compared with the CPM for those luxury adverts in the IHT and what www.nytimes.com can charge.
And peanuts don't pay for newsrooms.
So the question is, how do you increase the CPM on the web?
Answer: you can't, in fact it's trending down.
So what do newspapers need to do?
Answer: increase the CPMs on a medium that is trending down.
Problematic, non?
The elephant in the room that no one seems willing to address, is that indeed a new business model is required for newspaper companies, but that is going to require providing, and SELLING, a print product that people, younger people WANT.
They don't, evidently, want what I call Newspaper 1.0.
So someone needs to come up with Newspaper 2.0.
And that's doable.
Question is: will it be the NYT/IHT who show the way? I think they can.
Keep the faith.
And nor was this (encouraging)
Philadelphia papers may combine some newsroom jobs
PHILADELPHIA: A team of managers at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News has been appointed to oversee consolidation of some functions at the two papers in a bid to cut costs, a union official said Wednesday.
Leading the team is the Inquirer's co-managing editor, Sandra Long, who met with the union on Tuesday to talk about the changes, said Henry Holcomb, president of The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia that represents newsroom and other staff at both papers.
The broadsheet Inquirer and the tabloid-size Daily News compete for news stories but share the same owners, presses and Web site. Holcomb said the union wants to make sure it can help owner Philadelphia Media Holdings save money without hurting the quality, personality and independence of the two dailies.
"The reader wants two editorial voices," Holcomb said.
The proposal to merge functions from the two newsrooms shows the severity of the newspaper industry downturn is making negotiable what was once sacrosanct.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/02/america/Philadelphia-Newspapers.php
PHILADELPHIA: A team of managers at The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News has been appointed to oversee consolidation of some functions at the two papers in a bid to cut costs, a union official said Wednesday.
Leading the team is the Inquirer's co-managing editor, Sandra Long, who met with the union on Tuesday to talk about the changes, said Henry Holcomb, president of The Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia that represents newsroom and other staff at both papers.
The broadsheet Inquirer and the tabloid-size Daily News compete for news stories but share the same owners, presses and Web site. Holcomb said the union wants to make sure it can help owner Philadelphia Media Holdings save money without hurting the quality, personality and independence of the two dailies.
"The reader wants two editorial voices," Holcomb said.
The proposal to merge functions from the two newsrooms shows the severity of the newspaper industry downturn is making negotiable what was once sacrosanct.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/02/america/Philadelphia-Newspapers.php
Not very encouraging
Los Angeles Times to eliminate 150 newsroom jobs
The Los Angeles Times announced that it would eliminate 150 newsroom jobs - more than one-sixth of the staff - and publish 15 percent fewer pages, in the deepest of a series of cuts at Tribune Co. newspapers as the company tries to stay afloat.
In all, the Los Angeles Times Media Group, which includes the paper and some smaller businesses, is cutting 250 jobs, which includes nonnewsroom jobs that have already been eliminated, David Hiller, the publisher, said Wednesday. Russ Stanton, the editor, said that the cuts would be carried out over the next two months.
The reduction goes far beyond what executives were predicting just a few months ago; in February, Hiller said he expected to decrease the news staff by 40 to 50 positions. When Samuel Zell took control of Tribune in December, he said he did not plan newsroom cuts.
But Tribune's newspaper ad revenue was down 15 percent in the first quarter, and the company warned last month that significant cuts were coming.
In an era of shrinking newsrooms, The Los Angeles Times has been especially hard hit. It had about 1,300 people 10 years ago; after the new cuts, it will have around 720. Previous rounds of cuts involved voluntary buyouts, but this time executives say they expect layoffs.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/business/latimes.php
The Los Angeles Times announced that it would eliminate 150 newsroom jobs - more than one-sixth of the staff - and publish 15 percent fewer pages, in the deepest of a series of cuts at Tribune Co. newspapers as the company tries to stay afloat.
In all, the Los Angeles Times Media Group, which includes the paper and some smaller businesses, is cutting 250 jobs, which includes nonnewsroom jobs that have already been eliminated, David Hiller, the publisher, said Wednesday. Russ Stanton, the editor, said that the cuts would be carried out over the next two months.
The reduction goes far beyond what executives were predicting just a few months ago; in February, Hiller said he expected to decrease the news staff by 40 to 50 positions. When Samuel Zell took control of Tribune in December, he said he did not plan newsroom cuts.
But Tribune's newspaper ad revenue was down 15 percent in the first quarter, and the company warned last month that significant cuts were coming.
In an era of shrinking newsrooms, The Los Angeles Times has been especially hard hit. It had about 1,300 people 10 years ago; after the new cuts, it will have around 720. Previous rounds of cuts involved voluntary buyouts, but this time executives say they expect layoffs.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/03/business/latimes.php
Fancy Stuff from the IHT
I don't actually own a mobile phone, but if you do, and even better an iPhone, then you might like this:
To quote an IHT web person, here's the deal:
"OK, it's not a native app (overkill), but we just launched an AJAX-y iPhone-optimized version of IHT.com.
Point your iPhone or iPod Touch to: iphone.iht.com
Bugs and issues in the developer notes:http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/technology/lab/?p=20 "
To quote an IHT web person, here's the deal:
"OK, it's not a native app (overkill), but we just launched an AJAX-y iPhone-optimized version of IHT.com.
Point your iPhone or iPod Touch to: iphone.iht.com
Bugs and issues in the developer notes:http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/technology/lab/?p=20 "
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
Obama Bin Laden - so much for liberal bias
Corrections of errors is something the IHT and the NYT are extremely dutiful about, way before, for example, British newspapers like The Guardian turned this into a fun feature.
But these corrections are not, as far as I am aware, published on www.iht.com. The web allows the corrections to be made, the error forgotten.
www.iht.com does not allow readers to do after-the-fact-analysis of errors, which is a shame; history written, inaccurately, is quickly rewritten again online.
Which is why I just want to put on the record a headline from last week's IHT which referred to Obama Bin Laden. I've tried tracking down the original article in which the mistake was made, but I must have throw away the edition where it appeared (in the four star Atlantic edition; corrected for later editions), and I have also thrown away the edition (Wednesday, 25th June, 2008 I think) where the correction appeared.
But Obama bin Laden it was. In a headline.
Too late to help Hilary.
But these corrections are not, as far as I am aware, published on www.iht.com. The web allows the corrections to be made, the error forgotten.
www.iht.com does not allow readers to do after-the-fact-analysis of errors, which is a shame; history written, inaccurately, is quickly rewritten again online.
Which is why I just want to put on the record a headline from last week's IHT which referred to Obama Bin Laden. I've tried tracking down the original article in which the mistake was made, but I must have throw away the edition where it appeared (in the four star Atlantic edition; corrected for later editions), and I have also thrown away the edition (Wednesday, 25th June, 2008 I think) where the correction appeared.
But Obama bin Laden it was. In a headline.
Too late to help Hilary.
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