Well, Steve and Brian are free to start the New York Review of Journalism.

But I’m not sure how many will miss CJRDaily. It didn’t get a lot of link love; maybe it wasn’t polemic enough. It had a nice balance of content, but it was missing the heavy stuff published in the magazine (where OJR had pulled it all together in under one brand). And the lighter stuff, like the “Blog Report” feature, was nothing that couldn’t be found elsewhere.

If conversations are the currency of online journalism, there was a stretch in February where the only person responding regular was I. And the CJR staff never responded back. (see examples.)

My comments were often acerbic, sure, because I expected better from Columbia Journalism School. Many of their “Blog Reports” were just copy-and-paste jobs which didn’t elucidate anything on the craft.

I can’t explain why there were so few conversations– it was not like I making ideological complaints about the “liberal media” or about how the Times is insufficiently pro-Israel. Sure, they can ignore nobodies in the comments, but I made a point when I stopped by 116th & Broadway to introduce myself to Steve.

But there’s a broader problem. The Online Journalism Review at USC can barely drum up conversations. The Online News Assocation member email list languishes. Here on CitMedia, there’s a roster of “citizen media types” — defined as people who don’t comment to the blogs. Without Seth and myself, you’d have a much sparser community. The Poynter Institute remains the one media-crit site that has broad coverage and an online community, for what it’s worth.

BTW, Lemann deserves credit for the Campaign Desk and keeping the enterprise going afterward. He’s also one of the best journalists in America. And I grant that he’s in a tough situation now.

But for me, the evidence (including that New Yorker piece, which was not what I would call his best journalism) strongly suggests retreat, not advancement.

The Editor & Publisher piece is shot through with dubious boosterism. For, err, example:

“Online ad spending has been rising dramatically over the past few years and is forecast to rise even more rapidly in years to come, particularly on sites where advertisers can target a valuable niche audience. While Lemann blames slow Web ad revenue generally, there are more than a few online news sites and blogs that turn a nice profit”

One can’t eat “forecast”, and advertising is a cyclic business. We already went through one peak and trough cycle, and there will certainly be another. The sites which are profitable tend to be those which play to the crowd, or sell high-margin products, which is different from the kind of think-piece material at issue here. C’mon, you should be able to spot this sort of smoke-and-mirrors marketing, in your sleep.

Then the piece outlines where Lemann made a mistake in pursuing a funder and not advertising. OK, it didn’t work, but given the unreliability of advertising income, and the pressure it brings, looking for a big-money funder was probably a good idea at the time.

“killed the magazine and converted everything to online (including advertising), inviting free content and contributions from the public.”

Umm, I think this is unclear on the concept. The problem is how to pay a staff – not how to publish a website by not paying a staff and taking what you can get for free, and trying to be popular and inflammatory to drive the ad revenue (it should now be really obvious why Lemann tried to avoid this!).

It’s completely unclear if using the website to drive subscriptions works well (i.e., cost-effectively) at the small scale of CJR. It’s a nice idea, but very speculative. Note the website is not going away. That idea could be tried later – perhaps after the mail campaign.

“I can’t find any evidence to even suggest that redirecting resources to direct mail campaigns, in order to prop up a publication that has 20,000 aging subscribers, will work as he claims. If there’s any such evidence, I’d like to see it.”

My understanding is that the chain of reasoning is as follows:
1) The print publication is currently profitable
2) Direct-mail campaigns can increase subscriptions
3) More subscriptions means more profit
4) The profit is projected to exceed the cost of the direct-mail campaign

Assumption #4 is the most debatable, but it certainly seems *reasonable*.

Note it’s not a fair rebuttal to say that print is dying, etc. etc.
We’re talking about raising money THIS YEAR, RIGHT NOW. If it’s raised from 80 year old geezers, they’re not dead yet, and their money is just as good as MySpace teens.

Regarding: “Lemann is definitely a true believer: in the traditions and practices, journalistic and business-wise, of the past.”

“Statement from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism dean Nick Lemann
regarding CJR Daily

“In 2004, thanks to the generosity of a consortium of foundations, we were given a wonderful opportunity to start a Web site called Campaign Desk — a branch of Columbia Journalism Review that monitored the press coverage of the last presidential campaign. When the campaign ended, we turned Campaign Desk into an ongoing, general-purpose site called CJRDaily. We did this on a wing and a prayer, because we did not have funding commitments in hand to keep the staff at the size it was during the campaign indefinitely.”

Factual questions:
Is this wrong? (i.e. is he taking credit for someone else’s work?)
If it’s right, does this sound like “a true believer: in the traditions and practices, journalistic and business-wise, of the past.”
*WHAT* *EVIDENCE* COULD HE GIVE AND STILL DISAGREE WITH YOU?

This is all a deeply ugly side of blogging.

You defend Lemann’s reasoning as sensible. On that we simply disagree.

The best analysis I’ve seen of Lemann’s position is this one in Editor & Publisher. Whether Lemann has ever even tried to make the site more self-supporting is at best debatable, for one thing; in fact, what we know makes fairly clear that there’s been almost no such effort.

I can’t find any evidence to even suggest that redirecting resources to direct mail campaigns, in order to prop up a publication that has 20,000 aging subscribers, will work as he claims. If there’s any such evidence, I’d like to see it.

As the E&P story shows, however, there’s actual evidence to suggest that the way to sell print subscriptions (if that’s the goal) is to make better use of the online product, in part by investing in that.

Lemann is definitely a true believer: in the traditions and practices, journalistic and business-wise, of the past.

I hope someone will find a way to move CJRDaily.org away from Columbia University and the Columbia Journalism Review. It deserves better stewardship than it’s getting at the moment.

By “all the A-lister hype”, I meant that when an A-lister makes a marketing salles-pitch [exact examples I'll have to omit for self-preservation, but any slogan with "people" or "conversation" in it, is a good candidate], and gets criticized, they plead nuance, context, charitable interpretation – and of course the critics are using a straw man. But these practices of nuance, context, charitable interpretation, are not to be applied to those not of Kool-Aid 2.0. Instead, the reverse, statements are to be held up as proof of the unholy nature of the heretic, and interpreted as harshly as possible.

Concretely, Lemann is being raked over the coals in part as retaliation for saying some mildly critical things about the mismatch between sloganeering and reality. And the irony is that far from being a hypocrite, he’s being completely consistent with what he wrote, in that he’s got to deal with the real economics of journalism.

Look, “As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.” doesn’t mean “We ought to throw ever spare dollar we have at every money-losing cash-bleeding project that’s associated with the Internet, because it’s The Future” (no matter how much some would like that!).

Look at his reasoning (my emphasis):

“Mr. Lemann said he was faced with the same quandary confronting most news organizations today – how to pay for an online staff when the site is free to readers.

The Web site will soon start to sell advertising, hold conferences and sell archival material, he said, but even that revenue WILL NOT SUPPORT THE COST of the staff. He said he had been “out fund-raising every day,” but HAD NOT SCRAPED TOGETHER ENOUGH TO FINANCE THE SITE AT FULL STRENGTH.

As a result, he said, he has decided that a campaign to gain subscribers for the print magazine, while expensive, will RESULT IN MORE INCOME, which WILL HELP MAINTAIN AN ONLINE STAFF that he said would still be bigger than that of most other magazines.”

This is thoroughly sensible.

But he’s not a True Believer. So reason doesn’t matter.

Is the same “embarrass a politician” standard being applied to Lemann as is applied to all the A-lister hype? Obviously not.

To me, this is another instance where a critic has the better of the argument on the facts (show-me-the-money), and that’s obscured by rhetoric designed to make life unpleasant for the doubters.