New Alternative Press Resource

It's my pleasure to introduce a new open access database on the block, Independent Voices, a collection of alternative press materials from three pretty important decades of the last century--the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The database is the product of a four-year project by Reveal Digital to digitize over 1 million pages from academic library special collections across the United States.  Source libraries at Northwestern University, Duke Univeristy, University of Wisconsin, University of Buffalo, Michigan State University, University of Texas, University of Kansas and others are contributors.

So far the database is comprised of feminist, GI underground, LGBT, and the (literary) little press.  Other categories to be added will be the African American, Native American, underground campus, anarchist and right-wing press. In addition to newspapers and magazines, the archive includes little magazines, newsletters, pamphlets, and calendars.

Access to proprietary alternative press resources, namely Left Index and Alternative Press Index, is available through the Penn Libraries/ASC homepage.

State of the News Media 2014

It's that time of year again.  Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's STATE OF THE NEWS MEDIA 2014. The Pew Center's Journalism Project has been assessing the news media since 1997 and these annual reports, chock-full of data, researchers and students have come to rely on for insight on developing trends in the news media. If you want to compare new findings to previous years click on Datasets for data (in .zip files) from 2008 through 2013.

I've raided the Overview for these six findings you can
read more about in the whole report:

1) Thirty of the largest digital-only news organizations account for about 3,000 jobs and one area of investment is global coverage. 
2) So far, the impact of new money flowing into the industry may be more about fostering new ways of reporting and reaching audience than about building a new, sustainable revenue structure. 
3) Social and mobile developments are doing more than bringing consumers into the process – they are also changing the dynamics of the process itself.
4) New ways of storytelling bring both promise and challenge. 
5) Local television, which reaches about nine in ten U.S. adults, experienced massive change in 2013, change that stayed under the radar of most. 
6) Dramatic changes under way in the makeup of the American population will undoubtedly have an impact on news in the U.S, and in one of the fastest growing demographic groups – Hispanics – we are already seeing shifts. 
One thing that confused me about this year's offering is that there is no single pdf for it. When you go to the link the Report is broken down into separate boxes that add up to the full report. Don't be fooled by the Overview page that has a pdf called Complete Report--it's only the Overview. Go figure. 

Pew's News Media 2012 Annual Report

Don't forget to check out The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Media 2012 for lots of interesting findings and data.

From the press release:

A mounting body of evidence finds that the spread of mobile technology is adding to news consumption, strengthening the appeal of traditional news brands and even boosting reading of long-form journalism. But the evidence also shows that technology companies are strengthening their grip on who profits, according to the 2012 State of the News Media report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
More than a quarter of Americans (27%) now get news on mobile devices, and for the vast majority, this is increasing news consumption, the report finds. More than 80% of smartphone and tablet news consumers still get news on laptop or desktop computers. On mobile devices, news consumers also are more likely to go directly to a news site or use an app, rather than to rely on search — strengthening the bond with traditional news brands.

The full report is freely available here.

Good Things From Pew

The Pew Research Center's s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its eighth report, State of the News Media 2011

Among this year's e features is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. Each year the Report identifies key trends. Six stand out entering 2011:

• The news industry is turning to executives from outside. The trend has a scattered history. The complex revenue equation of news -- that it was better to serve the audience even to the irritation of advertisers that paid most of the bills -- tended to trip up outsiders. It spelled the end, for instance, of Mark Willes at Times Mirror when he let advertisers dictate content. With the old revenue model broken, more companies are again looking to outsiders for leadership. One reason is new owners. Seven of the top 25 newspapers in America are now owned by hedge funds, which had virtually no role a few years ago. The age of publicly traded newspaper companies is winding down. And some of the new executives are blunt in their assessments. John Paton, the new head of Journal Register newspapers told a trade group in December: "We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the web and, as an industry, we newspaper people are no good at it." A question is how much time these private equity owners will give struggling news operations to turn around. One of these publishers told PEJ privately that he believed he had two years.
• Less progress has been made charging for news than predicted, but there are some signs of willingness to pay. The leading study on the subject finds that so far only about three dozen newspapers have moved to some kind of paid content on their websites. Of those, only 1% of users opted to pay. And some papers that moved large portions of content to subscription gave up the effort. A new survey released for this report suggests that under certain circumstances the prospects for charging for content could improve. If their local newspaper would otherwise perish, 23% of Americans said they would pay $5 a month for an online version. To date, however, even among early adopters, only 10% of those who have downloaded local news apps paid for them (this doesn't include apps for non-local news or other content). At the moment, the only news producers successfully charging for most of their content online are those selling financial information to elite audiences -- the Financial Times is one, the Wall Street Journal is another, Bloomberg is a third -- all operations aimed at professional audiences, which means they are not a model that will work for general interest news.
  
• If anything, the metrics of online news have become more confused, not less. Many believe that the economics of the web, and particularly online news, cannot really progress until the industry settles on how to measure audience. There is no consensus on what is the most useful measure of online traffic. Different rating agencies do not even agree on how to define a "unique visitor." Does that denote different people or does the same person visiting a site from different computers get counted more than once? The numbers from one top rating agency, comScore, are in some cases double and even triple those of another, Nielsen. More audience research data exist about each user than ever before. Yet in addition to confusion about what it means, it is almost impossible get a full sense of consumer behavior -- across sites, platforms, and devices. That leaves potential advertisers at a loss about how to connect the dots. In March 2011, three advertising trade groups, supported by other media associations, announced an initiative to improve and standardize confusing digital media metrics called Making Measurement Make Sense, but the task will not be easy.
  
• Local news remains the vast untapped territory. Most traditional American media -- and much of U.S. ad revenue -- are local. The dynamics of that market online are still largely undefined. The potential, though, is clear. Already 40% of all online ad spending is local, up from 30% just a year earlier. But the market at the local level is different than nationally and requires different strategies, both in content creation and economics. Unlike national, at the local level, display advertising -- the kind that news organizations rely on -- is bigger than search, market researchers estimate. And the greatest local growth area last year was in highly targeted display ads that many innovators see as key to the future. Even Google, the king of search, sees display as "our next big business," as Eric Schmidt, its CEO, told the New York Times in September.
  
• The nature of local news content is also in many ways undefined. While local has been the area of greatest ferment for nonprofit startups, no one has yet cracked the code for how to produce local news effectively at a sustainable level. The first major concept in more traditional venues, the push toward so-called "hyperlocalism," proved ill-conceived, expensive and insufficiently supported by ads. Yahoo!'s four-year old local news and advertising consortium has shown some success for certain participants but less for others. There are some prominent local news aggregators such as Topix and Examiner.com, and now AOL has entered the field with local reporting through Patch. Whether national networks will overtake small local startups or local app networks will mix news with a variety of other local information, the terrain here remains in flux.
  
• The new conventional wisdom is that the economic model for news will be made up of many smaller and more complex revenue sources than before. The old news economic model was fairly simple. Broadcast television depended on advertising. Newspapers depended on circulation revenue and a few basic advertising categories. Cable was split -- half from advertising and half from cable subscription fees. Online, most believe there will be many different kinds of revenue. This is because no one revenue source looks large enough and because money is divided among so many players. In the biggest new revenue experiment of 2010, the discount sales coupon business led by Groupon, revenue can be split three ways when newspapers are involved. On the iPad, Apple gets 30% of the subscription revenue and owns the audience data. On the Android system, Google takes 10%. News companies are trying to push back. One new effort involves online publishers starting their own ad exchanges, rather than having middlemen do it for them. NBC, CBS and Forbes are among those launching their own, tired of sharing revenue and having third parties take their audience data.
  
• The bailout of the car industry helped with the media's modest recovery in 2010. One overlooked dimension in the year past: A key source of renewed revenue in news in 2010 was the recovery in the car industry, aided by the decision to lend federal money to save U.S. carmakers. Auto advertising jumped 77% in local television, 22% in radio and 17% in magazines. The other benefactor of the news industry, say experts, was the U.S. Supreme Court: Its Citizens United decision allowing corporations and unions to buy political ads for candidates helped boost political advertising spent on local television to an estimated $2.2 billion, a new high for a midterm campaign year.

Make sure you check out Who Owns the Media (a section of this year's State of the Media), an interactive database of companies that own news properties in the United States. You can use this site to compare companies, explore each media sector, or read profiles of individual companies.

Aanother new report of note from Pew is: How mobile devices are changing community information environments by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell.

British Periodicals

Once can do some serious historical investigation of the early periodical press in England with this latest Penn Libraries e-resource addition.

About British Periodicals:

British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of more than 460 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s, comprising six million keyword-searchable pages and forming an unrivalled record of more than two centuries of British history and culture....In addition to providing access to the original periodical versions of landmark texts like De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Cobbett's Rural Rides, Bagehot's The English Constitution, Gaskell's North and South and Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, the collection offers new ways of exploring the inaccessible, neglected or forgotten writings that formed their original contexts. A wide array of different types of periodical are represented, from magisterial quarterlies and scholarly and professional organs through to coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

McSweeney's Broadside Valentine to Print Journalism

Leave it to Dave Eggers at McSweeney's to try to save print journalism (well, DON'T leave it to him, but appreciate his efforts). In the publisher's own words:

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time only, Sunday-edition-sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It'll have news and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there. Expect journalism from Andrew Sean Greer, fiction from George Saunders and Roddy Doyle, dispatches from Afghanistan, and much, much more.

The folks at McSweeny's believe that if newspaper were better, more exciting reads, they wouldn't be so strapped for readers. Comments blogger Zach Dundas explains from a recent conversation with McSweeny's publisher Oscar Villalon, "papers need to realize that there are higher, better uses for their tactile, large-format pages than reprinting three-day-old David Brooks columns or intern-written high-school sports gamers. Though you wouldn’t know it to survey the abandoned-looking metal box on the average American city street corner, it is possible to design, shoot, write and edit a forward-thinking newspaper. Witness Mario Garcia’s recent redesign of Germany’s Handelsblatt, or any of Jacek Utko’s striking Eastern European dailies."

I've ordered a copy for Annenberg (for the holidays?). Along these same lines (items to sit down with over a latte between end of year paper writing or grading)... The Onion's Our Front Pages: 21 Years of Greatness, Virtue, and Moral Rectitude from America's Finest News Source is also on order.

January update: It came in and it's fabulous!