Convergence: Print, Broadcast

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Convergence Print, Broadcast Online Hand in
Hand

• Rosental Calmon Alves
• University of Texas at Austin

International Consortium of Investigative
Journalists General Membership Meeting London
4-7, 2005
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The first decade

• After 10 years of Web journalism, where are we?
• The audience has reached critical mass.
• Online journalism became indispensable for
  virtually all well-informed people almost
  everywhere.
• Online advertising has grown fast and will
  sustain high levels of growth.
• The Internet is taking audience from newspapers
  and television.

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From The Vanishing Newspaper, by Philip Meyer
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In the study Abandoning the News (spring 2005)
the Carnegie Corporation of New York shows how
young Americans (ages 18-34) are distancing
themselves from the traditional media and moving
to the Internet as a main source of news. The
next two slides are from that study and can be
found at www.carnegie.org/pdf/AbandoningTheNews.p
pt.
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From Abandoning the News Carnegie Foundation
survey of consumers ages 18-34
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From Abandoning the News Carnegie Foundation
survey of consumers ages 18-34
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The first decade

• Newspapers in general have more of an audience
  daily for their Web site than daily print
  circulation.
• Instead of circulation figures, newspapers now
  refer to audience, to include the Web users and
  argue that the Internet is only strengthening its
  outreach.
• In the US, the audience keeps declining for the
  traditional evening newscasts and lately also for
  cable news.
• The investments for the Web, however, are still
  small compared with its audience and strategic
  importance for the survival of any media company.

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Trends of the second decade

• The media are losing control to the consumers and
  to the advertisers.
• Consumers have more options to find information
  and are abandoning bundled products.
• We are entering an era of an I-centric media the
  content I want, where I want, in the format I
  want, but just when I want it.
• And also an era when the audience has a voice and
  wants to be heard.

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Trends of the second decade

• Journalism used to be a lecture, now it is a
  conversation, say Dan Gillmor and others from
  the Citizen Journalism or Participatory
  Journalism movement.
• Phenomena such as Ohmynews.com and WikiNews
  cannot be ignored.
• Blogs have grown fast (around 30 million now, a
  new one every second, creating challenges for
  journalism)
• RSS (Really Simple Syndication) changes the
  relationship between consumers and the news
  media.
• Podcasting proliferates and shows that new ways
  (and platforms) for journalism distribution are
  on the horizon.

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Trends of the second decade

• The media are losing control to the advertisers
  also.
• Advertisers depend less from the traditional
  media, since they have now other ways to reach
  consumers.
• The commercial equation that finances journalism
  has been undermined by the new media.
• Internet advertising is more precisely targeted
• And much cheaper.
• The bulk of the online ads goes to companies with
  little or no commitment to journalism.

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The Keller memo

• The executive editor of the NY Times wrote this
  week a memo to the staff announcing the merging
  of the print newsroom and the Web site
• Over the past ten years the newsroom of
  Nytimes.com and the newsroom on 43rd Street have
  been partners at a distance
• But in those ten years, the world has changed.
  The digital news operation is now grown up and
  strong, ready to enlarge its ambitions
• We have concluded that our best chance of
  meeting that challenge is to integrate the two
  newsrooms into one. This will enable us to fully
  tap the creative energy of this organization and
  thus raise digital journalism to the next level.

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The Keller memo

• The change embodied in this integration will be
  gradual but important. For quite a few years now,
  we've sworn allegiance to the modern-sounding
  doctrine of "platform neutrality
• By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish
  and eventually eliminate the difference between
  newspaper journalists and Web journalists -- to
  reorganize our structures and our minds to make
  Web journalism, in forms that are both familiar
  and yet-to-be-invented, as natural to us as
  writing and editing, and to do all of this
  without losing the essential qualities that make
  us The Times.
• Our readers are moving, and so are we.

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From shovelware to pre-purposing

• The Times announcement radically changes the way
  the newspaper views the Web and will be followed
  by other papers that will become more Web-centric
  (classifieds are already Web-centric).
• All news organizations adopted Web sites.
• Many have been lost in cyberspace, making their
  sites just a just-in-case-place-holder.
• News content was shoveled from the traditional
  medium to the Web.
• From shovelware, we evolved to re-purposing (a
  little adaptation to the new medium).
• That time is over Pre-purposing is the name of
  the game.

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From shovelware to pre-purposing

• Pre-purposing means the integration Bill Keller
  wants in that historical memo.
• It will not be the story of the New York Times
  formatted to fit in the Nytimes.com
• It will be the first version of the story for the
  online edition (and maybe the second and third
  versions as well), plus the print edition
  consolidated version.
• It means an involvement of the online in the news
  production process since the very beginning.

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A journalism under construction

• While journalism as we know it is dying, a new
  kind (or new kinds) of journalism is under
  construction.
• The next few years it will shape up on the
  Internet, on mobile phones, on PDAs, on MP3
  players, on Interactive TV, on new platforms that
  will be launched.
• Investigative journalism finds in this new world
  a fertile terrain.
• The new style is multimedia, multiplatform and
  has unique capabilities that facilitate the
  publication of investigative/in-depth pieces.

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Our readers are moving, and so are we. Bill
Keller, Executive Editor, The New York Times
Martin Nisenholtz, CEO, New York Times Digital

August 2, 2005
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?
Are you moving? Are you moving?
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Thank you very much indeed!
And, by the way, Are you moving?