This month’s Carnival of Journalism, which I’m late for due to an incredibly busy everything right now, asks the question.

I’m going to cede my space to ruminate on that one to Sean Blanda’s excellent post on how to design like Barack Obama:

“Originally created for GQ by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, the Gotham font was meant to be masculine and fresh, which aren’t bad adjectives for a political campaign.  If you are interested, the makers of Helvetica interviewed the creators about their thought process when setting the typeface.  But what regular designers can learn from Obama is not only his font selection, but the discipline to create a design and stick to it, much like good politicians stay on message.”

Read the whole thing…

Related Posts

• Font Squirrel | Handpicked free fonts for graphic designers with commercial-use licenses.
• Relative readability / Wilson Miner
• Why I’m voting for Barack Obama

“What are small, incremental steps one can make to fuel change in their media organization?”

I’ve mentioned some incremental steps you take to grow a little revenue at a time recently, and there’s a list of free or cheap tools for online news sitting around here somewhere, but here are a few general recommendations and specific ideas for things you can do on Monday morning to get the ball rolling and needle moving into the future in your newsroom.

In General:

• Engage your readers. Don’t be a faraway mugshot at the top of a column once a week; use blogs, comment threads on stories, microblogging tools, and every other tool at your disposal to foster a relationship with the actual human beings at the other end of your delivery routes and Intertubes.

To Be Specific:

• Start a blog, or a story with a comment thread, or a Twitter account on Monday morning, depending on the technology you have on hand.

The purpose of this blog/thread/Twitter account is to ask readers questions, and answer the questions they ask.  One staff member (probably you if you’re reading this) takes the questions from readers and routes them to the logical reporter, editor, photographer, graphic designer, etc.  You don’t need 30 staffers to sign into the account and type into the CMS, you just need to send them an e-mail and get their answer and post it yourself.  Do encourage them to read the comments and follow up by participating in the thread.

In General:

• Shoot more video. This isn’t as complicated as you think it is.  Get cameras in the hands of your reporters; don’t wait for your squadron of photographers to get the equipment they requested or for your editors to decide on which approach to newspaper video makes the most sense.  Skip the step where you try to produce video that looks like local TV news, and go straight to the step where you end up with a YouTube-like page with tons of video for your online readers to browse through.

To Be Specific:

• Buy a Flip or three.  This tiny handheld video camera costs less than $200 and requires zero cables, batteries, or software.

Importantly, this is *primarily* a video camera, which means it’s not going to be monopolized by well-meaning reporters who “need” it to shoot stills for print.  Start a rotation, one reporter per camera per week.  Shoot three videos a week, maximum two minutes each, and edit as little as possible.  That’s how you get started shooting more video, regardless of what other long-term high-budget plans you might have in place.

In General:

• Spend less time in conference rooms. If you feel like you’re spending too much time in meetings, you probably are.  Give yourself and your staff more time to get their jobs done and keep moving that needle in the right direction by not wasting their time.

To Be Specific:

• Use online productivity and project management tools as an always-on meeting place that anyone can drop in and out of as their day allows.  Google Docs, Basecamp, Prologue, Yammer, Present.ly — choose a flavor and try it out.

Have more meetings, asynchronously, online, and spend less time locked in a conference room trying to figure out why you didn’t know that story or package or project was on the schedule for this weekend.  Use these tools for scheduling, budgeting, staffing, tracking long projects over time, story counts, accountability — as much or as little as you want.  Refer back to these documents instead of having meetings to talk about what sort of form you should print out to refer back to later.

Overstating the Obvious:

None of this will work if you’re not interested in making progress, passionate about taking giant leaps forward, and curious about the range of tools out there in the wild.  Try any of these, and if it doesn’t work, fail fast and move on to the next idea.  Unless you have time to waste, in which case, I wish you the best of luck.

Related Posts

• At IdeaLab: Paul Bradshaw on crowdsourcing investigative journalism
• The snark of working in public
• Newspaper video lessons from The Miami Herald

Earlier today, I asked the list of carnivalers to consider answering this question at the core of driving innovation at mainstream news organizations:

What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

People ask me a version of this question nearly every day, overwhelmed by the barrage of demands made on them by people like me who roll through their newsrooms and ask them to put in more time on online news.

Think you have the answer? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

I’ll add links below to what the CofJ performers have to say, but here’s a starter link to get the ball rolling:

Matt King, a reporter and beatblogger at what I’d call a small-to-medium sized newspaper in New York, says the low hanging fruit of the police beat is actually a bit of an albatross, and that meeting stories should be the next item up against the wall when the revolution comes.

What do you think? What are we covering that we could turn over to the community? What are we wasting our time on?

• David Cohn, my Knight News Challenge brother-in-arms, says news organizations should save money by dropping AP wire content. I’m with him on this, more or less: No one is subscribing to your newspaper to find out what’s going on outside of a 50-mile radius of your town, unless you’re the New York Times, Washington Post, or USA Today, with few exceptions.
• Pat Thornton, Journalism Iconoclast, says the problem is a staffing issue first and foremost: “Why have two staffs to produce editorial content, when most employees could be creating content that works on multiple platforms?
• Charlie Beckett, Director of the POLIS journalism think think in the UK, lets Dr. Who help explain how new media technology is like time travel, or at least, how it can be for the traditional institutions willing to focus on the advantages it brings along.
• Adrian Monck, a J-School professor in London among other affiliations, is unimpressed with what most local newspapers are up to on the Web: “The online newspaper remains the formula for almost everyone. The paper is still the ‘brand’ – for which read the fraying security blanket on which ad sales are predicated.”
• Alfred Hermida, BBC veteran and journalism educator, takes the pulse of where traditional media stands when it comes to participatory journalism. I definitely think giving readers clearly defined spaces to add information to the offerings at a traditional news site is one of the keys to freeing up full-time staffers to Do Journalism instead of copy editing calendar submissions, among other timesinks.
• John Ndege of ScribbleSheet offers up three tips for news organizations. My favorite is #3: Behave like a technology company.
• Jack Lail, online content boss at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, reports on the answers to the above question from three colleagues at Scripps, including the editor of a paper in Anderson, S.C., which has dropped a daily Lifestyles section and flattened its newsroom structure a bit, with all reporters essentially on a general assignment beat for a geographic area.
• Will Sullivan, Journerdist and Interactive Director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, lets fly a long missive with details on how your news organization can get organized to save time and money. Details include: Use Web-based collaboration tools to track projects and progress, cut way down on meetings, and streamline middle-management.
• Jay Rosen, NYU J-School professor and PressThinker, notes in the comments here that my question is aimed at getting newsrooms to cut a task instead of getting the people formerly known as the audience to perform one of those tasks. I definitely see these as complementary angles. For example, there’s absolutely no reason why a staffer should be proofing and formatting calendar submissions e-mailed in by readers. They should be submitting their own items in a Web-based tool that puts out an XML feed to reverse-publish into print.
• Andy Dickinson, a UK J-prof and longtime newspaper video thinker, says getting over “the ownership thing” can free up intellectual cycles for innovation. His advice: “Give everyone in the newsroom playtime” a la Google. Agreed!
• John Hassell of the Newark Star-Ledger reframes the question, pointing out that innovative ideas can come straight from staffers intent on changing their own workflow. Conveniently enough, John has several great examples handy from the Star-Ledger, including Morristown Green, a hyperlocal play that appears to be drawing in local readers, comments, and even video from the community — if I remember correctly, John was heading up an effort to hand out Flip video cameras to locals with a little training.
• Bryan Murley of the Center for Innovation in College Media passes the question back to student media advisers, wondering what – if anything – can be cut out of a news organization’s workflow in a learning environment.
• Adam Tinworth, blogger-in-chief at Reed Business Information, offers up some straight talk: “If your business is predicated on breaking news on paper, give it up now. That’s a doomed effort. It ain’t going to work.” Long-term, he’s right. So how much of your news staff’s time is spent slogging through a list of daily tasks that assume a once-a-day print publishing cycle is going to be around for long?
• Doug Fisher, J-School profblogger, digests the question and comes up with a practical method for cutting down on double work in the newsroom: Write your budget lines like you mean it.  I think this can kill a few birds with one stone in larger newsrooms, saving reporters brief-writing time (or budget line writing time, depending on your order of operations) while getting news out quickly.

Rob Curley moderated a panel at the conference I was at last week, and he said that he tries to only work on projects that “move the needle.” So what are you spending your time on today that isn’t moving the needle?

Related Posts

• Your real competition
• Standalones
• Declare your independence from the curmudgeon tribe

The party gets started Saturday and Sunday.

Check out last month’s carnival, hosted by Yoni Greenbaum, or take a glance at Wikipedia if the phrase blog carnival sounds too mysterious.

Related Posts

• Romenesko and the Dawning of Gossip Journalism – Wired
• ICM interview: Pat Thornton, the Journalism Iconoclast – Innovation in College Media
• Is Reddit journalism? The inevitable investigation.