New York Times: All the News that Fewer Staff Can Produce
October 1, 2014
I read “New York Times Plans Cutbacks in Newsroom Staff.” I summarized the Times’s management decisions about online in this post. The Times has been floundering with new media for decades.
Unfortunately the revenue from online does not make up for advertising sales shortfalls, rising costs for paper and ink, and the old school business model that thrived on newspaper warfare.
The write up reports:
The note also said financial results from the company’s third quarter, which ended Sunday, had improved from a difficult second quarter. Digital advertising is likely to show growth of about 16 percent in the third quarter, the best quarterly performance since 2010, and digital subscriptions are expected to increase by more than 40,000, the largest number of quarterly additions since 2012. But the company’s profitability was lower than during the same period last year as costs increased.
So, farewell “real” journalists. Perhaps the Times should buy America Online and snag Ms. Huffington? Is she the future of “real” journalism? Maybe some of those mid tier consultants can come up with new ideas. (Oh, sorry, the mid tier consulting firms are struggling for revenues as well.) Perhaps a failed webmaster, unemployed middle school teacher, or a self anointed poobah will come to the firm’s rescue for less than a single “real” journalist. Well, there’s always selling write ups via Fiverr.com.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2014
Cross Books Off the Back To School List
September 19, 2014
No more pencils, no more books, no more…wait! No more books? According to an io9 article, “The First College In The US To Open Without Any Books In Its Library” dead tree items might be a thing of the past at least for one university. Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland recently opened with 550 students as part of its first class. The brand new campus has the usual campus buildings, including a library. The library, though, is different from your typical archive of knowledge: it is the nations first all digital library collection.
All of the books in the library are available via software that allows the students to download ebooks and what we can assume access to academic databases. An even bigger change is that librarians will not man the reference desk, because its name has been switched to the “success desk.” Librarians will instead be train students on information literacy and how to access electronic resources. Students will still be able to access books via interlibrary loan from other universities. They will also be able to decide how Florida Polytechnic spends its $60,000 library budget.
These are some good ideas in theory, but the technology is not up to being a free and browseable collection:
“Defenders of brick-and-mortar bookstores have argued the opposite, saying that the experience of wandering among bookshelves inspires serendipitous discoveries, while searching a database yields only the exact results you set out to find. While you can find related books in a database, it is unlikely you’ll stumble across an unrelated but helpful book while searching for another one by title.”
In most cases, students are also limited to how many times the can download and read an ebook. Digital licenses can track that kind of usage, so how long will some of these ideas last?
Whitney Grace, September 19, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
IDG Nukes Macworld Magazine
September 11, 2014
I love IDG, the publishing / services company founded by Pat McGovern in 1964. Mr. McGovern spoke to me about joining the company. I was an executive at Ziff Communications Co. He seemed like a nice guy. I recall he had on a plain blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. I think that every time I saw him at a conference or in a snapshot, he had on that attire.
I decided to deflect his interest in me. I did not get happy vibes from him. Bill Ziff, on the other hand, emitted a presence and triggered singing and dancing vibes. So what da ya think? Culture maybe? Integrity radar beep?
IDG owns IDC, an outfit that has used my content over the years. Most recently, one of the IDG/IDC “experts” surfed on my name, selling a heavily modified version of a report I wrote about Attivio. Did I get paid? Nah. Did the expert, Dave Schubmehl, I believe sign a contract with me? Nah.
Does this provide some insight into the pressure on IDG / IDC to make money without thinking too much about the methods? Hmmm.
When I read “IDG Shutters Macworld Magazine, Much of the Editorial Staff Let Go,” I had three thoughts race through my admittedly small mind:
- There will be more cost reducing measures. This is not the dropping of a single shoe. It may signal a semi carrying print titles that is losing its load.
- Too bad for the IDGers who have to look for work elsewhere. Leaving a company that seems to be starting a slim down plan to deal with cost issues is not the blue ribbon it was in the triage years after the crash in 2008. There’s a recovery, right?
- Are there other examples of rising pressure causing interesting business decisions? Surfing on my name by selling a report that puts some sparkle on the Las Vegas dancer’s costume is different from blue chip consulting methods. See this story for some color.
The article points out that the Macworld Web site will not be killed off. Some staff have been sent packing.
Not too surprising.
Stephen E Arnold, September 11, 2014
The Importance of Publishing Replication Studies in Academic Journals
September 1, 2014
The article titled Why Psychologists’ Food Fight Matters on Slate discusses the issue of the lack of replication studies published in academic journals. In most cases, journals are looking for new information, exciting information, which will draw in their readers. While that is only to be expected, it can also cause huge problems in scientific method. Replication studies are important because science is built on laws. If a study cannot be replicated, then it’s finding should not be taken for granted. The article states,
“Since journal publications are valuable academic currency, researchers—especially those early in their careers—have strong incentives to conduct original work rather than to replicate the findings of others. Replication efforts that do happen but fail to find the expected effect are usually filed away rather than published. That makes the scientific record look more robust and complete than it is—a phenomenon known as the “file drawer problem.””
When scientists have an incentive to get positive results from a study, and little to no incentive to do replication studies, the results are obvious. Manipulation of data occurs, and few replication studies are completed. This also means that when the rare replication study is done, and refutes the positive finding, the scientist responsible for the false positive is a scapegoat for a much larger problem. The article suggests that academic journals encouraging more replication studies would assuage this problem.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
A New Look for Computerworld.com
August 29, 2014
You are familiar with Computerworld, and you may visit the Computerworld.com Web site. The emulators and name surfers somewhere in the IDG Enterprise combine wants more eyeballs. That’s why I saw this news story from the professionals at Marketwired. Note: Not “marketwire.”
The title? “Computerworld.com Integrates Responsive Design Technology and functionality Enhancements in Site Relaunch.” The “real” news story reports:
The award-winning site incorporates responsive design technology to create a universal experience by scaling editorial and advertising content to the user’s screen size, whether they are accessing Computerworld.com with a smartphone, tablet or desktop.
I thought that blog themes like those readily available for WordPress, Joomla, and other content frameworks did the responsive thing automatically. The notion of “responsive design” is getting bright lights at “the leading enterprise technology media company”, however.
I suppose on a slow news day or when an IDC unit cannot publish my information without my permission or the other impedimenta that marks professional behavior, the crackerjack experts at IDG have to dig deep and gut through the really tough news. The story reports:
The editorial voice, content and design of Computerworld.com remains unique to the brand, while functionality has been aligned across IDG Enterprise sites including back-end capabilities enhancing search functionality and digital asset management for displaying more images and video content. The reader experience is further enhanced by large more legible type and fully integrated social media tools. Ads and promotional units are highlighted in a “deconstructed” right rail optimizing effectiveness and native advertising will be threaded intuitively throughout the site.
From whence does the content come from? Well, here’s an example of how IDG maintains its alleged “leading” position:
“Computerworld.com is well known for its superb tech news. What may be less obvious to website visitors is all the other great content Computerworld serves up for senior technology leaders,” said Scot Finnie, editor in chief, Computerworld.
Interesting since the consulting outfit bandied my name about like a tennis ball between mid 2012 and mid July 2014 without fooling around with contracts, sales reports, edit cycles, etc.
Now what about Computerworld.com? Today’s Computerworld.com has 64 objects on the home page, uses 30 images, and expects my wonderful Windows phone to render a page that is a svelte 1656946 bytes. Ooops. Don’t forget that the images pumped to me today total 1612438 bytes. You can see a report by navigating to www.websiteoptimization.com.
Fascinating news about the responsive design innovation. I am surprised that IDG elected to share this secret to online success. Is it possible that Computerworld.com invented responsive design following in the impressive footsteps of Al Gore’s Internet system and method?
Well, as long as revenues rise, the long slog to responsive design will have been worth it.
Stephen E Arnold, August 29, 2014
Inflation: How Professional Publishing Companies Cope
August 18, 2014
I saw a Twitter message at http://bit.ly/1qI2Uow. Here is the image I noted:
I then saw by happenstance another post on Imgur, a source with which I am not familiar:
I wonder if there is a relationship between these two items. I wish I were a student so I could help the publishers deal with the rising cost of paper, shipping, etc. I also wish I could be on a faculty or a library board so I could vote for more expensive peer reviewed journals and more databases of content produced by professors and researchers. Note: I do not want to be a professor or researcher. I think the pay for scholarly output is not as good as working in some other occupations; for example, professional publishing management at Springer, Elsevier, Wiley. Of course, these data may be bogus. If true, I find them suggestive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18, 2014
No Search Or Publishing For Science
July 30, 2014
The scientific method is used to approach a problem logically and come to reasonable conclusion based off the presented evidence. Allow me to present the following question: if only a small percentage of scientists publish their work, does that not distort scientific information? Let us approach this problem in the same manner that Erik Stokstad did in his Science Magazine article “The 1% Of Scientific Publishing.”
Stokstad already knew it was tough to get published in a scientific journal, but his findings were that one percent of scientists actually see their work published on a continuous basis and that equals 150,608 people. The number comes from a study done by John Ioannidis of Stanford University when he and colleagues searched Elsevier’s Scopus database of papers published in 1996-2001. Most of these scientists head laboratories, thusly adding their name to every research project or they have garnered enough of a reputation to do whatever they want in the scientific community.
What is sad is that new minds are often overlooked:
“But there’s also a lot of grunt work behind these papers that appear like clockwork from highly productive labs. ‘In many disciplines, doctoral students may be enrolled in high numbers, offering a cheap workforce,’ Ioannidis and his co-authors write in their paper. These students may spend years on research that yields, then, only one or a few papers. ‘[I]n these cases, the research system may be exploiting the work of millions of young scientists.’ ”
Based on the findings, it leads to the conclusion that only a small percentage of scientific research is available. The results are distorted and favor one side of the scale. It is an aggravating thought, especially with digital publishing. You would think that with the infinite amount of digital space that publishers would not be worried about the paper copies anymore.
Whitney Grace, July 30, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
The Future of Journalism Linked to Content Management Systems
July 17, 2014
The article titled Scoop: A Glimpse Into the NYTimes CMS on the New York Times Blog discusses the importance of Content Management Systems (CMS) for the future of journalism. Recently, journalist Ezra Klein reportedly left The Washington Post for Vox Media largely for Vox’s preferable CMS. The NYT has its own CMS called Scoop, described in the article,
“…It is a system for managing content and publishing data so that other applications can render the content across our platforms. This separation of functions gives development teams at The Times the freedom to build solutions on top of that data independently, allowing us to move faster than if Scoop were one monolithic system. For example, our commenting platform and recommendations engine integrate with Scoop but remain separate applications.”
So it does seem that there is some wheel reinventing going on at the NYT. The article outlines the major changes that Scoop has undergone in the past few years, with live article editing that sounds like Google Docs, tagging, notifications, and simplified processes for the addition of photographs multimedia. While there is some debate about where Scoop stands on the list of Content Management Systems, the Times certainly has invested in it for the long haul.
Chelsea Kerwin, July 17, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Searching News: More and More Difficult
July 10, 2014
An outfit called the Washington Examiner printed “Censorship: 38 Journalism Groups Slam Obama’s Politically-Driven Suppression of News.’” Stories that talk about censorship are difficult to peg on the white board of online information. True, I have noticed that certain documents once easily findable in www.usa.gov have been increasingly difficult to locate. My touchstone example is information about the US government’s RAC, MIC, and ZPIC programs to combat alleged Medicare non compliance. I have stumbled across other examples when querying the Department of Energy’s Web site with routine queries I used when DOE was a cheerleader for the Autonomy IDOL search system.
The “Politically Driven” article is somewhat different. The angle is that “real journalists”—presumably not the type of professionals working at entities like IDC—are not able to get information. The terms “media coverage” and “limiting access to top officials” make it clear that “real” journalists have some gripes; namely:
- Officials blocking reporters’ requests to talk to specific staff people.
- Excessive delays in answering interview requests that stretch past reporters’ deadlines.
- Officials conveying information “on background” — refusing to give reporters what should be public information unless they agree not to say who is speaking.
- Federal agencies blackballing reporters who write critically of them.
The article points to a “survey” in which “40 percent of public affairs officers admitted they blocked certain reporters because they did not like what they wrote.” Yep, a survey, similar to those cited by some consultancies to “prove” that something is really, really true.
The article concludes with a rousing call to action:
SPJ’s Cuillier told Secrets, “I feel this excessive message management and information control are caused by the professionalization of PR in the bureaucracy — in all levels of government.” And, he added, “It is up to journalists — and citizens — to push back against this force. Hard!”
I find this an interesting statement. What does “push back” mean? If I put on my semantic analysis hat, I can list possible meanings for “push back.”
The point is that news is shaped, sometimes gently, sometimes firmly. In order to determine what is accurate, one must work quite hard. The notion that an individual can ferret out specifics of a particular event by gaining easy access, walking halls, or just showing up flies in the face of my experience.
I have learned that misinformation, disinformation, and reformation are the common currency of professionals today. Forget the problem with US government bureaucracies. These operations survive changes in administration, budget shifts, and policy changes.
Focus instead on individuals who take information, put their name on it, reshape it, and use it to further a narrow agenda. I emphasize in my lectures for the intelligence community that figuring out what is “accurate” is getting more and more difficult.
We are in the grip of a cultural shift in information. Recent examples that make the magnitude of the “accuracy” challenge may be found in these examples:
ITEM: A Google executive dies and is described as a family man as a factoid in an article about a heroin overdose, a person of alleged ill repute, and a yacht. See “Did She Kill Before?”
ITEM: A fellow with a fascinating work history puts his name on work done by the ArnoldIT team, sells it for $3,500 a whack on Amazon, and ignores my requests for payment. The person appears to be David Schubmehl, employed by the consulting and publishing firm IDC. Here’s the Amazon listing for my work with my name and that of two of my researchers. Seems just fine, right? I find this shaping of my information interesting because I have not given permission for this material to be sold on Amazon. But who cares about a 70 year old getting trampled by the “real” professionals?
ITEM: WN.com search results for th3 query “Brazil Riots 2014.” A lack of information about the events after Brazil’s loss in Rio flies in the face of the alleged robberies and police actions. See http://wn.com/brazil_riots_2014. Where’s the information, WN.com.
Net net: Anyone who wants accurate information has to work the old fashioned way. Interviews, research, reading, and compilation of factoids from various sources. I am not sure a fuzzy “push back” will have much impact in our present information environment.
For short cuts, one can ask a reporter on the US government beat, the editor at WN.com, or the very, very happy David Schubmehl, research director, where he analyzes the future and surfs on my team’s research.
Exciting times when “real” pros want easy access, a hop over the negative, and a free ride to expertise.
Stephen E Arnold, July 10, 2014
Two Recent Charts Illustrate the Decline of Newspapers
July 10, 2014
To help us visualize the plight of the papers, Gigaom shares “Everything You Need to Know About the Future of Newspapers in in These Two Charts.” Writer Mathew Ingram shares two graphs based on 2013 data that show no signs of hope for the beleaguered industry. The first, created by University of Michigan economics professor Mark Perry and based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America, shows print-based advertising revenue falling by more than 70 percent since 2000. When digital and other advertising is included, the fall is only slightly less dire. Ingram likes to call this line graph the “cliff of despair.”
The second graph looks at usage and ad spending across different types of media, and was pulled from a presentation by KPCB partner and analyst Mary Meeker. The article explains:
“[This chart] contrasts the amount of time that users spend on a specific form of media — mobile, print, TV etc. — with the share of advertising spending that is devoted to that platform. Last year, print got just 5 percent of the overall time spent on media, but it pulled in almost 20 percent of the overall advertising revenue…. Meeker’s chart is an updated version of an earlier one, and the share of time spent that is devoted to print has (not surprisingly) continued to decline over the past couple of years…. But while the amount of advertising dollars devoted to it has also continued to fall, there is still a dramatic gap. And it is matched by the exact opposite gap on the other side of the chart, where time spent on mobile is 20 percent and share of advertising spend is just 4 percent.”
These trajectories may seem obvious, but Ingram points to evidence that senior staff at some publications still need to be prodded into this century. He closes with a suggestion: “If you work at a newspaper, post these charts in your staff room.”
Cynthia Murrell, July 10, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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