2 Editors Resign at Web Site Linked to Journalism Review
The managing editor of CJRDaily.org, an online adjunct of The Columbia Journalism Review, and his deputy both quit yesterday after the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism told them he was cutting the site’s budget nearly in half.
The dean, Nicholas Lemann, said in an interview that the amount of money raised for the Web site could not sustain the online staff, and he was using a portion of the magazine’s discretionary money for a direct-mail campaign to try to increase subscriptions to the print magazine. The journalism review, which comes out six times a year, has a circulation of 20,000.
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. …
I sympathize with the situation, but this solution doesn’t make any sense… or, rather, it makes sense in a rapidly fading frame of reference. Their strategy for monetizing the site may not have been robust enough to satisfy “projections” (notoriously squirrelly little buggers). But stripping resources from a medium that potentially reaches millions of people each month is counterintuitive. It would have been better for students, faculty and readers alike for the University to commit to the medium and to develop innovative ways to support the site (there are hundreds of these, several popping off the top of my head right now; I’d send over a list, but it looks like we’re past that point). If the product suffers, it will be a narrowing of the University’s influence and a loss for media criticism, which would be a shame. Here’s hoping there’s a twist ending.
Paper Chase
A curious decision (and a cautionary tale) at Columbia, where print is just the bee’s knees (via the NYTimes):
I sympathize with the situation, but this solution doesn’t make any sense… or, rather, it makes sense in a rapidly fading frame of reference. Their strategy for monetizing the site may not have been robust enough to satisfy “projections” (notoriously squirrelly little buggers). But stripping resources from a medium that potentially reaches millions of people each month is counterintuitive. It would have been better for students, faculty and readers alike for the University to commit to the medium and to develop innovative ways to support the site (there are hundreds of these, several popping off the top of my head right now; I’d send over a list, but it looks like we’re past that point). If the product suffers, it will be a narrowing of the University’s influence and a loss for media criticism, which would be a shame. Here’s hoping there’s a twist ending.
This entry was posted on August 11, 2006 at 2:47 am and is filed under Color Commentary, Foreshadowing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.