Link wrap: NY Times, iTunes for news, Al Jazeera footage

Michael Hirschorn ponders on the future of journalism and the New York Times’ chance of survival in www.theatlantic.com:

The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers, who pay actual cash money for the privilege of consuming the paper, and who are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who don’t and aren’t. Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity.

The New York Times questions Mr Hirschorn’s maths:

We have not already borrowed money against our building’s value as your article states.  Rather we are in the process of pursuing a sale-leaseback for up to $225 million for some of the space we own in our headquarters building.

The proposed transaction for our building gives us the right to buy back the space at the end of the lease.  In the meantime, we would continue to occupy our headquarters.  We plan to use the proceeds from the sale-leaseback to repay some of the long-term debt we currently have.  So the sale-leaseback would not add to the debt of the company, but rather is a way to refinance some of our existing debt.  We have chosen to pursue this form of transaction because it is one of the less expensive forms of borrowing in this difficult credit market.

While credit markets remain tight, we have been talking with lenders and, based on our conversations with them, we expect to get the financing to meet our obligations when they come due.  And please remember, we continue to generate good cash flow from our operations.

David Carr at the New York Times also questions Mr Hirschorn’s maths but ponders much the same questions and suggests an iTunes for news :

For a long time, newspapers assumed that as their print advertising declined, it would be intersected by a surging line of online advertising revenue. But that revenue is no longer growing at many newspaper sites, so if the lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement.

As a report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research stated last year, “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.”

With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself. Michael Hirschorn, writing in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, used some fatuous math to foretell the end of The New York Times and then added that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, that tweets, blogs and stripped-down news aggregators could fill the gap in reporting out the terrible events in Mumbai or New Orleans.

Mr. Hirschorn is a smart guy — I used to work for him at a Web-based media site — and while there is nothing sacred about The New York Times, the experienced, and yes, expensive journalistic muscle it deploys on events big and small is not going to be replaced by a vanguard of unpaid content providers. It’s not that journalism is impossibly difficult; it’s just that it takes enormous amounts of time and a willingness to stay with the story.

“Free is not a business model,” said Mr. Moffett of Bernstein.

Seamus McCauley says iTunes is the wrong model for news:

The right lesson is that for fragmentation of content to work as a business model, there has to be some inherent commercial value in the fragment. iTunes isn’t just a distribution platform, a facility for giving music away – it sells fragments (tracks) to buyers. On-demand isn’t giving TV and film away but selling it. Even p2p offers opportunities, perhaps the most robust opportunities, for smart TV and film makers who can get product placement into the distributed fragments, measure exposure and charge “advertisers” commensurately.

Seth Godin asks what we’ll miss when newspapers are gone:

Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.)

Al-Jazeera makes video footage of its Gaza coverage available for re-use under Creative Commons licence.

The Gaza footage is released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license which allows for commercial and non-commercial use. This means that news outlets, filmmakers and bloggers will be able to easily share, remix, subtitle or reuse our footage.

Mindy McAdams offers some tips on keeping news video short, tight and fascinating, and on designing sites to better allow people to sample and browse.