There were a few points that stood out to me over the course of the evening. Very early in the evening, the question of whether the business press produced adequate coverage of malfeasance in the financial sector before 2008 was superseded by the question of whether the public would have read such coverage during the boom years. “Just reporting this stuff,” said Felix Salmon, “doesn’t help if it doesn’t catch some public desire for justice, if they don’t want to blame that organization…If you do the journalism beforehand, no one cares.” Dean Starkman disagreed, noting a number of investigations of financial institutions, during boom years, that had helped prompt reforms. Suzanne Kapner went further, arguing that the essence of journalism’s public trust is an obligation to make important stories interesting: “You can talk about Basel III and say it’s boring, but it’s going to affect how banks hold capital and lend to the general public, and it’s our job to relay that. I don’t think you can say, ‘It’s boring and we’re not gonna write about it.’ ”

A second interesting point came from an audience question. Legendary financial journalist Myron Kandel suggested that big investigative pieces don’t receive adequate follow-up. As a result, he argued, readers don’t see that the malpractice uncovered by a reporter at one company ‘isn’t an isolated situation,’ and systemic issues go unaddressed. Felix Salmon replied that most investigations face an institutional constraint where follow-up stories are concerned: “Once that story is out, every other publication is going ‘Oh the New York Times has already done that, so we can’t do it, because we’d just be copying it,’ ” he said. Salmon went on to note the way the blogosphere is changing this attitude, as stories are amplified by being re-posted, recycled and linked to.

Later, in discussing the impact the internet has had on business journalism, Salmon noted digital journalism’s push towards transparent reporting, where source material is uploaded online. At Public Business, we believe the shift towards transparent reporting is also the solution to the follow-up problem, which is why we’re investing in tools to help researchers probe one another’s sources, and follow-up on one another’s work. 

But by far, the most contentious point was the discussion about coverage of the role of government – both elected officials and regulators – in overseeing and interacting with business. Panelists noted that newsrooms are increasingly exploring ways to merge their regulatory and business staffs, but, from the floor, New York Times contributing writer Diana Henriques had a different take: why shouldn’t political reporters, foreign correspondents and journalists on other beats have the basic understanding of economics and finance? “It concerns me,” she said, “that we have ghetto-ized business journalism and given it these vast responsibilities for reaching beyond our natural borders when in fact what has happened is that business has escaped its natural borders and invaded every other beat at our news organizations.” Here at Public Business, we agree. We’re looking to launch a training program this year, where we’ll provide financial and economic literacy education to reporters – on all beats, because an understanding of business is increasingly critical for all kinds of stories. Expect to hear more about that soon.

For more, watch the full video of the panel here.

The whole piece is worth reading, but there is one point I would like to highlight. Over the years that the Guardian spent pursuing this story, and publishing pieces of their findings incrementally, no other British paper thought it worthwhile to join in the chase. And instead of seeing this as a great competitive opportunity to dominate a scoop, the Guardian recognized it as a problem, appreciating that this was a story that even Nick Davies could not handle alone:

If the majority of Fleet Street was going to turn a blind eye, I thought I’d better try elsewhere to stop the story from dying on its feet, except in the incremental stories that Nick was still remorselessly producing for our own pages. I called Bill Keller at The New York Times. Within a few days, three Times reporters were sitting in a rather charmless Guardian meeting room as Davies did his best to coach them in the basics of the story that had taken him years to tease out of numerous reporters, lawyers, and police officers.

The Times reporters took their time—months of exceptional and painstaking work that established the truth of everything Nick had written—and broke new territory of their own. They coaxed one or two sources to go on the record. The story led to another halfhearted police inquiry that went nowhere.

Yesterday’s parliamentary hearings add something to Rusbridger’s account. In the Home Affairs Committee hearing, Metropolitan Police public affairs chief Dick Fedorcio suggested that the Times piece did more than prompt a new and inconclusive inquiry. He cited it as the direct cause of his decision to terminate Neil Wallis’ contract with the Met.

Moreover, getting the Times on board “gave courage to others,” in Rusbridger’s words, opening the door for pieces in the Independent, Vanity Fair, and the Financial Times, for broadcast reports and for new victims to come forward with lawsuit: “A wider group of people began to believe that maybe, just maybe, there was something in this after all.”

Stories this complex, with tentacles that reach deep into multiple powerful institutions – News International, the Metropolitan Police, Downing Street – need to be tackled like a hydra, from all sides at once. One news outlet can try to do it all, but, as Rusbridger’s article shows, it works better if each news team has time to focus deeply on one angle, and the ability to share findings freely with those who are coming at the beast from another side. Moreover, a story of this type, one that will raise shocking questions about institutions so embedded in our society, whose authority and honesty we are taught to trust, cannot break through if it comes only from one corner. True though the revelations may be – and Davies’ work was flawless - they are too easy to dismiss until they have been cross-checked and verified by multiple voices.

This is not the first time that the Guardian and the New York Times have worked closely together. Just a few weeks after the Times’ hacking story appeared, the paper appealed to Guardian for a favor: access to the latest tranche of Wikileaks documents, which Julian Assange had barred the New York Times from receiving after the paper ran a critical profile of Mr. Assange. At the time, I expressed enthusiasm for the Guardian’s decision to be generous with the documents, and hoped that it would be the start of a new paradigm for collaborative reporting. This week’s events bolster that hope.

The Guardian and New York Times collaborations have been struck at the highest levels, by phone calls between top editors. But at Public Business, we believe that all reporters and researchers should have access to the benefits this kind of partnership provides. That is why we’re working on establishing a space here on this website where journalists, nonprofit researchers and academic researchers can share their findings securely with one another, comment and build on one another’s work. Expect to see more about our plans in the months ahead.

It begins by laying out the unpleasant reality of what the news advertising business looks like today, focusing on the mismatch between traffic and revenue. An ever-expanding share of news audiences is online, but the greatest share of news advertising revenue is still in newspapers and on TV. That pattern, gleaned from interviews with news outlets in 2010 and early 2011, is similar to what we learned in our own preliminary research in 2009 and 2010.

One thing we did, though, was to look at news consumption as opposed to simply news consumers. Because it is not just that news organizations have to serve more readers online with less money. It is that they have to serve more content to more readers online with less money, and with that money targeted to the level of the individual story. The implication: for digital journalism to be sustainable as a standalone business, for its wee slice of revenue to cover the large percentage of consumption it represents, every story must pay for itself, and must cost less.

This report, to its credit, is blunt about that reality. It explores a handful of strategies for making news pay online, but it emphasizes that each one must be accompanied by bean counting on the editorial side, beyond what will come naturally from crashing production costs.

While it takes note of sites that have managed to eke out profits on a teensy budget, its business-side focus means there’s not enough evaluation of the content these sites have produced. It asks, for example, whether the hyperlocal model can support ‘serious accountability journalism’ but then fails to establish which – if any – of the hyperlocal sites profiled (TBD, Baristanet, The Batavian, Patch) qualifies as providing ‘serious accountability journalism.’

In failing to answer that question, this report doesn’t do much to challenge the contention made by last year’s reports from both Columbia Journalism School and the F.T.C. that certain types of public interest reporting are too fundamentally expensive to fit in the new market, that they will have to be supported by the public and nonprofit sectors. [More on these proposals here.]

We believe strongly that on the business beat, there is a unique case, both ethically and financially, to be made for nonprofit funding for certain types of stories, which is why we’re doing it.

But we would still like to see more discussion of the public-interest potential of for-profit media models. There is lots of good discussion about how to make news profitable, and lots of good discussion about how to make news better, but there is not enough discussion and research that tackles these questions together. That can’t be a good thing, for the media or the public.

As for the report’s findings and recommendations on the business side, they are mostly the things we already knew:

1. News is not going to become profitable online until the online advertising industry gets much more sophisticated, and more significantly, consistent, about its metrics. Unfortunately, this isn’t really something news executives have it in their power to solve, so they’re stuck waiting for an awful lot of dust to settle.

2. The best opportunities for making money from news come from focusing on niche verticals and hyperlocal sites. To break even, the report suggests, these sites should use tracking tools to advertise differently to their enthusiast regular visitors than they do to the rest. In particular, they suggest, an enthusiast site can show its most devoted users big, expensive, roadblock ads that have to be clicked through to access the site content and charge advertisers an additional premium for accessing these users. There’s something deeply wrongheaded about suggesting that news organizations can be more successful by treating their most devoted customers to the most annoying form of advertising, by suggesting they can ‘get away with it,’ and thereby encouraging the very callousness about audience that got the media in a rut to begin with.

3. Paywalls are not a solution. The report points out how inflated the numbers for subscriptions have been and how quickly subscriptions fall off after the initial buzz has worn off, two problems we’ve noted before. Like many media wonks, the report’s authors are more sanguine about the sustainability of tablet subscriptions. But they are completely (and justifiably) skeptical of the iPad as the tablet that will make this model work, given the 30% commission Apple charges publishers for using its platform. The report notes that one publisher – Time, Inc. – has had luck setting up its own sales platform for tablet subscriptions. That is heartening, but the report doesn’t go into the details of Time, Inc.’s pricing model, subscription stats, or revenue. Not especially useful to the news exec looking to use it as a blueprint.

The main purpose of reports like this is to provide best practices and cautionary tales to the rest of us. Because it lacks qualitative analysis of the websites profiled, and sufficient financial detail, this report fails to fulfill that purpose.

Public Business Launch, London, Part 1 from Maha Atal on Vimeo.

Public Business Launch, London, Part 2 from Maha Atal on Vimeo.

Public Business Launch Event, New York from Maha Atal on Vimeo.

I’ve been reasonably patient and benefit-of-the-doubt-giving about the new AOL, but this strikes me as a terrible idea. First, there’s the gap between how the two companies see ‘content.’ For all the heat it takes on the grounds that it doesn’t pay its writers (and that heat is deserved), the HuffPo is very much a place that believes there’s value to a publisher in original reporting. The front page may still read like the liberal answer to Drudge that its founders had in mind, but of late, the site has made major expansions into more serious coverage, and I increasingly run into HuffPo reporters who are doing gumshoe work. It is much more than an aggregator with great SEO managers, though it is that too.

AOL when Tim Armstrong first took it over promised to be that, hiring a number of high-profile journalists from collapsing newspapers to work on a number of smart blogs, and even recruiting stringers as foreign correspondents. But in the last few months, the strategy has shifted. This presentation of AOL’s new metrics for success is pessimistic and unimaginative, a vision of digital media seems stuck in the noisy, SEO-obsessed world of five years ago. It’s certainly not a vision that’s compatible with the kind of place that HuffPo has grown up to be, nor with some of the more interesting elements of AOL’s current content stable. No surprise, then, that those elements are the first to be thrown overboard.

Second, the new ‘AOL way’ is all about mass appeal, and, as everyone knows, the Huffington Post is partisan project. I am not sure what is harder to imagine: that all of AOL’s platforms could conform to Ariana Huffington’s worldview, or that the Huffington Post could suddenly shift center, in the way that Armstrong and Huffington promised when talking about the deal to AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher.

Actually, the whole Swisher interview is worth watching, because it highlights these two culture clashes–on politics and on reporting–that make me skeptical of the deal: listening to Ariana and then Armstrong, it seems as though they are talking about separate mergers. AOL. has been down the dangerous route of a merger with a very different culture before, and it had disastrous consequences. It’s a shame it seems to be making the same mistake twice.

This article is cross-posted from Instant Cappuccino.

First, there was the question of whether Wikileaks is a journalistic enterprise whose work should be published in full, linked to extensively, and treated with respect by the dead-tree publications of the world, or whether it’s a source to be used–like all sources should be–skeptically and sparingly? I’m inclined to view it as the latter, and I think most of the news organizations have now come around to that view as well. That’s why you see less actual publication of documents on the news org websites this time than you saw with the war logs. [The Guardian editors explain that choice here.]

Second, as we come to understand Wikileaks as a new kind of source, news organizations are beginning to writeabout Wikileaks the organization, and Julian Assange is less-than-thrilled with some of the coverage. The New York Times, which has been more aggressive in its critique of Assange than some other major papers, found itself officially cut out of this document release. But the Times managed to get access to the documents in time for the embargo anyway…via the Guardian. And that–trans-Atlantic sharing of an exclusive sources between publications similar enough in ethos to be competitors–is news. It’s a meaningful shift towards a more collaborative model of journalism, and a shift I welcome.

Third, as we come to see Wikileaks as just a source, news organizations are having to decide whether to cover them at all, and–as we often do with delicate subject matter–how to balance the scoop against the risk to those implicated. I have very minimal sympathy with Wikileaks’ overall agenda, which seems increasingly to be about embarrassing the US government for the sake of it rather than to advance any particular cause, but I do think that news organizations have an obligation to cover these leaks in some fashion once they’ve occurred. They can pick and choose what to include on the basis of what’s really significant, and they can avoid reprinting the actual documents if they see a risk to someone’s life, but they can’t just choose to ignore the whole development.  That’s why I think it’s deplorable that two major news organizations–the Wall Street Journal and CNN–chose to turn down access to the documents altogether, because, in essence, they were afraid of being compromised. National security reporting is inevitably compromised and risky, and to run from that challenge is unjournalistic, and wrong.

Finally, to those who are still itching for something substantive on the documents, I’ve read two good analyses that I’ll pass on. First, Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian says the documents–in their non-scandal–show us a benign side of international politics, and that the US actually comes off better than the countries from which its emissaries are writing. Second, Dan Drezner at Foreign Policy hypothesizes that while the ease of the leak is likely to push the US government to tighten up its data security further (not to open itself more as some technorati would like), it may make intelligence failures more likely because it will be pushing us back to the barriers between agencies that plagued US agencies in the lead-up to 9/11. Somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a rational balance between information sharing and data security, but it’s going to take us years to find it.

Cross-posted from Foreign Exchange.

The Times of London’s paywall, which blocks non-subscribers from reading anything except headlines–came down in July, and this month, News Corp announced that it 105,000 people have paid to access the site since then. Here’s the problem: we have no idea what kind of access they paid for. How many paid for desktop access vs. applications on the Kindle or the iPad? How many paid for a promotional subscription at a lower rate during the first few weeks? How many paid for single articles vs. for the whole site? Without answers to those questions, it’s impossible to know if the paywall is worth the dramatic crash in traffic that the Times has suffered. PaidContent did their best to sound cheerful in the rough calculations they published, but even they admit, the numbers look “a little meagre.” The FT,MediaGuardian and Clay Shirky were much less charitable.

It’s a pity because the Times’ redesigned site is a pretty sleek affair. But it’s a shame for another reason too: the Times paywall was not just an experiment for the Times but an experiment for the industry. And even those of us who agree with the Murdochs about next-to-nothing were curious about how it would work. Because we can’t get ahold of the details, the paywall can’t serve as a teaching moment. We know it probably didn’t work, but we don’t know exactly why, or where the failings were. Shame on James Murdoch for that.

Meanwhile, here in New York, the New York Times metered system is about to launch. I’m already a full print-and-web subscriber, so it won’t affect me, but one thing that is nice is to know that the meter–unlike Murdoch’s paywall–doesn’t shut out search, or traffic from blogs and other websites, which means I can keep linking to the Grey Lady from here. In that, it’s going to be a bit like the FT’s model (which I like). There’s more info on the meter and other things the NYT is thinking about in the most recent earnings call. [Worth noting: yes, profits are down for this quarter, but year to date, 2010 is looking to be a more profitable year than 2009.]

But here’s the interesting thing: despite all the hype surrounding it, the Times management seems to have already conceded that the meter is too soft an approach to radically change its digital revenue stream. CEO Janet Robinsontold Robb Montgomery that she think the real paid content winner is apps. Assistant Managing Editor Gerry Marzorati told a conference in New York that the Times can stay afloat for awhile by hiking up rates on its print subscribers, and scandalized many-a-blogger by noting that many subscribers don’t know what they pay. I’m not sure, exactly, how the meter helps either of those strategies along, or why so much time an effort went into it if the head honchos don’t expect it to make a splash. Thoughts?

This article is cross posted from Instant Cappuccino.

I had not considered however, the possibility that small new media might buy up big old media. That appears to be happening now, as Newsweek–just recently purchased by Sidney Harman–considers an offer from Tina Brown’s Daily Beast.

I am not a fan of the Daily Beast. There are one or two very smart people I know who write for them, but for the most part, I find the site tabloid-y. Its better writers are people whose work already had a platform at Slate or Salon or elsewhere. It’s unclear to me, more than a year after its launch, what the Daily Beast has added to the digital mediaverse that wasn’t there already. Given that I feel rather similarly about weekly news magazines, one would think I would be down on this merger.

But I’m not, entirely, because I still have a great deal of confidence in Tina Brown as an editor. As editor of Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992, then as editor of the New Yorker from 1992 to 1998, her mark on American journalism is undeniable. She gave Vanity Fair the combination of high fashion photography and deeply reported narrative that make it suo generis. She gave the New Yorker a batch of new writers–Jeffrey Toobin, Lawrence Wright and Adam Gopnik stand out–who made it fun to read again.  And through their voices, their combination of rich narrative, beautiful prose and rigorous reporting, she had a tremendous impact on me and the kind of journalism I aspire to produce. If that Tina Brown–magazine editor Brown–is taking over Newsweek, only good things can come of it. But if Newsweek is going to become a print version of the Daily Beast, I’ll pass.

Updated, 10/18/2010: The merger talks have fallen apart, because Brown, Harman and Barry Diller (who owns a piece of the Beast) couldn’t agree on how to share control. Says Brown in today’s WSJ: “The engagement was fun, but the pre-nup got too complex.”

Updated, 11/12/2010: The merger is back on. Read the announcement here. And note, it’s clear what Newsweek gets from the deal (Tina and her readers!), but it’s not clear to me what the Beast is getting, or what its future is.

This article is cross-posted from Instant Cappuccino.