The Bugler Gets a Facelift

As you can see, we've updated our look. As we approach our senior project deadline (yikes!), we've decided to make the Bugler a one-stop shop for all things future of journalism. Our blog is only one out of many components in our project, and as we finish them, we'll begin to upload them under the different tabs you see above.

Check out the Pictures tab in the meantime!

Online Journalists Come Together

At the moment we're watching updates coming out of to the International Symposium for Online Journalism, happening today (4/17) and tomorrow at the University of Texas in Austin.

Starting in minutes is a panel on visual and multimedia storytelling on the web. Hopefully we can pull out some tips for our movie on the today's news cycle.

The "Why" for Saving Journalism

Yesterday I attended the Murrow Forum on Issues in Journalism at Tufts, where Chris Matthews of Hardball, Michael Dukakis and Janet Wu of WCVB-TV Boston were speaking to the topic, "Digging Too Deeply? Headlines, Politics, and Public Service."

We were treated to a live version of Hardball, complete with arguing and wisecracks from Matthews. Among the highlights:

Dukakis: If you're going to be a public servant, lead a good, conventional sex life
Matthews: Tell us, please, exactly what is a good, conventional sex life.

But on a more serious note, the conversation was eye-opening because the social, political and philosophical issues at hand often get buried beneath the deafening conversation about the economic future of the press. We talk endlessly about how to save journalism, yet surprisingly little of the dialogue acknowledges a crucial reason why journalism merits saving; there is a deep linkage between effective journalism and effective democracy. A society without a diligent press as societal watchdog is not a place many of us would like to be.

I recently read Paul Starr's excellent essay "Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption)" in which he argues that the press' economic woes are compromising the ability to blow the whistle on public and private abuses alike. I agree, but I was interested to see what the three Murrow Forum panelists felt about Starr's conclusions. It turns it out wasn't much of a question; all three agreed immediately that a cash-strapped press corps means that more will slip through the cracks. Michael Dukakis offered an interesting take on the issue, explaining that he actually finds the press today far more brutal and thorough than when he started in politics 30 years ago. However, he did express fears that today's level of scrutiny is in danger. .

No one is denying that the business question is crucial (although journalists sometimes like to gloss over it akin to a ostrich sticking its head in the sand). But because the business angle is my primary interest, the Murrow forum discussion was for me a welcome reminder of the larger social and political issues surrounding newspapers' decline- the why, not just how, for saving journalism.

Big Things Start Small

Kat Powers, the Senior Editor of the Somerville Journal, is confident in the future of journalism.

Part of the optimistic prediction has to do with the students on their way to be leaders in the industry. I look around, and see many individuals (mostly students considering my age) so passionate about working with what's thrown at them, and molding it into a better shape. What drives the future of journalism, I ask? The profit or the hands of diligent and faithful students. I lean towards the latter.

P.S. I am humble to be part of the "really great crop of Tufts interns" in Kat's blog.

Time to Dust Off the Kachingle Model

Last month I read an article in the Chicago Reader proposing the Kachingle model for journalism. Kachingle is like a pre-paid card for the web: you put for example $5 per month in your account, any blogger or journalist can put a Kachingle badge on their site, and by clicking the medallion, you donate a tiny fraction of your $5 to support the blog.

Michael Miner writes in his column Hot Type:

Kachingle understands that so long as the Internet feels free, it won’t matter to a lot of people if it actually is. Sign up and “subscribe” to Kachingle—all founder Cynthia Typaldos is suggesting at the get-go is $5 a month, but the amount is up to the subscriber—and then go back to wandering the Web as you always have. Whenever you visit a valued site that has also signed up with Kachingle, show your respect by clicking on the Kachingle “medallion” there, and at the end of the month your $5 will be divvied up proportionally according to those clicks.

My objection at the time was, why pay for what you can get for free? It's a question of adding value. You already get the value of free content without bothering to top up your Kachingle account- there's no reason to start now.

Except that now all signs suggests publishers are moving towards paid content. Let's hope they don't move towards micropayments, which as Clay Shirky pointed out, will only be a nuisance. Subscription is always an option too. But both with both of these payments methods, we lose the highly valuable ability to link to other content. If paid content went into effect, I couldn't write this blog post in the same way. Essentially it would kill the conversation.

Kachingle could offer a solution, allowing for an online ecosystem with paid content that still preserves the ability to link. Tim Windsor from Nieman Journalism Lab calls for cooperation amongst publishers in the move towards paid content. Well, here's their opportunity. If newspapers across the country adopted Kachingle medallions on their websites, we could access paid content on any site by just clicking the medallion. Bloggers could also still link to other articles in blog posts (although they would start to link less only because readers don't want to click the Kachingle medallion at each link). As for how to divide up the revenue, well, here's the cooperation part. Newspapers execs would have to agree on one set of metrics possibly based on site traffic (haven't completely figured that one out yet).

This of course assumes that newspaper execs are concerned with preserving the value of link journalism- probably too good to be true.

Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

[The text below is taken verbatim from Paul Levy’s Running a Hospital blog. Levy started this blog rally, and we're joining in.]

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe. A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally. We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture:

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here’s your chance. Please don’t write with nasty comments and sarcasm: Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe’s community presence, and make money. Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help. Thank you.

(P.S. If you have a blog, please feel free to reprint this item and post it. Likewise, if you have a Twitter or Facebook account, please add this url as an update or to your status bar to help us reach more people.)

Also, here’s the Globe’s story about the rally.

Cutting-Edge Technologies

What kinds of devices would we be using to get news in the future? Would everyone be clicking their eyes (perhaps, winking) and taking pictures of breaking news scenes or have some sort-of-a tiny bluetooth embedded in their ears?

I just scanned my sketch of the first device (tentatively titled as, "'My News' Coffee Holder'"). Once I translate the sketch into a computer graphic image, I'd definitely like to share with our friends of the bugler :)

I am creating a storyboard for our video on future journalism process this weekend. Send your thoughts and suggestions away! :)

Movie time

We're making a movie! Sort of.

One of the most essential pieces of the future of journalism is exploring the way in which a story will unfold to the public: how will it break, who then picks up on it, which distribution channels are used to circulate the story, and where in the process analysis and editorial oversight come into play.

We've been playing around with video and we've decided to make a video with a “road map” of the potential future news cycle (even if we don't get off the wait list for a free Final Cut Pro workshop- fingers crossed!). We're still feeling out exactly how it will look, but we want to take into account current trends and ongoing transformations in the news process. Ultimately we'll attempt to offer a prediction, in visual form, of how those trends will manifest themselves in both the evolution of a news story and how we consume it along the way.

Suggestions are welcome!

Internships are collateral damage

As a student at Tufts, I read with interest AJR's latest article on journalism internships in today's climate.

Will Skowronski writes in "Priceless":

Many news organizations have eliminated paid internships to save money. Others are depending on interns like never before, giving them assignments that once would have gone to more experienced staff reporters.

Reading that, you would think that a bounty of paid journalism internships existed before times got tough; not true, not at least in my past four years as a Communications and Media Studies minor. Esther, an intern at the Somerville News, could speak to this more, but I've definitely found myself taking on more responsibility at internship sites than I would have anticipated.

If you don't pay an intern (and really, even if you do), news organizations have an unwritten obligation to create the best experience within their power. It's crucial and valuable to develop fundamental journalism skills like interviewing and writing, but it almost goes without saying that all interns should be exposed to web journalism. In a field whose future will be primarily web-based, it would do interns a great disservice not to let them gain the web skills they need. That is of course assuming the intern herself doesn't end up giving the newspaper's new media department a crash course in "The Twitter."

New study proclaims, "Newspapers are Dying!" Yes, and...?

I agree with Esther's post on the sometimes redundant nature of media research. To a point, research linked to journalism's present crisis is merited; how can we hope to fashion a solution to a problem we don't understand? But I feel like I see a new study every day reporting results that ultimately lead to one conclusion - newspapers are dying and network TV news isn't faring well either. Check.

The energy of media think tanks, especially in our down economy, would go further if less was devoted to quantifying today's Armageddon. Let's divert those resources to research that will help today's journalists and academics develop solutions- a comprehensive study on people's willingness to pay for news anyone? (If I'm missing something and this exists, apologies and please pass it on!)

Rebuttal: Problems with the Research Method

Diane Mernigas, Editor-at-Large at Mediapost blogged about the problems that she sees in the Nielson Company's research (refer back to my previous post).

She said in her blog:

"Did it really require a multimillion-dollar study and 952 days of observed behavior to confirm that the PC has supplanted radio as the second-most-used medium? Americans are consuming record amounts of media and are going digital regardless of age and other demographics. Is that a surprise?

So far, there hasn't been much study-related discussion about interactivity, connectivity and the quality of time consumers spent with media..."

What do you all think?

Everyone loves TV...Really? Not So Much When It Comes To News

I thought I found a light in the dark age of television news because guess what, "whichever screen, people are watching"!

Americans love spending time watching TV, and increasingly so. Just up until the end of 2008, more than 142 hours/month are spent in front of that television, the most popular device of video consumption. That is up from 137 hours/month in 2007. Through its quarterly "three-screen" reports, the Nielson Company revealed in 2008 that the "three-screen"-- TV, the Internet, and mobile -- have now become the most popular and significant forms of video consumption in Americans' lives.

While that still seems true today (just read a story about Tufts students' increased TV consumption a few days ago), broadcast journalists are still frowning.

During the same year ('08), viewership of television news declined, a continuing trend since '06. For local TV, evening newscasts were the most affected while morning newscasts were the least, according to Nielson Media Research. The only exception was cable news (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) last year in the light of the 2008 Presidential Election (they GATHERED viewers; "an increase in prime-time viewership of 5% from November to December").

The research, however, finds that by the end of year, all three of the networks have lost more than 40% of their prime-time audience it had compared to the climax of the presidential campaign.

So what do people watch when they turn TV on? The research suggests that news is not their number one choice.

My question to you: what are you likely to watch on TV?