Editor's Blog
Rebuilding nature: a preview of the next Monitor weekly
Here's a preview of the April 19th issue of our new weekly. In a special report, Monitor correspondents Sarah Miller Llana and Moises Velasquez-Manoff and photographer Melanie Stetson Freeman take a deep look at environmentalism. Focusing on the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin closely observed natural selection, the Monitor team shows how preservation is now restoration -- removing invading species and lessening the human impact on the fragile ecosystem. You can read more about the issue in this Bright Green Blog post, where you can also see a video that Melanie produced.
Google: whipping boy for distressed publishers
Google -- bad or good?
That's the hot debate in the troubled news industry.
The company whose motto is "do no evil" is being cast by some of the biggest names in publishing as the scourge of newspapers, the Godzilla that is wrecking journalism.
Linking in
Google's spiders scrape news off of thousands of websites every minute. Google then blurbs the articles on its Google News site. These are just blurbs, so a reader of Google News who is interested in an article needs to click on the link, which leads to the article on the originating website. Many more people find CSMonitor.com articles via Google News (and similar aggregators) than by going to our home page.
As much as it puts news sites in a subordinate position, the arrangement still seems like a win-win.
A story gets exposure by being teased on Google News. But the substance of the story -- the primary sources, the detail, the deathless prose, and the adjacent advertising opportunity -- goes back to the news organization that produced the article in the first place.
And the news organization then has an opportunity to introduce readers to other content on its site.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues that this is only helping the news industry by directing readers to their sites. His do-no-evil point, in a speech to the Newspaper Association of America, is that the newspaper industry needs a second act:
"How do you keep engagement?" he asked. "How do you avoid being just mediated with a set of stories that are aggregated with your brand on them."
Aggregation aggravation
Google does not put ads on Google News Pages. But it recently began placing them on Google News search pages (the page you get when you use the search box on the Google News Page).
Could Google News pages be next for ads? Google says no. News companies are not so sure.
And even if Google stays true to its word, the nagging worry of news organizations whose content is indexed on Google News is that for many users the aggregation page is enough of a destination. If you are a skimmer, you get all you need there from reading the extracts of the articles. No need to click through to the original.
Enter the aggrieved parties
As the financial fortunes of news companies have gotten more dire, Google has increasingly been cited as a reason. Rupert Murdoch, MediaNews Group's Dean Singleton, and a host of other publishers have been complaining that Google is using their content but not paying for it.
"Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" Murdoch asked.
"We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories," Singleton said.
Do not crawl - Doh!
Google counters that what it is doing is well within the confines of "fair use." It is doing what a librarian would do in providing an index to newspaper content. Yes, it's doing it faster and more conveniently and at a massively more dominant scale -- but it's the same thing.
And besides, if a news organization doesn't want Google to scrape its content, it can make a simple code adjustment on its articles -- a "do not crawl" designation -- and Google steers clear.
No problem.
Also no traffic.
What would AP do?
Jeff Jarvis thinks Google bashing is dead wrong. The City University of New York professor is a big fan of Google. How could the author of the book "What Would Google Do?" be otherwise? He also acknowledges a financial interest in another aggregator company, Daylife.
That said, he makes a compelling case in his Buzzmachine blog that all the Google-bashing among publishers is because they are caught in the past and are failing to embrace what he calls the "link economy."
Get me rewrite
His most provocative point isn't that publishers are old-school, however. It's that the real culprit is the organization that is the central nervous system of the news industry: the Associated Press.
The venerable AP, he says, is built on appropriating the content of its members, rewriting it, and selling it back to them and to other organizations without so much as a link back to the originator.
Jarvis writes: "If the AP really wanted to help support original journalism ... it would stop rewriting, homogenizing, and anonymizing all its members’ news. Or when it does, it should provide credit and links to the sources, a moral necessity in the link economy; I urged the AP to adopt such a link ethic last year."
The link economy
The ol' CUNY perfesser is right about the link economy. It is the real world we're living in. Or at least the world we are going to be living in.
What Google is doing is what any erstwhile librarian would do: cataloging information for your convenience. And Google is giving not just credit to the original source. It is creating a path back to that original source.
Google needs no defending. It is so strong that it can defend itself. It is incredibly successful. And it still isn't evident that it is doing evil.
Riled shareholders seek 'Say on Pay'
Fat cats, robber barons, masters of the universe -- there's a long and rich history of public anger over corporate bosses padding their pockets. During normal times, it's a low-grade drumbeat that causes eye-rolling in the office or on the factory floor. During bad times, CEO compensation becomes a populist battle cry.
Writing in the April 12 issue of the Monitor weekly, Jeff MacDonald sees this year as a "tipping point in activists' battle to rein in high-flying executive pay." Laurent Belsie, who edits the weekly Money section (and blogs on our Rebuilding the Economy site), explains the "say on pay" movement in this video.
Perplexed about the economy? Try the hair dye index
On CSMonitor.com, you can meet an economist who sees signs of recovery (click here), though other indicators are still pretty lousy (see this article on how CEO's feel and this one on student loans). At least we're getting a break on gas prices.
Up, down, bad, good -- what's really going? In our new Monitor weekly, we look beyond the daily headlines. Check out these videos previewing our special report on "The New Economy: 10 ways it will look different":
Monitor changes: What's a Content Management System anyway?
More changes here at the Monitor? You bet.
But not every change will be apparent to the average visitor (if there is such a thing).
Sure, we'll have more content (a.k.a., journalism), more timely updates, increased interactivity, and longer "open for business hours."
In order for us to provide all of the above (and more), we need the technology to get us there. It's coming. And getting from Point A to Point B is a bumpy ride.
Anyone logging onto the Monitor's website early this morning saw evidence of the bumps.
There was a gaping hole right in the middle of our home page. Nothing. Just white space. To use a radio analogy, dead air.
In radio, dead air is a bad thing. It makes you wonder if anyone's paying attention. Maybe the DJ took a break.
The same thing goes for a website. If there's a prominent error, it makes you wonder if anyone's home.
We weren't rolling out an encryption strategy or anything. What you saw, depending on what browser you use, was a problem that can be encountered when you hand code the home page -- in other words, manually placing content on that page.
Enter what's called a content management system (CMS). Ask anyone in the industry about their CMS and you'll hear horror stories, angst, and a lot of frustration.
And occasionally, you'll run into folks who love their CMS. They're easy to spot. They've got a crowd following them.
Basically, the CMS is the tool that organizes the content (articles, photos, etc.) and allows you to place it on different sections of the website.
A good content management system is worth its weight in gold.
Because the Internet is still young and evolving, there's not a perfect tool out there yet. You go with one and hope it stands the test of time. When you decide to update, not only is it very costly but the complexities are immense. You don't want to lose content. Or links to that content.
And since we've got live content going back to 1980, there's a lot at stake for us.
Ever since content management systems were created, there's been a struggle between flexibility and automation.
For the person running the website, flexibility is paramount. You want to be able to showcase your content in the most aesthetically pleasing way.
As with anything, there's always the other side of the coin. It takes resources to have this freedom. And in this industry, you really have to choose: flexibility or automation?
What you want is a CMS that gives you both. Or as our tech staff has called it: "auto-magic."
Regardless, we're moving away from the hand-coded model. Although it has provided us with flexibility, it is extremely resource dependent, takes a lot of time -- and, as we've proven (we're not the only ones), it is subject to human error.
Other than a moderately updated design, you won't see big change when we implement our new CMS over the next month.
The crucial difference is that it will enable our journalists to work faster and more directly on CSMonitor.com. They won't need strong technical knowledge to update the site. As a result, Monitor journalism will be published more quickly and with fewer production steps along the way.
That's good. It lets us do what we are best at: providing timely, humane, thoughtful journalism to our readers.
It's an exciting time to be at the Monitor. And it's an exciting time to be in the news industry.
We'll keep you updated.
Video: Previewing the 'new economy'
The recession will end. A new economy will emerge. When and how? Those are the big questions. In the premiere issue of the Monitor weekly, Washington correspondent Peter Grier outlines "Ten Ways the new economy will look different." Peter sat down with me for a preview of his report, which appears in the issue dated April 12.
Crisis in journalism: Boston Globe on the brink
In the most troubling news to date about the state of news industry, the New York Times is threatening to shut down the Boston Globe unless the Globe's unions quickly agree to $20 million in cuts.
As the Globe reports today: "This week, the Globe newsroom completed cutting the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs. But the deteriorating economy has made the Globe's financial outlook much worse ... The Times Co. is seeking (new) concessions from the unions because the New York company, which is also suffering from the recession, can no longer subsidize the Globe's losses..."
Hearst stopped printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, but the Seattle Times remains. Scripps shut down the Rocky Mountain News, but the Denver Post is still in business.
Boston without the Globe? That would leave the Boston Herald, a scrappy but underresourced -- and all too often unserious -- tabloid as Boston's only local newspaper.
What's at stake?
Even if unions and management come to terms on the concessions, as Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy notes in his Media Nation blog, "The problem is, I don't think anyone believes this is a one-time deal. What will the next demand be?"
To understand what is at stake, it is worth reading or listening to a thoughtful lecture that Globe editor Marty Baron gave on Thursday at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. Baron outlined the severe challenges facing newspapers in a talk titled “The Incredible Shrinking Newsroom: How can fewer reporters meet increasing demands for coverage?”
His is a sober message about the crucial importance of journalism (click here to listen to it), A key quote:
"In many ways, we are headed for a thrilling new world of media. Technology allows journalists today to tell stories in ways that were never possible before, to reach audiences larger than ever, and to build a tight and more intimate bond with the public. For young journalists, there can be remarkable opportunity as old media models crumble and as an entrepreneurial culture takes hold in a field that has long been dominated by overbearing media behemoths. There is a lot to be excited about, and a lot that is healthy."
He continues:
"There will be many experiments, many new models. Some will be nonprofit. But many will seek to make a profit, a big one. An era of entrepreneurship for journalism has begun. Entrepreneurship comes with greater risks.... There also are risks for the practice of journalism. There are risks that journalism will turn cynically to the quick, the easy, and the cheap -- that a story’s greatest accomplishment will be to get a million page views, rather than to correct an injustice, or unearth wrongdoing, or give voice to people who would not otherwise be heard."
Boston and the Globe
Marty Baron is one of the great journalists of this era. (Full disclosure: He is also my friend and former boss.) Under his leadership, the Globe broke the landmark story of the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Day in and and day out, the Globe holds politicians accountable; investigates fraud, waste, and abuse; and reports on social, business, scientific, and cultural news in a city that, with its rich mix of academic institutions and brainpower, can still be fairly described as "the Athens of America."
Boston without the Boston Globe is unthinkable. But every day, the unthinkable seems to be happening in the news world.
Question time: Monitor editors respond
You've got questions. We have answers -- mostly. And what we don't know, we'll try to find out.
Today's Monitor
Q: I’d love a single button to push to print out “today’s Monitor.” Browsing on the Web I don’t read things that I think I don’t want to read until I start reading them. To say nothing of I want to read while I eat lunch and I can’t eat lunch at the computer (the mustard on the keyboard just doesn’t cut it). Giving up the daily print is hard!
A: We are launching an easy-to-print news digest later this month. The Christian Science Monitor Daily News Briefing will give you abridged (but still substantial) versions of the top news stories, a selection of important news briefs, a daily editorial, a column from the editors, and the daily inspirational article. It will cost $5.75 a month. By mid-April, we should have a subscription form ready to go (watch this space). We plan to launch by the end of the month.
Which is the fresh content?
Q: I’ll miss the paper dearly but am 100 percent behind the reasons and decision, in full support. I’ve often visited the site, but today is my first time to try to “read the whole paper” online. My question: What’s the best way to see “24-hours fresh” content only? The home page is a mix of today’s content with older content, with presumably newest content first, but no clear delineation. Furthermore, I clicked on the “USA” section link, and there the dates of articles are shown, but the Blagojevich article dated today was at the bottom of the page after some older content. Will articles be listed in chronological order? Perhaps that Blagojevich article was just a glitch.
A: Thanks for your support. The Daily News Briefing that I mentioned in the previous answer might help you. The challenge of a website is that it is a continuous stream of news. We've been thinking of providing a daily snapshot of the top stories each day. And we also will continue to have our "text edition" available. For technical reasons, it doesn't currently contain all the new articles of the day, but it usually has the most important ones. A month from now, all new articles should be at that location. And keep in mind that one person's problem is another's solution. If you look at the next questions, you'll see that a fan in South Africa likes being able to find stories that aren't from the current day's news.
Even as we have shifted to the Web, we have been working under the hood on the site, building new, more interesting page templates, and figuring out new workflows. We'll also have a better search function on the site, which should make it easier for you to find articles.
Monitor story mix
Q: Where I live (South Africa) the Monitor has not been a subscription option so I have followed, and subsequently fallen in love with, the online version of The Monitor, which I suppose is the only version now. The Monitor always was a publication better fit for an online format with in-depth features and long-term investigative reporting rather than daily headline hooks. Not to say the Internet isn’t the place for breaking news, but other daily printed newspapers and 24-hour news channels already occupied that part of my news input. The Monitor, by contrast, is able to keep larger and longer features and articles, which are its forte, online for as long as they like rather than do smaller daily updates needed for a daily or weekly magazine. My question is, is the Monitor going to change its story habits now that it is no longer tied to such deadline pressure and article length requirements that are requirements of print media?
A: We'll have a mix -- shorter and more immediate articles and blog posts as events unfold, standard length articles of the sort that were in the print daily, and articles that will have appeared in our weekly edition that will eventually make their way onto CSMonitor.com or into our archives.
Losing your place
Q: It all sounds very positive to me. I like to check out the online edition daily, and I also love to read the International Weekly edition at the kitchen table, so US readers may be just catching up with the excellent balance already offered to overseas readers. What I don’t like about online is that you can “lose your place,” i.e., when you venture forth into one article, it’s not always so easy to get back to where you were so that you can check other articles that may have caught your eye before your foray. We in Australia are looking forward to seeing what changes might be coming our way. Keep up the good work everyone. We love it.
A: Thanks for the kind words. You probably know these basic techniques (so please forgive me if this isn't what you are referring to): You can bookmark the page you are on to go back to it later. Or you can open new pages in new windows by setting your preferences. Or you can navigate back by going up to "history." When we develop an application for the Kindle, which we hope to have a little later this year, you'd have the ability to save your place, since the Kindle is made for reading as opposed to browsing.
Advertisements
Q: It would be very helpful if advertisements were labeled as such. Often it’s not clear.
A: Standard practice in both print and on the Web is to let advertisements distinguish themselves from editorial content by placement and design. In the infrequent cases where the ad could be confused with editorial content, we do label them. But it is a judgment call, and we might not be meeting the standards you have in mind. If you see a specific one that you think is confusing, take a screen shot and e-mail it to us.
Updating the news
Q: What time of day do you expect to upload new lead stories on the home page? Also, will there be one per day, like the print version, or will it be event-driven… sometimes more than one a day, sometimes the same one for more than a day? Perhaps if I keep reading/watching I’ll figure it out!
A: Our aim is to update the home page every half hour. That doesn't mean every story will change, but it does mean there will be something fresh on the site quite often to reward your return visit. It's a little difficult for us to meet that standard right now because our technology is in transition. By early May, we should be updating more frequently.
Missing a tradition
Q: I’ve been a reader and a subscriber to the Monitor since 1968. During all these years I’d start my mornings with a good cup of tea and sit down to read my Monitor. I’d read while waiting for my bus and during the ride to work. I’d settle down with a morning cup of tea and my Monitor on Saturdays. It’s been unsettling to say the least that I must bid adieu to a pleasurable way to begin the mornings. It just ain’t the same electronically.
A: I sympathize. A laptop and a wireless connection and a "hot beverage" comes pretty close when you are at home. And the new Daily News Briefing (see Question 1 above) may give you something to read while waiting for your bus. Plus you could carry our new weekly with you.
How much news is new?
Q: The CS Monitor online seems like a cross between a daily and a weekly. This means if I read it daily there are a lot of articles that are the same from the day before and it doesn’t appear to be a whole paper full of new articles each day. Are there fewer new articles each day than before? And are major changes still coming?
I’ve been reading only online newspapers for the life of the Web. Having lived in Europe for 15 years it was my only way to get all the news on the day. I also miss graphics with the new online edition. It doesn’t seem as if as many articles have data graphics.
A: Most websites -- including those with much bigger newsrooms (the NYTimes.com, for instance) -- have a combination of new news and articles from the day before. As an old newspaper guy, that seems like a good thing to me. A great piece of writing, a popular feature, or an important investigative article would be difficult to locate in the old print days when the newspaper turned yellow and got thrown away. On the Web, good things live on. But as noted in a previous answer, we are looking at ways of pointing you to just the new news as well.
As to the number of new articles: I haven't done a precise count, but in this first week of Web-first Monitor I think we are producing the same if not more daily news articles. Our aim is to produce more, to be more timely, and to continue the Monitor tradition of perspective and analysis.
And as to graphics: We're still finding our way on this. Print graphics and Web graphics are somewhat different in presentation and execution. But we are aware of how important maps and charts are in presenting an issue, so we'll develop the right approach.
Reporters on the job
Q: Where or how do I find “Reporters on the Job,” which I used to enjoy reading? Will it be “here” but not daily as it used to be?
A: In our transition, it has been difficult to keep the "Reporters on the Job" feature going, since our International news staff has been juggling a number of new duties. Once we get up and running, we hope to revive it and to offer you access to an archive as well.
IPhone app for CSM?
Q: I really like and use the USA Today iPhone application and was wondering/hoping that the Monitor could develop this type of smartphone support. I find myself getting my news more from my phone and less from my desktop when I'm on the go, which is often.
A: We have this on our to-do list. We will probably develop a Kindle application first and then an iPhone application.
The new Monitor: Who we are, what we stand for
Here's a video we've just produced that gives you a look inside our newsroom, introduces you to Monitor correspondents around the world, and touches on the goal of our website and our new print weekly. The first edition of the weekly is just closing and will be in mailboxes next week. We're focusing in this issue on the new economy that is emerging from the recessionary wreckage. To subscribe, click here.
(Hit the “HQ” button to see the video in high-quality format.) And let us know what you think.
How the cloud could save the news
It is probably too late for the established news media, but somewhere in the cloud could be salvation.
If there is a tech buzzword in the blighted economy right now, it has to be "cloud."
The cloud -- a.k.a., cloud computing -- is the rapidly growing suite of software applications accessible by the Internet and residing in massive data centers around the country.
The cloud offers the possibility of shifting much if not all of a business's computing needs -- from hardware to software, email to databases -- away from bricks and mortar and IT departments onto the shoulders of Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, IBM, and a dozen other big players.
Cloud cover growing
The trend is unmistakable. Vast and power-hungry data centers already slurp up 1.5 percent of the energy consumed in the US. Such is their growth that within two years the EPA predicts their power usage could double.
They are more and more popular because as companies struggle to shed costs in the midst of a devastating recession outsourcing business infrastructure is an appealing option.
IBM's metamorphosis into a cloud computing company is perhaps the most interesting to watch right now. Remember that the "M" in IBM stands for "machines." IBM made its bones in the last century by selling hardware. In recent years, it has de-emphasized metal and plastic and microchips for industrial strength software. And now it is shifting once more.
"What you are seeing are the beginnings of the whole IBM company moving toward cloud computing," IBM vice president Sean Poulley said on Wednesday.
Clouds from both sides
Here's another sign that the cloud is the next new thing: It's April 1st and Amazon decided its hoax today would be about cloud computing, because "in today's post-capitalist world" companies need "locational flexibility, the ability to literally instantiate a cloud where they need it, when they need it."
Amazon's tongue-in-cheek solution: cloud blimps.
OK, it's not an April Fool's belly laugh for everybody. But at least you can see that the cloud idea is a hot enough topic enough that it can become a joke for propeller-heads.
The cloud is the message
Now imagine you are the CEO of a struggling media company. The story line is well known: Secular disruption caused by the Internet compounded by the worst economy since the Great Depression equals more and more red ink.
Revenue is collapsing. Proposed solutions like micro-payments and premium content don't yet seem substantial enough to make up for the loss of print advertising dollars.
What's left is cost cutting. And that's tough. Media companies already know how important it is to shed their industrial costs -- ink, paper, presses, delivery. Another big cost is people. But people are the core asset of media companies: independent eyes and ears that watch the world and tell the stories.
The cloud could be the answer. It could allow media companies someday to avoid going down the path of making significant capital investments in online tools such as content management systems and video hosting.
Like most proposals for helping the struggling news business, the cloud's potential for cost-shfiting probably won't kick in until after much more pain is experienced, more bankruptcies are declared, and more newsrooms shrink.
But the potential is there. To quote Google on the subject: "We have teams of people working with hundreds of publishers to find new and creative ways to earn money from engaging online content. AdSense, DoubleClick, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Earth, Google News and many other products are a part of our significant investments to innovate in this space."
Who will be the first to build the newspaper on a cloud?
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