Area newspapers

Area Newspapers: Publishing Weekly, But Not Weakly

By: Becky Taylor
Editor: Rachel Bunn

In the past, newspapers only carried the news.

Today, the newspaper itself is making headlines. Some major newspapers have folded, others have cut back their distribution, most have cut back their staff, and even more report a loss in readership.

But outside of the big cities, the news about the news is not all bad.

Four weekly Athens-area newspapers report one effect of the struggling economy is hurting their revenue, but all say their circulation figures have remained stable. One even reported that they were actually expanding.

The Oglethorpe Echo is a weekly newspaper in Lexington, Ga., that serves all of Oglethorpe County. Brenda Norman, bookkeeper for the paper, said that advertising has been down. The amount of subscribers, though, seems to be the same.

“I think that’s been pretty steady,” said Norman.

With a circulation at 4,800, the Oglethorpe Echo is only available to readers in a print format as it not available on the Internet.

Norman said there were currently no plans to go in that direction. She said that the newspaper currently lacked the staff to host the paper on the Internet.

“It’s like doing a completely different paper,” said Norman.

Just a little further south, in the city of Greensboro is The Herald-Journal. This newspaper is also a weekly and covers Greene County.

Like the Oglethorpe Echo, The Herald-Journal has also seen a drop in the usual amount of advertising. However, Jan Foster, general manager of the newspaper, reports that this is picking back up.

Also like the case in Lexington, readership of The Herald-Journal has not gone down. Foster estimated the paper’s circulation to be about 5,200.

The Herald-Journal does have a Web site at http://www.theheraldjournalonline.com/, but only to a minimum degree. Only a limited amount of pages are available on the Internet for readers to view.

“We’re thinking about expanding online,” said Foster.

Foster said, though, that putting all material available on the Internet was not the ideal business model.

“If you put all your pages online, you’ll hurt your subscription base,” she said.

Over to the northwest is Madison, Ga., with the Morgan County Citizen. Publisher Patrick Yost said its circulation was 5,000.

Yost also said advertising was “sluggish,” but the circulation figure had remained steady.

In addition to its print edition, all of the information contained within the pages of the Citizen is available online at http://www.morgancountycitizen.com/. Unlike The Greensboro Herald-Journal, Yost believes there have not been any negative effects of having all the content available for free.

Yost said the only potential change that could happen with the Web site is perhaps an increase in advertising.

Continuing south, the city of Eatonton, Ga., is seeing something different for the current state of newspapers.

“We’re actually growing,” Judy Maxwell, editor of The Eatonton Messenger, said.

Maxwell said the newspaper had a circulation of 7,000 and its two associated magazines had a circulation of 4,000. Although she said that advertising had been slightly down in the paper, they were currently expanding.

While Maxwell did not know an exact date, she said there would be a new newspaper coming along in the county. Tentative plans had the first issue rolling off the press this fall. In addition to the two already circulating, she said another magazine would start printing in spring 2010.

In addition to its expanding its printed product, Maxwell said The Eatonton Messenger was going to expand its Web site, which is at www.msgr.com/meesengeronline.htm.

This is quite a change, she said, considering that the newspaper’s Web site had only recently become operational again. For about one year it had been offline.

The Oglethorpe Echo's office in Lexington, Ga. The only way to read the Echo is in printed form.

Blogs as Hard News

JT Alexander, 21, checks a blog on Blogspot.com for class


By: Anne Connaughton

Although industry professionals consider blogs a credible source for daily news, readers have not embraced the trend.

The concept of a blog can be difficult to grasp. Anyone can write one. There are blogs on virtually any topic. Blog hosting web site, Blogspot.com, does not even have a comprehensive top 10 list. Instead, they post recent top ten lists on a variety of subjects. Some featured this week are Top 10 TV Blogs, Top 10 Librarian Blogs, and 10 Blogs Every Lawyer Should Read.

Recently, blogs have even been used to cover breaking news stories. With the wealth of technology on hand for the average person, citizen journalism is a common phenomenon. Someone can conceivably take a picture of a local disaster on their camera phone, upload it to their blog with a quick description in much less time than a traditional newspaper would take to be alerted of the news and cover it.

The question is, does the public trust their news from just anyone?

Seth Bailey, 27, a graduate student, from Covington, Ga., worries about the motivations behind news-based blogs. He feels that a blogger only caters to their own interests, while a traditional news sources is conscious of a wider audience.

“You’re only getting one side, not all the news,” he said.

Although he stays clear of blogs, Bailey does go online twice a day to read his news from online formats of his favorite papers. The Internet is easier for his lifestyle than a traditional newspaper, he said, because he spends a lot of time on the computer and often the exact story he is searching for pops up quickly.

“I’m more often in front of a computer screen than a newsstand,” Bailey said.

Hannah Wilson, 20, an art education major from Commerce, Ga., agrees that blogs are too opinionated for hard news. She commonly reads four newspapers a week, and only ventures online for celebrity gossip and the type of news she would not be likely to find in a daily, local publication.

“I like the idea of a team putting out my paper,” Wilson said, “Not just one person. That gives the paper different opinions, there’s protagonist and antagonists and positive and negatives in stories that are developed in newsrooms.”

Ashlee Berryhill, 20, a business administration/management major from Cochran, Ga., has the opposite opinion. Berryhill reads The Red and Black daily, and her hometown newspaper, The Cochran Journal, on weekends when she goes home.

Berryhill rarely turns to the online version of stories for her news, preferring a tangible newspaper because she can carry it with her all day long and read it when she likes.
However, she would consider a blog as a primary source of news. Berryhill likes the ability to comment on news stories, and likes more information than only what was presented that these posts offer.

Newspapers are rushing to compete with the upswing in blogging, and are hiring professional bloggers to their sites. Maybe this trend will make for a people’s wider acceptance of a blog as a credible news source.

Many recent graduates are entering the blogging industry, and Sara Idacavage, 22, an editorial intern for Dailycandy.com, is one such individual. Dailycandy.com is a site devoted to the entertainment, culture, and lifestyle of various major cities. According to Idacavage, 99 percent of her job is fact checking, looking up anything in a blog that isn’t an opinion.

Before her current position, Idacavage was a student at the University of Georgia and co-founder of a blog, Thepopcouture.com, a blog that ties pop culture references to what’s happening in the fashion industry. She started this blog because she saw a need for a different kind of fashion blog.

“So many blogs are just runway shows or selling some $700 dress,” she said, “I’m just not a blog person—I wanted something I would read.”

According to Idacavage, Dailycandy.com is a professional blog because of the effort spent fact checking and making sure the stories stay fair and accurate. Thepopcouture.com is more fun and personal, though she does feel that people take her more seriously with a blog on her business card.

Because of her experience at her current position, Idacavage believes a blog can definitely be a source for credible hard news.

“I mean, even CNN has a twitter,” she said, “So I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Edited by: Robert Burns

Print media struggles to stay afloat

By: Rebekah Baldwin
Edited by: Kate Parham

In an age where the death of print journalism is heralded as inevitable, publications must get creative about the way they do business.

As subscribers and advertising dollars dwindle and revenues fall, organizations are no longer able to rely on their standard operating procedures, and innovative new business model are being created.

One way that owners have tried to stay afloat is by laying off employees and enforcing strong cut backs.

The Athens Banner Herald is among those organizations that have reduced its staff to try to make up for lost advertising revenue.

“In the past year we had about a 10 percent staff reduction, which in real numbers is four people,” said Melissa Hanna, executive editor of the paper.

Although this does immediately save money, in the long run it is reducing quality. Fewer reporters means less time spent on each story, and a smaller budget restricts the scope of journalism.

“When you reduce your writing staff, your editing staff, you cover less and you cover not as well,” said Conrad Fink, professor of newspaper management and journalism ethics at the University of Georgia. “But it’s necessary because these newspapers are attempting to preserve profit and without profit they go out of business.”

For a while it looked like the advertising revenue from websites would support the industry, or at least make the sites profitable, but this is not holding up. Total advertising expenditures were down nearly 17 percent in 2008, and internet advertising fell for the first time since its introduction according to a report by the Newspapers Association of America. Even if the downturn is temporary, an industry of this magnitude cannot rely on one source of revenue.

Although most news sites are free and ad supported, a few, such as The Wall Street Journal, require subscriptions to view their content. But with so much content available for free, it can be difficult to get consumers to pay for a monthly subscription, especially when they usually only want to read one article.

Only 25 percent of an online news site’s visitors are “core loyalists”- individuals who log on to the site at least 20 days out of a month, according to data gathered by the American Press Institute. The remaining 75 percent of visitors view the site only 3 days a month or less, most likely because readers don’t want to get locked into a single publication for their news.

An alternative to the subscription model is to start charging micropayments to view online content. Many believe that readers would be willing to pay for content if it was cheap and easy.

“It depends on how cheap it is,” said Tien Phan, a third-year accounting and advertising major at the University of Georgia.

Phan explained that if the articles were priced comparably to a song on iTunes, she probably would not pay, but if they were a fraction of that price she would. She had other concerns about eliminating free content on media Web sites as well.

“If they make it too expensive it might discourage people from reading,” Phan said.

Some, such as economist Dean Baker, have suggested a government-supported media, but others believe this lack of separation between government and media is too dangerous.

Baker has proposed the use of “artistic freedom vouchers,” according to an article by the Nieman Journalism Lab. Under this plan, every adult in the country would get a $100 government voucher which they could then transfer to any person or company putting new intellectual property into the public domain. Even though the citizens of America are the ones deciding where the money goes, it’s still coming from the government.

“Once you take money from someone you become beholden to them,” said Fink.

Paste, an Atlanta-based music and lifestyle magazine, tried a tactic most people never expected
to see. They launched a campaign this summer called “Save Paste,” in which they asked readers, via Twitter, to donate to the publication to keep it from having to shut down. In addition to asking for donations, Paste also auctioned off memorabilia and other merchandise.

Although the campaign may have saved the magazine for the time being, as evidenced by the publication of its recent issues, this is probably not a viable option for most publications- unless, like Paste, they have a niche in the market and loyal readers.

Kachingle, a site that accepts user donations and then disperses them to the websites of the users’ choice, launches this fall. While users are not limited to news sites and blogs, that is the target market.

According to its website, www.kachingle.com, “Kachingle is a way for readers to choose and equitably share their $5 monthly contribution with the web sites they appreciate the most.”

There is no limit to how many sites a Kachingle user can choose to support, just as there is no limit to how much a user can donate each month. While $5 is the starting point, users can determine how much to give based on what their peers are giving.

A pediatrician in Idaho will be able compare his donation to that of other pediatricians in Idaho, or he can check how much his Facebook friends are giving.

“People are very influenced by these social signals,” said Typaldos.

A user who donates $10 a month to The New York Times, Vogue and a music blog will be able to display that on Facebook said Typaldos.

Kachingle hopes to be “a projection of who [users] are, which is hard to do on the internet,” said Typaldos.

Typaldos believes that as people see that their peers are donating to Kachingle to support their favorite websites, they will donate as well.

The question seems to be if the public will ever value content- content that they have become accustomed to getting for free- enough to start paying for it.

Print Media Needs Equipment to Survive

Print Media Needs Equipment to Survive
By: Kate Parham
Edited By: Rebekah Baldwin

In a world of tweets and blogs, there’s not much room left for traditional print media—or rather, there’s not much money left for traditional print media.

Newspapers and magazines around the country have had to let a significant number of employees go, if not cease publication altogether. Be it the death of the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News or the folding of Domino Magazine, Country Home and Portfolio, print media everywhere is hurting.

In fact, in a recent 2009 Pew survey, newspaper earnings reportedly fell 10 percent in 2007, primarily because of advertising losses. And according to a Magazine Publishers of America study, more than 250 major magazine titles lost on average 7.4 percent in ad revenue through the second quarter of 2008 compared to the same period last year.

Many publications are creating an online presence to help their survival. But in order to do so, newsrooms must be properly outfitted to move online.

Reporters are not just required to have a pen and pad anymore. In fact, many reporters need digital and video cameras, recorders, smart phones and laptops. However, not all publications can afford to have all of this.

According to Kristen Heptinstall, Web site coordinator at NBC 13 in Birmingham, Ala., her company is not as equipped as she would like it to be.

“We’re not where we want to be with personnel, after two rounds of layoffs, or with technology,” Heptinstall said. “Something I’m pushing for now is to get all reporters Blackberries through the company. You can post to our website through a mobile phone much more efficiently than everything having to be physically taken back to the station to be put up.”

Kathryn Ho, general manager of Modern Luxury Digital, has had similar experience. “My division has been fairly well-equipped with the proper technology, although it’s never the top of the line stuff,” Ho said. “We’re equipped to handle it if the site goes down at 3 am, but we mainly use a lot of open source software and freeware products and when that’s not possible we make the right business case to ask for the mandated funds.”

Gary Baum, senior editor at Angeleno Magazine, who works in the editorial department at Modern Luxury, isn’t so sure. “Once the new website, which has an at-this-point-typical mix of blog posts, repurposed magazine stories, and photo galleries, goes ‘live’ in November, so we should have a much better idea of the challenges of day-to-day, or rather minute-by-minute, content production online,” said Baum.
“Most of the reporters [at The Atlanta Journal Constitution] are amply equipped to be a digital reporter,” said Bert Roughton, managing editor. “You need a laptop and a camera of some kind and the AJC provides it. You could set up a bureau in the Starbucks.”

Roughton likens today’s reporters to his years of working as a foreign correspondent. “We’re using the same techniques to cover Cobb County that I was using to cover Kosovo,” Roughton said.


Efficiency seems to be a common denominator when it comes to technology-heavy newsrooms.

“I think that we view technology, generally speaking, as ways to reduce our costs because of its efficiency, which ultimately allows you to cut costs quite a bit,” Roughton said. “I think we’re pretty aggressive in looking for new technologies. It’s a matter of efficiency and technology advances tend to pay for themselves.”

However, it’s important that upper-level management feels the same way about technology, which not everyone does. According to the 2008 Pew Study, 48 percent of editors said they are conflicted by the trade-offs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards.

To meet these new media challenges, some newsrooms have completely reorganized to simultaneously improve both the website and the paper. Roughton said that the AJC has created an entirely new content management system.

“We’ve also had a series of management teams who embrace change and are constantly looking for structural rebirth,” Roughton said. “Our newsroom has been really aggressive about not fighting the Internet and keeping it fresh.”

Keeping it fresh is of utmost importance, and also of serious conflict with old school journalists. Heptinstall said that part of what is tough to get newsrooms to understand is that online content doesn’t have to be perfect.

“Newsrooms are used to having this final product wrapped up in a bow. But that’s not how online content works,” Heptinstall said. “It has to be more continuous.”

Heptinstall said that many reporters are still in the mindset of ‘you put in your story for the day and then you go home’.

“That’s just not how it works now. We’ve got to meet in the middle,” Heptinstall said. “It’s getting the broadcasters to slow down and the newsrooms to speed up.”

Part of the problem is understanding the new deadlines that come with online media. According to a 2008 Pew Study, fresh content must be up for periods when traffic spikes. These times include 6-7 a.m. (as people wake up), 8:30-9 a.m. (as they get to work), around 11:30 a.m. (before they go to lunch) and around 2 p.m. (when they return from lunch), according to the study.

“We began thinking we’d just put everything online, but actually you have news cycles on the Internet that you need to adhere to,” Roughton said. “You can’t wait to start writing until 2 pm, you need to start writing right now.”

Jay-Z Album Leak Sheds Light on Changing Industry

By Ryan Brooks, 09/09/09
Edited by Mark Stephenson

When Jay-Z’s newest album, The Blueprint-3, was leaked a week before its release date last Monday, September 1st, the enigmatic rapper was not phased. “It’s a preview. I’m excited for people to hear the album. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, so enjoy it,” he said to MTV News that morning.
The Twitter account “diditleak,” an account with 8,943 followers, reported the leak at 5:15 PM the following day. Search Jay-Z on Twitter and you will find countless links inviting one to download the album.
Twitter is fast becoming a medium through which music piracy can flourish.
The old method of using a torrent file- a small file typically used to capture pirated files- to file share through others, which in turn is the successor of older file-sharing programs such as KaZaa, Limewire and Napster, is being replaced by a smaller, less organized system.
Whereas torrents involve a bit of technical expertise and internet know-how, the new system involves a simple double-click. Users simply post a link anywhere they wish that leads to a server that hosts the free file. Rapidshare, Media Fire and Stream Matrix are only a few of the sites that have been created in the past year or two for the purpose of sharing files in this way.
Anyone can use social media to spread files to those looking for them. A journalism major manages his own Twitter account for this purpose, ‘leaktweet,’ with a following of 427 accounts.
“It’s a natural progress to downloading music,” he said. “I started my Twitter account because I felt like I had an idea that hadn’t been exploited yet; the perfect model to disseminate information.
“More and more of these hosting companies pop up every month. And accounts like ‘diditleak’ are purely informational, telling you only when something is leaked. Using these sites directly is the next step,” said Benton.
On the other hand, Richard, a Psychology major who frequently uses torrent files to download music, says that older models like torrent files still have a place.
“The problem is that sites like Rapidshare have many “false files,” used to lure users into a site filled with ads. Large torrent sites like Pirate Bay have lists of trusted sources,” said Richard.
The Jay-Z model for turning around and posting the files to a large media site is, however, new one. When an album leaks before the release, there is little an artist can do.
“Generally the albums leak a week before release anyway as distributors receiver albums,” said the LeekTweet student.
Established artists such a Jay-Z have little to worry about leaks, and new models of distribution are being explored throughout the industry.
“Artists have distribution rights to their music, and can do what they want with it,” said Dr. Kent Middleton, Professor and Department Head of Grady College. “Some big artists may try to leak tracks for publicity.”
Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” an album that received much press for its unusual distribution strategy, gave consumers a choice to pay “anything they like” for a download of the album. The band made more in total from its download service than the physical release of their previous album, “Hail to the Thief.” This was a method of distribution that many experts and critics said would cause the group to lose money.
On the other hand, Radiohead also put out hard versions of these same recordings on vinyl or CDs for fans who want a material copy of the music.
Ross, an employee of Athens, Ga. Schoolkids Records, feels frustrated with these new download models.
“Little stores like us are going to disappear, and little artists along with it,” he said. “Artists put incentives to buy vinyl and CDs, and there will always be those who appreciate not listening to a music file, but it’s so easy to just put everything online now.”
“Indie artists never use albums to make money anyway. Rock artists use them to advertise, basically. One of the last groups of artists to make money off of albums is the hip hop industry, but that is composed of large, super star artists and not smaller bands who make money off of music shows,” said the LeakTweet student.
As Twitter and faster, sleeker social media increases the flow of information worldwide, this chasm means that albums will become less important and the artists themselves will be sold to consumers.

Will Cell Phones Become Newspapers?

The Future of Cell Phones as Newspapers
By: ROBERT A. BURNS, II
Edited by: ANNE CONNAUGHTON

A decade ago, the Internet was where the journalism industry was headed. But ever since the birth of the "smartphone," the industry has veered into a new direction: your pocket.

Mobile platform journalism, or news broadcast to cell phones, is quickly gaining popularity with both newspapers and consumers. Many major online publications have adopted the cell phone as a new media channel of reaching readers.

Eli Wendkos, 38, social media product manager at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, manages the newspaper’s use of new media channels. Since 2006, AJC.com has expanded their use of mobile platforms such as cell phones, as a response of the shift towards new media in the journalism industry.

“I think you’re going to see mobile platform journalism continue to be a distribution mechanism for content, especially as technology continues to push forward,” Wendkos said. “Readers want to be able to choose the content they view, and with cell phones, news papers can do that.”

Mobile platforms are certainly being streamlined from print and online forms for concision and content at newspapers nationwide. The AJC.com, for example, offers a “text message alert system” on a variety of story types, including local and national breaking news, entertainment, lottery, sports and weather.

Readers can subscribe online to the text alert system, and are updated instantly when there is new info on the story types they have selected. Several major cell service providers support the system, making it even easier for readers to subscribe to stories. They need only indicate who their provider is and which story types they would like to receive text alerts for.

AJC.com is not the only online newspaper to offer a text message-based news service. CNN.com also offers similar features to the AJC, in addition to multimedia options such as photos, and electronic polling.

According to Wendkos, although AJC.com has yet to see drastic increases in revenue from the switch, the program has been very successful at building a following of readers that prefers reading the news on their phones. He said that even though advertisers are lagging behind the cell phone industry, many readers are still interested in mobile platform journalism.

Wendkos said that mobile platform journalism is fast becoming a big industry, and that AJC.com will continue to expand its program in coming years to continue to serve readers. “In the future, you’re probably going to see a move to smart phones, as well as an increase in focus on video submissions from readers," he said.

It is a common generalization that younger aged demographics embrace technology, but many college students still haven't yet jumped on the cell phone bandwagon, so to speak. In spite of all of the benefits that mobile platform journalism offers consumers, many readers are simply uninterested in reading the news from their cell phones.

Michelle Pope, a junior from Roswell, Ga., admitted that her lack of interest is the main reason she doesn't read the news from her phone. "I don't really care about reading the news in general," she said. "I don't read the news on my phone, but I don't even watch it on TV."

Brittany Vandemark, also from Roswell, offered a similar sentiment. "No, I don't read the news on my phone," she said. "There's so much everywhere about health care and the war, you really don't have to go far to get the news. And I don't even watch it on TV so my cell phone is really unneccessary."

Aleksi Reid, from Columbus, Georgia, reads the news, but simply sees no use for a phone as a newspaper. "I use my phone mostly for texting, and occasionally for calling people," she said. "'Text message alerts' on the news would just be annoying to me."

Some consumers see no need for mobile platform journalism. Still, others see a use for it, but do not have access to it.

Antonio Holliday, a senior from Roswell, Georgia, admitted that he does not read the news on his phone because he can't afford the cost of the internet, but he once did. "I don't have internet on my cell phone," he said. "I used to. If I got it back again, I would continue to read the news from my phone because it's quick and easily accessible."


Tags: cell phones, journalism, future, text message

Story in Progress

A decade ago, reading the newspaper online was the “next big thing.” It seems, though, that the Internet is quickly becoming old hat. Reading the news on your cell phone is the “next big thing,” according to several online newspapers.

Eli Wendkos, Product Manager of Social Media at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, manages the paper’s use of new media channels, such as social networking sites and cell phones.

Wendkos said that mobile platform journalism is fast becoming a big industry. Although most newspapers haven’t yet seen drastic increases in revenue, he said, there is a big population of readers that prefer reading their news on their phone, in addition to the other benefits of the medium.

According to Wendkos, the AJC.com has employed mobile platform journalism since 2006. Those who wish to subscribe to the AJC.com’s text message system can do so online, and they are alerted instantly when there is update on a variety of story types, including local and national breaking news, entertainment, sports, weather, and lottery.

Subscribers have the option on AJC.com to check boxes for each of these categories, denoting whether they would like to receive texts or not. Many cell service providers support the service as well, which makes things easier for subscribers, who need only click their provider and the kinds of stories for which they’d like to receive texts.

Though the company has yet to see drastic increases in revenue from the switch, due to lag of advertisers behind the cell phone industry, Wendkos said that the program has been very successful at building a following of readers that prefers reading the news on their phones.

“I think you’re going to see mobile platform journalism continue to be a distribution mechanism for content, especially as technology continues to push forward,” he said. “You’re probably going to see a move to smart phones, as well as an increase in focus on video submissions.”

The AJC.com is not the only online newspaper to offer a text message-based news service. CNN.com also offers similar features to the AJC, in addition to multimedia options such as photos, and electronic polling.

CNN.com could not be reached for comment, despite effort to make contact.