ProPublica has built quite a reputation for itself, in it short life. Its own work -- from the privatization of higher education to rogue nurses to BP's unreported pollutions has put it on the map. In addition, it also offers a handy index of the aptly named "Investigations Elsewhere." Pulling from sources as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, Parade and Mothers Jones, and including major dailies around the country, it's a great showcase, and check-in on the state of longer-form investigative pieces. We see a half dozen new pieces added daily.

Yes, budget cuts have hurt the form, but it's getting new life -- witness the energy brought by ProPublica, the Center for Public Integrity and Center for Investigative Reporting, among others -- that's extending back to major dailies. The partnerships with the foundation-funded national investigative groups has helped, as has the determination of those heading certain newsrooms and investigative pros, doing the work, even as their papers are challenged seemingly on every front.

Source

That’s the key question Poynter news analyst Rick Edmonds asks in his Thursday column, “Are Newspapers Sticking to a Premium Strategy Amid Digital Disruption?”

Citing a McKinsey study on how industries deal with the advent of “low-cost rivals,” Rick lays out good arguments for how the industry approaches are too little, too late, too limited. He’s right. In mid-2010, there isn’t a cohesive industry strategy. In fact, lower-cost entrants — AOL, Yahoo/Associated Content, Demand +++ — aren’t just pests; they’re changing the economics of producing content. That’s not a small issue. It may well lead the next wave of disruption.

Source

Marketing master Steve Rubel points to Morgan Stanley’s recent forecast that mobile info consumption will surpass PC-based consumption by 2015 and draws a few conclusions that all publishers should take to heart. Number one, in my estimation: the need for collaboration, between and among brands and with technology providers and distribution companies.

The mobile revolution is transformative, not a niche of what is mainstream today. As Mashable points out, “The mobile wealth creation/destruction cycle is in its earliest stages”.

Source

Need some great ideas to retaining those precious print subscribers? Stories printed on pancakes, features on dating in your sixties, and new Jumbles.

"We'll be bringing our readers the same high-quality news we always have, just focusing on the five or six topics that interest them."

A must-see for all newsrooms.

Source

Writer Harlan Ellison's impassioned, profanity-laced tirade against those who expect writers to work for free is making new rounds via the viralness of .... the free web, of course. We can have good abstract talks about content factories, content mills and the Pro-Am world. Ellison's rant is a perfect 3-minute tonic: plain-speaking in an age of analytic excess.

On YouTube, the 2007 video has now gotten almost 400,000 views.

Source

Good, in-depth piece by Nat Ives at AdAge on community dailies' paywalls. Nat concludes that you can learn something from the experiences in Harlingen (TX), El Dorado (AR) and Norwalk (CT), but that's there's hardly a panacea here. I recently did a panel with Arkansas Democrat publisher Walter Hussman at ASNE in DC, and came away with a similar feeling.

Smaller-market dailies can take a different route than metros. So far, it's not a route to prosperity, but one of staunching the bleeding....and waiting for a better digitally oriented business model to come along. In retrospect, given the carnage the metros have suffered, that's not a bad strategy, it's just a wait-and-see one that looks relatively good in 2010.

A key question for smaller community dailies: where are you going to find growth in your business? My sense is that even with a paywall, smaller dailies' abilities to reach out to higher-quality local bloggers, even smaller weekly newspapers, radio stations and TV broadcasters could enlarge their presence -- making them a small community center -- and that can give them a foundation for digital ad growth.

Finally, the article makes the point that the smaller papers receive more ad revenue from local advertisers than do metros, whose loss of national advertising (moving more quickly to competitive digital plays) has been another big negative. That national/local ad dependence further defines large market/small market difference.

In some sense, just as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, though still printed on newsprint, are no longer the same category of newspaper companies as the Philadelphia Inquirer or San Francisco Chronicle, neither is the Inquirer or the Chronicle really in the same business as the El Dorado News-Times or the Norwalk Reflector. The fact that they are all in still in newsprint no longer defines them; their size of market and audience, and their scale and uniqueness of content, does.

Source

Alan Mutter pinpoints an old-is-new opportunity -- the next wave of competition for the local directory market, put at $17 billion. The players here -- incumbent Yellow Pages, newspapers, local broadcasters and Google, each with too-numerous strengths and weaknesses to note here. Good post on a serious pot of money that should get new focus for local news companies of all kinds.

Source

Twitter feeds have only upped the high blood pressure quotient of following the news business news. One quite timely addition to our daily Romenesko reading is Poynter Institute's new Mobile Media blog, ably edited by Damon Kiesow, managing editor for online at the Nashua Telegraph, and Regina McCombs, a Poynter faculty member. The blog launched earlier this year -- just in time for tabletmania. Great daily point of reference on the news biz and all things not PC.

As Kiesow wrote near launch:

"Needless to say mobile is the next big thing for journalism and the Web in general. Many of our posts so far have been focused on the iPad, Kindle and the coming war between Apple, Google and Microsoft. The first one to hire Arnold Schwarzenegger to go back in time to destroy the original iPhone prototype wins.

We are also looking for examples of media companies (large and small) doing cool things with mobile devices. This could include streaming live video from a cell phone, writing stories with a Blackberry, using location-based social media or creating a great mobile ad sales strategy. Basically anything journalism (or news revenue) related that does not involve a desk and a PC".

Source