SoloJourno

On December 10, Nielsen Business Media announced that it was closing down its profitable trade publication Editor & Publisher, the award-winning “bible of the newspaper industry” which has published continuously for 125 years without missing a deadline.

The news was met with shock and dismay. As WalletPop.com observed: “In a year that saw 40,000 journalists [in the USA] lose their jobs and 143 newspapers fold, Editor & Publisher magazine stood like a sentinel, reporting every layoff, bankruptcy and closing with accuracy and integrity.”

Speaking to Walletpop.com, E&P editor Greg Mitchell noted:

“We’ve exactly mirrored the industry with layoffs, plus having to downsize, cut expenses and push our owners,” Mitchell said. At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,” Mitchell said. “As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.”

Read the full WalletPop.com article.

Staff stayed on till the end of the year in order to put out the final print issue. For now, the website is expected to remain up. There had been some doubt on that, but a post dated December 29, 2009, affirms: “This web site will not be taken down.” However, it won’t be updated.

Check out ‘E&P In Exile‘, the official blog of former staffers:

This is the (we hope) temporary new home for longtime staffers at the award-winning “bible of the newspaper industry.” The Nielsen Co. on December 10 announced the closing of the magazine after 125 years of operation, but several possible buyers have since stepped forward. Stay tuned here for news, links and commentary by once and we hope future ‘E&P’ staffers.

Via Silicon Alley Insider:

Newspapers had a nice run from the 1970s to the 1990s. Unfortunately, as this chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics makes clear — by way of Marketwatch — it’s over.

Newspaper employment has utterly collapsed in the last 15 years, with employment numbers now around where they were in the mid-1950s.

The good news: It’s a great opportunity. The next decade will give birth to new forms of reporting, more in tune with today’s technology and news consumption habits.

Via CBC News:

A professional journalists’ group is condemning NBC News for chartering a plane that carried a New Jersey man involved in a custody battle home from Brazil with his son.

The New York-based Society of Professional Journalists is calling it “chequebook journalism” and said the arrangement damages the network’s credibility.

David Goldman, who successfully fought the Brazilian family of his now-deceased ex-wife for custody of nine-year-old Sean, granted an interview to Meredith Vieira of NBC’s Today show that aired Monday.

NBC said Goldman was booked for Today before the network invited him on the plane.

The network had already arranged for the plane to bring its own employees back to the U.S. for Christmas, NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp said. If NBC hadn’t brought the Goldmans home, one of its rivals would have, she said.

“We’ve covered this story exceptionally well,” she said. “Their going on the plane did not affect our coverage of the story or getting them booked at all.”

Read the full article.

photo credit: Silvia Izquierdo/Associated Press

Via SaveTheNews.org:

If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward.

Journalism producers in 2010 must:

1. Use in-person meetings and online spaces to facilitate sharing results of experiments and the how-to’s of collaborations.

2. Create hubs where journalists and technologists can build new solutions together, just like massive groups of people contribute to open source software.
3. Include more women and diverse voices at the table discussing the future of journalism.

4. Foster deeper working relationships with ethnic media and a diversity of journalists/bloggers. Support initiatives like the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Parity Project.
5. Fight for the reinstatement of the minority media tax certificate program and update it for the digital era.
6. Develop and share best practices and models for community engagement
7. 
Invest in telling journalism’s story of impact and the creation of impact definitions.
8. 
Develop resources to help streamline collaborations and criteria to evaluate their impact on the public interest.
9. 
Fight for policies that create a level playing field for nonprofit and commercial journalism organizations.

10. Work with funders and investors to coordinate and increase support for experimentation and strategic collaborations.

Read the full article.

Sunny Lee, a Korea Times Correspondent, has penned an interesting article on his toughts about what the newspaper industry:

There seems to be a general consensus that newspapers are teetering on extinction. But readers are turning a blind eye, not coming to its rescue. Let’s not blame them for their lack of loyalty.

It’s time for the print media to change. Many business sectors reinvent their wheels to survive in a constantly changing environment. Media organizations are not an exception. They are also forced to review their business models in a very serious way. In the past, for example, the primary information delivery platform was newspapers. Then, information moved on to the Internet. Now, it’s available on mobile devices, even as moving pictures and customized video.

According to Poynter Online, a Web site run by media professionals, within 10 years, 80 percent of newspaper readership will be gone, and the only way newspaper companies can survive the change is to merge networks and adapt to the digital and multimedia environment.

Read the full article.