My guilty secret: A baker’s dozen books I’ve been meaning to get back to all summer

 

A collection of good intentions

Help! I think the Web has zapped my concentration. I’ve spent so much time online this summer reading about social media, citizen journalism, technology and day-to-day media business developments that I’m way behind on the books I meant to thoroughly comb for my class. Some I’ve read before, others I’ve started, some just stare at me above my computer, like puppies who need a home.

Please let me know if you have strong feelings about any of these for use in my Fall semester seminar, Strategic Issues in Media Management:

• Groundswell, Li & Bernoff
• Advertising and New Media, Christina Spurgeon
• Media Product Portfolios, Robert Picard
• The Technology of Journalism, Patricia Dooley
• Autumn of the Moguls, Michael Woolf
• Handbook of New Media, Lievrow & Livingstone
• Living in the Information Age, Eric Bucy
• Media Debates, Dennis & Merrill
• Journalism and New Media, John Pavlik
• All the News That’s Fit to Sell, James Hamilton
• Internet Advertising, Schumann & Thompson
• Handbook of Media Management and Economics, Abarran, Chan-Olmsted & Wirth
• Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida

Two updated books we’ll be using for sure:

• The World is Flat (Release 3.0), Thomas Friedman
• The Elements of Journalism, Kovach & Rosenstiel

The sickening plunge in newspaper stocks; the human toll

I’m finding it hard to concentrate this morning, so riveted am I by the death spiral of newspaper-related stocks and the carnage in newsrooms.

The day started with a terrible earnings report from Gannett, the largest publishing company. Earnings down 36% on a 14% drop in second quarter newspaper advertising revenue. USA Today ad revenue was down 17%. 

Alan Mutter, my blogging hero, reports that newspaper stocks have lost $4 billion in value since the beginning of the month. That’s his chart at right.

Meanwhile, the bodies stack up, day by day. the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported this morning it will eliminate 8 percent of its employeees, 189 jobs. It will also eliminate its geographically targeted sections, including a Gwinnett County section it has published for 20 years. I remember when it started, with great resolve and fanfare, to beat back a frightening challenge from a New York Times suburban newspaper, the Gwinnett Daily News.

That was a great time for readers, with two formidable competitors fighting for their loyalty with strong, locally-focused news and advertising products. The AJC destroyed the NYT entry. But even with a strong web presence of its own, it can’t compete toe-to-toe with all of the social, economic and technological forces making it more and more difficult for newspapers to prosper.

Will social media someday seem as quaint as fax machines?

I had a couple of invigorating conversations today with Wichita State graduate students about the future of media. Cindy Stanford, a PhD Human Factors student, was telling me about her fascinating interest in Human-Computer Interaction, HCI. She introduced me to Friendfeed.com, rheingold.com and quotably.com in the interest of expanding my understanding of social media.

Later in the day I talked with Bobby Rozzell, a former minister who is one of the impressive grad students in the Elliott School of Communication. Bobby recommended a book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. That led to a medium-or-message discussion that reminded me of a long-ago Knight Ridder committee called, tongue-in-cheek, The Edge of Knight.

The idea of the Edge group, circa 1984, was that the people who ran Knight Ridder knew that good ideas were dying because they couldn’t get through the bureaucracy and the budget process. In theory, anyone with a good idea could come to us with a proposal that might be funded independently of the normal process. It didn’t end up working, but I remember one particular discussion about the then hot delivery system — fax machines!

Our wise technical adviser, Steve Landers, urged us to shift our business focus from the whiz-bang platform (we were sure everyone would have one at home someday soon) to the content. He was right, of course. We’re probably at a point where about as many college students will have used a fax machine at home as will have used a typewriter — virtually none.

As journalism jobs disappear by the thousands, at least from newspapers, it’s time to keep a sharp focus on content. What will the audience want, and who will produce it, remain more important questions than how they will get it.