Ryan Sholin

1. It’s not Google’s fault. Get over it, professor. Blaming search engines is like blaming the library. “Oh no, please don’t let readers actually find stories from my newspaper and then click through to my site to read them, anything but that!” Forget it.
2. It’s not Craig’s fault. Newspaper classifieds suck and they have for years. Either develop simple database applications with photos and maps to let your users actually find what they’re looking for, or partner with a good third-party vertical who can. Anything less is a waste of your time.
3. Your major metro newspaper could probably use some staff cuts. If you’re not writing about local news, your paper’s readers are probably getting what you do from somewhere else. Get over it. CNN and ESPN are not new, and nytimes.com wasn’t far behind. Write local. There are plenty of cooks and painters and poets in your neighborhood. Go out and meet them.
4. It’s time to stop handwringing and start training. If your editors are still writing navelgazers about the cataclysmic changes in the business instead of starting training programs to teach some new tricks to you and that guy in the cubicle next door, that’s a problem. Stop whining and move on.
5. You don’t get to charge people for archives and you certainly don’t want to charge people for daily news content. Pulling your copy behind walls where it can’t be seen by readers on the wider Web. Search rules. Don’t hide from it.
6. Reporters need to do more than write. The new world calls for a new skillset, and you and Mr. Notebook need to make some new friends, like Mr. Microphone and Mr. Point & Shoot.
7. Bloggers aren’t an uneducated lynch mob unconcerned by facts. They’re your readers and your neighbors and if you play your cards right, your sources and your community moderators. If you really play it right, bloggers are the leaders of your networked reporting projects. Get over the whole bloggers vs. journalists thing, which has been pretty much settled since long before you stopped calling it a “Web blog” in your stories.
8. You ignore new delivery systems at your own peril. RSS, SMS, iPhone, e-paper, Blackberry, widgets, podcasts, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter — these aren’t the competition, these are your new carriers. Learn how to deliver your content across every new technology that comes into view on the horizon, and be there when new devices go into mass production.
9. J-schools can either play a critical role in training the next generation of journalists, or they can fade into irrelevancy. Teach multimedia, interactivity and data, or watch your students become frustrated and puzzled as they try to get jobs with five clips and a smile.
10. Okay, here comes the big one: THE GLASS IS HALF FULL. There is excellent work being done in the new world of online journalism and it’s being done at newspapers like the Washington Post and the Lawrence Journal-World and the San Jose Mercury News and the St. Petersburg Times and the Bakersfield Californian and all sorts of papers of all sizes. You don’t need millions of dollars or HD cameras or years of training to make it happen; all you need is the right frame of mind. So let’s stop writing and groaning about how things used to be different, and let’s start building our own piece of the new world of newspapers brick by brick, story by story.

[NOTE: This post was published in June 2007.  For an update on how newspapers are doing at these 10 things, check out the update, circa June 2008.]

[UPDATE: Dave Winer points out some bits of sloppiness in my reporting here. I'll update this post shortly. Revisions in italics.]

The “I won’t do a phone interview” meme made the rounds again this week, via a Wired reporter’s mission to get quotes from Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis on TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington.

Jason wanted e-mail questions and Dave has his own policy, wherein you can send him your questions and he’ll answer them on his blog if he wants to where everyone can see the complete answers for themselves.

As a reporter, as I’ve said before, this drives me batty. I don’t want static answers to static questions, I want to keep a back-and-forth going, preferably in person or on the phone, until I have your position clearly represented in a series of words my readers can understand.

The problem, of course, for folks like Dave and Jason, is that they’ve done enough print interviews to get frustrated at the fact that not everything they say, not every bit of context, not every piece of backstory makes it into the final published piece.

That’s my own interpretation of what it’s like to be misquoted, or partially quoted, or quoted out of context. It has certainly happened to me. If you want to know exactly what Dave’s concerns are, here’s a piece of a Scripting News post on the topic from August 2006:

“These days when I get an interview request from a professional reporter, I offer to answer the questions, best I can, on my blog, without saying who the reporter is and exactly what questions were asked. This way I create a public record, something that can be useful to anyone, and I avoid the problem of being quoted selectively and out of context. Having created a record that’s likely to be as widely read as the story, I make sure what I have to say has a chance of being heard.”

And in the case getting swatted around this week, of course they are right to worry about which of their quotes about a friend/colleague/rival will get used. Having no idea how the writer is going to frame the story, who knows whether they’ll come out looking like disciples or backstabbers.

Hence, the solution, and a good one at that: Podcast the interview.

The reporter gets his quotes; the blogger gets his public interview; the public gets an extra piece of the story: Everyone’s happy.

The question now, is how many of your sources would buy into this? If you have a curmudgeon of a mayor who insists you e-mail your questions, or a PIO that doesn’t do phone interviews anymore, would they be willing to talk on tape, given the promise that everything they say would be podcast for public consumption?

I’m betting the answers are mixed.

Every now and then I have one of those moments where I look at a newspaper or something someone’s written about them, and I remember – “Wait a minute, these guys are still trying to talk to everybody at once.”

It’s puzzling to me, and yet, it happens all the time.

So here are a few basics of the Long Tail, boiled down as tightly as I can work them in a few minutes over morning coffee:

1. Some of your content appeals to many of your readers.
2. Most of your content appeals to smaller groups of your readers.
3. Some of your content appeals to few of your readers.

Often, the stories that fit into category 1 will also be covered by TV, radio, and any print competitors you have.

The stories that fit into category 2 are things you find in sections, like sports and business, and you can break those down further into these three groups if you’d like, to things like the NBA playoffs (category 1), high school basketball profiles (category 2), and a brief about the nets getting repaired at a local public park’s court (category 3).

The stories that fit into category 3 will be your most specific local content, stories that no other news organization has the time or space to report on, but the people who care about these stories will be your most passionate readers on the topic at hand. (See above basketball example.)

So if a story comes across your desk, and your instinct is that “not enough readers care about this,” ask yourself how passionately they care about it, and then serve that niche, and every niche you can, because your readers might read the story that affects everyone in town, but they’ll be far more interested in what goes on in their neighborhoods, or their professions, or their sports, or their hobbies, or their schools.

This is basic stuff.

Your readers aren’t a mass — stop treating them like one.