The End of Net Neutrality?

Image via CrunchBase

Every day, millions of people log onto the Internet and visit all sorts of sites. My typical day of Internet use typically consists of Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Twitter and my school’s website. I log into the wireless Internet at Rider at least five times a day and head to these sites without actually thinking about how amazing what I’m doing really is. It’s incredible that I can access any site on the Internet at a relatively fast speed, assuming the network isn’t acting up.

However, this freedom might not last forever, if a couple of cable and phone companies have their way (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc.). Net neutrality is not something that will make the big companies money, so they want to get rid of it. This video explains it better than I ever could:

Is it wrong for these companies to make themselves the gatekeepers of the Internet? Absolutely. As the video says, all Internet users are currently on an even playing field. We can all get to any site we want, and those sites all load quickly. But these companies want to restrict our access so that they can make even more money. Yes, because the billions they already make in profits each year aren’t enough.

To be fair, I can see why they want to do this. TV is slowly but surely becoming less and less relevant. Instead of sitting on your couch watching television and being inundated with commercials every five minutes, we log onto the Internet, sit through a 30 second ad or two and watch our favorite show online. These companies just can’t make money this way. But is it fair for giant corporations to step in and regulate what the American people are doing? As far as I’m concerned, no way.

For more information visit http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-101

Opinion + news = good idea?

Recently, I came across a piece published in the American Journalism Review entitled “Verve and Attitude.” The piece discusses the vision of relatively new editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, Larry Platt, who used to make a living editing Philadelphia Magazine. Platt, the article states, is used to more opinionated writing, due to his former employer. This may explain his… interesting new idea. The article starts with the following words:

“I hereby free you from the tyranny of the Inverted Pyramid,” the list rousingly begins.

Larry Platt, the new editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, goes on to encourage his reporters “to write with wit and verve and attitude” and to “not be afraid to have a point of view about what you report,” among other changes announced in a memo to his staff on January 31, his first day on the job.

After a few more lines in which the article questions whether mixing opinion and news is such a great idea for a paper that has won 3 Pulitzer Prizes, Plat goes on:

“I don’t think it signals a shift in news values. I think it signals a shift in the voice that delivers those news values,” Platt said in an interview. Readers throughout America, he says, want journalists “to do their reporting fairly and accurately, but also not to pretend that they don’t have a point of view about what they’re reporting.”

I’m going to go ahead and disagree with Mr. Platt here. Not with the part where he says America wants journalists to stop pretending that they don’t have a point of view. For all I know, that’s true. But does that mean we should do it? Should we as journalists cater to exactly what the American people want? Or should we continue with the idea of fair and balanced reporting and let the American people make up their own minds about what to believe? Personally, I think it should be the latter. However, journalism students should be aware of possible changes in the field. Maybe those of us geared toward news writing should write an opinion piece once in a while, just in case.

The trouble with content aggregating

The Huffington Post logo

A lot of people read The Huffington Post every day. And by the Huffington Post, I mean the collected works of all the world’s real news organizations with a touch of liberal bias thrown in for good measure.

All right, so maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. Certainly, HuffPo has original content, but a fair amount of what is posted on the oft-visited website originated somewhere else entirely.

This, to me, is wrong. As an aspiring journalist, I take issue with HuffPo. It’s not real journalism or reporting if you’re simply copying and pasting someone else’s work onto your website. We have a name for those actions on college campuses the world over. It’s called plagiarism, and it generally gets you into huge trouble.

To top it all off, the bloggers who do contribute material to the website generally do so on an unpaid basis. These bloggers were less than thrilled when Ariana Huffington, the woman behind the website, sold HuffPo to AOL for $1.5 million. They were so unhappy that they filed a class action lawsuit.

According to an article published by The Guardian: 

The class action is led by Jonathan Tasini, a writer and trade unionist, who wrote more than 250 posts for Huffington Post on an unpaid basis until he dropped out shortly after the news and comment site was sold to AOL earlier this year.

Tasini complained that “Huffington bloggers have essentially been turned into

Arianna Huffington

modern day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation” and said he was bringing the action because “people who create content … have to be compensated” for their efforts.

Again, I take issue with HuffPo here. Certainly, there are circumstances in which it is okay for contributors to do some pro bono work, so to speak. However, to sell the written work of dozens of hardworking bloggers and not paying them a cent in not only selfish, it’s downright wrong.

While I do enjoy some of the content on HuffPo, I don’t like the way the website does business. Content aggregation and for-free journalism are both serious threats to the integrity and livelihoods of journalists everywhere.

How Twitter and Facebook are making blogs passé

Image via CrunchBase

“Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.”

So says a The New York Times article dated Feb. 20, 2011. But is it true? Are social media sites like Twitter and Facebook pushing young people away from blogs? The answer, it seems, is yes.

Certainly, there are blogs which people will continue to visit for a long time, such as Perez Hilton‘s. However, the vast majority of bloggers are everyday people who have a hard time getting traffic to their site. With the advent of social networking sites, it’s becoming much easier to quickly get your message across to a large number of people.

According to the article in the Times, “The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”

“No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world,” says the Times. “They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.”

From what I can see, all this information adds up. I know only a handful of people who still use blogs. Nearly everyone I know is on Facebook, and many people are also on Twitter.

Is this a good thing, though? Should we be glad that progress is moving from a 300 word blog post to a 140 character message with a link to an article you find worthwhile? If blogs are on the way out with the younger generation, what does that mean for the the already uncertain future of newspapers, magazines and broadcast journalism.

Suddenly, this whole social networking thing doesn’t seem so amazing.

Habits of Highly Successful Blogs

In the not so distant past, we could hold most of the things we read in our hands. However, since the advent of an accessible Internet, many people are now reading blogs to get their news. The vast majority of blogs are operated by citizen journalists: everyday people who add a little spin to a news story they feel strongly about. But now a lot of major news organizations have people that they employ simply to blog. The New York Times, for instance, has blogs on everything from politics and science to business and entertainment. There are millions of blogs out there. So, what is it that separates a good blog from a bad one?

According to an article entitled “14 Traits of Successful Blogs,” some ways to make a blog truly successful include posting useful content, posting that content consistently and are easy to share with others. Another article called “12 Essential Blogwriting Tips for Building a Successful Blog” included keeping readers in mind, interacting with readers and writing great guest blogs for larger sites.

One of the few blogs that I check on a fairly routine basis is The Lede on nytimes.com. Most of The Lede’s content is generated by journalist Robert Mackey. It’s more news than opinion, which is why I’m drawn to it. Some of the more popular blogs on the site, though, are generated by op-ed columnists Nicholas D. Kristof and Paul Kurgman. Thes blogs all allow for interaction between the writers and the audience in the form of comments.

 

A Bold Move

A story on nytimes.com announces that The New York Times will begin charging for online content after offering visitors to the site 20 free articles.

On Thursday, March 17, The New York Times introduced a plan to begin charging for web access. People who visit The New York Times website will be allowed 20 free articles per month. When they click on article number 21 they will be prompted to subscribe to the site. The subscription plans go from $15-$35 a month.

“This move is an investment in our future,” he said. “It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation, while maintaining our large and growing audience to support our robust advertising business. And this system is our latest, and best, demonstration of where we believe the future of valued content — be it news, music, games or more — is going.”

But will it work?

Will people be willing to shell out the cash for an online subscription to The New York Times? (Image found via Google Images)

On one hand, there is a good chance that there will be a lot of backlash over this plan at first. Very few people feel as though they should have to pay for information on the web. While $15 a month isn’t particularly outrageous, many people will prefer access to information that is free.

On the other hand, how many choices do The New York Times and other large dailies really have at this point? Revenue is falling and has been falling for quite some time now. Circulation of the print product is down. Advertisers on the websites of these papers certainly generate revenue, but do these papers have enough money to pay their reporters the salaries they deserve? Probably not. Of course, journalism isn’t a field one usually goes into for love of money. However, with the amount of work journalists do, a decent paycheck really isn’t so much to ask.

I have no doubt that many future journalists, myself included, are waiting with baited breath, hoping that the public will see that crucial information is at stake and that many jobs could be lost if this plan doesn’t pan out.

Sources: timesofmalta.com- NY Times unveils plan to charge its readers on the web, nytimes.com- The Times Announces Digital Subscription Plan

The Facebook Revolution

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, I saw the film The Social Network. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much from the film. Generally, when movies have words like “generational film” attached to them, I tend to expect less so that I’m not as disappointed when it doesn’t turn out to be life changing. However, this movie turned out to be one of the best I’ve seen in years. The film tells the story of the creation of Facebook, a social networking site frequented by college students the world over. However, what started out as a way for college kids to connect online has been transformed into a powerful marketing tool.

A few days ago in CDM, one of my fellow classmates presented a pair of articles about how wonderful Facebook and Twitter are for small businesses. Of course, larger companies have also taken advantage of the virtually free promotional tool that is Facebook.

While this inexpensive advertising may be great for business, it may harm certain forms of media. Television certainly doesn’t have all that much to worry about. I have a hard time imagining a future where all the biggest companies aren’t fighting for 30 seconds of airtime, particularly on Super Bowl Sunday. However, radio and print media may be hit a little harder.

If you go to The New York Times website, you can look up advertising rates, and they are nowhere near cheap. A full page ad on a weekday runs a cool $518 in the nationwide paper. That same ad runs for $791 on Sunday. If you’d like that full page ad to run in color on Sunday, it’s over $1,000.

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

Certainly, The New York Times can charge prices like this. However, I’m willing to bet Facebook and Twitter take a serious chunk out of a newspaper’s revenue from advertising, particularly on a local level. Newspapers depend heavily on advertising and always have. It’s nothing new. Newspapers are facing crises left and right, the most severe being an economic crisis. What happens to the locals of the world when all of the small businesses in town decide to stop running ads? What happens to national level papers when big advertisers stop spending so much money because they can reach their clients through cyberspace?

An interesting question that was posed during class was whether or not the social network is an appropriate place for advertisers. The Social Network asks this question repeatedly as the site’s popularity skyrockets. Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, Never Let Me Go), the CFO of the up-and-coming company, knows that advertising will keep the site alive with revenue. Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Rio), however, argues that Eduardo wants to “end the party at eleven.” According to Mark, what Facebook has going for it is that it’s cool. And advertising isn’t cool.

While I know perfectly well that Facebook needs advertisers to stay alive, I have to agree with the Mark Zuckerberg portrayed in The Social Network. I’m don’t like any businesses pages on Facebook and I have no intention of doing so. I understand that you can get coupons if you like the pages, but I’d rather not have spam from companies all the way down my news feed. It’s just not cool.

The Basics

First off, introduction. My name is Emily and I’m a student at Rider University. This blog is a project for the honors program in which I participate. I’m currently taking a class called Converging Digital Media, which is all about the huge changes the field of journalism is facing today.

I’m currently a junior journalism major and it’s always been my dream to work for a major news publication. Of course, the type of journalism that I’m incredibly interested in: actually going out and reporting on a story and then sitting down to type it out, is slowly falling by the wayside. Increasingly blogs (like this one), social media and other Internet forces are pushing newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks and radio stations to innovate like never before to adapt to the changing media.

Image via CrunchBase

I mean no one offense when I say that I would not exactly be thrilled if my first job out of college was simply updating a Facebook page or a Twitter account. I don’t want to be a pundit who refers to herself as a “journalist.” I don’t really want to be a blogger who doesn’t actually report but takes information from various established news sources and presents it as her own information. My options, however, are becoming increasingly limited. With this blog I hope to explore the changes in my field and figure out where I’m probably going to end up in about a year when I graduate from college.