5Spot

What Editor’s Picks is a response to is an intriguing question. Yes, Google still is the huge driver of traffic to news sites, much as they differentiate the value of its many fly-by referrals from the relative few that make a meaningful revenue difference, sending, it says, more than a billion referrals to news publishers worldwide each month. Yet, its behemoth standing is being challenged on multiple fronts. Facebook, Twitter and Linked In are newly proving the power of social news links. Further, in Steve Jobs’ mythical world, which is fast becoming, our own reality, search is so yesterday, replaced by a single-purpose (Apple-enabled), high-branded apps. With apps, search necessity is diminished, and we’ve already tiptoed into that world.

For journalists today it is a two-way window. On the creation end, no matter how much they crowdsource, use Twitter and engage with communities, core journalistic principles of fairness remain fundamental. On the viewing end, the new transparency helps us get it more correct, we would hope. Window washing, then, becomes the new order of the day

In any city, the number of print journalists far outnumbers broadcasters, even though in America the daily reach of TV news is fairly close to that of newspapers. Too often broadcasters follow up on (and feed off) work begun by print journalists. (At worst, it is “rip and read”, driven by ratings, with far less of a balance of public service and profit.) Without that daily work in print, the whole ecosystem of news spins out of balance, as it has already begun to do.

It has seen a huge jump in people visiting its website. On Monday, a peak, in this amazing, still-unwinding tale, the Guardian saw nearly 4M uniques. That compares with 2.8 million a day in May, and that was an above-average month for the Guardian, when it landed 51 million uniques overall.

American intends to go from one of the oldest (our backs testify) fleets in the industry to the newest. What else might this remind us of?
Who’s got the oldest platform in the business. Think Johannes Gutenberg. Think 1450. Yes, the printing press.

Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in distinctly new and better-informed directions.

The local newspaper editor is no longer the supreme arbiter of what his readers read. In the old print days, many regional newspaper editors (and in America, that has meant all the 1500+ newspapers, save three national ones) decided what their readers would read, defined what their readers would think was news. We were gatekeepers, holding all the keys. The internet took those keys away, defeated distance and opened hundreds of millions of readers’ eyes to other news organisations – from great to god-awful. So the rough justice of an evolving meritocracy has replaced the old print walled garden.

The Journal itself, with its publisher gone in a heartbeat, wouldn’t be hurt with a little contrition either. It is, unmistakeably, owned by News Corp and run by Rupert Murdoch. As such, it should distance itself from what anyone would think is wrongdoing, and use its space, to defend its own Journal standards — long-held standards (no matter what nasty things the Journal editorialists want to say of the Bancrofts, its former owners) that we hope have been strongly maintained in the three and a half years since News Corp bought the paper. With its own editorial oversight committee feeling compelled to issue a statement, however wan, yesterday, it’s time for the Journal to take off the gloves in this matter and give a hand to making sure its own readers’ trust is rewarded.

For Reuters, it’s a leg up in the agency world, and part of its big U.S. push (see my Thursday Nieman lab column, “The newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization”). Reuters gets a semi-exclusive, able to exclude a handful of key competitors, including AP, from doing similar syndication. The wire offers no financial guarantees, but offers the three promises INN members, and Davis, are banking on to propel them forward, and importantly establish a new syndication leg of revenue, as non-profit funders push for funding diversification.

Far more important for Apple to maintain the iPad as the best, most complete way to do our digital reading. Readers don’t care about the tiffs between Apple and publishers; we all just want everything in one orderly place (nothing hursts like an incomplete Newsstand). Yes, Apple will go some potential revenue, by giving up the attempt to choke off 30% of publisher sub revenue ’til the end of time. Its gains, though, may be impressive.