MediaMemo » journalism

The New Yorker Takes on Hollywood Power Blogger Nikki Finke

Peter Kafka — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:39:45 +0000

A treat for those of you who love reading about Hollywood’s inner workings: About 7,800 words in this week’s New Yorker dedicated to power blogger Nikki Finke and those who fear her and/or read her. Which pretty much includes everyone in Hollywood.

It’s a classic New Yorker profile, which means it’s thorough and a great read, though there’s not much in the way of news there. Writer Tad Friend mentions Jay Penske’s purchase of Finke’s services in passing, and there’s no update of Penske’s and Finke’s plans to expand the site.

For the record, in late June, Finke said she’d have a New York correspondent hired within three months; four weeks ago, Penske told me said correspondent was going to be signed within two weeks.

What’s the status now? “Not ready to comment right now,” Finke says via email. I’ve also asked Penske for an update.

Back to the story. There’s a lot of inside baseball about the symbiosis between the studios and the people who write about them, and some smart reporting about the tradecraft of reporting and how it has been altered by the rise of blogging.

I also detected at least a whiff of allusion to Janet Malcolm’s famous description of journalism, published in the New Yorker two decades ago:

Finke’s code is the Hollywood code. She is for hard work, big box-office, stars who remain loyal to their agents and publicists, and the little guy–until, that is, the big guy chats her up. Then she’s for that big guy until some other big guy calls to stick it to the first big guy. And this, too, is the Hollywood code: relationships are paramount but provisional. One executive observes that people who heed Finke’s call to snark about their competitors shouldn’t get too comfortable: “The idea is, The lion won’t eat me if I throw it another Christian. It works for a day, but you’re going back to the Colosseum soon.”

The bond between journalists and their sources is always complex–you’re friends with benefits, without being friends–but its contingent nature is particularly apparent in Hollywood. Finke’s sources can hear in her voice when she sounds low or unwell, and will ask if she needs anything. She’s grateful for the solicitude, but determined to maintain the barrier between her and those she calls “these people.” “A veterinarian treats animals–he’s not an animal,” she says.

What does Finke think? Glad you asked. She has an entire post dedicated to it, of course.

The gist:

As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick [the magazine's Pulitzer Prize-winning editor in chief] , whom I enjoyed bitchslapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod factchecking process.

No comment from Friend or the New Yorker’s PR staff, which sent me a copy of the article this afternoon.

A Mixed Bag From the New York Times: Q2 Costs Got Better, Ads Got Worse, and Web Dollars Disappeared

Peter Kafka — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:00:07 +0000

We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the hopeful notion that the worst may be over for the industry. Now investors are going nuts for the New York Times (NYT), at least in early trading, based on its Q2 results. But I think the results are a mixed bag.

The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of operating costs, knocking them down 20 percent. But revenue fell faster. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.

The numbers: After factoring out one-time charges and benefits, the Times posted earnings of eight cents per share, well above the four-cent loss the Street was expecting. But revenue dropped 21 percent, to $585 million; the consensus was $603 million.

The Times posted an operating profit of $23.3 million; without one-time charges that number would have been $66.1 million. That’s worse than the $100 million the paper made a year ago, but much better than the $74.5 million it lost (net) in Q1.

But! Ad revenue declined 30.2 percent, an acceleration from last quarter’s 28 percent drop. In addition to the regular culprits, the Times noted a “lower volume of online advertising.” More details on that: Internet revenue dropped a shocking 14.3 percent, and Internet ad revenue was down 15.5 percent; last quarter they were down 5.6 percent and 6.1 percent.

The assessment from Times CEO Janet Robinson:

Based on what we have seen so far in July, we expect the advertising environment to continue to be challenging. We believe the rate of decline will moderate slightly in the third quarter from what we experienced in the second quarter.

As we look ahead, an enduring constant is the outstanding journalism of The New York Times Company and the esteem in which it is held by our readers. For the balance of the year, we are focused on developing innovative new products and platforms based on our high-quality journalism, particularly in the digital area, and continuing to aggressively lower our cost base to better align it with our revenues. When the economy and ad markets improve, we believe we will be very well positioned to benefit from the restructuring of our business.

How to Survive the Media Meltdown: "Imagination, Enthusiasm"

Peter Kafka — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:17:24 +0000

Still have a job in media? Looking for a wee bit of inspiration in a gloomy week in a miserable year? Here’s a free pep talk, courtesy of Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment.

There’s nothing newsworthy in this memo, sent out last week in the wake of Forbes.com CEO Jim Spanfeller’s departure. There’s no staff-shuffling detailed, and no grand strategy revealed. It’s really not much more than a “keep your head up.” But things are dour enough these days that even that counts for something, I think.

The sun has risen. Another day. We kick on. Our audience knows little and probably cares less about our internal organization. What they do care about is that we continue to serve them with indispensable journalism in that forthright, robust way that is our hallmark.

The late Jim Michaels liked to say that a Forbes story made readers richer or smarter. Smarter, certainly, about the world around them and understanding the choices they’ll be facing; smarter at running their business and career; smarter at investing, and smarter at enjoying the rewards of success. But a Forbes story can also make readers richer in spirit, heart or mind. Richer/smarter remains a good lens to look through at all we do.

We celebrate entrepreneurism all the time, and we should look for that same spirit in ourselves. You don’t need me to tell you that our industry is changing beyond all recognition, both in its forms and in the business models that pay for it.

We now compete for the time of busy people with a whole range of new competitors with an equally broad range of journalistic standards, approaches and ways of paying for what they do. Now more than ever, we need to be flexible and open to how we think about our journalism, and to question past assumptions about how we work — holding fast to our core principles and never putting the trust our audience has in us and our brand at risk — but being ready to experiment with how we create and distribute our journalism.

Not every one of those experiments will work. We shall have to be disciplined in measuring their relevance and usefulness to our audience, and bury our losers while cultivating our winners.

As at every publication, there are serious constraints now on our resources, but there are no restrictions on our imagination, enthusiasm or editorial entrepreneurship beyond those we impose on ourselves. We all still have to do our day jobs, make sure our audience is served in the most forthright way we know how with great journalism, and help support a business underneath it all to pay our salaries.

I learned long ago that there is nothing like robust cash flow to support robust journalism. We shall still have to set priorities for what we can take on, but I am sure I speak for [Forbes magazine editor] Bill [Baldwin] and all our senior colleagues when I commit to do all I humanly can to get as many of the best of your new ideas in front of our audience as we can.

We are a publication across all our media for people in business, rather than a business publication, which lets us range wide in what we cover an how. We now have a broad audience comprised of many overlapping sub-audiences, but all seeking in various ways that Forbesian voice, insight and timely wisdom that we offer.

We need to stay relevant to every one in a changing and challenging world. So let’s kick on with vigor and imagination to make as large an audience as we can richer and smarter however we can. ‘Cos that is what we do. And our audiences deserve no less.

[Image credit: Eye of einstein]

How Much Will You Pay To Read Your News Online?

Peter Kafka — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:53:47 +0000

After years of training people to expect that whatever you can find on the Web will be free, media companies are trying — desperately — to reverse the trend, and figure out how to get people to pay up. Or at least some of the people, some of the time, for some stuff.

There are plenty of problems with this plan, and I think the biggest one is that there’s simply too much commodity content on the Web — stuff that doesn’t have any particular value to anyone, or at least not much more or less than something easily available somewhere else.

(Aside: The scenario above is great for Google (GOOG), which helps you find the commodity stuff no matter where it is, and bad for most publishers, who used to have control over their distribution. But I don’t see how you can blame Google for that.)

There are a couple exceptions that have worked so far, like the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by News Corp (NWS), which owns this site), and Consumer Reports. And even the New York Times (NYT) was able to convince some of its readers to pay to read the likes of Maureen Dowd via an experiment a couple of years ago and may try something like that again. But how many New York Times, Wall Street Journals and Consumer Reports are there?

But for argument’s sake, let’s say your local newspaper does indeed have some stuff that you can’t find anywhere else, and it wants to sell it to you. How would it do that?

Enter Journalism Online, a startup founded by media veterans Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery that wants to provide a backend service for papers that want to sell their wares. A few weeks ago I talked to Crovitz, who is the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and let him make his pitch.

They key point is that Crovitz and his colleagues don’t expect everyone to pay for everything on the Web — they figure that something like 5 to 10 percent of a publication’s readers will value the stuff enough to pay for complete access to everything, and that everyone else will be content to graze for free. That still sounds optimistic to me, but I’d love to be proved wrong.

If you’re looking for more details, here’s a link, via the awesome NiemanLab, to a deck from a presentation that Brill made to the hush-hush newspaper conclave in Chicago last week.

[ See post to watch video ]

Meet Maureen Dowd's Favorite Writer: Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall

Peter Kafka — Mon, 18 May 2009 14:05:56 +0000

Today’s life lesson: Procrastination does pay off!

A few weeks ago I sat down with Josh Marshall, the journalist/entrepreneur behind Talking Points Memo, and had a great chat about news, new media and the business of running a self-funded Web site. But my notes and video have sat on my hard drive since then, for no other reason than I never got around to publishing them.

Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the kick in the pants I needed: Over the weekend, the New York Times (NYT) columnist has given Marshall a huge, if unintended, endorsement by borrowing his work and then getting caught.

After an initial attempt by Dowd to explain away the similarity between her work and his, the Times is now running a correction on Dowd’s Sunday column, noting that she “failed to attribute a paragraph” to Marshall.

You’ll read plenty more about this on the Web over the next few days, if you’re inclined. But it would be a shame if that’s the only thing you know about Marshall’s site, which is an interesting hybrid of politically focused reporting, commentary, and aggregation/blogging.

And I do mean a mix: If you just glimpse quickly at his site, you might think it’s the same grouping of links and headlines that you can find anywhere else on the Web. But Marshall was a real reporter prior to starting the site and his 12-person staff does real reporting. Its best work, to date, was uncovering the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007, which led to prestigious Polk Award in 2008.

Just as interesting: It’s a profitable business that has never taken outside investment and until recently, has made almost all of its money by relying on ad networks. The most effective ad network, says Marshall: Google’s AdSense. See! Google (GOOG) really does support content!

More recently, Marshall has hired Yahoo (YHOO) vet Diane Rinaldo to serve as the company’s first real ad rep, trying to translate the site’s one million (give or take) monthly unique readers into more significant revenue. That’s alleged to be a real challenge since advertisers are supposedly loath to touch political content. But then again, start-up blogs aren’t supposed to do real journalism–or act as unattributed contributors to the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

[ See post to watch video ]

Riveting Tragedy=Boring Twitter Debate

Peter Kafka — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 17:56:49 +0000

This is now clockwork: Some kind of calamity happens somewhere. Shortly after, an Internet debate breaks out about who did a better job of breaking and/or covering the story–citizen journalists/bloggers or boring old mainstream media.

The new variation on an old theme: Does Twitter constitutes a “news” source?

If you want to read about that at length, be my guest–there’s plenty over at Techmeme. But Dave Winer has summed it up pretty well in a couple of words:

What you see on Twitter, when:

1. People witness events that others are interested in; and

2. They’re posting about it on Twitter; and

3. The interested people are reading their posts…

It certainly is news. Whether it’s journalism or not isn’t a very interesting discussion, to me.

To the user, both extremes, Twitter and the most vetted pro news, require skepticism. The reader triangulates”

The Indian police, meanwhile, seemed to take Twitter seriously, at least according to the Times “Lede” blog, which reported that cops asked that both reporters and Tweeters “do not discuss their movements, because they are concerned that the terrorists in the Taj and Oberoi Hotels are watching television to monitor the situation.”

What I haven’t seen on the blogosphere–or any news outlet–is a reasoned and thoughtful discussion of why India is seemingly beset with terror attacks. But I don’t expect to read or hear that a day after a news event, in any medium, because that’s not fast-twitch material.

Meanwhile, if you want to see what actual Twitter users are actually saying about the Mumbai attacks, head over here (even though Twitter spent some $15 million buying a search engine, it makes its search function inexplicably hard to find).

From what I can see, at this point Twitter is basically a good place to find quick links to other people’s coverage of the event, but maybe I’m missing something. (Click on image to enlarge)

[Image Credit: Stuti, which seems to have lifted the image from NDTV India]