Columbia Journalism Review

The consolidation boom in the media business may soon extend, albeit on a vastly smaller scale, to newspapers, especially the smaller ones. And no, that’s not an applause line.

Several key financial players and newspaper operators have publicly expressed interest in buying, and are doing so privately as well.

“Everybody’s talking to everybody,” says one top executive of a major newspaper company.

Among those that have made recent acquisitions or have publicly said they are looking are the soon-to-be-spun-off Tribune Publishing Company, which recently bought some smaller papers around Baltimore and Hartford and said in a recent financial filing that it expects acquisitions to be “an important component of our business strategy”; News Corp, whose main man Rupert Murdoch was recently heard strongly hinting along these lines; and an under-the-radar owner of smaller newspapers, GateHouse Media, among others.

The main reason for all this is pretty simple: Newspapers, having crashed in value, are now cheap, have more or less stabilized, and are still throwing off lots of cash.

It’s as if the market has hit a giant “reset” button, and buyers are back on the market with a new rationale. “People just have different expectations for newspapers today,” Van Essen says. In this case, different means much lower profit and growth expectations.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission records are a potential treasure trove of near real-time political spending data -- though they are difficult to dig into.

They can only be searched by television station, and the reports the stations file are only kept as PDFs, so the numbers within them can’t be easily crunched. And for the moment, the FCC database only includes records from the top four stations in the top 50 markets; beginning in July, all broadcast stations will be required to upload their records to the FCC’s site.

The discrepancy between what was filed with the FEC and what was filed with the FCC doesn’t necessarily mean any law was broken. The filing requirements at the two agencies are different. In addition to being cumbersome, the FCC data isn’t always complete for federal races either, observers say.

But it’s always worth checking. And for small markets, this could be a treasure trove once all stations have to upload their reports. That’s where it would be easy for a smaller news outlet to cull through the FCC filings and find out what’s going on in their media market.

[Commentary] Most of the discussion of youth news consumption and news literacy focuses on articles and written content. Increasingly, however, young people are consuming their news via online video.

More news consumption of any type might be viewed as a good thing, but it’s only as good as the videos younger folks are watching.

When comparing legacy media outlets, studies have often found that cable news viewers glean less than newspaper readers.

“They don’t call TV ‘the idiot box’ for nothing,” says Duy Linh Tu, director of the digital media program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “But video online is not just TV replicated online.” Many of the most popular original online news videos feature on-the-ground reporting.

WNYC’s data team has tracked a lot over the years: cicadas, flood zones, and even wireless Internet access on the subway.

Now the station’s newest project, a community data experiment called “Clock Your Sleep,” aims to help New Yorkers monitor their sleeping habits. Recently launched, the sleep study is part of WNYC’s ongoing data journalism expansion. Spurred on by the success of projects like the cicada tracker, which got listeners up and down the Eastern Seaboard to keep an eye on last summer’s once-in-17-year swarm of insects, the station is increasing its data visualization and crowdsourcing efforts.

Data journalism is in the spotlight these days, thanks to sites like Ezra Klein’s Vox (which launched on Sunday) and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and WNYC has responded by beefing up its data team.

Data reporting is now a key part of WNYC’s digital strategy because it works, Jim Schachter, WNYC’s vice president of news, said. The station’s seven-person data team is recruiting -- they’re currently looking for a backend developer -- and planning to develop “Clock Your Sleep” as a “project in a box,” complete with digital tools and a programming guide to help other media outlets recreate the project in their communities.

WNYC will also soon revamp its School Book site -- which helps parents assess the state of New York City schools -- by making it possible for users to search for schools within a given distance of their homes. “In the same way that hurricane maps are an important public service, this is sort of an ongoing, lasting public service that the data news [team] operates,” Schachter said.

[Commentary] Vox.com, the much-discussed new project from Ezra Klein, Melissa Bell, and Matt Yglesias. With the obvious disclaimer -- cautioned by the Vox crew -- that it’s way too early to draw any real conclusions, I agree with what seems to be the prevailing view online: It’s off to a pretty good start.

But if it’s still early to draw conclusions about the execution, one thing about Vox seems already clear: It’s going to be, basically, what you’d expect if you’ve been following Klein’s critique of the industry -- which is that journalism turns off news consumers by focusing too much on what’s new, and so makes it hard to understand why it matters, or what the big picture is.

When The Washington Post announced in mid-March that it would provide free digital access to subscribers of a half-dozen local papers around the country, the consensus take was clear: After years of hesitation, the Post, under Jeff Bezos, was finally looking to “go national” in a big way.

Under the arrangement, subscribers of six papers -- The Dallas Morning News, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and The Blade of Toledo (OH) -- will get digital-subscriber access to the Post’s website and apps once the pilot program launches in May. The local papers get an extra benefit to offer subscribers; the Post gets greater national reach, a local marketing boost, and a chance to build relationships with people who are already devoted news readers. No money changes hands. The offer is “intended for print subscribers [of local papers] only -- not for digital,” Steve Hills, the Post’s president and general manager, said.

For the Post, the new program is “a bigger bet” on the paper’s ability to attract a larger, engaged national audience while it also remains focused on its local market, said Hills. And while the arrangement will presumably make it a bit harder for the paper to sell web subscriptions in, say, Dallas or Minneapolis, he said the program can co-exist with the Post’s efforts to build its own digital subscriber base. “We think it’s a great fit for the industry, because so many papers have decided the key differentiation they have is local,” he added. From the Post’s perspective, a side benefit of the deal is that it adds another incentive to subscribe to local papers, he added.

[Commentary] The Obama Administration set forth a proposal to reform one part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program: the indiscriminate collection of American phone records.

Under the President’s proposal, the government would no longer collect call data in bulk but would be allowed to ask for it from phone companies with court approval, and only for numbers linked to terrorism.

But the White House proposal leaves plenty of room for reporters’ information to be caught up in the NSA’s -- albeit smaller -- dragnet: The government would still be allowed to collect data for numbers “two hops,” or degrees of separation, from the targeted number, down from three. And once the government has that data, there are few restrictions on what they can do with it. In other words, the proposed reforms don’t appear to do anything to address journalists’ concerns about this administration’s crackdown on national security leaks.

“Journalists are at risk if they communicate by phone with potential NSA targets -- or even if they simply talk with others who happen to speak with those targets,” said Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.

[Commentary] The native-ad wars have flared up again, this time over Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, the longtime standard bearer for serious, digital-first, for-profit news.

TPM has signed up Phrma, the drug-industry lobby, to sponsor its Idealab Impact section, a deal that includes running Phrma-written pieces as native ads.

There’s nothing inherently worse about an advertiser using a thousand words in story form to spread its message than there is with an ad that uses 30 words, an idealized photo, and a catchline to do the same. So if we accept that advertising itself is a necessary evil, the only question for native ads is whether they’re clearly presented as advertisements and not editorial.

The Jacksonville-based Florida Times Union is a rare outlier these days, a mid-sized regional paper willing to fight big open-government battles even as most media organizations cut back on the resources they devote to forcing officials to do their work in public.

The paper has been aggressively enforcing the state’s expansive Sunshine Law, going to court in three recent cases to compel officials to open meetings and court proceedings and release records. At times, the paper has mounted these battles to get key information for a major article. In other cases, they took on a fight even when editors and reporters expected no story would result. They did it on principle.

“We’re teaching government officials they can’t throw the public out of public meetings and they can’t withhold public records,” said Frank Denton, the Times-Union’s editor. “If there is a perception out there that the media is weak because of what has happened in the newspaper industry, we’re letting them know that we’re still here, we’re still strong, and we’re still raising hell.”

This is a battle Denton’s been fighting for 40 years. In the column, he recalled how he had sworn out a criminal complaint against the entire board of trustees of a local public hospital for violating the open meetings law back when he was a cub reporter at The Anniston Star in Alabama.

[Commentary] Someone is wrong on the Internet, and I wonder if it might be me. I recently wrote a piece for the Guardian about what I saw as a disappointing trend: high-profile journalism startups reflecting the structures of old media. Namely, they’re led by white men.

Many women cheered both publicly and privately, saying, “Everybody wants to say it, nobody quite dares.” Others did not, saying that I was both overlooking and diminishing the roles of women in new journalism startups by writing them out of the script. The most thought provoking responses came from Melissa Bell, who elegantly pointed out that if my coverage overlooked her, then it added to the problem of visibility in the media. This is true. Had I been unfair in my assessment?

However, the numbers for all startups, where journalism is not broken out, are indisputable. Venture capital money mostly goes from men to other men. Estimates of what proportion of funding, exactly, goes to women-owned startups vary but never get above 15 percent, and are often as low as 7 percent.

The grander point that I tried to make, and will continue to hammer away at, is that journalism is important. It shapes information and the way people engage with vital issues. But doing it differently is not just words on page, or line graphs, listicles, and math. Doing it differently means considering the workforce, the outward face of the organization, and measuring it carefully. One of the most common refrains I heard was, “Are we still having this debate?” Yes, I’m afraid so.