At the Online Journalism Awards banquet this Saturday, Publish2 had the honor of receiving the first Gannett Foundation Award For Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism.
Here’s our big thank you to all the journalists that made our success possible.
Scott Karp (yes, he’s my boss over at the office) is more fascinated than I am about Google’s new FastFlip, but he’s wisely focusing on the fact that it’s an experiment with a new user experience for online news, and not implying that it’s something poised to Save Journalism.
Scott’s latest post on the topic argues that “content doesn’t matter without the package.”
“Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.”
It’s that last part that’s most interesting. I mean, it’s no surprise that the news business in the age of the Web now operates in a world of unbundled media, where the mp3 is currency, and the album is an outdated package. The individual news story, blog post, or tweet is not something we’re willing to pay for as consumers, even though we might occasionally still drop a few quarters in a box for a Sunday New York Times print edition — a packaged product that includes a bunch of individual items and products that we’re interested in. (For me, it’s just about the crossword, and it’s been multiple years since I last purchased said paper for said purpose.)
But. How do we consume all those broken up pieces of content, news, information, and commentary online?
Maybe we use Google Reader. (A package of RSS feeds we’ve selected.)
Or Twitter. (A package of microblogging feeds we’ve selected.)
Once upon a time, people paid for software like RSS readers. (NetNewsWire in its heyday.)
Today, some people pay for Twitter clients like Tweetie, and many, many more pay for iPhone apps that package individual bits and streams of information into a pleasant interface that minimizes both button-pushing and waiting, two things of limited desirability when a human being is mobile.
The iPhone app package is so useful and valuable to us as consumers, that we’re even willing to pay for niche content like a Miami Dolphins app from a news organization.
I’ve been meaning to write about Mark “10,000 Words” Luckie’s “How Twitter saved my career… and my life” post since he wrote it, but haven’t had a chance yet. If you want a good idea of what publishing an excellent blog and maintaining a presence in social media channels can do, in the face of layoffs, unemployment, and general upheaval in the news business, read what Mark has to say here. [Spoiler: There's a book and a great job at the end of the tunnel.]
I’ve been saying those words in person to people a lot lately:
“There is no newspapers.”
What’s it mean?
It means that if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience it would provide for said ruminations, there is no such thing as a monolithic, uniform entity called “newspapers.”
Really.
In my relatively short career, connected in one way or another to a wide variety of newspapers, I’ve already been involved with organizations staffed by crews of 1, 3, 10, 30, 100, 300, and 1,000 — and they’re owned by individuals, universities, nonprofits, corporations, communities, investment bankers, media moguls, local collectives — and the communities they serve have just as wide a variety of needs, wants, economies, sizes, shapes, colors, and creeds.
So the next time you’re about to use a phrase like “newspapers should…” or “newspapers have to…” or “newspapers can’t…” — I’d like you to stop for a moment and focus your decree a little more specifically.
Are you talking about the New York Times or are you talking about the Detroit News? Are you talking about the Denver Post or are you talking about the Holland Sentinel? Are you talking about El Pais or are you talking about El Nuevo Herald?
Are you talking about an imaginary entity where every piece of the puzzle is a uniformly shaped block, or are you talking about an incredibly diverse mass of publications that includes everything from shoppers to weeklies to alternative weeklies to the tiniest of dailies to major metros to national newspapers read all over the world?
Directly related: 10 little white lies you hear about the future of newspapers
Obviously: I’ve been guilty of this, myself, right here, although it’s been some time since my last “newspapers should.”
In January 2008, Howard Owens, Zac Echola, and I launched a social network with self-motivated, eager-to-learn reporters, editors, executives, students and faculty in mind.
Wired Journalists was born with the mission of connecting the knowledgeable, expert innovators in online news with journalists of all stripes hoping to learn something new about their evolving craft.
Today we’re proud to announce that Publish2 has acquired Wired Journalists.
At Publish2, the mission of connecting journalists based on common goals and interests will continue and — we hope — grow exponentially as the Wired Journalists network becomes a space for collaboration on real-world reporting as well as conversations about craft.
Publish2 builds online tools for news organizations looking to bring the best of the Web to their readers — and to each other. Those of you who know me personally are likely aware that I joined Publish2 earlier this year as Director of News Innovation. In one of my early conversations with Publish2 CEO Scott Karp, we started sketching out what Wired Journalists might look like if it had the funding, attention, and staff that we’d always wanted.
Out of those conversations came a rock-solid proposal to give Wired Journalists a new home under the Publish2 banner, where I could personally devote time to it as a part of my role at Publish2.
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Wired Journalists has been a labor of love — and love only — for Howard, Zac, and I, with some help from Pat Thornton of BeatBlogging more recently, but we always saw the potential of the 3,000-plus-strong membership, if only we had the time to manage the community and help to make a few connections and guide a few conversations.
With Publish2, we’re going to get that opportunity, and a lot more. I’m looking forward to jumping into conversations on Wired Journalists as part of my day job, and I’m psyched to get Greg Linch involved as soon as he hits the ground at Publish2.
In short, it’s been great, and it’s going to be excellent.
A personal thank you to everyone who showed up in early 2008 when Howard, Zac, and I told you about the vision for Wired Journalists, and thank you to those of you that I’ve learned more about over the last year and a half through the network.
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Here are a few key links from the beginning of Wired Journalists:
2008 objectives for today’s non-wired journalist
howardowens.com | December 27, 2007
At the end of 2007, when I had been working for Howard Owens for about three months, he posted this checklist of goals for journalists new to online tools and media platforms. It sparked enough interest, and inquiries from journalists within GateHouse and other organizations, including Forum Communications, where Zac Echola fielded requests from reporters asking how they could get involved. So this is the blog post that started Wired Journalists.
Introducing WiredJournalists.com, a place people looking for new knowledge to get help
howardowens.com | January 22, 2008
Here’s the January 2008 announcement post from Howard Owens, calling Wired Journalists a place “…for journalists just starting down the path of transforming their careers and doing the hard work of saving journalism…”
Zac Echola’s original message about Wired Journalists
blog-o-blog.com | January 22, 2008
This page has been standing on Zac’s blog since the launch of Wired Journalists in January 2008. It starts off with a call to action: “Now is the time to be that catalyst for change in your news organization. No more talking about it. We’re doing it. And we want you to do it too.”
Introducing WiredJournalists.com
Invisible Inkling | January 22, 2008
Here’s my first post introducing Wired Journalists in January 2008: “So please, come join this new community, but more than that, pass the link along to the guy in the next cubicle who doesn’t read blogs. Pass it along to the photographer who hasn’t built a slideshow. Pass it along to your editors, your teachers, and your students.”
I feel like this summer has been sort of a rolling watershed moment in the Present of News, if not necessarily the Future of it.
(Yes, yes, the lowercase present is always becoming the lowercase future, but I’m talking about the supposed collective vision for the Future of News that, well, usually gets held up as a straw man as if every proponent of online news tools for communication believes the same thing.)
There are a lot of ongoing battles right now, if I can call them that, over things like paywalls and copyright. These are more than kerfuffles here, folks; we’re talking about the future business model paths for some pretty large chunks of the mainstream media at this point, for better or worse.
So, in an effort to pull together some of what I think would be the most important footnotes in the Summer 2009 chapter of the book someone surely must be writing at this point, here are some recent favorites:
Microformats, hNews, the AP and the Animals: Steve Yelvington sanely and succinctly dissects the AP/microformats weirdness and explains what could be great about the deal (Semantic Web!) and what doesn’t make any sense about the way they’re going about it (Function-free DRM!).
Chris Anderson on the Economics of ‘Free’: ‘Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job’: Everything Chris Anderson says in this Spiegel interview is quotable and crucial to anyone interested in the future of news. Like this, for example: “If something has happened in the world that’s important, I’ll hear about it. I heard about the protests in Iran before it was in the papers because the people who I subscribe to on Twitter care about those things.”
The Nichepaper Manifesto: If you haven’t taken a look at Umair Haque’s piece yet, I think you’ll want to. Niches, topics, different models that are working online to bring *some* news to *some* people. Worth keeping around as a reference.
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real: Anil Dash’s crucial primer on the blossoming technology behind the Real-Time Web. This is the most important thing I’ve read in the last week.
What Would Fair Use Look Like in an Online Era?: C.W. Anderson starts exploring what an updated Fair Use test should look like in 2009. “1. The presence and quality of the link…”
A lesson from Patchwork Nation: Frameworks for Reporting: Chris Amico explains: “When I get a new set of data, I spend a good deal of time deciding what’s important, and where a story is. I might run it through a visualization tool, like ManyEyes. Starting with data but no story tends to be a slow process. Ending up with a story but no data makes me feel like I haven’t done my job.”
And you? What’s on your crucial reading list?
This post was ridiculously easy to write and compile thanks to Publish2′s WordPress plugin and its Link Assist feature. (Yes, I work at Publish2.)
When I met David Weinberger in person last month at his Harvard talk with Doc Searls and Jonathan Zittrain about Cluetrain, I told him something along the lines of “I’ve been enjoying your blog for as long as I’ve been reading blogs.” And that’s true. I’ve been reading Weinberger, and — probably more interesting to me — listening to any conference talks of his that I find in audio form when I can. Weinberger is one of those first bloggers I started following when I got into all this just a few short years ago.
Anyway, the point is, I pay attention when he gets all philosophical.
So I grinned and raised my eyebrows during this year’s Personal Democracy Forum as I watched commentary and bits flow through my Twitter stream as Weinberger said “Transparency is the new objectivity.”
There’s a lot of Dan Gillmor in that, I thought, and I’d love to hear more about what he means.
Today I read Weinberger’s post that extends his “X is the new Y” cliché into something much more meaningful.
My favorite bit, after summarizing many of the assumptions about the power and purpose of objectivity:
“We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links.”
In other words, Show Your Work.
If transparency is the new objectivity, it has to go deeper than disclosing conflicts of interest. Transparency on the Web is all about disclosing how and where you found the information you’re passing on to the next person, or readers, or audience, or community. It’s at the heart of the blogosphere’s “via” links. It’s at the heart of sourcing the facts of your story.
Related: Matt Thompson steps over the corpse of objectivity and writes a eulogy for “the news voice” itself.
What was the news voice?
“As best as I can tell, institutional voice ascended in popularity with the same trajectory and for similar reasons as the concept of “the brand” did. During the advancement of the industrial age, local suppliers of goods lost significant ground to much larger regional and national suppliers. “Brand reputation” became a substitute for personal reputation. (”I love that cheese made by Farmer McGinty down the road!” became “I love Kraft cheese!”)”
In other words, newspapers lost a great deal of their humanity in favor of gaining institutional credibility. Which they needed, if they were going to sell a bundle of paper with a name at the top of the front page for a set price every single day of the week, every single day of the year. (Pretty impressive industrial trick when you think about it, eh?)
And finally: A link to more links. Kevin Sablan links to Weinberger’s piece on transparency/objectivity and adds a list of four more links to the canon. Click, then click again. Read them all. Save them for yourself, share them with others, or follow the trail backward to see where the ideas got their start.
I asked my Twitter followers what they think of substituting the word “community” for “readers” and I’m getting lots of good responses, many of them negative.
Either I didn’t know “community” had much of a stigma, or I spent too long working with “community” newspapers to notice. Back then, it seemed like a great linguistic way to hold a grizzled editor or publisher’s hand as they made the leap from thinking of the people in town as their “readers” to collaborating with them as “the former audience” as Dan Gillmor called them.
Twitter conversation embedded below, using Twickie to try it out.
A few days ago at the annual APSE convention, I led two sessions on Networked Journalism. On the way down to Pittsburgh from Rochester in the car, I tried to work out an idea I’ve been playing with for a while.
Authenticity.
Not authority, or reliability, or popularity, but a more difficult to quantify metric that I think is crucial for news organizations trying to engage their community in the social media world.
Here’s a few links I referenced in the discussion as I flipped back and forth between Keynote and Firefox. I’d post my slides, but as usual, my use of slideware rarely tells the whole story.
Later in this post, I’ll include the mp3 I recorded of me talking through the presentation in the car (if you can deal with my hoarse/coughing voice and a couple tollbooths on the Thruway, you might find it interesting, albeit rambling). That certainly tells the whole story, and a few others as I change lanes and wander off on tangents.
So that’s the backstory.
Simple, right? OK, more details…
Look, if you’re going to jump into Twitter and Facebook and whatever comes next, in an effort to report or to engage with the community on your beat, or just to have a conversation, you need a name. And a voice. Preferably your own. @nytimes isn’t human, but @pogue certainly is. @chicagotribune isn’t human, but @coloneltribune absolutely is, which is a bit of a twist since he’s a somewhat fictional character with more than one Tribune employee behind his avatar. @ricksanchezcnn might be the most human journalist on Twitter. Using your own name, image, and voice is step one to engaging with the online community on your beat or in your town. Because if you’re not human, you’re just another robot.
It’s easy to treat social media channels like a comment thread or a letter to the editor or an e-mail inbox if you’re not careful. And if you’re not careful, you might find yourself as defensive and unwilling to admit to a mistake, or a conflict of interest, or an oversight as you might in those other spaces. Try that on Twitter and you’ll be eaten alive. Own up to your errors, correct them in public, and disclose whatever needs disclosing without a whole lot of preamble.
If you’re the last one to know that your community is profoundly interested in a particular issue, you’ll look like a latecomer when you ask them what they think. “Be Aware” means this: Listen. Listen to what’s happening in your online community. Do it using tools like Google Reader and Tweetdeck, or set up an online nerve center for your department or news organization. Try using iGoogle, Netvibes, or even FriendFeed to build a one-stop bookmark where everyone in your newsroom can take a quick look at what’s hot in the local blogosphere and social media channels once or twice a day. If you want to be an active node in your local network, it’s critical that you know what’s important — right now — in the community.
Once you’re listening for mentions of issues, beats, towns, and people you cover, it becomes infinitely easier to jump into those conversations. Every time your name, a story you wrote, or your beat comes up in conversation online, you should have the option to drop in and answer questions, ask new ones, follow up, or high-five a member of your community. Being ubiquitous is a huge part of succeeding in social media. When every reader is themselves a producer of content and a manager of their own network of friends, followers, and fans, you need to show up like Beetlejuice when they say your name three times.
In print, it’s your job to attribute quotes and information to your sources and provide readers with resources to find out more about the story.
On the Web, and especially in the short-form statusphere, links are the essential means and currency of sourcing your reporting, adding context, and providing your community with a curated stream of complementary content.
If your newsroom’s content management system allows you to add links directly into the text of your own story, you’re in luck. Go for it. If not, or if you want to integrate your stream of links into section pages, topic pages, blog sidebars, your Google Reader, Twitter, and Delicious accounts to bring your readers the best of the Web on any social media platform where you engage with them, the collaborative journalism tools at Publish2 have you covered. [Full disclosure: I work for Publish2.]
Thanks to everyone who came to the sessions at APSE, asked great questions, and shared their successes and failures with the rest of the room.
As promised, here’s the audio of me talking to myself in the car fleshing out the presentation:
Some of the items in this list might look familiar if you spotted my social media guidelines post a few weeks back. It’s short and sweet, if you’re interested.
If you still need background for newsroom conversations about why you should link to your sources and resources, here’s something I wrote as a guest post at BeatBlogging.org recently on that topic.
Most of what you’ll find on the Web re: authenticity in social media comes from a marketing/PR point of view, but even so, there’s a lot of solid thought on social media for businesses that applies to your news organization. Try Jeremiah Oywang’s February 2008 post on what it means to be authentic, transparent, and human, for starters.
Get started. Sign up for Twitter, use Twitter Search and Google Reader, among other tools, to find and follow the online community on your beat.
Participate, listen, and engage with the community every chance you get. You’ll get as much out of it as you put into it, so find the workflow that works for you, and get started today.
Over at IdeaLab, I’ve interviewed Baghdad Brian, who I met in October 2007 at the first Networked Journalism summit Jeff Jarvis threw at CUNY. At the time, Brian was raising money to keep Alive in Baghdad going, and we did everything but pass a hat around the room to try to back him up.
The next time I remember hearing about the project was two months later, in December 2007, when one of the citizen journalists working with AIB was killed. At the time, it wasn’t clear whether or not his murder (he was shot 31 times) was related to the story he was working on.
Brian popped up on my radar again over the last two weeks or so, as he quickly ramped up Alive in Tehran, exploring different communication channels to get stories out of Iran during the current post-election upheaval, protests, and violence.
I spoke to Brian by phone a few days ago. You can listen to the audio at IdeaLab or read the full transcript. Here’s a sample [emph. mine]:
“…I don’t really have any contacts there. I have a couple of contacts, it’s sort of funny, because we did look into trying to set this up, back in…a couple of years back, sort of looking at doing a project in Iran, with a couple of filmmakers who are known over here and in the blogosphere. I got the impression that nobody wanted to be associated with a project called “Alive in Tehran” because it was too political. It seemed political, inherently. And it is to some degree political, because we’re making this statement that we don’t necessarily need the foreign press to go and say “Live from Tehran, this is what you need to know.“
Check it out.