Columbia University has surveyed the state of digital journalism, and it has concluded that journalists must rethink their relationships — and their audiences’ relationships — with advertisers.
That does not mean yielding editorial control to sponsors, but it might mean coming up with alternatives to impression-based pricing, creating higher-value content for the Web by tapping into page view data, and helping to ensure that Web ads have value on their own.
In a 139-page report, the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University outlined those recommendations and others, all of which are intended to help newspapers, magazines and television stations better compete in the online marketplace.
“We’re not suggesting that journalists get marching orders from advertisers,” said Bill Grueskin, the academic dean for the journalism school and a co-author of the report. “We are suggesting that journalists get a much better understanding of why so many advertising dollars have left the traditional news media business.”
And, he added, a better understanding of what the news media can do to bring the dollars back. To have a journalism school, especially one as esteemed as Columbia’s, studying ad rate cards and the online coupon craze might seem unconventional. But it is an outgrowth of academia’s growing interest in the economic foundations of journalism at a time when those foundations appear unstable. Columbia and some other journalism schools, for instance, now offer courses on the economics of journalism.
The report’s section for conclusions opens with a quote from Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and a former reporter for The New York Times. Rothenberg told the report’s authors, “Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”
That possibility comes up repeatedly in the report. “Many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes brought on by digital technology,” it states, before recommending a “faster and more consistent pace of innovation and investment.”
It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimisation,” and that larger news organisations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”
The report is a product of several months of visits to news organisations. Grueskin, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, co-wrote the report with Ava Seave, an adjunct professor and a consultant, and Lucas Graves, a doctoral candidate at Columbia. The journalism school will hold a public discussion about the report this week.
©2011 The New York
Times News Service
