I don’t care if you write for a tabloid, college paper, local placeblog, niche site, major metro, community newsletter, alt weekly, or the New York Times — What’s the one thing you wish your news site had more of?
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Is Gannett blowing up the newsroom or just handing out new business cards?
Nov 6, ’06
9:38 AM
Everyone is a bit excited about the Gannett thing.
Me? Not so much.
I know it’s a big deal that an extravagantly large news organization has announced they’re going to blow up the newsroom, re-imagine it as an “information center,” and start calling the editors the “Digital” desk, but frankly, I’ve seen good memos and earnest plans for radical online development before.
If Gannett wants to successfully execute on this plan, the company needs to do more than hand out new business cards and blogs to everyone in the newsroom.
It’s going to take freshly-trained employees who know their way around the tools of multimedia, content management systems, and how to evangelize in the newsroom. It’s going to take a sea-change of attitude in some papers, and it’s going to take time.
So, I’ll save my excitement about this until I see a handful of papers make the switch with a positive outcome. If they can successfully reconfigure themselves, still get the morning paper out, and keep the troops happy, I’ll be taking notes the whole way. (Did I hear that Fort Myers is one of the pilot projects? Hard to tell from the Web site. Lots of content, but I can’t see the organization behind it from this side of the screen.)
In the meantime, Jack Lail, managing editor for multimedia at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, pulls together the crucial links for those trying to get their heads around the Gannett news.
Disclosure: No, I don’t work for a Gannett paper, but I’d love to hear from folks who do. Drop a comment or an e-mail, and let me know what you think of the Information Center talk.
[UPDATE: Joe Strupp at E&P has reaction from three Gannett editors running on the new model.]
Enough handwringing, let’s get down to business
Aug 28, ’06
7:20 AM
What’s the future of news? What does the audience want? What will the dead-trees edition be able to do about either?
Lately, it seems like these questions are brought up by newspaper editors and journalism educators fraught with worry over what will become of their medium and of their readership. (And the children! Won’t somebody please think of the children?!)
They write editorials and cluck over how journalism students don’t read the newspaper anymore.
No, we don’t. We read more than that, we do it faster, and we do it at a level of depth that correlates to the amount of time or interest we have for the topic.
What’s far more fun, not to mention useful, is to get down to the research and conversations that are going to lead to real answers.
So enough whining — let’s get to work on brewing up a new business model for the news. Try to lead the experiments instead of following the leaders online all the time. And don’t be afraid of the answers to all those worrisome questions.
For your pleasure reading today, you might take a look at the following:
- Can the Newspaper Industry Stare Disruption in the Face? – In Nieman Reports, Scott Anthony and Clark Gilbert take a look at the how the newspaper business can keep from being bled dry by the chupacabras of disruptive technology currently nipping at its heels.
“Too many newspaper companies have replicated their print models online, relying on display advertisements and classifieds, instead of creating new business models. A recent study showed that as few as 10 percent of top print advertisers are top online advertisers in newspaper Web sites.”
- What does your newspaper’s Integrated Audience look like? We’re talking print-Web integration, here. Scarborough Research released a study (PDF) this week that ranked papers based on their combined print and online market penetration. No suprpise to see The Washington Post at the top, but the San Diego Union-Tribune and St. Louis Post-Dispatch at 2 and 3 aren’t necessarily the first names that jump to your lips, are they? More on the study from E & P. Jemima Kiss at paidContent has some highlights, including this takeaway:
“The need to understand the distinctiveness of web content is also important. Hyde Post, VP-Internet, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, lists four key audience drivers: urgency, utility, visual energy and community interaction – which is about the most concise and compelling summary of effective web content I’ve read.”
- Meanwhile, Jay Small tries to reconcile those two pieces of research, and he’s worried about how newspaper execs might read that second one.
“Establishing mindshare for the Internet as a growth opportunity is not the same thing as consolidating your Internet development, operations, marketing and sales arms into the corresponding printside organizations. But I’ll bet a lot of publishers who read ‘integration of the Web site into the core newspaper business’ think the latter, not the former. And for those publishers who already folded online into offline, whether hoping for innovative outcomes or, more likely, cutting costs, I guess they could look at the Scarborough report and infer a rationale for their decisions.”
Did you get that, folks? Just because you can meld your print and online staffs into one big happy understaffed newsroom doesn’t mean you should. Oh, by the way, Small is the director of online audience and operations for Scripps newspapers. You may have heard of them.
And now, here’s what you really should be worried about: David Weinberger, Jay Rosen (only in spirit), Dan Gillmor, Mike Davidson of Newsvine, and Jay Adelson from Digg all in the same room talking about the future of news.
In the beginning, newspapers competed with each other, racing to scoop the crosstown rival on the hot breaking news.
After the (still-ongoing) mergers of the last 30 years, newspapers turned their competitive guts toward rival mediums, trying to keep up with local and cable TV, the 24-hours news cycle, and then the continuous updating of online news.
Now that newspapers can shoot, edit, and post video, audio, and text updates nearly as fast as anyone else, they’ve arrived at the next frontier of competition: The Readers.
So how are you going to approach this problem? Are you going to beat your audience to the story, or are you going to compete with your rivals to print their story? Give your readers the attention they deserve, and maybe they’ll be writing for you someday, instead of themselves.
10 things I heard at the AEJMC convention today
Aug 3, ’06
7:40 PM
Let me tell you about my first time … at the AEJMC convention.
Seriously, I had never been to a conference or convention that was about my own field before today. I mean, I’ve hung out with the physicists and the photographers and maybe even the real estate data information professionals back when I was a wee tyke, but this was (obviously) cooler. I mean, as cool as you can expect a bunch of journalism educators to be. Which ain’t bad.
I felt a little awkward about identifying myself, because I kept switching from student to researcher to reporter in midsentence, leaving people asking me ‘Wait, where are you from?’
Wish I could have made it there all week, but San Francisco is far, and there are stories to be filed and thesis proposals to conjure out of thin air.
So without further narrative lede, here’s Ten Things I Heard Today
- J-Schools can act as hubs for all sorts of interesting experiments. They can aggregate ethnic news outlets, bootstrap citizen media projects, or develop new news products from the ground up.
- The need for media literacy increases right alongside the number of communication channels. This theme was repeated by a few people today, Dan Gillmor among them, who pointed out that skepticism is a requirement to sort out the signal/noise ratio online.
- The best pitch I heard on how to teach computer programming to journalism students (which everyone wants to do, but no one knows how to do) came from SFSU’s Andrew DeVigal, who thinks it can be taught online, where the few kids at each school who want to learn it can meet up with someone like Adrian Holovaty all at once. Sign me up.
- Keeping journalism students in their silos (print, broadcast, online) and just adding classes might not be the answer, but convergence isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, either. Lots of schools in lots of different spots on the continuum on that issue. Thorny one.
- Phil Meyer of UNC has faith that something new is going to develop out of the decline of the print newspaper, and today’s journalism students are going to be the ones inventing it. The job of the J-School is to prepare them to do so. Jerry Ceppos said something along these lines, too: Journalism students should be learning “how to expect change.”
- It sure would be nice if journalism students could learn something about business strategies, entrepreneurship, and new product development. Why? Because investment banking firms and media moguls might not have the same principles as journalists. Plus, getting information gathering and business sense on the same team makes for innovative news.
- Journalism schools should be leading the profession, and not the profession leading the journalism schools. J-School should be more like law school or medical school, driving changes in the industry rather than always playing catch-up.
- Newspapers are still having a hard time finding journalists to build infographics, interactive graphics, and multimedia presentations. Unfortunately, J-Schools are having just as hard a time finding faculty to teach those things. See Andrew’s idea above at #3. Calling Mindy McAdams…
- J-Schools aren’t going to be able to teach all this stuff on their own. There must be some dance partners out there, whether we’re talking about a magnet high school full of little programmers and web designers or a venture capital company willing to finance an experiment.
- Make your journalism school a laboratory and experiment with the future of journalism. Emulating a vanishing medium teaches students how to vanish.
Thanks to all the folks I buttonholed after panels, on elevators, and in the halls today, whether I was acting like a student, researcher, or reporter.
Two takes on the storypushing idea
Jul 26, ’06
5:46 AM
…wherein the readers push the story ideas up the rankings until a pro journalist takes over to do some reporting on the topic and turns out an article…
So I was imagining this Digg-ish thing where readers would vote for story ideas, adding their own research and insight along the way, preferably with some data wherever possible.
And I’ve now seen two sites that, well, don’t do that exactly, but they do something.
First, I heard Jason Calacanis on the Bloggercon lunch Gillmor Gang this morning talking about the new Netscape.
It’s essentially a Digg clone, but after hearing Jason lay out the reasons why that’s okay, I’m not going to worry too much about that. The point is this: Calacanis has a posse of “anchors” who supposedly are doing bits of fact-checking and follow-up on stories that are posted. It’s an interesting approach, but trying to get a comment from the congressman who told Colbert that he’s into cocaine and hookers is not exactly what I’d call performing a useful public function.
Nevertheless, Jason promises more, so it’s worth keeping an eye on this.
Then I noticed a link to something called AskQuestions.org in the comments of Jay’s post.
Readers, er, ask questions, then vote for the story ideas they like. The folks behind the site seem familiar and credible enough, and I like the simple feel of the site, especially the “Me Too!” button, which is a far more human touch than just coming up with another made-up word for “Digg.”
It looks like they’ve got a pair of writers and a crop of researchers, but no articles have been posted since June 2005, so maybe this is a bit dormant at this point. Either way, it looks like they tried a piece of what Jay is talking about.
The key to this might be keeping it local. Is it really feasible to have a reporter tackle a national issue based on user requests? Maybe, but the army of distributed researchers would have to stretch pretty wide to give any credibility to the results of an investigation. On a smaller, local scale, the information from contributors should be far more detailed and accurate, not to mention easier to confirm, plus you’d have the advantage, hopefully, of a more passionate core of researchers who care about their neighborhood. Maybe.
What do you think?
Are you prepared to ask your readers to help generate and research stories? On what scale? Does this belong on the front page of your newspaper, or off in a hyperlocal corner where the folks most interested can get at it without disrupting anyone else’s ideas about credibility?
Career paths of glory
Jul 18, ’06
6:21 AM
(Just thinking out loud here…)
There’s the multimedia producer version, where I keep learning Flash and web design until I can get myself a job putting together interactive graphics and training others to do it. Extra points here for my video editing skills and general understanding of visual style. Those four years of film school gotta be good for something, eh?
There’s the community editor position, which doesn’t seem to exist in many places, wherein it’s my job to bootstrap the newspaper’s online connections to local bloggers and community members, launch hyperlocal sites comprised mostly of stories written by The People Formerly Known As The Audience, and manage them. This means learning some more web design and coding to modify some existing open source software, but the hard part is getting the community (and the editors) to see your newspaper as a place for participation.
One job I’m pretty sure I could handle today if I had to is more of a project: Design a template for a newspaper’s blogs, get all the disparate blogs created by different departments together on the online front page, create an aggregated page where readers can find links to all the blogs, recent posts, recent comments, and maybe later, blogs from outside the newspaper.
Once that exists, then it’s time to evangelize within the newspaper, get more reporters and editors to blog, create a standard workflow and outline a few elements of a blogging policy. I’m seriously considering a run at this, because it involves a bunch of knowledge I already have, plus more PHP and web design, which I want to keep learning anyway.
I’m also pretty decent at talking people into blogging, which is a plus. The only downside I can see is the possible path-crossing with my thesis, although that’s probably a good thing. On second thought, that’s definitely a good thing.
Way out in right field, there’s the “additional schooling required” career paths: Law School or a Ph.D. in communications. The former results in Ryan-the-First-Amendment-lawyer, and the second results in there being two Dr. Sholins in the house, which I find amusing. Oh, and I’d teach. Both of those are more like 15-years-down-the-line possible tracks, though. Not right now.
Of course, the Billings Gazette is looking for an online editor. Damn, that’s tempting. Do they have winter in Montana? Crap. Maybe they need an online editor in Tulum…
Your comments are welcome on the topic of What Should I Do With My Life For The Next Few Years?
Geeks for journalism or journalism for geeks?
Jun 8, ’06
8:11 AM
“We frequently get asked why we don’t do X, or whether we have ever thought about doing Y. Regarding Y, the answer is “probably.” But the N&R’s news department has an appetite for doing stuff online that exceeds available resources. Our department relies on people in another division, News & Record Interactive, who must divide their time between revenue-generating sites for outside clients and news content for our Web sites (and guess which is the higher priority). Only a few of those folks even work with the News Department, and only one (last I checked) worked directly on the kinds of things that make interacting with the site fun and worthwhile. These folks are very talented and work some very long hours, but there’s only so much they can do. One way or another, we’re going to have to get more programmers for News, and Editor John Robinson knows that.”
This is the sort of thing that’s gone on at Knight Ridder, too, where the online edition is constrained a bit by the templating done at KR Digital. I’m still wondering if that process is going to change on July 1 when McClatchy takes over.
“One way or another, we’re going to have to get more programmers for News…” Alexander wrote.
Which brings me to a twist on the computer-assisted reporting discussion: Should j-schools be teaching journalists how to program, or should they be inviting programming students to take journalism classes? At SJSU, can Computer Science majors get some sort of useful gen-ed credit for a 61-level introductory journalism class? That would be cool…
Either way, if you’re a journalist who knows how to manhandle some code, or a coder who knows how to copy edit, there should be a boatload of jobs for you any second now.
Why news organizations might be afraid to blog
May 31, ’06
8:08 PM
“I believe media companies are afraid of interacting with their audiences, because they (mistakenly) believe that their audiences are made up of people just like them — resentful, mean spirited, backbiting, hostile egomaniacs with inferiority complexes who, if given the opportunity, will spout their opinions without regard or respect for anyone but themselves.”
Building a community with newspaper blogs
May 22, ’06
8:10 AM
John Robinson, editor of the blog-and-citizen-journalism-happy Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina, points to Robin Roger’s UNC-Chapel Hill master’s thesis on “Creating community and gaining readers through newspaper blogs.” [The full thesis as a PDF is here.]
Robinson on the broad strokes of community-building:
“We use the blogs to help us add information, context and further depth to news events. Because the online world is so fluid and natural, we talk with readers, readers talk with us and with each other. Ideas and information are exchanged. Arguments break out; perhaps even understanding and acceptance occur. That’s community. That’s civic engagement.”
Roger surveyed blog readers, asking them questions about the sense of community they get from participating in the newspaper’s blogs. Her findings have a bit of tail-chasing to them. Readers who visit the blogs more often report a greater sense of community; readers who start off with a stronger sense of community report visiting the blogs more often.
From her conclusions:
“The results of this study suggest that a strong sense of community may influence people to visit more often, or vice versa, but only half of the respondents reported a strong sense of community online. One suggestion would be to increase the sense of community online and see if daily page views increase. The question is “how does one do that?” The people at the News & Record have taken the first step by asking readers what they want and involving them in this ongoing experiment. Agency and ownership can contribute to a sense of community, and these elements have been implemented from the start.”
I think creating that sense of ownership is key, and I’m interested in finding out how big a step of letting-go that is for editors and management to take. Lucky me, my research is going to focus on that sort of question. While Roger concentrated on the reader’s point of view, I’m planning to stick with the decision-makers at the organizational level who decided to launch blogs at newspaper sites, focusing on figuring out why they did it and what factors influenced their rationale.
- Worth noting: Roger’s thesis advisor was Phil Meyer, author of The Vanishing Newspaper, and prof/blogger Paul Jones was one of the readers.
- Bonus Link: Ed Cone notes the role the independent Greensboro blog community has played in the success at the News & Record.
- Via: Reinventing College Media
- Previously: My potential thesis has reared its bloggy head.
Online and print partying together
May 19, ’06
2:43 PM
One j-school professor in the audience asked what the panelists were looking for in young journalists — should they already be focusing on multi-tasking, shooting video and the like?”
“I want journalists who think first and foremost about how people are consuming media,” Wilson responded. “It’s not about necessarily learning software or reporting on different platforms. It’s more about how much time people spend with media and how long they are going to spend on various types of consumption.”
That’s Kinsey Wilson talking, the executive editor of USA Today.
Is he talking about editors or reporters? Does a reporter coming out of j-school need to know “how much time people spend with media,” or is he talking about having a basic understanding of news consumption, as in, what sort of people will read a story online and what sort of people will rip a story out of the print edition to hand to a friend?
The question the prof is asking, of course, is whether or not j-schools have to start teaching the print kids how to do a stand-up. Note to the prof: you don’t, but you’ve gotta teach someone with a journalism degree how to decide what sort of audio & video to post online, when, where, and how to do it. We need to learn how to edit for the Web.
Bonus: Here’s a year-old interview Terrence Smith did with Wilson.