One of our reporters, Erin Smith, in Cambridge, Mass., has produced a three-part series about local police officers. Part one went up today.
It’s interesting to me to read some of the responses to my MBO offer about reporters these days being too overworked to learn this new fangled online stuff, or what a miserly offer my $100 is for all that work … and here’s Erin, quite on her own, on a small-paper staff, going out and producing a three-part series, with a self-shot and self-edited video.
Internal motivation is what makes great journalism careers, so I’m sure Erin has a bright future.
Here’s the video. And I think it’s worth noting that it was shot with a Casio.
I love the community journalism aspect to this package — getting personal with the local police officers, talking about what they deal with everyday, and getting their own names, faces and voices out there for the community … “Behind the Badge” is an appropriate title for the video.
Many news organizations have bonus plans for newsroom personnel called MBOs (MBA speak for Manage by Objective). The idea is to reward people for doing work that helps advance the company’s strategic goals.
Is there any higher strategic need for news organizations today than becoming more digital savvy?
I suspect there are still too many non-wired journalists in most US newsrooms. Either out of fear, indifference or hubris, too many reporters and editors resist using the Internet for anything beyond the occasional Google search (and heaven forbid they ever click a search result link to Wikipedia) and a daily dose of Romenesko (and heaven forbid if you call him what he is, a blogger).
That just isn’t acceptable.
So to help newsroom managers advance the digital literacy of their organizations, I offer the following MBO plan. I recommend readers pass this along to the top editors at their newspapers. And for non-wired journalists ambitious enough to pursue their own MBO paths, I’ll offer a reward myself (strict rules and details at the bottom of this post).
Become a blogger. Start with a favorite topic. For example, if you’re a baseball fan, start with baseball. Find all of the baseball-related blogs you can and become a regular reader of five or six of the best of these blogs. Participate — leave comments; follow links. After three months of blog reading, start your own blog on that topic. Try to post daily for at least six months. For blog topics, avoid anything related to your beat or politics. First, you need to blog about something you are passionate about; second, there are too many political bloggers already (accept maybe for local politics, if you see that need in your community and it won’t conflict with your day job).
Buy a small digital camera that can take both stills and video. Open an account with a photo sharing site such as Flickr or Buzznet. Take photos and post them. If necessary, use some online tutorials for digital photography. (NOTE: If company will buy you this camera, great, but if not, remember you have a responsibility to invest in your own career.)
With the same camera, make at least three videos. Use the free video editing software that comes with your computer and edit those videos. Post them to YouTube and at least one other video sharing site. There are plenty of online tutorials for shooting and editing video. Your goal here isn’t to make great video, just to learn what is involved in making video so you have the capability in your online journalism tool bag.
Related to video, spend at least two hours a week for six weeks on YouTube. Search for topics that interest you and then follow the trails where they lead. Pay attention to the daily most popular and see what other people are watching. Be sure to watch both amateur and professional video.
Join a social networking site. Every professional should have a profile on LinkedIn, so make sure you do, also. Facebook has been hot in 2007, but I think you’ll get more out of MySpace, which still remains popular with your future readers. You will get more DIY (the backbone of modern media) experience with MySpace, if you take full advantage of the site features (which, admittedly, I have not). Do Facebook, too, but don’t neglect MySpace.
Use social bookmarking. Set up del.icio.us for yourself and use it every day. Learn about tags. Check out Digg and Mixx and similar sites. If you can, get into Scott Karp’s Publish2 beta.
Start using RSS. Use RSS to keep up with the news of the day and the blogs you are now reading every day. Make sure your blog has an RSS feed. Here’s Marc Glaser’s guide to RSS.
If your current mobile phone doesn’t handle SMS (text messaging), get one that does. SMS works best when you have friends who text, so figure out who those friends are (by now, you have them). For neophytes and gray hairs, a phone with a QWERTY keyboard (Treo, or iPhone) works best. Blackberrys aren’t great SMS handhelds because they mix SMS and e-mail together.
Learn to twitter. I’m not a big Twitter user myself, but Ryan Sholin and Jack Lail swear by it. I think there is something to be said for learning how this technology may change information dissemination.
Create a Google Map mashup. If you don’t know what those are, google it. If you don’t know what to do or where to start, google it (hint: or you can search this site). There are plenty of tutorials available. It’s easy. All you need is a spreadsheet with appropriate data and enough smarts to follow step-by-step directions.
After you’ve done these ten things, document what you’ve learned — write something, such as an essay to your editor or a blog post. Discuss how technology has changed media, and follow the string of where that change might lead. What will your job be like in 10 years? What will media be like in five? How will news reach young readers in a generation? Tomorrow?
For those of you who work for a newsroom that doesn’t offer an MBO, or you’re not being included in the MBO program this year (maybe because your editor perceives you as too stuck in the past), I’m here to help.
I will give a $100 Amazon gift certificate to one journalist who completes all of the objectives. Here’s the rules:
You must today be a non-wired journalist (which probably means a well meaning friend passed the link to this post along to you, because you, yourself, don’t normally read blogs). As a non-wired journalist, you only use the Internet for e-mail and a little web surfing, but not much else. You have yet to do anything along the lines outlined above.
To be eligible, you must first send me an e-mail (howardowens at gmail dot com) and tell me about your current level of non-wiredness. To help confirm your position, you will need to CC your immediate supervisor at his or her work address (for this exercise to be meaningful, it probably helps if you have your boss’s support, anyway).
You must be the first among the eligible participants to complete all of the objectives, and they must be completed in 2008.
Part of being online is to be public and transparent about who you are and what you’re doing, so when you nominate yourself to participate, expect me to post your name and news affiliation in a blog post. Our readers should be able to follow your progress. Of course, there’s some advantages for you — it’s a great career move to be known as a learner; and the people who read this blog are the kind of people who would be happy to help you as needed; and when you have your own blog, you’ll be grateful for the links. And there’s no shame in admitting it’s time for you to go digital — you’re not alone.
For supervisors who use this post to fashion an in-house MBO program, it would be great to hear from you, especially as the program progresses, so we can all learn from the experience.
In the recent issue of PressTime, Topix CEO Chris Tolles talks about the future of journalism and says,
“I don’t think you’re going to have the same kind of stories that you’d have in traditional papers. Your site should have 100 stories a day, not six. Journalists are going to have to work longer, harder and for less money. Think about blogs – you’re going to have to write 12 stories a day at $25 a pop.”
Lucas Grindley has done a great series of posts on the PressTime article, he responded specifically to this quote, and not necessarily favorable to Chris’s POV.
In my world, most journalists already work long hours. They work hard, and they’re not getting rich. The idea that Tolles would implement worse work-life conditions is baffling. Even worse is Tolles suggestion for how to accomplish this feat of 12 stories per day, per reporter.
I dropped Tolles an e-mail and noted my lack of surprise at the reaction. With his permission, I’m posting his response:
That wasn’t meant as a prescription, as much as a prediction.
I’m looking at Gawker and the like as the stalking horse for whatever the newspaper business is likely to become. Nick is currently paying $12 a post, but modeling out a pay-per-view scenario according to my friends over there.
I’m sure most journalists work hard and don’t get paid much - but the issue here is that newspapers mismanage what they have, and the reporters, eventually, pay by losing their jobs from what I can tell.
Part of my schtick, obviously, is to gore some sacred cow here - but, seriously, reporters need to start caring about how many people read and care about what they write, and measuring themselves in ways that eventually align with the business of gaining audience.
Everybody in journalsim land wants to get the same paper they had with all those monopoly profits, but on the web. I think the paper of the future is going to look a lot more like gawker or curbed, or a topix forum, and a lot less like the NY Times, and the sooner they start building it, the better off we’ll all be for it.
Personally, as a reader of the SF Chronicle, I live in constant fear of my newspaper just disappearing one day, or getting replaced by some clear channelized piece of crap - so not a little bit of this is a wakeup call.
If you cast this whole new media thing as the Reformation, it all makes sense. I’m just trying to point out that it’s in process, and humpty dumpty can’t put back what was lost once those monopoly profits go away.
But you know what they say about the messenger.
Note that Chris left a shorter, similar comment on Lucas’s post, and Lucas responds in the comments.
A conversation with a friend reminded me of the George Jones classic, “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” That got me poking around the web a bit.
I didn’t start listening to country music seriously until 1986 or so, and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” just seemed like one of those songs that had been around forever. All this time, I’ve just assumed it dated to the 1960s or early 1970s. It has such a classic sound.
Actually, it dates from 1982, and Jones recorded the song even though he believed it too sad to ever become a hit (Wikipedia).
Many people believe, as I do, that it is the greatest country song ever. It’s also a song, I believe, that nobody will ever sing as well as George Jones.
How we label and categorize things is important to how we understand our environment.
Nearly a year ago, Andy Dickinson did a post labeling three types of newspaper video: Disruptive, channel and multimedia. At the time, I suggested “attached video” was a better label than “disruptive,” being that disruption is a strategy not a category.
That post influenced a slide in my internal video training presentation. My three categories of video have been: Attached, story, and webcast.
Attached is that short video meant to embed on a story page. Story video is the full story, no text needed, and webcast is that sort of thing that usually has an anchor/host and covers more than one topic.
Nice raw video, yes. But where’s the journalism? Where’s the editing? Where’s the context?
And somewhere, though I can’t find the comment now, somebody said of one of our videos that it was nothing more than a moving photo illustration.
That’s the comment that stuck in my head. It’s a V8-moment! The proper term is not “attached video.” It is a “video illustration.”
To me, these comments intended to be criticism are actually high praise. This is exactly what we’re after with quick-production, point-and-shoot video.
Story video may have its time and place, but unlike some, I don’t believe that is the sum and whole of what online video can or should be.
The point of quick-production, reporter-shot video should be to illustrate in a way that words alone cannot. Raw is good. Heavy editing is a waste of time. Context is a distraction. The point is not to capture the whole story. It is to illustrate a story.
That’s not to say that we’re doing all that well at that goal yet, but it’s still a style of newspaper video I believe in passionately. I believe we will learn. I believe we will get better. I’ve seen enough glimpses of how well this can work to believe that as quality and understanding (reporters developing the appropriate sense of when and how to use this type of video), it will prove a very useful tool both journalisticly and strategically.
UPDATE: Andy Dickinson does a nice job of responding to this post. He clarifys, expands and explains what I’m trying to explain.
Matt Welch, who recently wrote a book about presidential candidate John McCain, spent Christmas in Phoenix, staying at the Clarendon hotel. The hotel is significant in journalism history. In its parking lot, Don Bolles was murdered.
What’s the McCain-Bolles connection? It’s tenuous at best, if not non-existent, but read Matt’s post to find out. It’s fascinating, nonetheless.
If there’s one statement I’ve made about video that has drawn the mostfire it is that reporter-shot video should take no more an hour to shoot and edit.
For most news videos, any more time than that is just a waste because you’re not going to get enough views from any one video (there are exceptions, of course) to justify the time commitment, especially when you’re talking about reporters who also have print responsibilities.
I think this line of thinking is especially important at small newspapers (the kind I deal with every day) where publishers will NEVER hire a full-time videographer (or at least not until video advertising becomes a major revenue stream).
Andy Dickinson points us to a newspaper web crew in Nebraska that is regularly doing quick-production video and starting to get some traction with the local audience.
Online producer Eric Eckert tells Andy,
This year alone, we (3 staff) have produced over 450 videos which have received over 120,000 views. Most of the videos are, as you stated, 2-3 minutes long. The numbers differ though when you look at how long it takes us to make the videos. We usually spend 10-15 minutes shooting the video and I usually spend 15-30 minutes editing the video. In breaking news situations, like car accidents, we are generally shooting photos as well. We probably average getting a 2-3 minute report and 100 photos onto our site in less than an hour.
And in a follow up, Eric says,
Melanie has been instrumental with helping to get more videos out fast. She takes flack from time-o-time because she might say “uh” here or there, but we generally get the shot done in one take and that’s what we want. Our number one concern is to get the information out there.
Sure, we could spend a day making a report, but when it comes down to it, it looks real, you can tell she’s not robotically reading off a prompter and once again, we can have it online faster.
There are many advantages to putting the emphasis on speed-of-production:
You can simply produce more content, and more content feeds the long-tail.
More, faster production, means you’re going to learn faster. Learning is still the number one task for all newspaper video producers (remember what Ira Glass says about this?).
More video means the audience is learning faster than your site is a go-to place for local video.
Speed to publication is exceptionally important to online audience growth.
Eric’s newspaper is the York News Times. There are two interesting things about that. First, the York paper is a GateHouse Media property now; second, while it’s a GateHouse property, we’ve never had a direct discussion with anybody in York about our video strategy. York developed its approach while still owned by Morris. It’s great to see York being successful with its own homegrown strategy.
Vivian Schiller, GM of NYT.com, who comes from a TV background, says that doing video for the web at the Times has been real learning experience. “I basically had to unlearn everything I knew about making television,” she tells Beet.TV.
I think I’d easily trade what’s left of my privacy for some major strides forward in eliminating abuse of anonymity. I say this as a person who truly resents the intrusion on my privacy. I just don’t know what to do anymore.
I believe in free speech. I think we ought to be allowed to say whatever we want to whoever we want. But if we’re not backing that up with our identity, it’s not fair to anyone on the other side of the conversation. We can say whatever we want, and go much further than manners allow. ….
I say this as a person who has kept a blog for seven years hidden under a pseudonym.
…
But I don’t know how much longer we can live in the wild west.
Anonymity is great in certain cases, but those cases probably should be rarer than we think. Anonymity is easy and it feels good, but maybe it’s something we’re growing out of. Bullying and abuse are not okay, and we’re seeing more of it everyday.
UPDATE: I’ll add this: Identity and profiles help add context. As this post points out, in absence of context, many people fill in the blanks with base assumptions, which leads to insults and invective.
To wit: When you “meet” someone in Halo online, you have only two indicators of who they are — their gamer tag and their voice. You never see their face, you probably don’t know where they’re from (unless you look at their profile), and you don’t know their age. Your competitors are probably from an entirely different city, state, or nation. Faced with this absence of context, people rely on the basest of psychological tropes, i.e., homophobia. How else to deny the sameness of the other than by inverting his/her sexuality.
Brand: Yes and no. I mean, one thing that we insisted on was no anonymity. And lots of the systems out there now like anonymity or encourage it, or individuals absolutely hold out for it. Personally, I would have preferred to see it go the other way. Not so much on the … I mean, The Well’s compromise is pretty good, I think, which is that people can have whatever amusing handle they wanted, but it was linked and it was linked publicly to a real person. That gave the accountability I wanted, which is, I knew that flame wars would go over unless somebody’s nose was identifiable so that if necessary, you could go punch their nose. And they would know that, and you would know that, and that would slightly ameliorate the otherwise extreparous (sp?) behavior. What it did probably, in reality, was connect cyberspace with real space a little better because you always had the sense there were real people and real places behind whatever they were doing online.
The opportunity for local newspapers to build online communities that lead to real-world affiliations is another reason to have some connection to real identity. It’s also another reason not to outsource your community building to Topix.
At breakfast this morning in the Cincinnati airport, I cruised through the Wall Street Journal while I shoveled my Southwestern Omelette into my mouth. This was much easier than juggling a paper, even a tabloid. I’d already started reading the paper on the plane on the way up. (I looked in my mailbox at 5 a.m. to see if the local paper and my print version of the Journal were there yet. No way. I’m lucky when they arrive by 7:30 … but the Kindle version of the Journal had downloaded automatically overnight.)
I’ve seen a lot of the digital hipsters pan the Kindle over flaws ranging from the way it manages digital rights to the look and feel of the thing. There’s merit to some of these complaints, but overall, I really like it and think it’s a big step forward. Wireless and ease of use make it a device that has me geeked.
Here’s another example of the advantage of journalists always being armed with video-capable cameras.
There was a dramatic fire in Gloucester, Mass. Saturday morning. GateHouse Media photojournalist Kirk Williamson shot both stills and video (for the video, he used one of the Casio’s we issue).
How did you juggle between still and video? What was your thought process? As with all spot news it’s important to shoot the overall as you are going into the scene. This I did with my still cameras, shooting wide with one camera and long with the other. Once the paper and Web site are covered with stills (about 10 minutes in) I pulled out the Casio and started doing video overalls following the same routine. Wide overall, then tight action. In this situation it’s important to follow a pattern and not get all flustered with what is going on. After I had some video I went back to shooting stills and alternated back and forth until I went, looking for different angles, etc.
I would contend that Kirk would have had a lot harder time doing both stills and video if, after taking his stills, he had a complete video camera kit to set up (bigger camera, tripod, lights, mics, etc.). And having all that, there would be a real temptation to turn this into a “visual journalism story,” instead of simply showing what’s going on. And the whole process, including editing, would have taken exponentially longer. For this event, just being able to whip out the Casio and get a few frames to show the fire live-action is all that is needed.
How do we teach, explore and learn to use online tools and techniques properly?
One thing I see happening a lot in online journalism is we do stuff just because we can. That is fine for experimentation, but at some point you need to get beyond the mere ability and delve deep into art of when and why.
I thought of this thanks for just a few words from Jeff Jarvis, “Newspaper online sites tend to use slideshows too much, just because the internet lets them.”
We do a lot of stuff, just because we can.
There’s a lot of blogging going on at newspapers — the majority of it bad blogging — because we can. We’re doing a lot of video with uneven results because we can (and hey, I acknowledge my role in this, and contrary to anything I say here, I am not going to stop pushing that approach, because we still have a lot of learning to do).
The flip side is, and also a contradictory truth, is that not enough journalists are doing any of these things. There are still way too many journalists sitting on the side lines thinking, “This web stuff isn’t important. Let me just cover my stories and meet my print deadlines.”
Let’s be clear, we should do a lot of blogging, and a lot of video, and a lot of slideshows/photo galleries, and multimedia packages, and so on.
But we also need to start doing a better job of learning how to do each of these things well and appropriately.
Print journalists need to start thinking like web journalists.
Web journalists, I believe, have an instinct for blogging, the tools and craft to explore informing the public through words, sound and moving pictures, and the deft skill of a pro to know what to use when.
For anybody who has ever tried to master a craft, such as writing, you know there is a process by which you begin with a very elemental understanding of how to put pieces together. What comes out at first is often clunky. In writing, maybe you’ve used too many short sentences when one long one would have worked better, or maybe that really gorgeous five-syllable word bogged down a sentence that wold have been improved with four-fewer beats.
Just as there is subtly of craft in writing, or computer programming, or cabinet making, there is a subtly of craft in being a web journalist.
I’m not sure there are many journalists out there trying to learn that craft the way a Hunter Thompson or a Tom Wolfe or a Gay Talese worked at theirs.
Those who are doing that very important thing now have a blog, they engage in conversation with sources and readers online, they carry with them 24/7 a video-capable camera (of any sort), they can dabble in Flash or mash ups and long ago stopped trying to filter how they approach news through a prism of what they learned in J-school. They are working at their craft, not just doing it because some boss told them to, or they’re worried about becoming irrelevant, or even because it’s fun — they’re doing it to help create a new vocabulary for 21st Century journalism.
Jim Romenekso’s blog post deals with a story and video about an annual tradition at Tufts University — hundreds of students made naked laps around the quad early in the night (video at the bottom of this post).
Romenesko’s primary link to a blog post by a Jay Fizgerald, a blogger for a a rival newspaper site, BostonHerald.com. I mention that because I find it terribly interesting that Fitzgerald seems comfortable snarking at our web policies while lacking enough savvy to link to the story on the WickedLocal.com site.
Dan Kennedy, a generally reasonable, savvy and experienced media commentator and journalism professor in Boston is more pointed in his criticism (seemingly calling me out along the way to weigh in myself, which is fine by me).
Still, posting pictures of drunken* students running around in their birthday suits is not the sort of thing a community newspaper ought to be doing. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
*(Are they drunk at this stage of the evening? How do we know? The run is pre-D.J.-hosted party.)
As for me, I think one of the reasons quality journalism is in retreat these days is because we haven’t spent enough time and effort truly covering our communities. We spend way too much time on he-said, she-said local political scandals and deadly dull town council meetings and not enough time really showing what people in our communities are doing.
We certainly don’t cover enough events attended by young people, unless those young people happen to be singing in the choir or collecting dimes to earn a Rotary trip to Ethiopia.
All of that, of course, is good important community news, but that isn’t all there is, and our failure to cover the rest is a big part of why we’re losing readership, especially among younger audiences, who are getting more and more accustomed to the uncensored web.
(The underlying point here, in case it isn’t obvious, is that audience=revenue, and newspapers are declining on both counts, and it takes revenue, and lots of it, to pay for the kind of journalism us ink-stained types love.)
This is no time for community journalism to be squeamish — and keep in mind, we’re talking about a video that shows, essentially, nothing. What it does capture is the spirit of the moment. What it does record for posterity is a real event, in a real community, that is seemingly important to a lot of people in that community.
Isn’t that an essential part of journalism’s role, even if offends some people’s sensibilities, even some of the participants (read the comments on the story)?
Should journalists really be in the role of hiding the truth of what really goes on in a community? I feel like that is what Dan Kennedy is suggesting.
To me, this story and this video (and it really isn’t much of a story without the video) are fundamentally good journalism because they capture some societal reality. In fact, the reactions to the video support that assertion — just read the 100+ comments on the story, or the comments on YouTube or on Dan Kennedy’s blog — the video is forcing some real debate about the state of our society, including journalism’s role in society. I think that debate is both healthy for the community and healthy for journalism. And it doesn’t happen, sometimes, unless reporters and editors are willing to take some chances and do some things that people in the community would rather they not do.
What ever happened to no fear, no favor in journalism?
There’s also a Facebook protest group now, which is highly amusing. Think about it — group of students throw privacy concerns to the wind by running around naked in public (even posting pictures to Flickr), and then get upset when that event is covered by a media outlet. How ironic.
And think of all the media coverage there has been recently about how open many students are on MySpace and Facebook about their private lives (example).
Obviously, these people are operating at a level that embraces some sort of double standard — as in, we can post our own drunken, irreverent pictures for all the world to see on the Web, but don’t let “the media” post anything about our shenanigans. Is that a double standard journalists should accept, meaning ignore, or cover it as part of a journalistic obligation to correctly reflect what’s going on in society?
One thing about GateHouse Media is that it is blessed with many great editors. One of them is Greg Reibman, the editor-in-chief ultimately responsible for coverage in Somerville. He left this comment on Kennedy’s post:
Ever since Community Newspaper Company was formed, the rub has been that a giant corporation was going to take unique papers and turn them into cookie cutter clones. Instead, we have scores of unique community publications and a management which recognizes that different communities have different standards.
None of this is meant to suggest that I think this story is bold journalism or making a strong social statement.
We covered it because it was fun — and funny — which I believe is the same reason why all those Tufts kids have been taking off all their clothes and running around in public for the past five years.
Yes, it is a fun story, but it also accurately reflects an element of what is going on in that community, and that deserves, to me, serious consideration by a news organization — and serious consideration means accurately covering the event. I would argue that video gives us a unique power to provide that accuracy that mere text doesn’t capture.
These are turbulent and fast-moving times — times that are comparable to the introduction of moveable type, when first-ever communication among a more more greatly dispersed strata of society forced rapid societal changes, even toppling church hierarchies and governments. It is in that context I say again, this is no time for journalism to become squeamish.
We must cover our communities as we really find them. We must use all available tools to reflect those communities back to our friends and neighbors in those communities. And then we must host the discussions that those reports encourage.
Good journalism, as always, and to again repeat myself, requires no fear and no favor.
… it seems Howard Owens is upset with me for actually getting the Somerville Journal’s side in a very small controversy over its written and video coverage of the Tufts Naked Quad Run … I also know how to link to stories and posts on the Internet. I can even do Google searches. See my combined talents here and here and here. … Now that is snark. …
P.S. - I didn’t mind the Journal’s coverage. I also like what WickedLocal is doing on the web in general, though I could do without the hair-trigger self-righteousness at the slightest whiff of controversy. …
Team members confer with their editors frequently, but they often edit postings for each other, and they don’t wait for assignments or debate whether to head out for a promising story.
Karen Kucher, one of the original members of the team and an assistant editor, said, “Our default is supposed to be to go.”
And for those who think web-first publishing is somehow an affront to journalistic propriety:
Through its speedy postings, the team competes directly with TV, Baker said. “But we get it right, we don’t run stuff that’s not confirmed yet, and we don’t sensationalize it.”
…
Greg Gross, who’s been in this business more than 30 years, said of the team’s work, “There were all sorts of uncertainties on the mechanics and maybe the wisdom of it. That has all faded away with amazing speed.”
And some might be surprised to learn that not only does this approach help grow audience, it is also journalisticly satisfying.
Mallory said, “I’ve never experienced more gratitude from readers for anything we’ve done in journalism than for the simple postings on the news blog, three or four paragraphs at a time, of reliable, confirmed information, sortable by area.”
With this kind of breaking news, readers care more about the information than the prose. As Gross said, “I don’t feel as if I’m writing or reporting for the ages . . . and much to my surprise, I’m fine with that.”
Somebody should send this piece to the cranky copy editors, or whatever other forum is out there where newspaper people spit bile at web publishing.
Still, I would argue that for news organizations, building online community should be more than an outsourced service. I’d go so far as to say that cultivating community is the most important step for news media to take in order to build online engagement. By partnering with Topix, news organizations are essentially making a statement that online discussions are not important enough to build technology and staffing capabilities around.
While Topix is owned by three newspaper companies, I’m not aware of any Gannett, Tribune (see second update below — there’s at least one each for Gannett and Tribune) or McClatchy newspapers (or any companywide deals) outsourcing its community building to Topix. That’s telling. And my prediction, none of them will any time soon.
If you look at Topix leadership, you see these are not newspaper people, but Silicon Valley pros. This is just another bubble play for them. Their strategy isn’t aimed at helping newspapers, but how to harvest audience and revenue from newspapers.
UPDATE: 2007 NAA Online Innovator winner Steve Yelvington weighs in:
I’m in Howard’s camp on this one. This is not the same as outsourcing obituary guestbooks to Legacy.com (which I think actually makes sense). This is core.
…
This is a great opportunity to listen to the community that’s being thrown away. You can’t grow to understand what people care about, what’s on their minds, behaving like an absentee landlord.
…
We don’t listen enough. Voicemail systems and security guards separate our newsrooms from the real world. Beat reporters talk to beat sources, who have an agenda, and rarely to civilians. Normal life rarely shows up in the news report.
The Internet gives us a powerful opportunity to reconnect with communities of real people. Handing that opportunity to Topix, regardless of how well Topix might perform, squanders a treasure.
If any news companies are looking at the Topix offering and thinking, “Great. We can outsource our audience interaction and get back to the news business as usual,” well, that’s nuts. User comments are just one small element of interacting and engaging with your audience.
But the problem is, for any news organization that doesn’t have the fortitude to handle community conversation itself, that is exactly what is going to happen, especially if it’s a companywide mandate, such as Media News is doing. It’s inevitable.
I realize my rhetoric has been a little heated on this topic, but it’s a major issue of survivability for newspapers on the web.
Only Nixon could have gone to China, and only Mindy McAdams could write a post entitled “Flash is not the answer.”
Flash is not a magic elixir. Flash will not make your Web site better if it’s generally bad, and it won’t make your stories better if you’re not already telling stories well with sound and pictures.
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Second, let’s look around your Web site. Has anyone been producing any audio slideshows or videos that have … um (trying to be tactful) … substance? Value to the audience? Or are people just throwing random spaghetti at the wall? Because if that’s what your newsroom is doing, maybe you’re not ready to produce packages yet. Maybe you don’t have a strategy for your Web site — and if you don’t, then what are you going to use Flash for?
One ongoing theme of my blogging is “journalists need to learn to think strategically.”
In the olden days, when newspapers were essentially monopolies, competition was scarce and the profits were rolling in unabated, publishers could afford to employ journalists who pontificated in smokey, after-work barrooms about the puriety of their craft. No strategic business discussions allowed.
Those days are buried under a pile of rusting manual typewriters.
Nowadays, especially when you’re working online, you must think about more than the journalistic value of the story, but also ask questions like — where does this fit into our overall online strategy (do we even have a strategy)?, and how will this help grow and retain audience?
Mindy also hits on an important theme: Quality. If you’re going to do Flash, you better make sure it’s good. A lot of people don’t like my approach to video, but video is a much more forgiving medium than Flash multimedia projects. If it isn’t well done, and it isn’t meaningful, it’s a complete waste of time, both for the people who produce it and the audience asked to endure it.
One last thought for journalists: Don’t get too hung up on the idea that you need to learn Flash. There are lots of other things you can learn that will help you and your newsroom. If you’re not a visually oriented person to begin with, then learning Flash may not be your best bet. You and your newsroom might advance much faster if you learn PHP/MySQL, or even how to shoot and edit quick, down-and-dirty video, or how to do a Google map mashup, or hell, just how to blog proficiently, which for many print reporters, isn’t as easy as it looks.
