Digital

The Daily Dot, the “hometown newspaper of the Internet,” is a bizarre proposition to say the least. But founder Nicholas White is determined to make it work, and more power to him. (Jobs! Journalism! Awesome!)

He’s hired scads of talent, including former Valleywag editor Owen Thomas, and as White says in this piece for MediaShift that that’s all part of the plan.

“Everything, from Backfence to Patch, is about creating a technological solution and keeping human expenses as low as possible. That only works if you’re creating a content farm,” he says. “When sites have gone (comparatively) premium — The Huffington Post, Politico, TMZ — they can be successful, but they are expensive. They have a lot of employees.”

Out of White’s five tips for other media entrepreneurs, two of them involve hiring.

One: “Get the team in place, and get them in place early. You can never have someone too early — you can always manage budget or other timing issues by having someone keep their current job for the time being and start in a month, or three months.”

Two: “Don’t compromise on people. People make any business. But early on, there are no norms, no momentum to sweep people along. Everyone is going to feel like they’re dragging a big boulder uphill. There’s going to be lots to improvise, and relatively little room for learning on the job. You need people who are ready to operate on the best information they have, and yet still question everything they know. You need people who can take surprises in stride, who are ready to plan, but also to act.”

The Daily Dot exited beta this week.

One analyst has estimated that AOL is spending $150,000 per year on each of its roughly 1,000 Patch sites, the WSJ says.

That’s insane.

We know that each Patch has a jack/jill-of-all-trades editor who makes around $40,000. Then there’s the freelance budget (roughly $26,000 a year, we hear) and the salary for each regional editor who oversees a number of individual Patch sites. Let’s estimate that each regional editor makes $100,000 and oversees five sites. That’s $20,000 a year per Patch.
Then there are the ad sales people, roughly $40k a year, but they must work on more than one Patch each; let’s be conservative and assume 3 sites per salesperson.

That’s $93,000 per Patch per year.

Someone at AOL want to tell us where the rest of the money is going?

At any rate, the $160 million per year AOL is reportedly spending on Patch pales in comparison to the $315 million it spent earlier this year to buy the Huffington Post; AOL also spent nearly $100 million last year to acquire TechCrunch, 5min Media and Thing Labs.

The Wall Street Journal argues that AOL is spending more than it can hope to make back.

“If you sell lemonade for $1 and it costs $800 to make it, that’s not a great business,” Robert Peck, managing partner at Quasar Capital Advisors, which advises Internet and technology companies, told the WSJ.

On the other hand, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said that things are looking up: AOL’s domestic display-ad business should start growing in the second half of the year.

Progressive site Truthout looks at the growing movement of comic book/graphic novel writers and cartoonists tackling journalism.

Comics journalist Dan Archer has drawn comics about the 2009 Honduran coup and the 2007 Nisoor Square shootings. Joe Sacco’s “Palestine,” based on two months of on-the-ground reporting, is considered a seminal work of comics journalism.

But recently, there’s been a new way of doing comics journalism that doesn’t require a book deal.

Cartoonists Ted Rall and Matt Bors traveled to Afghanistan in 2010 on $25,000 raised on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter. The resulting book is going to be picked up by Farrar, Straus & Giroux for a 2012 publishing date.

On a smaller scale, Sarah Glidden rose $2000 to fund a trip to the Middle East.

Truthout says:

For the uninitiated, Glidden’s quest to report from Syria without journalistic experience or funding and to do so in comics, may seem laughable. Yet Glidden, whom I talked with after she returned from traveling to Iraqi Kurdistan and Syria with a group of veteran reporters from the Seattle-based Common Language Project, might be the first to laugh. She told me she is in awe of great reporting and is fully aware that she isn’t a reporter and that comics are not a medium that the average reader takes seriously.

And while many readers may not take her chosen medium seriously, Glidden, also observed, the average American reader – her 30-something urbanite friends in particular – don’t take serious news seriously anymore. Her friends “hate journalists, distrust the media and want to tune out.”…By contrast to the typical, sterile establishment reports from Iraq, Glidden’s comic report is full of life: she thrust herself into an underreported story half-way round the world, spending her own money and devoting countless hours translating interviews into images and shaping an accurate and compelling narrative that brings her subjects to life and, hopefully, “tricks” her world-weary friends past their cynicism.

Could this be the first wave of successful crowd-funded journalism projects? We hope so.

A screengrab from Stumbling Towards Damascus is below.

Last month, the Wichita Eagle reorganized its newsroom, affecting 50 of 60 staffers.

Most now report to deputy editor of digital, John Boogert, instead of reporting to a print section editor, reports the Knight Digital Media Center (which funded a leadership workshop in which the reorg was apparently planned).

Boogert reports to editor and vice president Sherry Chisenhall along with three other senior editors: a deputy editor for print, a deputy editor who “focuses on the news desk and production of both online and print,” and a senior editor for investigations.

The print editor’s responsibility is to make sure online stories are “tweaked, augmented or reshaped for the next day’s newspaper.”

“We clearly place print at the end of the process,” Chisenhall told KDMC.

Will it work? They’re only a month in to the reorg, KDMC notes. But if this change can create a more engaging online experience that people will pay for, great!

Writing about boobs and sex noises is probably not part of the job description for writers at Min, that publication that provides breaking news for people in the publishing business—Min contains lots of serious articles about which ad sales reps have changed jobs and how to monetize content.

But that has changed—at least for today, when Minonline digital editor Steve Smith reviewed Hearst’s new Cosmo For Guys iPad magazine.

The gist: While Smith concedes that building an interactive iPad app is not cheap, it’s so much less expensive than launching a new magazine that Hearst could afford to put lots of interactive gizmos in.

He writes, playing it straight:

The best thing about CFG is that it presses against the confines of magazine convention. Because they are not tasked with starting an “enhanced” version of a print entity, the creators have freed themselves to engage more interactive and real-time features than most mag apps we have seen. … The features on women’s bedroom moans and the large collection of women recounting best sexual experiences are immeasurably more effective because you can tap audio samples and hear the narrative.

….
And like fantasy football, this app is filled with stats, almost all of them calculated in real time as users interact with the app. The best of these features in the CFG Sex Map, which monitors how women across the country are answering a set of burning questions like “Nipple biting: hot or not?” The page pulls in the current percentages as women enter their responses but also maps the binary responses on a map so you can see how the answers are running in your vicinity. This is fun and cool.

Smith goes on to compare and contrast other features (the 3D sex position models are “fun but less informative”; the quizzes are useless without a 3G connection) and ultimately gives the app a B+.

But we would have killed to be inside the newsroom when this story was being written.

The New Yorker said that it has 100,000 iPad readers, including 20,000 who have paid a $59.99 subscription fee for the year, the NYT reports.

That’s $1.2 million in revenue for what is essentially the same product as the print magazine.

It proves, the Times said, that iPad apps don’t have to be complementary to the print product, with extras or video ads. The iPad app can be the print product.

“There are some bells and whistles, but we’re very careful about that. We think about whether or not they add any value. And if they don’t, out the window they go,” Pamela Maffei McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, told the Times.

In fact, the New Yorker app is outselling every other Conde Nast app out there, including the much-lauded Wired. It helps that demographics for iPad owners (wealthy consumers of news) are similar to the demographics of New Yorker subscribers. It could be that the New Yorker’s text-heavy format works better on a tablet than a magazine with “highly stylized photo shoots and sleekly designed page layouts.”

But can we say again: $1.2 million in revenue since subscriptions became available in the spring. And yes, someone needed to get paid to develop the app, but it’s not a complicated app, with just a few extras (one such extra links to primary sources from articles). This is good news for digital media all around.

The silos are breaking down, says Arik C. Hanson, principal of ACH Communications in Minnesota. When before you could be just a writer or just a photographer, tomorrow’s PR pro is going to need to know more than one technology. (We’ve already seen this happen in journalism.)

“Many companies cannot afford to specialize any longer when it comes to content. Sure, they need quality, but not at a severe cost (and not for every project)….companies will be looking more and more for a professional with storytelling skills. And photography skills. And video producing and editing skills. These people exist–just not in big numbers quite yet.”

A PR ‘media producer’ would know the basics of photography, writing, SEO, social media, video, and podcasting, just to name a few.

Hanson says he’s already seen some employers looking for such a candidate.

And if you think this is nigh impossible, look what one producer (who, to be fair, specializes in video) for the National Science Foundation did recently. Total budget: $0. That’s right, $0. So writers, that excuse about how it costs too much to learn video just went out the window.

(story via)

In what may be the best use of q&a site Quora thus far, three New York Times reporters will be holding question and answer sessions on the site to talk about their new books (which Bill Keller tongue-in-cheekily wishes his employees would stop writing).

The first will be tomorrow, when Diana B. Henriques answers questions about Wizard of Lies, her book about Bernie Madoff.

Gretchen Morgenson and Adam Bryant will follow on July 26 and August 2, respectively.

According to Times digital initiatives boss Jim Schachter, Diana is already addressing Madoff-related questions that have already been posted to the site. Sadly, this doesn’t yet appear to be true (hey, managing daily deadlines and mucking around on Quora takes time) but we’ll keep an eye out.

ERE.net reports that next week two “virtual job fairs” will bring thousands of jobseekers from at least eight cities to electronically network and meet with recruiters.

The first event is the American Jobs Conference, organized by TweetMyJobs. It will take place entirely on Twitter, with the hashtag #jobs4us. Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty will keynote the conference, and there will be question and answer sessions, panels, and advice from 9am PDT Tuesday to 3:15.

The second event takes place a day later, on July 20. Tribune Digital is offering a virtual job fair for 50 employers that would have placed ads in one of eight of Tribune Co.’s newspapers, in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Hartford, Orlando, South Florida, Central Pennsylvania and Newport News, Va. Interested jobseekers should register through one of the websites listed in this press release depending on which city you’re nearest to. This is a true “virtual” fair in the sense that participants “travel” from booth to booth, network in the “lobby,” and participate in video interviews if the recruiter likes the cut of their jib.

We’ve been down on virtual career fairs in the past, but other people have really liked them, and virtual fairs have at least one big advantage: they’re cheap.

For recruiters, that means that multiple recruiters can take turns staffing a booth (without having to pay to fly all of them to the event). For jobseekers, no travel means you don’t have to take a day off work. ERE.net even says that the event will be accessible from smartphones.

This event takes place from 11am to 5PM CST the 20th. We’ll try to sneak in and report back.

Time Inc.’s Cooking Light and MyRecipes.com have hired Rich Rennie to serve in the newly created position of national digital director, the company announced in a release.

He will manage the digital sales teams for both brands as well as all other “digital food assets.”

Rennie will report directly to publisher Karla Partilla.

“Rich has a stellar reputation in the industry,” Partilla said in the statement. “He is hardworking, focused, and a great leader, with a background in selling integrated print and digital packages that will be valuable to our brands.”

Rennie previously worked at People, also part of Time Inc.; and, according to his LinkedIn profile, also worked at Woman’s Day magazine and Walt Disney World.