A Monday kvetch about newspaper websites

There are better places to read about what’s wrong with newspapers’ websites, so I’ll be brief:

• Why is the New York Times hiding the audio of its interview with President Obama? Hearing it talked up on MSNBC and NPR, I headed to the Times site to load it onto the iPod for my morning run.  There is no mention of Saturday’s interview on the home page; after some digging, I find an article about, and transcript of, the interview, but when I dig around long enough to find a summary and transcript of the interview, I only find excerpts of audio.
• Why can’t the Chicago Tribune learn to link correctly? This article about airfare price cuts (which oddly isn’t listed on its Travel page) mentions travel sites like BestFares.com and Vayama.com without including links; a mention of The Travel Team Inc includes an apparently auto-generated link to a seemingly irrelevant Tribune page. This would have been silly in 1998; in 2009, it’s ridiculous.
  
• NPR’s David Folkenflik apparently watches Jon Stewart, as his story this morning (watch out for the apparently new NPR.org popups) on the failings CNBC lifts, with no shame or attribution, from Stewart’s much discussed rant last week. Wouldn’t it have been cool if the journalist had done the story before the comedian?
  

Super-mega Tuesday Newspaper Endorsements– relevant in “highly visible races?”

The NYT endorsements of HRC, and McCain, made news on Friday; today we see that the largest papers in Illinois, Arizona and Washington all endorsed Obama on Sunday; as did the San Jose Mercury News.

The more interesting question to me is how helpful, and whether they’re a good idea. Tim Porter, in AJR in 2004, noted:

They have some value to some people some of the time in some circumstances, but no one can say how much to whom and when–for sure.

CQ:

Research suggests that newspaper endorsements have only a slight impact on election results. From 1940 to 2002, newspaper endorsements changed perhaps 1 percentage point of the vote, according to a 2004 study by Steve Ansolabehere, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of and now a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the issue over time and found that “the more visible the race, the less impact the endorsement has.”

Dean Jamieson, again, on the NewsHour in 04:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson… noted that endorsements are less important to readers than they are for the campaigns, which often use them as proof of their superiority over their rival. “The effect of the editorials doesn’t come out of people reading them, they come out of the ads by the candidates saying ‘I’ve been endorsed,’” Jamieson recently told UPI.

EveryBlock Debuts, as the Sun-Times Winds Down

EveryBlock, the much-anticipated new project from ChicagoCrime founder Adrian Holovaty, debuted Wednesday– at least for Chicago, New York and San Francisco. (Was it a a coincidence that Wednesday was also the anniversary of the birth of Django Reinhardt, Holovaty’s gypsy jazz guitar hero?) I’ve had fun exploring restaurant reviews and Flickr photos near my block, and I’ve heard nothing but praise so far– including from a friend in New York who is turning her neighborhood council onto the service. Adrian and his team are freakishly talented, but the usefulness of the project largely depends on the degree to which local governments will make their– our– information available. (Relatedly, Tom Steinberg and MySociety today unveiled a new set of public transport maps. I’d love for the Chicago Transit Authority to be involved– the CTA announced the purchase of new cars yesterday.)

As Adrian and his team were basking in their deserved laurels today, across the Chicago River the evisceration of the Chicago Sun-Times continued. Michael Miner makes the case that the loss of 29 positions was not as bad as expected, and I think more than one of them was glad to get the layoffs, expected for weeks, over with. Will the Sun-Times survive as a source of local journalism, or is it just a matter of time until we are a one paper town.

La Opinion Grows By Focussing on Community

The ongoing fall in newspaper circulation was widely reported earlier this month. What received less attention, at least within my Google Reader universe, is the fact that the numbers for Spanish-language dailies continue to grow. La Opinion, Los Angeles’ Spanish-language daily, is the nation’s fastest growing large paper. While circulation of large dailies dropped 2.9%, La Opinion increased its numbers by 3.57% (a number that does not include pass-around figures, which is believed to be higher for Spanish-language dailies.) New York’s El Diario la Prensa also grew by 1.1%.

La Opinion is growing because it tells important stories about Los Angeles. A pair of articles from Thanksgiving Day stand as examples, on the National Transgender Day of Remembrance and the Thanksgiving/protest march by day laborers in the San Fernando Valley. (Neither event was mentioned by the LA Times.)

I lack the skills, and the patience, to adequately translate the two articles– perhaps at some point La Opinion, which is vital for those who care about LA news, will publish include translations for those that don’t read Spanish.

From the article on the jornaloers, Día de agradecer y protestar en LA:

Pablo Alvarado, coordinador de la Red Nacional de Jornaleros, señaló que este año los trabajadores de las esquinas han logrado ganar varias batallas legales ante ordenanzas municipales que les prohibían trabajar.

Destacó también que este año se han abierto cuatro centros de trabajo para los jornaleros, que se han organizado más esquinas, que han marchado y que han llegado a los recintos del poder para demandar y exigir sus derechos y un paro a las redadas.

“Estamos peleando, estamos luchando y estamos ganando, sin embargo, a pesar de que nuestra lucha va a seguir, no va a parar; todavía hay muchas peleas que librar, todavía hay muchas municipalidades que están obsesionadas con terquedad en pasar leyes que criminalicen al trabajador jornalero y a las jornaleras”, dijo Alvarado. “Creemos que este año habrá un aumento de ese tipo de leyes, con la falla de la reforma migratoria en Washington, D.C., este número de ataques va a continuar, pero ante el alza de esos ataques, también va a incrementar nuestra lucha”.

Debido a que los jornaleros son el rostro visible del inmigrante en las esquinas, comentó Alvarado, se han convertido en el blanco favorito de los “minutemen”.

“Pero nosotros venimos a este país a trabajar”, insistió Diego Cap, un jornalero más de los aproximadamente 200 participantes en la marcha. “El único interés de nosotros como jornaleros es venir a este país para trabajar, para llevar el sustento a nuestra familia, no hemos venido aquí a quitarle ni a robarle a nadie, hemos venido aquí a trabajar, los que hemos venido esta mañana aquí, somos la voz de todos los jornaleros de esta nación”.

From Transgéneros piden alto a intolerancia:

En la ceremonia recordaron la historia de Víctor Arellano, o “Victoria”, un joven hispano de 23 años quien decidió vivir plenamente su identidad femenina y que murió tras los barrotes de un centro de deportación en la ciudad de San Pedro.

También la vida de Gwen Araújo fue motivo de lágrimas. Araújo, un estudiante de 17 años, perdió la vida en 2002 tras la golpiza que le dieron cuatro hombres después de que éstos descubrieran que es transgénero.

“La realidad es que por lo menos una vez a la semana me doy cuenta de que una de mis amistades fue públicamente hostigada y hasta atacada físicamente, simplemente por ser quien es”, dijo Victoria Ortega, activista transgénero…

“Para las transgéneros hispanas la lucha es aún más difícil. No sólo nos atacan por vivir nuestra feminidad sino por nuestra identidad latina. A nosotras se nos presentan nuevos obstáculos, como el dominio del inglés, la estrechez de la situación económica, el racismo y todo eso se suma para que nos sea más imposible alcanzar una justicia social”, declaró Victoria.

Sin embargo, las transgénero hispanas son el grupo de más amplio crecimiento en el sur de California. Tan sólo en el grupo de Bienestar hay cerca de 300 miembros de esta comunidad.

“Llegamos a este país en busca de la libertad que se nos niega en nuestros países y nos duele escuchar que aún aquí nuestras hermanas son golpeadas o asesinadas sólo por vivir esta verdadera identidad”, comentó Cristal del Toro, la primer transgénero hispana del condado de Los Ángeles en dirigir una campaña nacional contra el virus del VIH.

The Onion and Nichey News Models of the Future

Greg Beato’s homage to The Onion in the November issue of Reason Magazine is finally linkable.

At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn’t ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion’s journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

Are there any other newspapers that can boast a 60 percent increase in their print circulation during the last three years?…Too many high priests of journalism still see humor as the enemy of seriousness: If the news goes down too easily, it can’t be very good for you. But do The Onion and its more fact-based acolytes, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, monitor current events and the way the news media report on them any less rigorously than, say, the Columbia Journalism Review or USA Today?…Despite its “fake news” purview, it’s an extremely honest publication. Most dailies, especially those in monopoly or near-monopoly markets, operate as if they’re focused more on not offending readers (or advertisers) than on expressing a worldview of any kind….Until today’s front pages can amuse our staunchest defenders of journalistic integrity to severe dyspepsia, if not death, they’re not trying hard enough.

Also today (via Romenesko) The Naperville News reports on “Our Dumb College Speaking Tour: The News Business and How it’s Done – An Evening with Two of the Most Important Writers in Journalism History,” featuring The Onion’s Todd Hanson and Chris Karwowski. Says Hanson: “The Onion is about one thing, and that is having the courage to tell the truth in ways that other newspapers are afraid to print….None of this stuff is actually real. We make all of this stuff up. It’s all made up. But you’d be amazed by how many people don’t figure that out.”

Meanwhile, some sketches on what news might look like in the future from Rob Paterson and the World Association of Newspapers. First, Rob:

• The new will be “nichey” – headlines and regular news are commodities – the more “nichey” the more likely to meet the needs of a community – the more a community is served – the more likely that the community will have a value – the more likely some kind of economic model can be arrived at
• The “reader” will pick from the many niches the areas that they want not the “editor” – no reader will go in the front door – they will want it “their way” – for instance I could not care less about sports BUT many would kill to find a real insider – if the writer was some one like Michael Lewis even I would read it – I want to build my newspaper
• Make it easy for me to find and read/view/listen to great material – make it easy!!!!!! I will pay for my time – I want great stuff about things that I find important – I want a person’s opinion about it all too
• Key being personality – I don’t read the Times – I like certain writers – they stimulate me – I don’t want an institution – I want to relate to people – then I want to have my say
• Comments can be awful – most are crass – many are crap – but what if a hosted community was added – look at Leroy at NPR and at how his community acts – now imagine if this was expanded so that cancer sufferers and their caregivers could speak in some kind of privacy with each other?

From the WAN report:

“The printed newspaper will get smaller and become mostly free. New technology and combination probably with mobile phones will make even the printed newspaper much more interactive than today. Low voltage e-paper or other paper-replacing foldable screens will be available to offer an alternative to the paper version, but very little interactive or cost efficient in regards to information retrieval.” Moritz Wuttke, CEO, APAC Publicitas, China