Merrill on Multimedia

We’ve been expecting this so long it seems anticlimactic, even overdue.

The Christian Science Monitor announced today it will end its daily print edition and publish only on the Web, except for a new weekend print magazine. The 100-year-old newspaper claimed in a press release it will be the first national daily to substitute its Web site for its print edition when the change kicks in next April.

That may seem true now, but six months is a long time for an industry where circulation and revenue are in freefall. It would be surprising if more newspapers didn’t go Web-only by April.

CSM Magazine prototype

It’s a tough switcheroo to pull, as the Monitor’s finances demonstrate. Most of its revenue comes from the paper’s $219 annual subscription fee. It hopes to make up some of that lost money by recruiting subscribers to a new $89-a-year print magazine and –this is the big surprise — by recruiting Web readers to pay an undetermined subscription fee to receive a new digital version of the daily Monitor.

That is a gambit worth watching, for sure. But there is so much news available on the Web for free –at least for now –that almost any attempt to charge for a Web-based general news service seems doomed.

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Uncategorized newspapers, The Business

With all the live-blogging, tweeting and video chat taking place online during Friday’s presidential debate, who could pay attention to TV?

OK, so most folks don’t sit in front of TV with their laptops and watch other people watching television, but that’s what I did while Barack Obama and John McCain verbally sparred in Mississippi on Friday night. I wanted to see how the Internet’s live political conversation might affect my perception of the televised debate.

So while listening to the candidates talk, I was clicking around the Web, watching citizens and professional journalists use live-blogging services like CoverItLive.com, video blogging services like Seesmic and text-messaging services like Twitter to share their thoughts on what the candidates were saying.

Pictured above is Seesmic

Hardly a satisfying way to experience a big moment in American political theater, I know. But it was strangely compelling, especially the video-blogging by people in their living rooms and home offices. Even some of those annoyingly short text updates from Twitter added a new dimension to my debate experience.

I confess I’m no fan of Twitter, the real-time “micro-blogging” service that lets people write often incomprehensible text messages of up to 140 characters and zap them to anyone who “subscribes” to their updates. And on Friday, most of the political “tweets” (web jargon for Twitter’s text updates) scrolling down the service’s special election page seemed obvious and trite. For example:

stephensays one of the things that scares me about mccain: he whistles when he speaks. a sign that a man is too old: he whistles when he speaks.

SignalToNoise Obama and McCain are very catty tonight.

mimiboo McCain’s tie is giving me a headache.

But as the debate wore on, this stream-of-consciousness reaction of strangers slowly added up to more than the sum of their individual comments. I had been looking for a new view of public opinion. What I found felt more like a multimedia party–where everyone was talking and hardly anyone was listening.

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Blogging, Multimedia live-blogging, Multimedia, Twitter, video

Here come the elephants, video cams and cell phones dangling from their trunks.

 Images of multimedia elephants popped into my head as I sat listening to washingtonpost.com’s video guru conduct a workshop at the Online News Association annual conference this month. Chet Rhodes, assistant managing editor for news video at the Post’s Web site, got me thinking about what news might be like if newspaper staffs not only survive, but start doing live video from urban streets all over the U.S.

 Newspapers are the elephants of American news, with reporting staffs that vastly outnumber their TV and radio rivals. Even though the elephants have been put on a panic diet–with newspapers slashing staff and expenses to stay alive–the surviving herd is lumbering into video and other multimedia news formats.  Rhodes, for example, has trained more than 200 Washington Post print reporters to shoot basic video, typically for 90-second visual sidebars to text stories. He’s planning to boost that output by teaching reporters the basics of editing so they can pre-edit in the field. 

Radio Pictures  – Oxymoron?  

Yesterday I laughed when I got an e-mail from a videographer (and former colleague at washingtonpost.com) who now works at NPR, John Poole. He included a copy of the infamous New Yorker cartoon of a dog sitting in front of a computer, with “dog” crossed out in the caption. “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a radio network,” it said. Poole included a link to his company’s new videos on iTunes, which led to this logo: “NPR’s Radio Pictures Podcast.”  The tag line said NPR was offering “radio with a vision.”

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Multimedia Multimedia, video

Blogging is still like the early days of the ‘Net–mostly a good ole boys club. That much is obvious from the just-released State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which found that 66 percent of bloggers worldwide are male.

But some less obvious findings in this report from blog search engine Technorati interest me more. After all, the Internet population eventually lost its male dominance. So, too, will the blogging universe gain more women writers over time.

What surprised me about this survey of 1,209 bloggers is how much money some are making. The top 10 percent of bloggers are earning an average of $19,000 a year from their blogs, while the top one percent earn over $200,000 annually.

That doesn’t mean most blogs throw off much revenue, though. The median annual revenue for all U.S. bloggers with ads on their blogs is only $200, meaning half earn less. The higher, $19,000 average is skewed by top-tier bloggers who earn the really big bucks.

Slightly more than half of all blogs have advertising now, and most use self-serve tools from Google, Yahoo and others that automate the display of ads based on the text of their posts. Only 19 percent negotiate directly with advertisers, and six percent have a sales force.

Technorati, which monitors activity in millions of blogs, released the fifth and final chapter of its blogging report today. Overall, it shows blog growth slowing, and posting activity declining.

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Advertising, Blogging Advertising, Blogging

Pass the word to students and other young innovators — deadlines are approaching for two grant programs that fund innovative projects in digital media.

Closing first are the “young innovator awards” for HASTAC’s “digital media and learning” grants. The theme is participatory learning, which doesn’t necessarily mean journalism. But a project involving participatory learning about news or journalism might well qualify. Applicants must be 18 to 25 years old, though HASTAC also has a similar grant program that is not limited to young people. Submission deadline is Oct. 15

Two weeks later, applications close for the third annual Knight News Challenge contest, which will award up to $5 million to promising digital media experiments.  Winning entries must have three elements: “use of a digital media; delivery of news or information on a shared basis to; a geographically defined community.”  Anyone can apply, but people 25 or younger are eligible for a special “young creators” category.

A large crowd turned out yesterday at the Online News Association conference in D.C. to hear the Knight Foundation talk about what it’s looking for this year. Innovation was the short answer.

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation said 3,000 ideas were submitted last year and went through a multi-tiered screening process. Some 447 applicants were invited to submit full proposals, which got winnowed to 64 finalists. Their ideas got submitted to the final review panel, which picked 17 winners.

The deadline to apply this year is Nov. 1. So if you have an idea, go for it!

Innovation contests, grants, Innovation

One of the sillier mapping sites I’ve seen lately is PaperCuts, which attempts to map where newspaper layoffs are taking place. Trouble is, the map is hard to navigate and the contextual info around it is presented in a chaotic design.

Contrast that with the cleanly designed electoral college map at RealClearPolitics. It uses personalization effectively. You can redraw the map–and tally how many votes McCain and Obama would get–based on polling results in various states. Nicely done.

RealClearPolitics has a map that allows users to simulate Electoral College vote scenarios by state and polling results.

Interactivity, Locative media, Personalization, Uncategorized Interactivity, location, mapping, mashups, Personalization