emilywsussman.net

Women and Nonfiction

(From 2009. No idea what I was responding to, except that it had to do with Elaine Showalter.)

I’m a great admirer of Elaine Showalter’s scholarly contributions, and I certainly do hope her new book will start some conversations about whether women have been underrepresented in the canon of fiction.

That said, it’s unfortunate that conversations about women’s contributions to non-fiction aren’t drawing the same kind of mainstream media attention. That’s not because an equivalent book hasn’t been written, either: my quickie Internet search came up with a very recent one, last year’s Women in American Journalism: A New History by University of Colorado journalism professor Jan Whitt.

Perhaps that’s because non-fiction has long been a boys’ club, despite the disproportionately large numbers of women receiving a formal journalism education. Read the rest of this entry »

Shirky to Newspapers: It’s a Revolution… Deal With It!

When a New Media blogger as influential as Craig Stoltz (whose Web2.0h…Really? was ranked one of Time’s Top 25 Blogs) confers PnR status on an article — shorthand for print and read, i.e., worthy of taking up three-dimensional space — you know you’d better sit up and pay attention.

In this case, Stoltz was referring to Clay Shirky’s March 15 post, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” a piece that many are already calling a seminal piece on the rise and fall (and ultimate triumph) of the newspaper industry.

Shirky — NYU professor; contributor to Wired, the NYT, the WSJ, and Harvard Business Review; author of last year’s  Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations — is no slouch in the world of New Media-crit himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Voluntary Subscriptions: A New Spin on Pitching Reader Donations

Maybe it’s just the idealistic blogosphere in which I immerse myself, but the rallying cry of “reader donations will ensure the survival of journalism!” seems to be picking up steam. Jason Preston of EatSleepPublish has a post this week about why local news sites like West Seattle Blog ought to offer their readers a “voluntary subscription” option.

As always with persuading people to adopt new ideas, it’s all in the pitch, and I think Preston is really on to something. At first glance, the term “voluntary subscriptions” may sound meaningless, cryptic, or a sucker’s game. (After all, the content’s already free.) But by creating a commodity (i.e., a value-added subscription) out of what is essentially a donation, it communicates to the readers that they would be getting something for kicking in some bucks — which, of course, they would. Read the rest of this entry »

Vivian Schiller on the Future of NPR: A More Cohesive, Effective Network of Local News

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/3349090]

KnightPulse, the Knight Foundation’s online discussion forum, brings us an interview this week with new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller. The segment centered on the direction of NPR in the midst of the current economic downturn, and Schiller, the former head of New York Times.com, conveyed an optimistic outlook for the public radio network, citing the “loyalty and devotion” of its 25 million NPR listeners and the network’s continuing push to digitize content and create a stronger cohesion between the network and its 800 member stations.

As for all the buzz about “hyperlocal” news? “I don’t think anyone’s doing it very well,” Schiller said. “The landscape is wide open.” And though she doesn’t say so overtly, Schiller’s comments about strengthening the partnerships between NPR and its member stations seemed to hint that the company would take a bigger leadership role helping those stations innovate and distribute local news content more effectively.

-Emily Sussman

First-Person Journalism

Look, I happen to like first-person journalism. Most of my professors in graduate school were, at best, lukewarm about the “I,” the self-conscious presence of the storyteller in an article. Some outright despised it, calling the practice narcissistic and distracting.

Used judiciously, however, first-person narrative actually does the reader a service. By inserting himself into a story, the writer is coming clean that that events he depicts might reasonably been presented — or have unfolded, even — in an entirely different way had another journalist taken it on instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Will the NYT Make Blogging Profitable — But Leave it With a Wounded Foot?

Our local NPR station, KBIA, has an excellent show, “Views of the News,” in which three journalism professors here at the University of Missouri (Lee Wilkins, Charles Davis, and Mike McKean) discuss the significance (or insignificance, as the case may be) of the major media events of the week.

This week’s show (definitely worth a listen) was near and dear to the topic of the Information Valet Project: it centered around the sorely needed monetization of news sources. Specifically, the panelists discussed the New York Times‘ new initiative to feature hyperlocal blogs on the NY metro areas, expressing deep cynicism that the effort would result in anything remotely involving dollar signs. Read the rest of this entry »

Can Kachingle “Change” the Unpaid Content Paradigm?

In today’s depressed economy, status symbols like fancy cars and logo-embellished shirts broadcast foolishness, not prestige. It makes far more sense to spend what (little) we have on things that sustain us physically, professionally and intellectually. Right?

In theory, yes. But in real life, only my landlord and my grocery store have business models in place for collecting my dwindling dollars.

I know I’m not alone in relying on blogs like TechCrunch or EatSleepPublish to keep me up-to-date professionally, or in feeding my intellectual curiosity with the free online version of the New York Times Book Review and its kin. And while I’m grateful for the knowledge-service they provide, that’s all I can do: be (passively) grateful. The sites’ producers don’t even ask me to chip in, let alone provide a sidebar widget that would enable me to compensate them.

Which is where the elephant comes stomping into the room. As in, if I’m not paying for it — and, by extension, nobody else is either — how on earth can these enterprises keep churning out content? Read the rest of this entry »

Charging for Trust? The Perils of Information Investment on an Unstable (Free) Platform

Is ”too free to be trustworthy” today’s web-wise version of the old adage “too good to be true”?

MediaShift’s Mark Glaser had a great cautionary post last week about the dangers of professional and/or personal overreliance on any one sharing-is-caring 2.0 platform, such as Facebook or Twitter. [I'll refer to these types of sites here as 'SN/UGC' for Social Networking/User-Generated Content.]

In today’s unpredictable climate of spend-venture-capital-cash-now, find-revenue-later SN/UGCs, Glaser advises, it’s folly to put all your information eggs in one basket.Better to spread your (virtual) self across a number of platforms, so if “your” SN/UGC tanks or becomes a capricious master, you won’t feel like your (real) self is lost at sea, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Potential “Valet” Service: Robust (Semantic) Search and Info Delivery

Yes, information is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get what you want. Case in point: While researching one of those ubiquitous “future of journalism” op-ed columns — the logic of which hinged on key events in the history of paid news content on the web  — Stanford prof. Joel Brinkley apparently missed a few things, as Steve Yelvington informs us on his blog.

Some of these were fairly big omissions. Like Brinkley’s failure to acknowledge the existence of New Century Network, that well-intentioned but ill-fated effort in the mid-90’s to aggregate the online presence of the major news publishers.

And some was just faulty reporting. Like a gaffe on whether it was the Justice Department or Congress that was originally responsible for exempting certain same-city newspaper consolidations from antitrust laws. Read the rest of this entry »

Evaluating Blodget’s Paid NYT Model

Reacting (as many bloggers did) to Michael Hirschorn’s apocalyptic scenario for the New York Times in the Atlantic, former stock analyst and Internet publisher Henry Blodget proposed a three-pronged plan last week to save the paper. “Current management doesn’t seem to have one,” says Blodget. “So it’s up to us.”  Here’s his strategy:

1)  Cut overall costs by 40 percent by 2010.
HOW: Reduce the number of editors. Fire reporters for not being “productive” enough, as quantified by page hits. Shut down bureaus. Shutter non-essential sections of the paper. Consolidate newsrooms.

2)  Make its print product profitable.
HOW: Charge the most loyal print supporters more and more for their subscriptions as paid circulation drops. Read the rest of this entry »