via 10 New York Times Visualizations | A Beautiful WWW.

By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010.

After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, some experiments with new revenue models began to show signs of blossoming.

via The State of the News Media 2011.

During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

PRINCIPLES OF JOURNALISM

In 1997, an organization then administered by PEJ, the Committee of Concerned Journalists, began a national conversation among citizens and news people to identify and clarify the principles that underlie journalism. After four years of research, including 20 public forums around the country, a reading of journalism history, a national survey of journalists, and more, the group released a Statement of Shared Purpose that identified nine principles. These became the basis for The Elements of Journalism, the book by PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel and CCJ Chairman and PEJ Senior Counselor Bill Kovach. Here are those principles, as outlined in the original Statement of Shared Purpose.

The first among them is that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing.

To fulfill this task:

1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. 
2. Its first loyalty is to citizens. 
3. Its essence is a discipline of verification. 
4. Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover. 
5. It must serve as an independent monitor of power. 
6. It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise. 
7. It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant. 
8. It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional. 
9. Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

Nicholas Kristof has been writing for The New York Times for more than a quarter century and has appeared on that paper’s op-ed page since 2001, often penning articles about the struggles of people in distant parts of the world. He has even been dubbed the “moral conscience” of his generation of journalists. Less well known is his role as an innovator in journalism. In 2003, he became the first blogger for The New York Times website. Ever since then, Kristof has been a pioneer among journalists in the digital world. He’s active on Twitter and Facebook. In 2012, he even plans to venture into online gaming.

Kristof made his mark covering human rights crises around the world: the ongoing protests in Bahrain (he was tear-gassed there last month), to war in the Congo, to the genocide in Darfur (the latter won him a Pulitzer Prize). Kristof and his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn, won a joint Pulitzer for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. Despite Kristof’s print pedigree, he’s not afraid to jump into social media and experiment publicly. For six years, Kristof has been bringing readers directly into his work with his annual “Win a Trip” contest. The student with the winning essay travels with Kristof on a reporting trip to a developing country and then blogs about it. The 2012 edition of the contest recently opened for applications. We spoke with Kristof about how journalism is evolving in a digital world.

These especially troubled, historically uninventive media companies (such as the New York Times, ironically) must find their own paths to profit. Rather than feeling jaded by disinterested brands and dwindling ad dollars,

via Advertisers Grasp at Straws.

As the internet destroys the local advertising monopoly previously enjoyed by newspapers, newspaper people are talking about radically altering their current digital business models. One idea getting a lot of attention is that that iTunes Music Store points to a generalizable model for selling digital content.

via Why iTunes is not a workable model for the newspaper business « Clay Shirky.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

via Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it.

via How to Save Your Newspaper – TIME.