Newspapers are dying for a few reasons. Readers don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news, and advertisers follow them. Your iPhone, your laptop is muc more handy than the New York Times on Sunday. …. It’s enough to bury any industry. So, should we rather ask, “Can anything save newspapers?”…We started to redesign [newspapers]…I wanted to make posters, not newspapers….Design can turn your company upside down.” -Jacek Utko on newspaper design

Recent news in the decline of newspapers and magazines reminded me of the above video of Jacek Utko explaining his successes in reinvigorating European newspapers through design. By radically transforming the visual culture of newspapers in Poland, Estonia, Russia, and elsewhere, the newspapers’ circulations jumped between 30 and 100 percent. In Russia, circulation jumped 29%, in Poland 35%, a Bulgarian newspaper saw a 100% jump in circulation just after a visual redesign.

Tyler Hicks - A Scrapbook From the Tribal Areas - NYT At War Blog

The New York Times’ blogs keep getting better and better. Everyone knows Lens, but perhaps At War isn’t as well known. Formed out of the now defunct Baghdad Bureau blog, At War is “a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other areas of conflict in the post-9/11 era.” There’s always something interesting to read or see, from the above seized pictures from Pakistan’s restive Waziristan to Franco Pagetti’s grandmother’s gnocchi recipe as served to Ashley Gilbertson for a birthday to a translator’s perspective on speaking with a would-be suicide bomber to downtime on patrol with Afghan and American soldiers.

A number of photographers currently contribute or have contributed to the blog (that list isn’t up to date), and the archives are worth a look: Peter Van Agtmael, Tyler Hicks, Christoph Bangert, Michael Kamber, Johann Spanner, Ashley Gilbertson, and Joao Silva

Angry People in Local Newspapers - Comic Relief Pupils Sent Home

ProbablyBadNews.com

I spent a year working for medium-sized community newspapers in the midwestern US. Maybe that’s why I like Angry People in Local Newspapers, Glum Councilors, and Probably Bad News (part of the Cheezburger empire), and Media Relations’ Funny Headlines, so much. Angry People in Local Newspapers especially hits home with me, because it was such a common assignment. Maybe the city wasn’t properly clearing snow, or maybe a nearby business put up some garish new signs; somehow, I was supposed to come out of the assignment with a publishable picture communicating local dissatisfaction with something difficult to photograph (or impossible to photograph, in the case of complaints about noise). Ironically, this Angry Citizen of the Week sort of story is one of the great powers of the local newspaper. Once a problem is made known in such a public way, the problem usually gets solved pretty quickly.

(via Metafilter here and here)

San Francisco Panorama

Q: Why broadsheet?
A: We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet–15″ x 22″. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.” -McSweeney’s FAQ on the one-shot San Francisco Panorama project

McSweeney’s, whose lists you should know, is producing a one-time-only 380-page newspaper to be distributed in San Francisco, to McSweeney’s subscribers, and in bookstores across the US. The teaser pages of the San Francisco Panorama are beautiful, and the list of contributors reads as a who’s who of contemporary American writing, design, illustration. The photography is top notch, too. Can’t wait to see one of these in the flesh.

‘Show of hands, how many of you have bought a newspaper in the last week?’ Usually no one raises their hand.” -Greg Ceo

Greg Ceo likes to survey his students in his Business Practices for Photography class at Savannah College of Art and Design. Usually, in his classes, a couple of students have purchased a newspaper in the last month, and none are subscribers. Great post on his blog about reactions to the survey. (via APhotoEditor)

US newspaper circulation has hit a 70 year low. Here’s a graphic illustration of the past 20 years of major US newspapers’ circulation sizes. The aging “creative class”, who once staffed newsrooms, production departments, and studios, is finding that there’s no work to be had.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor seems to have found success after switching to a majority-online publication, seeing an increase in paid subscribers.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to like reading online any time soon…

After a recent entry in the neverending debate on the death of journalism and how to save newspapers, Metafilter user fightorflight took a page from an old antispam email forward (which in turn might well be based off of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s solution to fan mail) and developed this standard response letter. A shortened version:

Check as many as apply:

Your [idea] advocates a

	( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

	( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working
	    journalist
	( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council
	    meeting to do it
	( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
	( ) Print readers will not put up with it
	( ) Good journalists will not put up with it

[...]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

	( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
	( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
	( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too
	    small to do real reporting
	( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to
	    account by two guys with a blog
	( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for
	    small sites

[...]

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

	( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none
	    have ever been shown practical
	( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few
	    readers are actually all that interested in, quite
	    honestly
	( ) Having a free online "printing press" doesn't turn you
	    into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
	( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
	( ) You are Jeff Jarvis

[...]

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

	( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
	( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person
	    for suggesting it.
	( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and
	    burn your house down!

- posted by fightorflight on Metafilter

Read on »

This may be a dead horse, but I’m going to keep reading about it. Dispatches co-founder Mort Rosenblum penned a great rebuttal to those crying for the death of old media. It starts:

Here’s a hair-raising snippet from the towering babble of media debate, signed by a Richard Sine, that argues journalism schools should be abolished:

“You can pick up most media skills on the job, or with a few hours of instruction. If you screw up, nobody dies, and nothing collapses.”

Someone fired back a single-word rebuttal: Iraq. Dead right. And that barely touches the surface.”

-Mort Rosenblum / Dispatches

Well worth a read.

Techcrunch writer Paul Carr comes up with a striking example of the danger of an unmediated, everyone’s a publisher style of news and information. A baseless ZDNet article accused Yahoo of giving thousands of Iranian’s confidential information to government authorities after recent protests in the country. Techcrunch itself has shown severe lapses in journalistic diligence this year.

And I guess I don’t want to suggest that just because something’s written in a newspaper it must be true. James Fallows points out that the celebrated newsrooms of yesteryear, if they ever existed, are but shadows of their former selves. In this case, the Washington Post failed to exercise basic fact checking in its lead editorial on the Obama Nobel announcement.

Remember, though, the media isn’t the message. There’s still a lot of good journalism being done both by online-only organizations and by print publications. What’s really to be criticized here is lazy journalism lacking in rigor.

Although, I’ve got to say, it’s been real nice having printed newspapers and magazines on this trip back to the US. I’m not sitting at a computer for all of my news, I can read in the park or on a bus, and all the weird little stories that I didn’t know I was interested in somehow make it into my peripheral news consumption.

(via TheRumpus)

Silicon Alley Insider gathers data on some newspapers who have recently ceased their print publications and moved entirely online.  While some, notably the Kentucky Post and the Seattle PI, have seen sharp increases in online viewership, the picture isn’t as rosy for most online-only newspapers.  A few of the newspapers now boast monthly online readership about the size of our own here at dvafoto, which is both a bad sign for those newspapers and a nice sign for us.  Most interesting, though, is an almost throw-away comment about the Kentucky Post:

A study by Princeton economists says that since the Posts closed, both the number of candidates for city council and local board posts, and the number of people who showed up to vote has dropped. The study also says that the incumbent politicians and board members now have higher chances of staying in office.”

In short, the printed newspaper is an important check on politicians. Not new news, I suppose, but now there’s data to back up the assertion.

You heard me right: Publicly traded newspapers stocks have been doing quite well lately.”

Rick Edmonds the Poynter Institute’s Biz Blog analyzes the stocks of publicly traded newspaper companies and finds some interesting results. Of the nine stocks listed almost all are up at least double from their 3-month low (the Washington Post Company’s stock, now at $370, isn’t because the stock price is so high, and McClatchy at 69 cents a share (finally more than the cost of a single issue of many its papers!) is up only 75% from its 3-month low). Many of the stocks are still quite low–well below 5 dollars a share–so they’re still considered risky buys. The news is good sign, however, after weeks and months of bad financial news for all media companies. And, if you’d bought any of these stocks in early March, you would’ve doubled your money by now. Long-term prospects, of course, remain dismal. Warren Buffett’s recent pronouncement that “For most newspapers in the United states, we [Berkshire Hathaway] would not buy them at any price,” does little to reassure.