As AdAge points out, Groupon’s 2010 revenue of $760 million is one-quarter of the entire US newspaper’s online revenue. No wonder news folk want in.

While it is not yet nearly enough to stop the steady bleed in print ad dollars, media companies are seeing their own Groupon-style deals bring in new revenue. Better yet, the revenue is often from entirely new customers. The San Diego Union-Tribune is now making more money in deals than in interactive advertising. That’s more revenue than LivingSocial in San Diego, said Mike Hodges, Union-Tribune’s VP-interactive. “We’re not up to the Groupon standards but we’re starting to cut into their market share as well,” he added.

The New York Times launched its first daily deal, called TimesLimited, last week. Hearst will launch about 70 deals properties in the next month. And McClatchy, which first partnered with Groupon to provide deals to its web readership, will be rolling out its own in April.

Newspapers were caught flatfooted when Craigslist disrupted their lucrative classifieds business. While a little behind in the local coupon game they do have one significant advantage as they enter it: deep relationships within local markets where they publish.

Time will tell if they know how to leverage it or if it will be another opportunity that passes them by.

Originally posted on The Future Journalism Project.

Hello Future Journalism Project,

I’m not sure if you’ll answer a question from a pesky college student looking for answers on choosing the right decision for the future. I am an aspiring journalist, worked on my high school newspaper as editor-in-chief for two years, and had fierce competition from my junior editor-in-chief my senior year. I went to a B-rated college. It’s not as great as many may consider. My junior EIC got into Uc Berekely. Sh’s a year younger than me – but I feel my passion is still emerging. Does it matter what college I go to? Will she have better, bigger oppurtunities than me??

p.s. Sorry for the illiterate typing. I can’t see what I’m writing bneccause your ask box is too small for my question!

Have you ever read Cary Tennis? He’s the advice columnist for Salon and the reason I ask is because reading your question reminds me of him. It reminds me of him because he has the astute ability to read between the lines of life’s quandaries.

I don’t pretend to be as astute as Cary but I am going to read between your lines.

And here’s what I find: you feel burned.

You’re not only an aspiring journalist but took it seriously enough to not only work for your high school newspaper but become its Editor in Chief. You worked hard, you stayed up late, you stressed out but you did it. And then along comes another who’s a year younger but hungry just like you and the two of you butt heads over story ideas and angles and assignments and comma placement and heds and deks and everything else that goes into creating a newspaper.

And this pissed you off.

And it still pisses you off because you ended up at what you call a second rate school while she’s sitting high and mighty at one of the best colleges in the land.

Here’s what you need to do: let it go.

Will it matter that you went to a “B-rated college”? Not really. You’ll find that once you’re a few years out of college no one really cares which one you went to, or if you even went at all. What they care about is what you can actually do.

So don’t be bitter and don’t be pissed. These battles are well done gone and it’s time to move on.

And here’s what you should do: Join your college paper or — perhaps even better — find like minded collaborators and create something of your own. Then report the hell out of your subject.

Be tenacious. Write short form. Write long form. Take some multimedia classes and create in that form too.

And learn a bit of code. I can’t tell you how valuable it is to know a bit of code.

Build a body of work for yourself so that when you leave college you’re defined by the awesome that you created in college.

And then hustle. And then network. And start making yourself known to people and organizations that you think you’d like to work with some day.

Do all that and opportunities will come, regardless where you went or what’s printed on your diploma. — Michael

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project

In February, NYU’s Rodney Benson & Matthew Powers published Public Media and Political Independence: Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World (PDF). Above are public media per capita spending numbers from the study that compare 14 countries.

What you’re seeing is a high of $134 for Norway and a low of $4 for the United States.

In the introduction to the report, the two write:

In report after report, America’s public and noncommercial media sector has been held up as a core component to the future of hard-hitting, accountability journalism. All of the major reports released in 2009 and 2010 agreed that there is a vital role for public and noncommercial media to play, and that the federal government must work to strengthen and expand funding for it.1 Together, these reports sparked inquiries at both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

However, too often the moderate proposals for federal funding and public media run into a wave of protest and knee-jerk reactions against any and all government action. In fact, government has always and will always influence how our media system functions, from the early newspaper postal subsidies to handing out broadcast licenses and subsidizing broadband deployment. The question is not if government should be involved, but how, and that is a question that demands an in-depth conversation, not a shouting match.

And while the recent NPR flair-up had not occurred as of the report’s release, political pressure is nothing new when it comes to America’s public media.

And as the recent efforts by politicians to punish NPR for its firing of Juan Williams suggest, public media in America possess little autonomy from direct political pressure. How can public media be adequately funded and adequately protected from partisan political meddling? These decisions do not need to be made in a vacuum. The lessons of other democratic nations, many of whose public media systems have been around long before American public broadcasting, are instructive.

Two good articles exploring the report come from Miller-McCune and Nieman Labs. Journo geeks can download the report from FreePress.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Adobe proposed new CSS standards to the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards body for the Web, that would allow for more magazine-like layouts.

Called CSS Regions (PDF), the proposal is an attempt to break out of the typical grid layout that designers work within by creating a property called regions that aren’t constrained by geometry or position.

From the proposal:

CSS Multi-column Layout specification has pushed the limit of what is possible to achieve with CSS. However it still falls far short of the goal of representing typical magazine, newspaper, or textbook layouts in the digital space. This specification aims to close the remaining gap by giving content creators basic building blocks to express complex layouts. It does not aim to cover higher-level layout issues (e.g. allocating areas to fit all the content completely or placing areas on the page). These issues can be addressed by using either scripting or another CSS module.

The most obvious shortcoming of the CSS Multi-column layout is that columns are all of the same dimensions and placed next to each other. In more complex layouts, content can flow from one area of the page to next one without limitation of the area sizes and positions. For complex layouts, these areas need to be explicitly defined; in this specification they are called regions.

We noted the other day that Adobe released an FLV extraction tool called Wallaby that creates HTML, CSS and JavaScript versions of Flash animations, which is necessary for display on iOS devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

This proposal moves in the same direction by allowing designers to create complex layouts using Web standards instead of proprietary plugins and tools such as, say, Adobe’s Flash player.

Is the company cannibalizing itself then? Not really.

It’s still pushing forward with Flash Player 10.3 beta and last week previewed its 11.0 player. However, back in the print world it has InDesign and is pushing its adoption to create tablet ready apps. This was used, for example, to create digital magazines such as Wired and the New Yorker for the iPad.

If Adobe can get the proposed standards accepted, browsers will follow. And with that, they’ll have another tool at their disposal in their digital magazine publishing workflow. 

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Subsequently, Davis was arrested and charged with murder but the US government claimed he worked for the US Embassy and has diplomatic immunity.

Background, Part II: US media outlets reported the US government’s story, repeated claims that Davis served in some sort of diplomatic capacity, and while admitting the issue was cloudy, basically made the case that he could and should be freed.

Until, that is, the Guardian reported:

The American who shot dead two men in Lahore, triggering a diplomatic crisis between Pakistan and the US, is a CIA agent who was on assignment at the time.

To which the New York Times concurred, while adding:

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A.. On Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication, though George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined any further comment.

Issue, Part I: Salon’s Glenn Greenwald claims that not only did the Times withhold information, but it also included information in their reporting that they knew to be false:

It’s one thing for a newspaper to withhold information because they believe its disclosure would endanger lives. But here, the U.S. Government has spent weeks making public statements that were misleading in the extreme — Obama’s calling Davis “our diplomat in Pakistan” — while the NYT deliberately concealed facts undermining those government claims because government officials told them to do so. That’s called being an active enabler of government propaganda.

Issue, Part II: So should news organizations have revealed that Davis was CIA?

The Guardian Readers’ Editor Chris Elliot walks us through his news room’s decision to expose the connection, saying that newspapers are faced with such dilemmas all the time. They apply ethical tests, he writes, and live with the consequences.

Quoting David Katz, the paper’s deputy editor:

We came to the view that his CIA-ness was a critical part of the story, bound to be a factor in his trial or in attempts to have him released. The reasons we were given for not naming him were, firstly, that it may complicate his release – that is not our job. If he was held hostage other factors would kick in but he is in the judicial process. The other reason given by the CIA was that he would come to harm in prison.

The New York Times’ Public Editor Arthur Brisbane defends the newspaper’s actions, saying that news organizations don’t have standing to make life and death decisions.

As profoundly unpalatable as it is, I think the Times did the only thing it could do. Agreeing to the State Department’s request was a decision bound to bring down an avalanche of criticism and, even worse, impose serious constraints on The Times’s journalism. The alternative, though, was to take the risk that reporting the C.I.A. connection would, as warned, lead to Mr. Davis’s death.

In military affairs, there is a calculus that balances the loss of life against the gain of an objective. In journalism, though, there is no equivalent. Editors don’t have the standing to make a judgment that a story — any story — is worth a life. I find it hard to second-guess the editors’ assessment…

…It was a brutally hard call that, for some, damaged The Times’s standing. But to have handled it otherwise would have been simply reckless. I’d call this a no-win situation, one that reflects the limits of responsible journalism in the theater of secret war.

To report or not to report: Truthiness is a difficult gig.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Actually, there’s a third thing I find sexy: open government and organizations that increase government transparency.

For those counting, that might bring sexy up to four depending on your arithmetic.

So this is what I think: the Sunlight Foundation is a sexy organization. And the sultry group running Sunlight Labs gets data wonks and Open Gov advocates hot and bothered. 

Here’s what they ostensibly look like.

And here’s what they’ve recently done:

• Created the Real Time Congress API that gives developers real-time access to everything going on in Congress from bills to videos to votes and documents.
• Updated the Open States Project that’s doing very much the same thing on the state level.

This latter work might slip under the radar but is very important.

As Tom Lee writes on the Sunlight Labs Blog:

State legislatures are where vital decisions are made about civil rights, transportation, education, taxes, land use, gun regulation, and a host of other issues. Far too often, these issues don’t get the attention they deserve. It’s a simple question of scale: there are a lot more resources available at the federal level for both lawmakers and journalists. That means state governance both requires more transparency and tends to get less of it. We think technology can help make the situation better — that’s what Open States is all about.

Now it’s up to the rest of us to create great applications around this Open Gov treasure trove.

We’re looking forward to all sorts of new sexy. As a certain captain of a certain Starship Enterprise frequently said, “Make it so.”

And, by the way, they’re hiring.