Tuesday, May 10, 2011

For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models

NYT reporting: By
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.

In a 139-page report  the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University will outline those recommendations and others, all of which are intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.
“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”
And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/business/media/10adco.html?_r=1

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