Convergence Print Broadcast Online Hand in Hand

Convergence: Print, Broadcast & Online Hand in Hand Rosental Calmon Alves University of Texas at Austin International Consortium of Investigative Journalists General Membership Meeting London 4 -7, 2005

The first decade After 10 years of Web journalism, where are we? The audience has reached critical mass. Online journalism became indispensable for virtually all “well-informed” people almost everywhere. Online advertising has grown fast and will sustain high levels of growth. The Internet is taking audience from newspapers and television.

From “The Vanishing Newspaper, ” by Philip Meyer:

In the study “Abandoning the News” (spring 2005) the Carnegie Corporation of New York shows how young Americans (ages 18 -34) are distancing themselves from the traditional media and moving to the Internet as a main source of news. The next two slides are from that study and can be found at: www. carnegie. org/pdf/Abandoning. The. News. ppt.

From “Abandoning the News” – Carnegie Foundation survey of consumers ages 18 -34

The first decade Newspapers in general have more of an audience daily for their Web site than daily print circulation. Instead of circulation figures, newspapers now refer to “audience”, to include the Web users and argue that the Internet is only strengthening its outreach. In the US, the audience keeps declining for the traditional evening newscasts and lately also for cable news. The investments for the Web, however, are still small compared with its audience and strategic importance for the survival of any media company.

Trends of the second decade The media are losing control to the consumers and to the advertisers. Consumers have more options to find information and are abandoning bundled products. We are entering an era of an I-centric media: the content I want, where I want, in the format I want, but just when I want it. And also an era when the audience has a voice and wants to be heard.

Trends of the second decade “Journalism used to be a lecture, now it is a conversation, ” say Dan Gillmor and others from the Citizen Journalism or Participatory Journalism movement. Phenomena such as Ohmynews. com and Wiki. News cannot be ignored. Blogs have grown fast (around 30 million now, a new one every second, creating challenges for journalism…) RSS (Really Simple Syndication) changes the relationship between consumers and the news media. Podcasting proliferates and shows that new ways (and platforms) for journalism distribution are on the horizon.

Trends of the second decade The media are losing control to the advertisers also. Advertisers depend less from the traditional media, since they have now other ways to reach consumers. The commercial equation that finances journalism has been undermined by the new media. Internet advertising is more precisely targeted… And much cheaper. The bulk of the online ads goes to companies with little or no commitment to journalism.

The Keller memo The executive editor of the NY Times wrote this week a memo to the staff announcing the merging of the print newsroom and the Web site: “Over the past ten years the newsroom of Nytimes. com and the newsroom on 43 rd Street have been partners at a distance… “But in those ten years, the world has changed. The digital news operation is now grown up and strong, ready to enlarge its ambitions… “We have concluded that our best chance of meeting that challenge is to integrate the two newsrooms into one. This will enable us to fully tap the creative energy of this organization and thus raise digital journalism to the next level. ”

The Keller memo “The change embodied in this integration will be gradual but important. For quite a few years now, we've sworn allegiance to the modern-sounding doctrine of "platform neutrality… “By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists -- to reorganize our structures and our minds to make Web journalism, in forms that are both familiar and yet-to-be-invented, as natural to us as writing and editing, and to do all of this without losing the essential qualities that make us The Times. “Our readers are moving, and so are we”.

From shovelware to pre-purposing The Times announcement radically changes the way the newspaper views the Web and will be followed by other papers that will become more Web-centric (classifieds are already Webcentric). All news organizations adopted Web sites. Many have been lost in cyberspace, making their sites just a just-in-case-place-holder. News content was shoveled from the traditional medium to the Web. From shovelware, we evolved to re-purposing (a little adaptation to the new medium). That time is over… Pre-purposing is the name of the game.

From shovelware to pre-purposing Pre-purposing means the integration Bill Keller wants in that historical memo. It will not be the story of the New York Times formatted to fit in the Nytimes. com… It will be the first version of the story for the online edition (and maybe the second and third versions as well), plus the print edition consolidated version. It means an involvement of the online in the news production process since the very beginning.

A journalism under construction While journalism as we know it is dying, a new kind (or new kinds) of journalism is under construction. The next few years it will shape up on the Internet, on mobile phones, on PDAs, on MP 3 players, on Interactive TV, on new platforms that will be launched. Investigative journalism finds in this new world a fertile terrain. The new style is multimedia, multiplatform and has unique capabilities that facilitate the publication of investigative/in-depth pieces.

“Our readers are moving, and so are we”. Bill Keller, Executive Editor, The New York Times Martin Nisenholtz, CEO, New York Times Digital August 2, 2005 Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving? Are you moving?

Thank you very much indeed! And, by the way, Are you moving?