As advertising revenue goes online, so should the news

It’s really about who first noticed the importance of the online consumer. It would sound good to say the media took a chance going online, and the advertising dollar followed when they noticed how far-reaching it could be. Unfortunately the opposite is more accurate – traditional media are wary about taking a chance on the unproven.

Like it or not, advertising is what pays for the media, and they pay well. Apparently the advertising dollar is worth $12 billion per year across all media.

In 2005 only 5 per cent of that money was spent online.

By 2006 that figure rose to over 8 per cent, and is predicted to grow by 30 per cent a year, reaching $3 billion by 2010.

The moral of the story is, advertisers know online is growing and they’re willing to invest in it. Traditional media need to trust that fact, also be willing to invest, and take bolder chances online rather than being overcautious, or slow to fully integrate. You hesitate and you get left behind.

via The Australian

Interview is Art

It can be easy to screw up an interview. John Sawatsky trains ESPN staffers in the art of interviewing and says some of those considered the best in the business are making basic mistakes.

It all comes down to having a plan.  To paraphrase Sawatsky:

Have a strategy.  Use questions to build off questions to get more, to get your subject to go further than their normal cautious self would normally go

Any journalist, or journalism student, should know or have heard these simple rules.  They’re not exactly Sawatsky’s rules, but very basically: don’t ask yes-or-no questions, keep questions short and avoid charged words, which can distract people.

via NPR

Newspaper of the Future

Mark Glaser from MediaShift  gives his breakdown of how the newspaper of the future will thrive, minus the paper.

It basically breaks down to these seven things.

• community and citizen journalists
• niche topics
• staff with multiple skills
• transparency
• audio and video aren’t “web extras”, they’re just part of the story
• respond to criticism positively
• leave the “save it for print” mindset behind.

Essentially, become a web-first newsroom.

Digg: A Geek’s Domain – or Hitting the front page

An interesting timeline of how the Digg’s built up. A single-author niche blog pulls 50,000, then 80,000 page views on consecutive days, up from an average of 1,000/day since being launched only 10 days beforehand.  But do the general online newsreading population use Digg, or is it just the geek’s domain?

The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction | Linux Brain Dump