Eideard

Remember when CNN was one of the best news sources in the world?

CNN President Jim Walton announced a major shakeup of CNN management today, replacing the head of CNN/US with a long-time CNN executive known for his business turn-around skills.

HLN head Ken Jautz takes over as executive vice president of CNN/US, replacing Jonathan Klein, who headed the network for six years. CNN’s chief marketing officer Scot Safon will run HLN, replacing Jautz.

Walton also said he would hire a managing editor to “help leverage our newsgathering resources across multiple platforms.”

Most recently, Jautz has presided over the revamp and rebranding of the HLN channel, introducing [crap] signature programs such as Nancy Grace, Joy Behar, ShowBiz Tonight, Issues with Jane Velez Mitchell and Morning Express with Robin Meade…

Safon takes over HLN after heading CNN’s marketing for the last eight years, winning wide industry accolades for his marketing campaign for CNN and CNN=Politics. Before joining CNN, Safon oversaw marketing for one of CNN’s sister channels, TNT…

We continue to witness the devolution of a seminal news organization into the sort of grubby, entertainment-centered crap machine that doesn’t grow past mediocrity at that role.

The only person associated with CNN who deserves concern is Ted Turner – who admits that selling his networks to Time-Warner was the dumbest thing he ever did.

No – Murdoch’s not feeling sorry for himself, yet
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds…”

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then, interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times…”

Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary…

“The final thing I’d say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you’d wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you’d still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.”

RTFA. Interesting, provocative. Having wandered through this cyber-landscape for a larger number of years than either the protagonist or antagonist – I’ve been online since 1983 – I have a passing acquaintance at least with each facet of the discussion.

Like Shirky, I agree with him because I want to. Though that’s an equal part reflection from someone who is a hermit in real life as much as online.

ESPN plans on the World Cup starting the spin for 3D TV

We usually scold our children and teenagers for watching too much TV. It turns out that their grandmas and grandpas spend even more of their time watching TV, and it is not good for them either, according to researchers…

In a study published online in advance of publication…UCSD researchers examined television use in a large, nationally representative sample that was collected by the Center for Health and Well Being at Princeton University. Using an innovative, diary-like assessment strategy called the Day Reconstruction Method, study participants were asked to measure how they spent their time and describe their experience of everyday activities.

“We found that older people spent a great deal more time watching TV than younger people did, yet they enjoyed the experience less,” said first author Colin A. Depp, PhD…“What the study underscored is that alternatives to television as entertainment are needed, especially in older adults…”

The authors were surprised to find that older adults experienced TV watching as less enjoyable than younger people. “It is reasonable to expect that older adults may enjoy TV more than younger ones do, because they have fewer demands on their time. Prior studies also suggest they may use TV to regulate negative emotions,” said co-author Dilip V, Jeste, MD…

“Yet, our study indicates that older adults report lower levels of positive emotion while watching TV when compared to other activities – which is not the case in younger adults.”

The researchers concluded that increasing public awareness of alternatives to TV watching and reducing barriers to alternative activities that are more socially and physically engaging could reduce TV use in older people and diminish the potential for associated negative health effects.

I fit the profile for more TV watching since I retired. The extra is sports and movies.

Do I enjoy it less? Well, it pisses me off more. The content that is.

Of course, you could have someone online to read you the newspapers

Online news has become more popular than reading newspapers in the US, according to a survey. It is the third most popular form of news, behind local and national TV stations, the Pew Research Center said.

“News awareness is becoming an anytime, anywhere, any device activity for those who want to stay informed,” it said…

The survey showed that news aggregators such as Google News and AOL were most commonly used, along with the websites of CNN and the BBC.

Which is misleading without noting that sites like Google News reference online sites run by newspapers probably 99% of the time.

Sixty-one per cent of readers surveyed said they got their news online on a typical day, compared with 78% from local news channels and 71% from a national TV network such as NBC or cable channels such as CNN or Fox News.

Fifty-four per cent said they listened to radio news programmes at home or in the car.

More than 90% use more than one method to get news, and 57% consult between two and five websites as part of their newsgathering, the survey found.

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Foursquare has inked a partnership with the Canadian version of Metro, the free newspaper that gets distributed on subway trains and other locations in various cities, that will give its users the ability to see local news and reviews related to a specific location they are “checking in” at using the service’s iPhone or BlackBerry app.

Metro International, a Swedish company that publishes free papers in more than 100 cities around the world, says this is the first time the location-based startup has partnered with a news organization in any country.

In Canada, the paper is in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and claims circulation of some 800,000. So if a Foursquare user is near a restaurant in one of those cities for which Metro has a review, that will be displayed as a choice for the user. Although the Metro release doesn’t say whether other forms of news will be available as well, the potential is there for Metro reports on fires, break-ins, celebrity sightings or other news to be provided to users of Foursquare based on their location as well…

Mark Briggs at Lost Remote makes a good point that in the long term, location-based news would be better accomplished by way of an open API and open data-sharing rather than proprietary relationships between news services and app vendors. But at least in the short term a deal like that of Foursquare/Metro could provide some interesting evidence as to what’s possible when you blend location and news (or marketing) content.

Any of our Canadian readers have a chance to try this, yet?

The BBC has today said it has “no intention” of charging for online news, in a declaration that is unlikely to please James Murdoch and his father Rupert as they prepare to start charging for News Corporation content on the internet.

Sir Michael Lyons, the BBC Trust chairman, said the corporation has “no intention of diluting BBC commitment to universal access to free news online” as he outlined the areas director general Mark Thompson’s ongoing strategic review will cover.

The BBC’s internet news operations came under fire in August at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival from James Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation in Europe and Asia, who accused the corporation of “throttling” the market and preventing its competitors from launching or expanding their own services online.

News International, the News Corp subsidiary that owns the company’s British newspapers, including the Sun and the Times, is planning to start charging for its journalism online.

Lyons said today that the BBC Trust “recognises external concerns over scale and growth of BBC online operations”. But he added: “Equally, it’s an immensely popular service with audiences and an important tool for the economy…”

One would hope the Beeb also realizes their reach is well beyond the UK or the Dominion. They have an intact newsgathering organization that is replacing the role of many other news media operations – that have become dedicated to News as Entertainment. Which requires little or no journalistic skill.

Just ask anyone who used to enjoy CNN.

Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.

The digerati crowed over the collapse of the hated digital rights management (which Apple never liked, either) and record companies kicked up their heels at the thought of leaving behind the tyranny of the 99-cent price point.

But lost in the hubbub was the fact that Steve Jobs and Apple had been able to charge for content in the first place. Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.

Those of us who are in the U.S. newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

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.

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Wanna buy a building?
Daylife/AP Photo by Frank Franklin II

As Barack Obama marched towards the White House and the economy plunged, more Americans ditched newspapers for the internet.

For the first time, more Americans are getting their news online than from traditional ink and paper, although the popularity of television still eclipses all other forms of media.

In an apparently sharp shift in habits, the Washington-based Pew Research Centre found that the number of consumers using the web as a main news source surged from 24% to 40% in a year, overtaking the 35% who rely on newspapers. Television slipped from 74% to 70%.

The change is yet another blow to the newspaper industry. Papers across the US are cutting jobs, closing bureaux and trimming costs as they try to adjust to a collapse in advertising revenue.

Sree Sreenivasan added: “Keep in mind that most online news people read still uses a lot of newspaper-sourced copy that has been put on line. It’s still a lot of traditional media that’s feeding this.”

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Sharda Janardhan Chitikar, left, grieves the death of her two children in the terrorist attack
Daylife/AP Photo by Gurinder Osan

As I would expect, Daylife is doing the best job of collecting news photographs from the terror underway in Mumbai.

A record-setting 70 million-plus viewers watched election returns Tuesday night, which proved to be historic for cable TV and Web news consumption just as it was for Barack Obama.

It was no doubt the most people to use those mediums to follow election returns. Nielsen Media Research doesn’t have complete historical viewership figures, but the 47 million homes following the story on TV was the most ever.

Web sites run by MSNBC, CNN and ABC News all shattered records for traffic on Tuesday. The top site Yahoo! News saw its page views up 80 percent over the 2004 campaign.

ABC News had the most prime-time viewers, according to Nielsen’s preliminary estimate. But stretch that coverage to 12:30 a.m. EST, which would include John McCain’s concession speech and Obama’s victory appearance in Chicago, and CNN was watched more than any network.

Not only is that CNN’s biggest audience in a nearly three-decade history, it proved that a cable network could beat the major broadcasters on a big event. That’s an important change from even four years ago, when more viewers turned to ABC, CBS and NBC on Election Night.

DirecTV’s Election News Mix was a gas. They ranged 8 mosaic-style panels, 4 over 4, with the network channels top half and CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC and BBCAmerica across the bottom.

Absolute heaven for news junkies. Especially with 6 of the 8 in Hi-Def.