Tag Results for Nieman Journalism Lab

As regular readers of this blog might surmise, I'm becoming quite a fan of Nieman Journalism Lab blogger Zachary Seward. He's an astute analyst of media trends who also knows how to sniff out interesting examples of the topics he's writing about.

Today Seward has a fascinating post about how New Zealand fishermen who specialize in catching the Hoki - "an unattractive sea creature best known as the primary ingredient in the (McDonalds) Filet-o-Fish" - used a Google Adwords campaign to draw attention to their rebuttal of a New York Times article suggesting the species was being overfished.

Seward notes that the strategy employed by New York-based PR man Jim McCarthy was fiendishly clever in several ways, not the least of which was that it took advantage of an existing Times link to send readers to a rebuttal page.

Our friends at Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab have an interesting blog post about GlobalPost, the international news startup created by New England Cable News founder and former WCVB executive Phil Balboni and former Boston Globe foreign correspondent Charlie Sennott.

Speaking at a recent conference at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, Balboni said the company should generate $1 million in revenue this year. That's the good news. The bad news: Nieman Lab blogger Zachary Seward estimates that GlobalPost's annual expenses are about $5 million.

But as with any startup, the question isn't so much whether you're profitable right now as whether you can get to profitability before you burn through your seed capital. Balboni said the goal is to achieve profitability by 2012, which would mean reducing the company's operating loss by 50 percent each of the next two years.

I plan to file a longer post on this topic soon, but the New York Times and our friends over at the Nieman Journalism Lab have fascinating stories about how the Associated Press is pushing fundamental changes in the way its content is distributed on the web.

First, the Times broke the story that the AP would be attaching software to all of its content to track how it's being both used and abused. The story was more remarkable, though, for the AP's aggressive interpretation of what constitutes abuse - including, apparently, the common web practice of using a headline and a link to an AP story without actually paying for an AP license. That news caused a lot of consternation until AP officials clarified their position, saying they were interested only in going after large-scale abusers, not Mom and Pop bloggers.

Now the Lab's excellent Zachary Seward is writing about a confidential AP memo which says the news service is also planning to prevent subscribers from using some AP material on their own web sites. Instead, subscribers would have to link to the stories, which would be hosted on "news guide landing pages" on the AP's own web site. The idea, apparently, is to boost the AP brand online by making its content more centralized and therefore more attractive to search engines.

It will be interesting to see how AP member news organizations, some of which recently revolted against the news service's high fees, will react.

In a post today on Nieman Journalism Lab, blogger Jim Barnett argues that the New York Times may not be so quick to sell the Boston Globe, and compares the Globe to his 1996 Honda Civic:

I drive a 1996 Honda Civic, and I love it. Why? It costs me virtually nothing. It gets 30 m.p.g., we paid it off years ago, and I carry no collision coverage. I could sell it, but I won't. It's running great, and it probably will last several more years.

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If I were at the NYT Co ... I'd start looking at the Globe the same way I look at my Honda. Sure, I could sell it for a couple thousand dollars. But it's worth more than that to me, even in its depreciated, degraded state.

I have to say that metaphorically comparing the Globe to a car that's "running great" is one of the most optimistic assessments I've heard about the paper in years. To me, the Globe is much more like my 1993 Mercedes 300E 4Matic.

It was a wonderful car when I bought it, but those circumstances changed over the years. First the AC went, then the suspension, and finally the all-wheel-drive system (a $4,000 repair). It got to the point where the cost to repair my car far exceeded what it was worth. So I sold it, as quick as I could, for $800. Given that I had originally paid $14,000, the sale price stung a little, but the point was that I had stopped throwing good money after bad and even had a few bucks to show for it.

That's why instead of being "insulted" by the latest offer of $94 million ($35 million in cash plus the assumption of $59 million in unfunded pension liabilities) from Beverly Hills investment group Platinum Equity, as Barnett suggests, I think the Times will grab it (or another offer) with both hands.

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