old-fashioned? you bet.

Perhaps I won’t succeed in this new world of journalism. I arts-and-craftsed my presentation visual, for goodness sakes. I didn’t use the Internet until I got to college…didn’t even know what YouTube was until freshman year. It’s obvious I have no patience for trying to figure out how to link things properly, otherwise you would see a picture of the clips or articles that I have posted thus far in the blog. I still write a lot of things on paper before typing them out on the computer.

YES. I am old-fashioned. And it never mattered so much until now, when my potential journalistic career depends on my youthful computer savvy.

Disclaimer for anyone who happens to read this when I’m a rich and famous digital-age journalist: I’m a fast learner. Guess that’s all it takes – blood, sweat, tears, time, patience, more tears, tears…

ANYWAY…notice how I blog about that which I do not know.

nexterimentations – what happens next

GUYS – we are the future. apparently…
good luck. here are my ideas, don’t take them*

It is no secret that journalists are making less and less money these days. For the most part, it is the Internet that we have to blame for this situation we are now in. The future of journalism rests in the experimentation of the future journalists themselves. While it is of an honest journalist’s utmost interest to have important news available to anyone and everyone, free access to the news stands in the way of that same journalist’s financial living. Things must drastically change. The following is a collection of ideas for a future business plan that is intended to bring money back into the journalism industry, a collection of ideas hopefully worth paying for.

Audience
This plan involves an international paper that is offered both in print and online. The perks, however, will be found mostly on the online edition, the specific features of which will be discussed later. In essence, the print edition will be for the older men and women who have established a solid habit of reading a hardcopy of the news, while the features of the online edition will target the college-age students who are evolving and adapting to the ways of the Internet as it changes. One of the main goals of the paper will be to highlight the interests of college-age students, while at the same time appeal to their parents, who will likely be the ones paying for the subscriptions.
Customization
The idea is not entirely new, but customization of this paper will be unique. Subscribers will decide what areas of reporting they will receive, i.e. science, health, technology, etc. Other sections will include college-life reporting, video games, fashion, etc. to appeal specifically to college students. National and international news will come with the subscription. Online editions can be customized by “shopping” around for different sections, with a shopping cart icon and “add to cart” features. This is meant to reinforce the idea that this is something you can buy, something that can’t be found for free elsewhere on the Internet.
Subscription
This daily paper will be accessible to those who have six month subscriptions, which will be the same cost for both the print and online editions. This will be the primary source of revenue for the paper, along with advertisers who will have to pay to display their ads and marketing. Since subscriptions can be customized the prices will be applied as follows: national and international news alone will be the lowest subscription cost; three more sections added will cost more; national, international, plus six more sections added will be still more; a bulk price of all the sections offered will also be available. Print editions can be ordered online, but subscription forms can also be mailed in. There will be no cost to change the type of subscription in the middle of a six month subscription period.
Online Perks: Multimedia, Interactivity, Instant Messaging
The online edition of this paper will offer things that the print edition cannot. A nightly video recapping the top news stories of the day will be available with the online subscriptions only, at no extra cost. Special preprogrammed stories, such as presidential speeches, will also be played, as well as urgent breaking news.
Subscriber comment boxes will be displayed on a separate page that is linked to the bottom of the article that is being commented. Derogatory and inappropriate comments can and will be deleted promptly.
The biggest experiment of this paper will the subscriber-journalist instant messaging feature. Next to specific articles will be the option to ask questions and discuss content of an article with a group of reporters who worked on the article together or reporters who were briefed on the content and ready to discuss the content competently. The feature will be available for longer articles, such as investigative pieces of reporting. Messages will be monitored and if it becomes apparent that a subscriber is using the feature for inappropriate purposes, they will be kicked off and blocked from using the feature. In turn, the journalists on the other end give useful information, relevant to the article and the questions asked. They must always be honest and transparent in their instant messaging interactions. The purpose of this new feature is to welcome a community of individual thinkers who want to engage in meaningful discussion about current events.
Staff
The staff of this paper will be a mix of full-time, part-time and freelance reporters and editors. A massive reporting staff will be needed and divided into the appropriate news sections. A group of reporters will be in charge of online video. Journalists who work on the top stories will report to these online video editors. Editors will not only need to look over the content of the written reports, but special editors will monitor the instant messaging conversations. Graphic designers will be needed to grab the audience’s attention.
Production costs
The online version of the paper will be pushed, hopefully making the ink and paper production costs of the print paper manageable. The cost of staff will be big, but worth it, for the success of this paper depends on a large staff to cover multiple areas of reporting, which will be important to its customization.
Important aspects of the timetable
Even though these economic times are bad, for this project to success, it needs to go full force from the beginning. People need hope for growth, and this is where they can find it. The only aspect of this paper that will be held off for some time will be the instant messaging feature. The feature will be available to a random selection of the subscribers in order to add more control to an experiment that may have many kinks to work out. However, if the consumers are receptive and the tests successful, the option will be available to everyone within a year.

The intended target audience, college-age and older, will be able to find honest, transparent, fair and balanced content that is meaningful and interesting. Journalism is finding itself comfortable on the Internet, which is why several important features will be available on the online edition. The ability of subscribers to ask questions and discuss an article’s news content will engage the community, involving its members and inspiring them to be more active in important current events. The goal of this paper will be to open up a community of informed news consumers, while at the same time giving subscribers the ability to pick and choose areas of their own personal interests.

*Copyright 2009

(something tells me that writing “copyright” doesn’t mean it actually is…)

updates

Just a quick note:

This could serve as an update to my “blah blah blog” post. But, I think one deserves a post all it’s own. I literally just found this article in the Global section of the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/world/asia/25woeser.html?ref=world, “A Tibetan Blogger, Always Under Close Watch, Struggles for Visibility.”

Now, I know “blah blah blog” was a sad insight to the world of blogging, but then I come across this article and I get deeply inspired.

Like I said, it’s just a little update, so I recommend just reading if you’re interested. It’s about a Tibetan poet and blogger, whose books and blogs are banned in China, but she is nevertheless trying desperately to get her message through.

experimentations

For the final project of this class for which I am blogging, we J-school students have to come up with a plan that will help bring money back to journalists in the future.

Dear Diary,
I am very scared.

I keep thinking of different small ideas that might add something that consumers would be willing to pay for. But every time I think of a new idea, I find something potentially wrong with it. Then I get discouraged.

The deal with our future plans is that it’s all about experimenting. I think for my final project I’m just going to have to suck it up and present my ideas, however potentially pointless, because I think it’s important to at least get them out there. Maybe other students will have similar ideas, and we’ll realize that if we put them together we will get one huge power idea. Maybe, maybe not.

Basically, this blog is more for myself than it is for anyone else. It’s all just a pep-talk to myself. Anyone who reads this though, I’d appreciate some J-school support in the form of not laughing at my ideas.

To the future! Ready, set…GO!

blah blah blog

You know how the credits roll at the end of a movie? Most people only keep them rolling because everyone knows that end-credit music is the best. A lot of people turn it off before it even gets to that point.

Isn’t it sad that a vast amount of blogs out here are just like those end-credits? The afterthoughts, or so it seems? But, maybe those credits are the most important part of the movie – who played who, who directed what, who lit whose face up in just the right way.

My blog is an end-credit. I’m not going to yell about it, I just want to understand it and accept it. Blogs are the work of the people that gets vastly overlooked.

Cliché: sad, but true. That’s pretty much all I wanted to say.

‘Twas a short blog.

Hannah Montana

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/arts/television/14boys.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Disney%20boys&st=cse

I read this article, “Walt Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers” in the New York Times the other day. Something about it just made me laugh. Laughter is good. Let me share it with you.

The basic gist of the article is that Disney, with all its Disney Channel wonders, is realizing that it targets mostly girls and would like to broaden the horizon to include the boys. Which is all well and good, because it’s hard to imagine boys feel welcome in a world of Hannah Montana. However, the way the article is written is massively creepy and, what’s that word people use nowadays? oh yeah…SKETCH.

The lede starts off with Kelly Peña, who apparently understands the interests of kids and is working with the Walt Disney Company to come up with a plan to include boys as a more focused target audience. Yes, fine. But she is rifling through a 12-year-olds clothing drawers to get the answer, and that sounds just a little weird to me. She found a Black Sabbath t-shirt, which apparently was the golden ticket into the “heads of incommunicative boys.”

And, of course, all semester long we’ve been talking about how the tactics of advertisers to target specific audiences is creepy. This article even admits this fact and tries to disclaim it: “Fearful of coming off as too manipulative, youth-centric media companies rarely discuss this kind of field research.” It then goes on to say that Disney was just so excited and “proud” of their ideas that they just had to come forward and explain, “offering window onto the emotional hooks that are carefully embedded in children’s entertainment.”

I recommend reading the article. It’s quite fun. I could write more about it, but each time I find something funny in the article, I laugh…and then I cry just a little bit. SKETCH.

shaking net neutrality, making jobs

Does anyone else think that there is something fiercely warlike about the term “net neutrality.” Each time I hear the word I conjure up images of Google and Yahoo! doing battle on my screen, and then some other generic Web site standing off to the side with a big NEUTRAL stamp placed in the search bar.

Anyway…that’s just my crazy head. Obviously, as well all have been learning in class these past weeks, net neutrality is not exactly about Web sites fighting or not fighting.

Something about the net neutrality debate gets me thinking. A lot of people support a free and open Internet, as opposed to one that is accessed through payment (tiered pricing? ah!) Yes yes, the wealthy would get the nice high speeds and good quality, while the less wealthy would get, well…crud. However, in these troubled economic times, would the doing away with net neutrality make more jobs? Perhaps I think about this completely the wrong way, but I think I should write it all down anyway.

The problem with keeping the Internet all free and open the way it is, is that it takes away jobs. We see it in journalism every day! Some things are going to have to change drastically in order to start this economy back up, in order to save some jobs and create some new ones. Maybe net neutrality would be keeping us from that?

I really don’t know. And honestly, I’m all for net neutrality, so this blog is one hundred percent just me writing about a thought that I could completely contradict in one of my later posts. Who knows?

I don’t.

the great depression

Being in the journalism world has always been hard, or so I can guess from what I’ve read. You’ve always got to be cut-throat to get a great story and confident in your work to survive. You have to have thick skin, even when you have a thin wallet. Now more than ever, it seems like things are at their worst.

I know it’s not a dying industry, and there are still dedicated reporters out there. But, I can’t help but get worried as to whether I chose the wrong field to study sometimes. Guys, I know I’m not the only one.

Sure, the teachers are enthusiastic, even as they carefully tell us that newspapers are dying and there’s little money in the Internet. It’s all getting me quite depressed, to be honest.

I know this is more of a small emotional rant rather than a news analysis, but I figured it’s pretty relevant, so why not just write.

Even having a blog reminds me that anyone can do this. Citizen journalism is pretty big nowadays, and it’s creating such a cloud of information that many people don’t know where to turn for real, hard-fact news.

I don’t know how I should conclude this thing, so I think I’ll just end by saying that I guess as with everything, the real way to survive and make it big while making a living, is to not give up.

Aww…

good news, bad news (about the news)

In Jennifer Saba’s article, “Newspaper Sites See Big Gains in Uniques,” (http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003952221)
it’s obvious that where there is a gain in one news medium, there has to be a loss in another.

Basically, top newspaper Web sites are seeing an increase in visitors, which is good for the Web sites, and good for the reporters who want the public to read their articles.

But guess what…it’s yet another reason why print is dying. The more people that flock to the Internet for their news content, the closer the newspapers get to “folding,” as they say.

The article is not very long, but I thought I would comment on it. It’s an article that reminds us that it’s not that news is dead, it’s just the papers themselves that are dying.

some magazines are made of paper

I read this article from Slate about how the magazine industry is not going down like the newspaper industry, but rather changing and adapting to the times.

“The Magazine Isn’t Dying,” by Gabriel Sherman, published March 17, 2009, goes into how magazines are coping with decreasing readership and irrelevant content. Some magazines are out completey: lifestyle magazines, like Best Life and Travel + Leisure Golf, are gone because their content catered to a wealthier lifestyle that even the well-to-do are finding hard to maintain during the recession. Many can’t afford to think about those things right now.

Other dead or dying magazines include teen magazines, because things like Facebook and Twitter have taken the spotlight, decreasing teen magazine readership. I remember when I was a young girl, I used to read a magazine called Girl’s Life. Loved it. I haven’t heard about their demise (yet), though I know that some of their content is placed online through their Web site. Perhaps young girls will always love to cuddle under the sheets with a good girl magazine that discusses how to get rid of those pesky cramps.

According to the article, “it’s not that magazines are dying; it’s that the magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are.” Couldn’t have said it better myself…which is why I quoted. Ahh! Another journalism lesson.

But all is not lost, as long as the content is relevant and meaningful, things should be fine for the magazine industry, which is what the article goes on to explain.

I have a lot of hope for the magazine industry. I don’t really subscribe to many magazines, myself, but there is something about a nice glossy stack of stapled papers that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, right? I used to read my sister’s Scientific American. That was obviously when I graduated from Girl’s Life. Those were some good times…