Justin Ellis assesses the non-profit news site The Texas Tribune on its fifth birthday, and wonders whether its future will remain bright: "While the business of journalism today offers less stability than ever before, the Tribune has been able to build a measure of security through a mix of philanthropy, donations, and sponsorships. But success brings spectators, and the Tribune’s business model has many trying to clone it and others continuing to question it."
State of the craft
Forget what you've heard about the modern reader's short attention span. Lucia Moses writes that the optimum story length is about twice the standard 700-800 words: "It’s tempting to think the Internet has not all but killed our ability to slow down and sustain our attention in an era of slide shows, listicles and other easily digestible posts. But the truth is actually more complicated. It turns out that longer is better at drawing attention, but only to a point."
Michael Meyer writes in CJR about an energetic news operation in the corporate environment of Nestlé Purina PetCare. "The Feed" produces information for audiences on social media platforms, and its work may threaten traditional news organizations: "As journalism newsrooms have diminished in strength and ambition over the last decade, 'brand newsrooms,' a term that’s now used casually within the marketing and PR industry, are booming — and have been for some time."
Less repetition. Less editing. Less travel. More collaboration. Those are some of Kate Galbraith's proposals for making journalism more efficient: "The universe of possible news is vast and mostly untapped. I’ve argued that most papers in the country could grow to five times their size, given sufficient money and talent. Yet news coverage reflects a herd mentality. Everyone rushes to do their own story on Ray Rice, the latest iPhone, a new fracking study, and so forth."
Erin Madigan White reports on what Associated Press Washington Bureau Chief Sally Buzbee recently told a conference of editors about the Obama administration's efforts to block news coverage: "Day-to-day intimidation of sources is chilling. AP’s transportation reporter’s sources say that if they are caught talking to her, they will be fired … Government press officials say their orders are to squelch anything controversial or that makes the administration look bad."
The first problem Francie Diep ran into in her survey of minority science writers was finding them: "I received only 46 responses from U.S.-based respondents, itself a telling statistic." Diep nevertheless parsed the results for some conclusions about the obstacles to diversity (low pay being among them), examples of bias for and against minorities, and the state of efforts to promote diversity.
When a team of business leaders issued a recent report on the costs of climate change, the subject moved out of the science pages, Robert S. Eshelman writes: "The novelty of the report was that it talked relatively little about science and more about what this whole threat is going to cost us," Eshelman writes. "And with this shift in focus — from the physics of climate change to its financial consequences — came a subtle yet perhaps significant change in media coverage."
Lucia Moses interviews a "veteran freelance writer who has written for top women’s magazines" but now writes "native advertising" for much better rates: "At least with native advertising, it’s saying, sponsored by Chipotle, sponsored by GE, sponsored by Coca-Cola," the unnamed writer says. Also, do readers notice the disclosures? Do they even care about native ads? And Gene Weingarten recounts how he once fought back.
If you think blogs are dead, eclipsed by social media platforms, you'll get an argument from Dan Kennedy, who says that having an independent online presence remains essential for most journalists: "The reason is that you need an online home that is controlled by you — not by Mark Zuckerberg or Arianna Huffington or some other digital mogul seeking to get rich from your content. Moreover, you need to establish an online identity. If you don’t, others will do it for you."
The Pew Research Center's Alex T. Williams uses U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data to show that the salary gap between news reporters and public relations professionals has widened over the past decade of shrinking newsroom budgets: "Journalists on average earn just 65% of what those in public relations earn. That is a greater income gap than in 2004 when journalists were paid 71 cents of every dollar earned by those in public relations ($43,830 versus $31,320)."