Howard Owens

I've been both a reporter and part of news stories. I've been quoted (and misquoted), represented (and misrepresented) by reporters. So in this light, I find it interesting that the Spokesman-Review is a bit displeased with a PBS story that, in part, examines the newspapers coverage of a scandal.

Spokesman-Review editor Steven A. Smith says he doesn't want to pick a fight with "Frontline" over its report on Jim West, the late Spokane mayor. "I think their mistakes of commission (fact errors) and mistakes of omission were not malicious, in general, but driven by the demands of their narrative and their medium," he writes. "But the overall effect, I think, was to seriously dilute the depth, breadth and detail of our reporting and to place far more importance than facts warranted on West’s gayness as the cause of his fall."

How many times have we heard similar complaints from our sources and subjects? Journalism is an imperfect art. We're better off if we realize that.

And when the spotlight is turned around on our reporting, we need to be a little less thin-skinned. I've had time to watch only three of the PBS segments online, but so far, I would say it's a pretty fair-minded attempt to examine the Spokesman-Reviews coverage, which is certainly worthy of peer review.

[tags]newspapers, journalism, ethics, spokane[/tags]

I guess I started the debate (with this post), so I guess I should answer the questions posed by Mindy McAdams, even though Bryan Murley has already done a fine job.

1. Should print reporters shoot video?
   Yes. Of course. Why wouldn't they? Reporters are supposed to inform the public to the fullest extent possible. You wouldn't send a newspaper reporter out to cover a story without a pen and paper, so why send him to a story without a camera? There are some elements of a story that words can never capture, so why limit a reporter to telling a story with only words?
2. Can journalists accept the low video quality produced by ultra-cheap ($129) video cameras?
   Keep in mind, the camera I'm proposing reporters carry costs more than twice the price. From what I've seen so far, the $129 camera doesn't capture sound very well. This is a major issue - sound quality is more important than picture quality. The camera I recommend does very well on sound, when used properly. And when used properly, it takes amazingly high quality video. In some respects, the "quality" argument is a bit of a red herring. Quality has a lot more to do with training and talent than the equipment. Smart reporters are constantly striving to improve the quality of the video they shoot.
3. Should the video be edited, or posted "raw"?
   Depends. What's the story? How timely is the video? The Tsunami video was raw and compelling and deserved to be posted raw and immediately. The story demanded it. An interview with the mayor after a city council meeting, not so much. Most video can stand some editing, if by that you mean cutting out some extraneous stuff, such as the reporter's questions (something I recommend, unless there is compelling news value or an ethical need to include the question). The greater the editing demand, the less video that gets posted.
4. Does the popularity of YouTube video (most of it very low quality) indicate that the content is more important than the poor image and sound quality?
   Content is king. And no pun intended, but think back to the Rodney King beating video -- if a reporter where out with a $320 Lumix set up and saw the same exact moment, should we not publish the video because it isn't of DatelineNBC quality? Context matters. Or flip the question around: Would you post something of zero news value just because it was high quality (whatever that means)? One thing I've been telling people in my newsrooms for three years -- some day quality is going to be much more important than it is today, so I want you to get better. I've sent reporters and editors to the best training courses available, because quality does matter, but it isn't the only thing. Also, quality takes time. Speed is often more important than time spent on polish.
5. Does the popularity of YouTube video indicate anything at all about journalistic online video?
   Yes. It says, we better be doing it. People want video. People like video. Video can help tell a more powerful story, or capture a moment better than words. Also, YouTube points the way to how people often use video -- bounce around from subject to subject, skim, scan and graze, hunting out that which is interesting. This is how people use the Web in general. This is why quantity is so important. Also, think of the whole long tail thing when thinking about quantity.
6. What should be the content of reporter-shot video? E.g., is a talking head okay?
   Why wouldn't a talking head be OK? As I said before, it's all about context. That said, just about any story can be improved by video, so if all you can get is a talking head, then take that opportunity to improve your story.
7. Is doing it, and doing lots of it, more important right now? That is, will we learn more about what works best if we produce a large quantity of video (vs. tinkering away to make it sound and look better)?
   As Rob Curley has observed, it takes about 18 months to train online visitors to accept something different from our Web sites. I've observed a similar pattern. People aren't used to going to a newspaper Web site to get video. We are giving them something new, so we need to help them get used to it. If you're only posting one video project every three or four days (about the time it takes to produce a full-blown, in-depth video production), you are not putting enough video in front of your visitors to get them used to the idea that they can expect video from your site. Quantity also fits best into how people actually use the Web. It also helps create more rich data points for learning what works and what doesn't. It also accelerates the learning curve for reporters and editors. Doing is always better than not doing.

[tags]video, journalism, youtube[/tags]

My friend, and one of the godfathers of blogging, Tony Pierce answers a few questions for Simon Owens. Here's the Bus Blog, if you've never stopped by. And here is LAist.

Rick Broida offers 8 tips for better video.  (Via Will Sullivan)

Cool, Huell Howser is doing a series of shows in Kern County.

I wish I could watch them when they air.

But at least Bakersfield.com got a little video.

[tags]video, huell howse, california's gold, kern county, bakersfield[/tags]

Just as a follow up to a couple of previous posts, here's a link to NewsDesigner.com and Alan Jacobson address reports of circulation declines at papers he's redesigned.

It just goes to show you that there are two sides to every story.

And sometimes more.

Previously: Small Papers That Show Circ Gains, and What's the Count Alan?
[tags]circulation, newspapers, redesign[/tags]

Nobody ran the Times as well as the Chandlers. Harry Chandler has some thoughts on how to save a once great newspaper. There are too many good bits to quote selectively, so I suggest you go read the whole thing.

Some of us have intuitively known this for a long time -- virtual communities, user-generated content, comments on stories -- need control. Now an actual university study backs the observation: Users participate more when comments are moderated.

“The idea of having no moderation is initially appealing but in practice, if there is no moderation, bad things happen,” he says. “Threads get hijacked, flame wars break out.”

“People want to have the opportunity to have some kind of discussion, and keep things open,” Wise adds. “At the same time, what they don’t want is for the discussion to get totally sidetracked.”

Ideally, you post comments live, but maintain heavy oversight, removing off-track comments as you find them.

Kevin Anderson writes that "blogging is not a publishing strategy," which is correct, of course. He's also right when he says that many newspaper leaders see blogging or podcasts as just another distribution channel. And he's right to say that is wrong.

I do take issue with this, though:

I'm not saying that it's a mistake to allow comments on the bottom of articles or columns. But that doesn't change the fact that simply allowing comments on static content isn't taking full advantage of blogging. It's is treating blogging as a content-management system that allows comments. If that's your goal, just adapt your content-management system to accept comments.

Comments on stories isn't blogging. There may be newspaper leaders, who believe it is, but it's not. Kevin, however, seems to be equating comments with blogging. Comments on stories is exactly that: Comments on stories. It is a way of having a conversation, if done correctly. It is a way of directly bringing community into the journalism. It is something all newspaper sites should and must do. To do it right is hardly simple.

Most newspapers do blogging poorly, of course, but that is unrelated to the comments on stories issue.

Jason Fry is suggesting that copyright law may be out of step with the modern world

This is the YouTube curse: If a clip gets a lot of viewers, it immediately falls under scrutiny -- and if it's copyrighted material, as is often the case, the clip may well be removed, leaving useless links and frustrated viewers in its wake. Asking that clips be removed is a copyright holder's right, of course -- but this scenario raises a host of questions. Is there a level of success video sites dare not rise above, for fear of being sued into oblivion? And are our copyright laws still the right fit for an era where user-generated content is an increasingly important part of both art and daily life?

...

Maybe a little coercion is what's needed -- particularly when the balance between content owners' rights and the public good seems increasingly out of whack. Lawrence Lessig opens "Free Culture," his superb book on copyright and creative control in the Internet age (see more here), with the Supreme Court's 1945 decision ruling that aircraft weren't trespassing on the property of the Causbys, a North Carolina farm family, despite long-established law declaring that property rights extended to "an indefinite extent, upwards." Such a doctrine "has no place in the modern world," wrote Justice William Douglas, who imagined near-infinite trespass suits against airline operators and concluded that "common sense revolts at the idea."

Maybe the answer is Creative Commons? I'm not sure copyright law needs to change, but I am sure that the way media companies value content need to change. The value is in the network. Free distribution is your friend.
Jason also makes the point that YouTube has radically changed online video:

YouTube is revolutionary, and it didn't take $1.65 billion from Google to make that plain. Remember how bad Web video used to be? It was a minefield of missing codecs, players that tried to take over every function of your computer once installed, and lots of staring at the dread word "buffering." If a link turned out to be video, many Net users would simply corner-X the player out of existence rather than wind up aggravated.

YouTube changed all that. Suddenly video was easy for readers and for Web-site creators. And in time, it's become part of more and more sites, instead of some awkward tack-on to be endured rather than appreciated. Readers can watch a video just by clicking on a still image, without going somewhere else or dealing with a new window.

Where Jason gets off track is comparing YouTube and Napster. Napster was essentially created to help people steal music. YouTube is more like a discussion forum aimed at helping people share ideas and themselves, as such it is a common carrier and protected by Federal law. YT is obligated to remove intellectual property upon request, but should easily win any copyright lawsuits filed against it. In fact, YouTube may be overly aggressive in removing clips upon request. I think a case could be made that the David Letterman clip Fry mentions was uploaded and could be maintained on YouTube within the scope of fair use.

If you keep these points in mind, the idea that copyright law needs to change seems less compelling.

Earlier, I said -- more video, less production.

I've also been second guessing in my own mind the idea of a newspaper doing a video of recapped headlines, sort of a TV-like newscast.

I just checked out Roanoke's TimesCast for the first time. I'd just like to know how it's doing for them on traffic/popularity, because it's mighty engaging. What makes it good, of course, are the people -- they inject verve and personality into every segment. This isn't just a static restatement of the news, but a very creative and un-TV-like approach to news.

Kudos.

[tags]video, news[/tags]

[ifilm]2689069[/ifilm]

[tags]tron[/tags]

I'm catching up on AmandaAcrossAmerica, and found her interview with one of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki (Part 1 / Part 2:

• It takes ego to change the world.
• Guy likes to know what people are writing about him, but he doesn't read blogs (headline of this post comes from this section of the interview)
• He's obsessed with watches.
• "I don't want to be the next person. I want to fund the next person."
• "Failure is a good thing."
• The companies that have changed the world, failed the three-point VC test (No proven team, no proven business model, no proven technology), such as Yahoo!, Cisco and Google.
• If it takes 30 minutes to explain the problem, it's not a problem.
• Missed opportunity is what keeps a VC up at night, not bad investments.

And Guy interviews Amanda.

[tags]guy kawasaki, venture capital[/tags]

I was just thinking about this ... somebody told me yesterday about a newspaper that spent $20,000 to train about six reporters to become "multimedia storytellers," meaning they can now get some audio, some pictures and some words and make a slick Flash presentation (at least, we hope it's slick).

Here's the thing, building a good Flash story takes hours and hours (depending on the story and the content assets), and has probably less than a 20 percent chance of being a hit with the audience. Whereas a quick video can take very little time to edit, and stands about the same chance of being a hit with the audience.

For $20,000 you could buy more than 50 of these (plus memory cards and carrying cases). In a mid-size newsroom, that it is enough to give one to every reporter, and have 20 or 30 left over to hand out to potential citizen journalists in the community.

That strikes me as a much, much higher ROI.

Not to mention that you're going to have to buy hardware (visual and audio) for your Flash reporters, anyway.

There can be a time and a place for Flash storytelling, but for the most part, video is a better bet.

[tags]newspapers, video, multimedia, flash[/tags]

I read this piece about Google in the New York Times this morning and found it interesting, somewhat of a rehash of a very old debate -- does Google help media companies, or are they the enemy?

John Battelle links to it now and pulls out this quote from Steve Ballmer:

"The truth is, what Google is doing now is transferring the wealth out of the hands of rights holders into Google. So media companies around the world are all threatened by Google."

We could have a very healthy debate about whether redistributes wealth or hordes it. Sure, Google is getting very rich making money off of other people's content, but they're also redistributing a good deal of revenue to content producers. In fact, many content producers who never had a chance of earning a time from content now have that opportunity. Some of them are doing quite well. And for a a big media company, thanks to Google, content that was once nearly valueless (long tail content) now has value.

Yes, Google competes for ad dollars, but much of its wealth is generated by advertisers who couldn't afford big media. Google didn't take a piece of the pie. Google made the pie bigger.

I've said before that Google is the enemy. I want to take it back. I now see Google as neither good nor evil. Google is a tool. A hammer is a tool. A hammer can help you build bird feeders and spice racks, or it can kill kitty cats and smash fine china. You can use Google to your benefit, or not. The choice is yours.

It used to be that becoming a start involved a lot of time and money. Now all you need is a cheap camera, a laptop and YouTube. The entire Hollywood star making process has been disintermediated. And this trend is only going to continue, and the quality of the programing that comes out of basements and back bedrooms around the world is only going to get better. Increasingly, who needs a TV?

Here's a NYT piece on the changing face of entertainment.

Content-heavy newspaper home pages, take notice: What users want most is speed.

UPDATE: Greg Sterling notes that Gannett's new "information center" initiative is fine at all, but the first order of business that newspaper sites must address is usability. Take a look at the chart.

Kevin Roderick at LAObserved has posted a memo from LATimes.com editor Joel Sappell promising more and better video.

Today, we're implementing a new and improved latimes.com video strategy. We'll be giving our audience better and faster access to local breaking news and features through an upgraded video player on the homepage and throughout the site. The effort also will mark the beginning of a new, creative partnership with our sister company KTLA and, come early 2007, we'll be operating a full-fledged video portal.

I'm not sure partnering with a TV station is the smartest way to go. I would rather put cameras in the hands of every reporter and get them posting their own video related to the stories they're covering. I happen to believe that newspaper reporters have a better eye for detail, are less likely to engage in sound-bite journalism, and are better at telling a story than what TV news has traditionally done. TV reporters and editors are trained to think about time. On the Web, time is irrelevant. It's all about intention and attention.

[tags]newspapers, video, journalism, Los Angeles Times[/tags]

I'm not a big fan of projects -- by 2010, X will equal Y sort of stuff. That sort of crystal ball gazing is of limited value. But when some industry source releases projections that confirm my own prejudices, I can't help but say something -- video will get bigger.

Steve Yelvington addresses the departure of Dean Baquet from the LATimes:

I'm sorry to see Dean Baquet lose his job as editor of the Los Angeles Times. I take no joy in the wholesale restructuring of the newspaper business that I see unfolding before us. But it's real, it's necessary and it's driven by economic and technological change beyond our control. This is not the result of evil owners and management conspiring against the good guys, and making speeches about how editors need to stand up against an "irrational era of cost-cutting" is not helping.

Back when I was a young reporter at the Daily Californian in El Cajon, I had a publisher who I didn't particularly like. I thought he was clueless about the news business and how reporters should do there jobs. I didn't believe he cared about quality, and that whatever an advertiser wanted, an advertiser got. I didn't like that. He was from the East Coast and often complained that anyone who went to a West Coast J-school hadn't been properly trained.

His name was Paul Zindell. As far I know he's now out of the newspaper business, but still lives in San Diego County.

Back then, I was a hard-charging reporter -- completely faithful to the Church of Journalism. I believed in truth, justice and the journalistic way.

Mr. Zindell had a couple of famous catch phrases, phrases that still echo in the minds of all of us who once worked for him:

• We don't need any Woodward and Bernsteins here
• I can get any mother off the street to write stories
• We don't need to hang the mayor

Back in the day, I thought he was an idiot. These days, I think he was right -- well, sort of.

There is and should be a place in journalism for Woodward and Bernstein, and there is a time to hang the mayor. It's just that those situations are rare, and for the local journalist, pretty close to non-existent.

Ninty-eight percent of a local journalist's job isn't to be hard charging. It is tell the stories of neighbors and communities. The thing I realize about Mr. Zindell is that he angrily told us what we shouldn't be, but he never told us what he should be. He didn't tell us, because he didn't know. He had only part of the insight, which was that local news isn't about uncovering scandal. It's about telling neighbors about neighbors. He never told us that.

But when I was at the Daily Californian I covered a story that taught me everything I really needed to know about local journalism. It's a story that I reflect on often when I think about journalism these days. The story was about a young single mother with three children and a house. There was a big rain storm and the hill behind her house started to melt away, slowly sliding into into her rear sliding glass window. Over the next two weeks, I covered every inch-by-inch change of this woman's life. Why? Because when I was out in the community, talking to friends, family and sources -- it was the story everybody asked me about. Every where I went, everybody wanted updates. More than any "hang the mayor" story I ever wrote, the story of the mother without home owners' insurance who was slowly losing her modest dwelling was the most read and talked about story I ever covered. There was no scandal. It was just a story of a neighbor facing a crisis. It was a story about a real person.

I still don't agree with the way Mr. Zindell ran his paper, but if he had been able to do a better job of getting news staff to catch his vision (if what he was saying could be called a "vision"), the Daily Cal might still be in business today. It was that, and fixing a fully dysfunctional circulation department.

I now believe the best journalism, the jouranalism that is most needed, and the journalism that will save the journalism business, is the little journalism, the small journalism. It is the journalism Paul Zindell wanted but didn't know how to ask for or get.
[tags]journalism, newspapers, el cajon[/tags]

MediaPost takes a look at the complex circulation picture for small daily papers -- many of which reported circ gains in the recent Fas-Fax.

For the most part, small dailies not within the sphere of large metro areas and without high broadband penetration reported circulation gains.

[tags]newspapers, circulation[/tags]

There are seldom times when Web editors can predict in advance that a lot of people will be looking to their newspaper.com sites for fresh coverage, and one of those times is election night.

So how did the South Carolina newspaper sites do last night? Doug Fisher took a look and was disappointed in what he found.

There are not too many people working at US newspapers doing what Steve Swenson does for Bakersfield.com -- moderating citizen participation. He's been doing it since July 2005 and for part of that time I had a front-row seat to watch him grow into the job in a way that is authentic and vital, applying the right balance between inserting himself into debates and cracking down on bad actors.

N.L. Belardes does us all a favor by interviewing Swenson.

What my role is in relation to the world of journalism is actually a pivotal question. I've been a news reporter for 36 years. I've spent nearly all that time keeping my opinions to myself while trying to be fair and accurate.

This is different. I can share what I think. I can comment on the news and the people in it. I generally do that in a light hearted way. I like to think of myself as a paid smart aleck.

If newspaper.coms are going to be successful with citizen content and user participation, they will need more Steve Swensons -- many, many more. It's one of the most important jobs news sites need to fill. In fact, there should have been an army of Swensons in the news business a decade ago.

Good job on getting this interview, Nick. I think it's cool that you, who has so often been so harsh on TBC, recognize the value of Steve's job.

[tags]blogs, citizen journalism, citizen media, newspapers, journalism[/tags]

Doug Fisher seems to think that Gannett's new Information Center design, which does seem to emphasis original, local reporting, bodes ill for Associated Press.

Doug was reacting to this E&P article.

Peter Krasilovsky notes that Gannett's initiative is aimed at better community coverage, which surprisingly isn't something newspapers have down well of late:

One would think that digging deep into the community is something that newspapers intuitively do. But actually, they don’t. Low budgets, unfocused editing and a desire to avoid controversy sometimes leave many communities feeling alienated from their newspapers – on both the reader and advertiser levels.

Across the pond, Andrew Grant-Adamson says Gannett's efforts makes the Telegraph's integrated newsroom look like a toe in the water.

Dan Kennedy is worried that Gannett is just trying to cheap out on content. That's a complaint I first heard from Nick Belardes a few months ago. I was frankly caught off guard by Nick's reaction, because it to me it just seems so obvious that newspapers need to open up their publishing platform to everybody in the community. It's the right thing to do. It's also nice that it makes business sense, but not because of the free content -- but because it will help increase readership.

Jeff Howe offers this round up of blogger coverage. As an example of crowdsourcing in action, he points to this page racking reports of election-day irregularities.

Previously:  Gannett FAQ on the Information Center (which will lead you to previous posts)

[tags]gannett, crowdsourcing, journalism, newspapers, information center, jeff howe[/tags]

The Center for Citizen Media has a wealth of useful legal information for citizen journalists planning to document election day.

If you're in California, you should note that picture taking at the polling place is clearly prohibited.

Cal Elec Code § 18541: Prohibited activities within 100 feet of polling place; Punishment for violation. (a) No person shall, with the intent of dissuading another person from voting, within 100 feet of a polling place, do any of the following: (3) Photograph, videotape, or otherwise record a voter entering or exiting a polling place.

UPDATE:  I just re-read this post in a differet light ... and now wonder if it is so clear that citizen media, or any media, is prohibited from photographing or videotaping polling.  The key phrase above is "intent of dissuading."  Legitimate journalistic activities have no such intention.  That said, if I were a blogger with no media organization behind me to pay my legal bills, I'm not sure I would want to be a test case.

Remember when AOL used to try to block access for other instant messaging services to its AIM network?  Now AIM has its own API.

Jason Calacanis says buying distressed newspaper properties is one of the best investment opportunities available.

Adam Grant-Adamson is tackling the subject of newspaper blogs, and makes this vital point:

Newspapers need to be selective and think carefully about their policy. Blogs have to be an integral part of the business plan and show that they contribute to the achievement of the plan.

Blogging is not news reporting, nor news analysis, nor column writing -- it is a completely different creature. It is blogging.

I see too many journalist jump into blogging without having ever read a blog. In some cases, I know this for a fact, in others, it's just obvious from reading the blog. When it's obvious, here's some shared characteristics:

• Stiff, journalistic writing
• Personal pronouns such as I, We and Me are missing
• No links out
• No blog roll beyond other bloggers at the same newspaper

If you don't read blogs, if they're not part of your media mix (and they should be), then you'll never be a good blogger.

(via Mindy McAdams)

[tags]newspapers, blogging, journalism[/tags]

Jack Lail has a round up of posts on Gannett's Information Center.  I like his last sentence:

Somebody, somewhere, just stepped on the accelerator of change. and that's a good thing.