My, it’s nice to see you again.

It’s been far too long since my last post.  I blame that on the following:
• the arrival of real, actual work to complete at TIME
• the continued search for post-graduate, post-internship employment
• general fatigue and disbelief that my summer is almost over
• lamenting about my lack of job and wishing I was headed back to school for the victory lap that is a fifth year

All jokes aside, I recently decided to put the link to this blog on Wired Journalists, so that means I need to keep this up. So I am.

UNITY 2008
First things first, I figure it was career suicide not to have been at the UNITY Conference this past week in Chicago, particularly as TIME was a co-sponsor and I’m a member of NABJ. I really enjoyed looking at all the student work, though – particularly photos from my friend L. Kasimu Harris. The convention news Web site is here.

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER?
On the work front, I sat in on an interesting discussion Monday about weekly newsmags and how newsy they should – or could – be. Newsweek and TIME have gotten some criticism lately about their covers, from both those on the outside and within their own ranks. For example, instead of last week’s Olympics-related covers, shouldn’t Obama have been on the front for his trip overseas? Wasn’t that the newsier item, and thus, the best to lead of the issue?

As I listened to all this talk, I thought about something TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel said to us at Ole Miss last year during our Journalism Week keynote. Don’t quote him on this, but Mr. Stengel (or Rick, as he is to the millions of TIME readers), said basically that TIME’s responsibility wasn’t to be a news aggregate. It needed to go deeper than the stories newspapers and bloggers cover everyday, because readers expect more than what they’ve already seen and heard. My college paper did a good story on his talk here. In case you’re interested.

Anyway, it seems that if a newsmagazine is basically National Newspaper 10.0, it wouldn’t be in fitting Mr. Stengel’s vision to feature a photo or topic on the front of the magazine that had already been dissected by NYT, WaPo, whatever. Thus, Olympic coverage was a smart choice for the front, as was putting Obama-related things, like this article by Karen Tumulty inside.

I love that at TIME, everything is a discussion, you know? Sure, Mr. Stengel has the final say, but everything about the magazine is up for criticism and review daily, by lowly interns like myself and those much higher on the food chain. Not to get too corny, but the magazine is constantly trying to improve itself, issue by issue. People are willing to argue over something like a cover line because they are genuinely invested in the magazine’s success and relevance to readers. I love it.

INDUSTRY NEWS
And finally, Editor and Publisher had an article today where it recognized the last 6 of 10 newspapers nationwide that are Doing it Right.

I find it so refreshing that smaller, lesser known papers that are experimenting with new things are getting some major recognition. I’ve always believed that one of the best ways to judge a paper’s value was not just in its circulation or reputation, but also in its creativity and community impact. When you look at that, a lot of small newspapers are doing big things.

That’s all for now.

Our fates are linked, TV kids.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant article I read today from Variety magazine

I used to get so frustrated at school when our campus TV station – Newswatch – grabbed the stories and reporting done by The Daily Mississippian staffers to fill their 30-minute show, not once ever mentioning that The DM had reported the news first. I got in arguments with their station manager over the pilfering of our content; some of them were bloody. I asked my journalism professors, “Do TV stations even have reporters of their own, who go out and drum up stories and gather facts like newspaper people do?” I was assured that at bigger stations, many reporters did run out to cover things. But the local newspaper was still one of their first, go-to sources for story ideas and content.

Gag.

Even some print-based writers who visited UM for journalism week hinted that they were frustrated by the “read and tell” strategy of TV networks; one big name from a big mag in New York even said CNN would stop running if the New York Times failed to come out one day. I nodded along with him from my seat in the audience and cursed TV journalism one more time.

So it’s nice to see that:
• People are aware that broadcast sources borrow heavily from newspapers and other print media
• As such, TV and radio will see declines like the newspaper industry

Karma, karma, karma.

Somebody stop the bleeding!

Before I graduated from Ole Miss in May, I had to write and defend a 75-page honors college thesis on the future of newspapers.  I paid special attention to all published State of the Media reports from the Project for Excellence in Journalism as I was doing my analysis.  If you havent checked the PEJ’s report, you should.  It’s amazing.

My findings weren’t much of a surprise to me or any of my journalism professors – the writing has been on the wall for a while now.  Circulation is down (though readership is up in some places), advertising revenues are down.  Web site views are up and increasing, but few papers have found a way to make enough money off their sites to support their print product.  The public opinion of newspapers continues to drop, thanks to publicized scandals, conflicts of interests and decreased quality.  And all of this is compounded by increasing cuts in staff and resources necessary to put out a consistently good product everyday.

Which is why it saddens me to see things like this, but no longer shocks me:

• So long, Wall Street journal editors
• We’ll miss you AJC team
• Aloha in Honolulu

I concluded at the end of my thesis defense that I believed newspapers that invested in their reporters, photographers and editors and provided them with the resources and support they needed to do their best work would see revenue gains.  Quality is directly linked to revenue, I said.  Mass layoffs and buyouts fly in the face of quality and make readers even less confident in the product that hits their front porch and newsstands everyday.

Are newspapers really the last of a dying breed?  I want to make my career with these things.  I’m hopeful they can turn it around for my sake, and the sake of the millions of readers who count on them – despite insisting they don’t.