Tag Newspapers

Entries 409 Total

The community-directed reporter: Daniel Victor gears up to go mojo

Jan 8, ’09 5:48 PM

From Daniel Victor comes news that he’s working on a new job description, and a new reporting beat:

“If I can sell my editors on the concept, I would be the author and community manager of a new blog. My stated goal will be to have at least one originally reported story per day, usually some combination of text, photography and video. Sometimes it’ll be a three-minute video with 200-word text, sometimes it could be a great photo with 800-word text.

The stories I’m looking for are next-door slices of life that are usually the first to go because of shrinking staffs. A new museum exhibit, an innovative classroom project, a personality profile, a soup kitchen gearing up for a busy time, a little-known hiking trail, a new business opening, etc.

If you check this new blog every day, you will always learn about one new wrinkle in your community. That’s a wonderful promise for a news site to make.”

It’s difficult to measure all the things Daniel and his employers are about to do right, but here’s the short list:

  • Getting a reporter out of the newsroom and into the community to cover actual human beings.
  • Dedicating a reporter to the Web, free to post all day long without waiting for news meetings or multiple reads of a story to publish.
  • Letting the community directly decide what the reporter covers.

That last point is huge, and fun, and highly recommended.  I’m curious about how he’s going to do it.  I’d try Uservoice or something like it, although a simple comment thread with a voting plugin would probably do the job, right?

Whenever anyone asks me what I would do if I were re-organizing the staff at a medium-to-large daily, I talk a lot about this sort of beat:  A reporter who lives in the beat, geographically and/or topically, and meets readers head-on, not via phone lines or e-mail or letters to the editor, but shaking hands and having coffee and knowing what’s going on because s/he knows the people, not just what the city council says is going on.

Daniel’s been doing that sort of work already — check out the Beatblogging archives for more notes on how he’s done it in the recent past — but this sounds like a big step forward in how we think about beat reporting and letting the public act as the assignment editor.

So although this wasn’t an overnight change for this particular news organization, there’s still quite a bit of inspiration to it, as far as I’m concerned.

Speaking of inspiration:

Dealing with the elephant: Cutting ties to the legacy albatross

Jan 5, ’09 8:41 AM

[Some time ago, I wrote a series of posts that attempted to address some of the revenue-related issues facing traditional news organizations and suggested some possible solutions to making incremental (and larger) changes that might help them stay profitable. For no good reason, I'm going to carry on the ill-advised, barely meaningful elephant metaphor (or is it a metaphor piggybacking on a cliché?) every now and then when I write something about the changing business models for news production and consumption.]

Zac Echola has posted an essay (it’s really longer and far more in-depth than the average blog post, although that’s par for Zac’s eloquent course) called “Cutting the cords, bridging the gap.”  It’s mostly about making serious changes to your news business to keep up, increase online revenue, and (crucial part here) decrease what I’d call your legacy expenses.  As in, print.  As in, outdated systems and vendors that aren’t geared toward

Here’s a long clip from early in the essay:

“Media companies must sever the bindings that drag business in the long run. Market fluidity, the key to the successes of the few that weather the coming storm, will only come through agility and unyielding focus on the future. Mammals didn’t inherit the Earth because the dinosaurs died. The dinosaurs’ extinction was a product of an outside force that lead to a more hospitable environment for mammals. Yes the majority of revenue comes from the ‘core’ print product, the ‘core’ broadcast product. But we aren’t in the ‘newspaper’ business. We aren’t in the ‘broadcast’ business. We are, by definition through ownership of web domains, in the information business. We’re in the advertising business. The medium is just that—a medium for passing information and advertising, connecting audience in search of information to business in search of audience. The Web is best suited to show measurable results to advertisers looking for ways to not spend advertising during a recession.”

Now, that’s the hook.  Zac goes on to explain — in far more detail than I have, with a lot of knowledge of precisely the sort of legacy systems, vendors, and thinking that forces the hands of news organizations and their corporate parents — some of the particular advertising-related problems facing the news business online and suggests a number of good solutions.

The hitch, because there always is one, is that doing the job right often requires doing it yourself.  At the scale of one newspaper that can logically pay a developer instead of three vendors, great, no problem. Done. But at the scale of a consolidated newspaper or broadcast company, perhaps it is more difficult to rationalize that change, depending greatly on the resources available, and the scale of the company.

Read Zac’s post and add your comments there, especially if you’re someone in a position to make changes like this in your organization.

Depressing bonus link: Alan Mutter details the financial problems of a newspaper company, answering common questions about stock prices, bankruptcy, and debt.  See also: Steve Yelvington calls it an “ownership crisis.”

Inspiring bonus link: Mark Glaser’s recent MediaShift post rounds up alternative and innovative business models for news.

Comments Off

Looking back: My year at the Santa Cruz Sentinel

Dec 29, ’08 10:22 PM

For those of you unfamiliar with my personal and professional timeline, I worked at the Santa Cruz Sentinel from October 2006 through the end of September 2007, first in a position accurately titled Webmaster, and later as the Online Editor, working in a mostly bright, young newsroom in downtown Santa Cruz, blocks from the Pacific Ocean.  I walked to work.  I liked it.

Morale got pretty crappy there a couple corporate owners into my stay, and rather than stick around when the newsroom moved a couple miles up the highway out of town, I took a new job with a GateHouse Media in Fairport, NY, worked from home for a while, and then moved out here to the frozen (well, it’s been warm and melty for a couple days as I write this) tundra.

So the year in question isn’t 2008, it’s October 2006 through September 2007.

Tom Honig was the executive editor at the Sentinel during my time there, and along with Don Miller, the managing editor, presided over what were clearly pretty crappy times for a local newspaper.

If you’ve been reading my blog on any sort of regular basis, you know that I’m not one to pull punches when it comes to newspaper management, but I am going to disappoint you if you expect me to dish about the miniature dramas and deleted blog posts and questionable decisions that are the fodder of local e-mail newsletters and DeCinzo cartoons.

In other words, sure, these guys weren’t geniuses at operating a newspaper in a market that was completely, utterly, and politically disconnected from them, but hey, they certainly weren’t the only ones in that situation in 2006-2007.

That said, I was curious when Honig passed along a link to a recent story he wrote for the local alt-weekly about the state of the Sentinel since MediaNews bought the paper.

Here’s a clip:

“Community newspapers ought to forget about the frivolous stories. Sure, go ahead and put wire stories about Madonna and Heather Locklear somewhere in the paper. But when it comes to local, the core audience–the ones who will keep buying the paper–want real news. Is the water clean, and is there enough of it? If you oppose widening Highway 1, what real-world solution is there to mass transit? How much pollution is spewed into the air over Highway 1, and would it be less or more if a lane were added? Forget the tree-sitters at UCSC–what kind of research is being done on campus, and how about a story explaining in simple language what they’re working on at the Human Genome Project? Is illegal immigration affecting wages in Santa Cruz? What has happened to all those loan officers from the housing boom? Is District Attorney Bob Lee looking into any illegal predatory lending practices? If he isn’t, why not”

There’s nothing in there that’s news to me, and anyone who was in an A1 meeting that year with Tom and Don know what in that paragraph to take with a grain of salt, but it certainly did get me thinking about what I learned (a lot) from my year at the Sentinel.

Here are a few of the more specific things I learned at the Sentinel that should apply to any newsroom:

  • The copy chief is likely to be the smartest person in the room.
  • Make sure that crazy thing you heard on the scanner isn’t a drill.  Do not speed over to the wharf unless you’ve confirmed there’s a car in the water, or a beached whale.  (Alternate: If the sun is setting and you really feel like taking a walk on the wharf, don’t confirm anything. Just go.)
  • If anyone tells you it’s a good idea to do a daily video newscast that’s anything less than Ledger Live, tell them they’re wasting your time, then go outside with the video camera and shoot something new.
  • Make friends with the cops reporter, who will have a steady supply of breaking news.
  • Any camera will do the job when news breaks.  Many reporters e-mailed in photos taken with mobile phones from accident scenes and other situations where it would have been at least an hour before a photographer’s camera or a reporter’s SD card would have been back in the newsroom to be ravaged.
  • Let everyone take a turn with the audio and video equipment, but put everything in crash cases so when it falls off their desk, it bounces..  (You know who you are…)
  • Don’t lay off the education reporter AND the higher education reporter in a college town with serious school funding issues.
  • If you can’t figure out what photo would go with your story, you’ve written the wrong story.  Go back to your notes and find a human being.
  • When you’re shooting video for a newspaper and you find yourself standing next to three shooters from local TV, you’re standing in the wrong place.  Don’t bother duplicating their story — go find something better than a stand-up.
  • The reporter who writes the “society” column is the person to go to when you need a source, or a phone number, or a story idea.
  • If you want to get anything really great done, treat every conversation with management as though it were your exit interview. ;)

Bonus link: A letter to the editor in the alt-weekly the following week, which manages to both amuse and sadden while it repeats the common jab at newspapers that don’t write stories about their own layoffs. (It really is a personnel issue, people.)

Super-extra bonus link: The video I shot of the last press run in downtown Santa Cruz before the press was sold for scrap and the Mercury News started printing the Sentinel.

Only-in-Santa-Cruz bonus link: The truck carrying the press over Highway 17 wrecked, providing the Sentinel with a news story.  Eh, actually, no link to that.  Either it happened before the Sentinel switched content management systems and is gone from the Interwebs for now, or it’s behind an archive paywall anyway.  The jist of it: The truck carrying the Sentinel press to be scrapped rolled over on Highway 17.

Carnival of Journalism: Five positive predictions for new media in 2009

Dec 21, ’08 10:42 AM

For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Dave Cohn is asking for positive (if possible) predictions for the new media world of 2009.

How about 5?

  1. Mobile video streaming goes mainstream: Probably tied to disaster/breaking news reporting from non-professionals, a la 9/11 blogs, the YouTube tsunami of 2004, Flickr bombings of 2005, and the livetweeted siege of #Mumbai in 2008.  Whether it’s the expansion of a startup like Qik or Flixwagon or a wildcard like an improved iPhone with a real video camera, something is going to change in 2009 that’s going to put live mobile video at our fingertips.
  2. Fewer newspaper jobs means more local news startups:  As major metro news organizations continue to contract, consolidate, and implode, more journalists will walk away from the press, but not walk away from reporting.  Right now, most of this is happening at the national level (think: Politico) or in local blogs, but as more entrepreneurial journalists leave the “industry,” more of them will start small businesses of their own, reporting on their neighborhoods.
  3. Local news organizations will continue to improve at being “of” the Web and not just “on” it:  Yep, that means more newspapers (and local TV stations) on Twitter, blogging, livechatting, streaming video, participating in comment threads, and generally getting in gear — though still perhaps far behind the pace of Internet time.  This seems obvious enough, although as a media critic, if all you’re looking at is a selection of major metro papers, you’re not going to see the changes as clearly as readers — or participants in the news site’s social web — will see them.
  4. Alternative business models for monetizing journalism will flourish: There are plenty of ideas kicking around already on this front, although few of them are coming from traditional news organizations.  That won’t matter, because people with ideas for solving the riddle of funding quality journalism without the revenue of a standard daily print product are already having success.
  5. Crowdsourcing tools will evolve on the backs on existing platforms: I’m thinking DocumentCloud plus Twitter or Facebook, or some similar combination that lets a large news organization with a large social network power through large documents (think: US Attorney firings data dump analysis at Talking Points Memo, but with a much bigger crowd and structured data instead of a comment thread.)

And of course, a bonus prediction:

  • Major newspapers and huge newspaper companies will continue to consolidate, sputter, fail, and close — but it won’t matter.  The people formerly known as readers will be too busy informing each other about their world to notice.

So, got any predictions of your own for 2009? (Remember, we’re trying to keep it positive…)

BarCamp NewsInnovation – Philadelphia

Dec 14, ’08 8:29 AM

barcamp_logo_template

Will you be there?

Thoughts on the Tribune bankruptcy

Dec 9, ’08 7:07 AM

I came back to an office in the suburbs of Chicago yesterday from a lunch with colleagues to the news that The Tribune Company had filed for bankruptcy.  (A journalist told me. Pretty sure it was the NYTimes Dealbook blog I spotted on her screen.)

Thoughts:

  1. This has little to do with Sam Zell’s abrasive attitude, or attempts at sweeping changes throughout the company.
  2. Union members, staffers who took buyouts in 2008, and anyone who put any of their paycheck into the employee ownership scheme in 2008 all appear to the odds-on favorites to be screwed.
  3. Having heard Lee Abrams speak recently, I’ll say this was not the guy who should have been trying to build a culture of innovation at Tribune’s newspapers, but hey, someone had to write the half-crazy memos, right?  It wouldn’t have mattered to the short-term finances of the company if General Patton were giving the motivational speeches.
  4. Bankrupt United Airlines is still in the air.  (Exception to this rule: When I am flying United through O’Hare, one of my flights will be canceled.)

Recommended reading:

BarCamp NewsInnovation update: Regional in January, NYC in April

Dec 2, ’08 10:00 PM

Jason Kristufek is proposing the details for a set of regional BarCamps to get “smart, cool, tech-savvy media industry folks together in an environment that doesn’t acknowledge rules or boundaries to help solve problems and create best practices.”

This grew out of reaction to the recent closed-door API newspaper executive meeting, where, as best as anyone who wasn’t in the room can tell, nothing was achieved.

So, Jason and a group of people, all of whom work on the front lines of the changing newspaper business rather than the corner office, are planning to start gathering some alternate troops.

That would be you.  Are you in?  Check out the list of proposed regional meetups and post your feedback now.  See you there.

[UPDATE: Of course, you'll want to bang on the wiki.]

Dear Blogosphere, There’s more to newspapers than The New York Times

Dec 2, ’08 9:22 PM

I’ve been holding back on this for a long time, and I write enough about the Web development team at nytimes.com enough to be held to this as well, but really, I’m incredibly tired of reading media and technology bloggers debate the future of news as if the only existing newspaper in the world is The New York Times or other papers of its size, scope, or readership.

Here’s a link to an extremely incomplete list of all the newspapers in the U.S. on Wikipedia.

So please, when you talk about “newspapers” or “the future of news” or anything of the sort, please stop thinking about what will replace The New York Times.  The answers to that are obvious, and we see them now at Politico and HuffPo and niche blogs and even Twitter from time to time.

The far, far more interesting question, from my point of view, is what will replace all those other, smaller, newspapers on that long list, especially the ones in towns without blankets of TV coverage, or public radio, or an existing blog community.

The massive changes in the way we get informed that everyone can easily see the negative (for newspapers) evidence of in the form of major metro layoffs and cratering circulation numbers certainly are taking longer to fully filter down to smaller newspapers in smaller towns, but they are certainly filtering down.

So, if it’s journalism that you’re interested in saving, please don’t worry about solving the problem of the NYT.  Worry about solving the problem of keeping communities informed about themselves as what used to be the easiest way to do so becomes economically unwise.

As the printing press fades from memory, the question isn’t going to be, how do you feel about there being no New York Times, it’s going to be something like:  How do you feel about how much you know about your world?

My world happens to be both bigger and smaller than all the news that’s fit to publish.

/minor rant

Notes on getting serious about staffing for online news

Dec 1, ’08 11:37 AM

Mark Potts on what it takes to shift a news organization’s focus from print to Web:

“How many newspapers have a sizable staff responsible for managing print circulation? All of them of course. Now, how many have even one staff member responsible for managing online distribution via RSS, e-mail or Facebook? Damn few.

How many newspapers have a department devoted to fixing and painting news boxes? Just about all newspapers of any size. Now, how many have any staff devoted to thinking about how to optimize their site’s placement in Web searches? Not many.

How many newspapers have an advertising production staff that can churn out a good-looking ad for any advertiser? It’s essential, of course. Now, how many have anybody thinking about new forms of Web advertising that take advantage of tools like search, widgets, Flash, interactivity, data-mining, etc.? Very few.”

Read the whole thing at Recovering Journalist.

Comments Off

BarCamp: NewsInnovation

Nov 22, ’08 9:03 PM

Jason Kristufek has opened up a wiki for BarCamp / NewsInnovation:

“The idea is to get energetic, tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry because the ability to do really cool things still exist. We also need find those people outside of our industry who love to consume news and information and are great thinkers and innovators.”

Will you be there?

BarCamp / newsinnovation