What's New in News

 

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This week Corey and Charles return from hiatus for a new episode of What’s New in News, and they get back into the swing of things by taking a look at Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Corey is underwhelmed by Schmidt’s effort, and sizes the piece up as Google saying ‘Who us?’ in response to criticism from the newspaper industry.

It’s been a busy past couple of week’s for our benevolent dictator Google, as they launch their own DNS service and show off real-time search results.

The Seattle Times website had 3.3 million page views during their coverage of the manhunt for a suspect wanted in the killing of four police officers. The paper says their tweets during the search were the site’s biggest draw, and that Twitter was responsible for much of the traffic spike. The paper also tried a Google Wave with site users.

After 125 years of publication, Nielson has decided to shut down industry magazine Editor & Publisher. The website is on its way out too. Corey will miss the website in Google Reader, but Charles isn’t shedding any tears.

Tweets of the Week

Corey asks Charles about his tweet that Google Wave is a bust and that he’s looking for the next social media frontier. Charles asks Corey about his tweet on the failure of streaming media to hold viewers.

Picks of the Week

After declaring Google Wave a wash, Charles still uses it for his pick of the week, and they both wonder at its real news application. Corey shares a great little tool he found to get rid of those pesky Twitter spammers. It’s TwitBlock.org, and it makes cleaning up your Twitter followers fairly easy.

 

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This week, Charles and Corey are joined by local news director Patti McGettigan, the news director at WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Patti stopped by to chat about the changing landscape of local journalism, the role of social media in a broadcast newsroom, the pressures of the bottom line, journalistic integrity and the smaller, more efficient newsrooms of the future.

Patti has worked for years with White House correspondent Helen Thomas’ niece Suzanne Geha in Grand Rapids. This week, Thomas took White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to task. Later she told CNN that not even the Nixon administration tried to control the press to the extent President Obama has.

 

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Charles and Corey are joined by guest pundit and local news producer Nate Hoekstra. The three take a look at the ramifications of social media in the reporting of news in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Just how does one separate the signal from so much noise? Is that now the role of news organizations? CNN seems to think so.

Despite being lambasted with the #CNNfail hash tag for their initial lack of coverage of protests in Tehran, CNN turned up the socialmedia-ometer to report news from Twitter and Facebook it couldn’t readily confirm.

Did you turn your Twitter avatar green? Corey wonders if it was a sign of solidarity or meme for Birkenstock wearing Berkley college kids.

Michigan Representative Pete Hoekstra took some kidding for his tweet that compared the plight of protesters in Tehran to that of Republicans in the House last year.

And in the end, Corey calls for a move away from Twitter as too closed a platform for this evolving form of micro-communication. The revolution, he says, should not be tweeted.

 

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Charles wrote up a great post this month in which he outlined a number of best practices for a new news organization. Charles and Corey take a look at some key points, with a little healthy debate.

USA Today introduces a digital edition that they’ll email to you for a price. Not only will Corey not subscribe, but he’s being proactive and adding USA Today to his spam filter.

The Newport Daily News tries to protect its print business by charging inflated prices for access to its website.

On a related note, is Western Union trying to prop up the telegraph business by charging too much for cell phone calls? They would if they were run by IAC’s Barry Diller. He speculates that all content on the Internet will be paid within the next five years.

Charles points out that Diller’s no spring chicken in much the same way that Jon Stewart had a little fun this week at Katie Couric’s expense over the average age of her show’s audience: 62. Every time a bell rings, does one of her demo die?

We don’t know, but if the journalism business dies, who will pay for journalism? Charles and Corey spend some time talking about models for getting journalists paid in a post-print world.

 

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The Wall Street Journal announced the coming of Web 3.0 at its D conference. It’s too bad they’re only talking about the iPhone. With a new iPhone in sight, will it be a game changer for the news industry?

Despite speculation that iPhone apps will be able to charge for news subscriptions or micropayments, it won’t be enough to offset the worst quarter for the newspaper industry in modern history, with sales diving $2.6 billion.

Newsweek makes headlines again. This week they’ll be having the news magazine’s first guest editor in its 75-year history: Stephen Colbert.

Brian Williams spent some time in the White House, only to deliver an NBC News special even Perez Hilton would be proud of.

CBS inked a deal with Ustream to stream live news content. Ustream is calling it viral news, as if you could pre-accounce a viral success.

And MSNBC’s Morning Joe show fawns over its new product placement sponsor Starbucks.

 

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The drumbeat for erecting pay-walls around online news content continues, with Rupert Murdoch telling FOX Business his vision of the future. Let’s just say it requires you to give your credit card number to News Corp. if you want to read news from any of his sites.

News Corp., however, isn’t alone in these efforts. This week, the Newspaper Association of America gathered top media groups together in Chicago to quietly discuss options for deriving more revenue from their online content. Don’t worry, though. They assure us they weren’t colluding.

In attendance were representatives from MediaNews Group, which began testing its home printed custom newspapers this week. The content is supposed to match your interests, and so are the ads, which sell for ten times the normal rate.

If you can’t wait for custom print news, check out Time’s Mine magazine. You can pick content from five different Time’s properties.

This week, the New York Times hired Jennifer Preston to be the paper’s social media editor, not that any one, the Times included, knows just what that means.

And it also came to light this week that two former Times’ men had the scoop on Watergate before Woodward and Bernstein. Instead of digging in to the story, one went to law school and the other went on vacation.

 

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Columbia University’s president called for more taxpayer funded news during the school’s graduation ceremony.

Whether or not non-profit is the model of the future, Google isn’t interested in being a part of it. Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked with the Financial Times this week to say Google wasn’t interested in acquiring a stake in any newspaper. Schmidt also said, for general news, micro-payments or subscriptions don’t seem like a viable solution; though, Google’s Vint Cerf said Tuesday that the news industry should be looking to Apple’s iTunes for a possible model.

While news outlets look for a model to increase online revenue beyond what display ads provide, economic media analyst Robert G. Picard published a op-ed explaining just why he thinks journalists deserve low pay.

It may be low pay or the just plain lack of jobs that are sending 13 of 16 graduating seniors on the Harvard Crimson to look for work outside of journalism.

One j-school student in San Francisco is trying to invoke that state’s shield law for journalists causing some controversy.

But even more controversy was generated Sunday, when New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was accused of plagiarizing from a blogger.

They’re not plagiarizing, but TV news outlets in Boston and Washington DC will be sharing news-gathering efforts, begging the question: How long until each market really has just one newsroom?

Despite comments from CBS’s Moonves late last year about the end of the affiliate model, NBC’s Zucker told affiliates this week that they’d be in business together for a long, long time. Perhaps those relationships will be cultivated to support NBC’s plans to delve into online local content.

 

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A new study asks just what types of news are readers willing to pay for online, just as the New York Times announced that it was considering two distinct methods of charging for online content: micro-payments and memberships.

It was a busy week for the Times, as they released their Times Reader, an Adobe Air application that brings Times content to your desktop in a format more akin to the paper itself, and they launched the Times Wire, a twitter looking web feed of the Times’ stories updated in real time.

Embracing the Twitterverse, ABC’s Nightline launched a new Web show, NightTline, that uses Twitter to interact with viewers.

Newsweek redesigned Newsweek.com just in time for the first edition of the redesigned weekly.