Howard Owens

TechCrunch has posted an interesting chart showing the fast growing web sites.

Take out the porn, and what you have are blogs, social networks, video and UGC sites.  Some of the fastest growing encompass  one or more of those content strategies.

There's not a traditional media site in the bunch. Even the government (weather.gov) is kicking MSM's butt.

Your audience is drifting away, MSM.

Is this where I get to say, "I told you so"?

Whenever I write about the need for journalists to start blogging in order to really get online journalism, some journosaur pops up with some snark about blogging and how journalism hasn't changed because of the Web.

That so misses the point.

Colin Mulvany now gets it. He has discovered how blogging is really different from just slapping repurposed print content on the web and calling it journalism.

I will be honest with you, until I started this blog, I barely understood the concept myself. I was shocked by how many people Mastering Multimedia has reached in such a short amount of time. But what really opened my eyes was how people are finding this blog. RSS feeds, tags, Google Reader, blog rolls, and links from other social networks. It’s about sharing. It’s about a conversation. It’s about Web 2.0.

I now understand. I have been a producer of web content for years on a creaky CMS that only partially takes advantage of the Web 2.0 tools available on any WordPress blog. I just didn’t see the big picture of why this is important for all of us in the newspaper industry to grasp. If I didn’t get it, then how will my non-blogging co-workers, who are already apprehensive about change, ever understand?

If you haven’t already, my advice is to get an education in Web 2.0. Start a blog. Feed it. Share it. Our very survival as an industry will be predicated on how well we interface with this expanding social networking universe.

Sorry for the blogging triumphalism, but I've been saying this for like two years now.

If you want to understand where journalism is going, start blogging. There is simply no other way. And if you don't believe me, start blogging. I won't believe your alternative view until you do, because until you do, you have no credibility to snark at blogs. Sorry, you just don't get it otherwise.

Now, if we can just work on Colin's adherence to Big-J journalism "storytelling" instead of just connecting with video, making video that fits the conversation, then we'll have a hell of a break through.

(via Mindy McAdams).

UPDATE:  Must-read post from Scott Karp, who articulates very well why journalists need to learn self-publishing tools.

Many people referred to my MBO post as a "challenge." That wasn't a challenge. It was just a task list with a reward. Here's a challenge:

Make your focus your audience. Try to figure out what readers want, not just what you think they want.

For the individual reporter: Make a three year commitment not to submit any story you report or write to any journalism contest. Insist that no editor submit any story you write to any contest. At the same time, collect every reader praise you get and track them. Make it your goal to get at least 4 reader praises per month. The praise can come through a phone call, in person, e-mail or story comment. In months that you make goal, give yourself a treat -- it might be a night out at the movies, a nice dinner, a concert or whatever makes you happy but you don't already do regularly for yourself (or your significant other). When you don't make goal, deny yourself that treat. If you make goal three consecutive months, increase the goal by a reasonable amount.

For editors: Ban your staff from submitting articles to award contests. Start collecting reader praise. Every week, post the number of reader praises on a prominent bulletin board in the newsroom. Encourage editors and reporters to forward praise to you so you can count it (if the praise didn't come in written form, require specifics on the nature and source of the praise). Track that number every week and graph it. When praise comes in written form, post the best of the praise. Do not give gold stars or bonus checks for praise. Don't make it an individual contest. But do thank every staff member who forwards praise to you. Though, you should encourage reporters to do the individual measurement on their own.

BTW: Praise can be for stories, blog posts or video -- any kind of journalism, no matter where it first appears or what format.

It can't be from sources or subjects.

Don't count complaints. Complainers about stories often have agendas, or are just zealots with an anti-media bias.

Or develop your own reader satisfaction index. The goal is to focus on the reader, the audience.

I can already hear the objections -- you're dumbing down journalism by aiming for the lowest common denominator, you're ambulance chasing and taking journalism from the context of serving the public good.

Bunk.

It's a false dichotomy to say there are only two kinds of journalism -- the "holy temple of serving the civic good" journalism and the ambulance-chasing journalism. There are all kinds of journalism. Your job is to figure out what kind audiences really want.

Related Posts:

• Review: Discovering the News, by Michael Schudson
• Journalism has evolved to fit society’s needs and demands

When ever I write about the need for journalists to learn new tools -- such as blogging or DIY video -- there's a few hearty souls who pop up and say, "It's not about the technology. It's about the journalism."

Those people are absolutely right. It's not about the technology. Where they might be wrong is, it is not necessarily about the journalism.

What they should really say is, "It's not about the technology. It's about the audience."

The audience decides what journalism they want. They always have. For background on this, see my review of Discovering the News.

Successful publishers of the past figured out what audiences wanted and gave it to them.

Publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer became wealthy and built successful publishing empires by giving audiences the kind of journalism they wanted.

Even as journalists at the start of the 2oth Century began to take a greater role in defining their profession, they still had to write and report what people would buy.

What journalists mean by "journalism" today isn't what journalists meant when they spoke of "journalism" in 1830, 1880 or 1910. It was only during the radical changes in society following World War I that the word objectivity entered the lexicon and modern journalism began to take shape.

It may merely be a coincidence, but interestingly, as journalism became more of a profession and less of trade in the 1930s, newspaper household penetration began to decline.

Real circulation losses didn't start until the 1970s, at the apex of the rise of investigative journalism and the birth of the Woodstein era.

Is it possible that professional journalism, for all its pretense to serving society, has really been out of touch with its readership?

Is it possible that for the past four decades, journalists have produced stories to impress other journalists (aka, win awards), not please readers?

The funny thing is, Mr. Reporter, when is the last time the guy in the other cubicle picked up a paper and read one of your stories, or you one of his?

It doesn't often happen, does it?

Now, for the first time, our audience can fight back. They can post comments, publish blogs, produce videos, and report the news themselves. Society is changing, but many journalist hide behind the notion that "technology does not change journalism."

If society changes journalism, however, what happens to the journalist, or the newspaper, that doesn't change to meet the new needs and demands?

If a brand of journalism doesn't fit with the society it purports to serve, is it really serving that society?

Shouldn't we be listening to our audience so we can figure out what they want from us?

Journalism -- what constitutes a story, the guiding principals and mores of editors and reporters -- hasn't changed much in my lifetime. It's easy to think that the attitudes, aptitudes and priorities of journalists have been much the same all the way back to Gutenberg.

Of course, people who have studied journalism history know that's not true.

We don't spend a lot of time talking about our profession's history, even though history might teach us a good deal about today.

A great place to start the discussion is a book I just read called Discovering the News by Michael Schudson.

Schudson's book is thirty years old, but it covers the major changes in journalism through the Watergate era.

The primary theme of the book is that journalism has evolved in response to changes in society.

Schudson's story begins in the 1820s, when the dominate newspapers where either organs of political partisans or served the interests of the business class. They sold for six cents per edition, but required annual subscriptions. This meant only the wealthiest Americans could afford a newspaper. Few papers sold more than 2,000 copies per day.

In the 1830s, the penny press arrived. Some might think it was technology (steam-driven cylinder presses) that drove the advent of the penny press, but it was really the rising tide of a middle class in America, and a greater sense of democratic rule over gentry rule (voting was now open to more than just land owners). The penny press met the demand for news (something the six-penny papers didn't have) by reporting actual events, such as murder trials, rather than just political editorials.

The publishers, such as James Gorden Bennett and Horace Greeley, cranked out a lot of news, and a lot of advertising, to a middle class, trained by the six-penny papers, to see newspaper subscriptions as a status symbol. They sold a lot more newspapers.

The papers were not necessarily non-partisan, and while the reporting was informational, it wasn't necessarily without an agenda, and they were certainly sensational.

By the 1880s, the New York papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst took sensationalism to new levels. While the journalist of the day would believe their reporting was truthful, they were not beyond withholding information to shape a story. Consider the career of Richard Harding Davis and his role in reporting the Spanish boarding the Olivette. Davis didn't quit Hearst not because Davis didn't support the publisher's position, but because the particular fictionalization wasn't his fictionalization. Davis merely withheld facts. Hearst invented new ones.

It would be a mistake, however, to attribute the success of Pulitzer and Hearst to Yellow Journalism. At a time when New York first became a commuter city, and a city of immigrants in need of illustrated papers and simple language, Pulitzer and Hearst met the need.

It wasn't until Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times in 1896 that a more non-partisan, less sensational style of journalism began to take hold. Ochs' style of journalism came along at a time when observational science was beginning to shape cultural attitudes and realism was the leading trend in art and literature. Again, Ochs was meeting the needs of a changing society, not driving innovation in news coverage.

Prior to World War I, the word "objectivity" was not part of a journalist's lexicon. Reporting was expected to be factual, but objective was not a common news value.

With the unraveling of the world after the Great War, up through the Great Depression, people began to question democratic institution and market forces, and the very idea that facts could be considered neutral came into question. Objectivity became a counter weight to the questionable judgment of individuals, not just in journalism, but in law, social sciences and art, as well.

Walter Lippman and others began to call for and define a greater professionalism in journalism. Schools were founded and awards created. It was in this environment that interpretive reporting -- putting the news in context -- first gained currency.

During World War II, the U.S. government entered, for the first time, into organized attempts to control the news flow. Press agents were hired and press conferences became widespread. Reporters lost access to government officials. The relationship between press and White House changed radically in the post War years.

The rise of McCarthysm, the Bay of Pigs and the start of the war in Vietnam were all events that helped create within society a greater sense that the U.S. government, now no longer easily accessible, was not always worthy of trust. For the first time, the press began to take on a watch dog role and investigative reporting was born.

This trend reached its apex with Watergate.

The way I read the book, prior to the 20th Century, publishers (not reporters and editors) reacted to changes in society where they saw business opportunities. As the 20th Century has progressed, and journalism has become more of a profession rather than a trade, journalists have had a great say in what constitutes professionalism, but there is still a good deal of reaction to society, rather than journalists simply changing the terms of their jobs.

And now, society is apparently going through its largest upheaval, especially in terms of how it interacts with media, since at least the 1960s, if not the earliest parts of the 2oth Century.

If that's the case, should today's journalist react with "we should keep doing what we've always been doing" attitude, or figure out how journalism needs to change to meet new demands and new needs?

I have yet to hear of a newspaper improving its revenue or audience growth by offering free classified ads.

The San Diego Union-Tribune tried it int 2005.

Now the U-T is further trimming staff.

"Not since the merger of the Union and Tribune over 15 years ago have we faced such wrenching changes," he (CEO Gene Bell) wrote. "At the same time, never in our history have we faced revenue losses as dramatic as those of the last 12 months."

Observation: The U-T offered free classifieds  and that did not stem the tide of revenue loses.

I'm not trying to draw a direct connection, just saying ... it didn't help.

The only time I've ever heard of an MSM newspaper offering free classifieds and using it to win market share was in Arkansas when Walter Hussman took the Democrat from second-tier player into only game in town.

There might be a very scary lesson about the inability of a market leader's inability to use disruptive strategy to beat other disruptive players.

What worked for Hussman to beat a bigger paper, may not work for a market leader like the leading metro in town to beat Craigslist and other free-classified sites.

If that's true, then sustaining innovations (which most newspapers have been pursuing in the recruitment ad space for a decade) may be the only way to go.

Just thinking out loud.

I've had a couple of reporters contact me to say they had already done things on the list, but were inspired to do more, including Stephanie.

One reporter has legitimately (no prior wiredness and included supervisor on e-mail to me) taken up the objectives (no blog yet).

And this Roving Reporter blog just appeared from an unnamed journalist at at daily in Mass.  Said reporter is also new to Twitter, judging from a note at the bottom of the blog.

Mark Glaser has a good post up summarizing the various positions and approaches media companies are taking to user participation.

“I think quality is more important than quantity,” Landman said. “You have to create a space where the conversation is the kind of conversation that appeals to the people in your world. There are places where the conversation gets really ugly and people don’t go to the New York Times to get yelled at.”

Mark was kind enough to include a couple of words from me.

We've discussed before that journalists need to get an RSS reader and read it.

Over on Back Channel, I offer a list of ten RSS feeds that should be in your feed reader.  I didn't post it here, because the list isn't intended to be just for journalists, but for anybody who values being a well-rounded person, which we would hope would apply to all journalists.

That post I did about an MBO program for journalists led to an invitation from the American Press Institute to lead a discussion about becoming a wired journalist.

It's part of a session on Innovations in Storytelling in Reston, VA, Jan. 21-24.  I'll be there on the 23rd.

Hey, Mr. Reporter, you like your job, right?

You do realize, don't you, that its advertising that pays your salary, right?

And newspaper advertising is getting hammered.

Online news sites, however, well, there is some revenue growth and opportunity there, isn't there? It's just not enough, necessarily, to save your job ... yet.

What if you could help online revenue grow?

No, I don't mean you should go out and sell advertising. What I mean is you should help your web site get more traffic.

If your newspaper.com revenue is based on CPM or CPC models, traffic equals revenue.

There are at least five simple things (and none of them require a huge time commitment once started) you can do to help your site grow traffic. All of them are ethical, both from an SEO perspective and an SPJ perspective.

1. Start a blog. Yeah, I know, I'm always saying journalists should start a blog (interestingly, 27 percent of them have), but this time the advice isn't about doing something to learn web culture, it's to help your site's SEO. To be useful, your blog can't just be a link farm to your site. You need to do real blogging, the kind of blogging other bloggers will link to, so you build good SEO credibility. When you do, you can use your blog to deep link to your own stories and to your favorite stories of your colleagues. Google loves blogs. Blogging is great SEO.
2. Join social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Now, you should NOT just throw up a link to every story you do -- only your best stuff. You should build a network and use that network to drive traffic to your best work. Nick Belardes at KERO in Bakersfield uses MySpace a lot to promote his work.
3. Use social bookmarking tools such as del.icio.us and reddit. Bookmark interesting things you find on the web for your own benefit, but also bookmark your best stories. With proper tagging, others will find your links.
4. Get into Digg and/or Mixx, or similar sites. To be effective, you have to Digg more than your own work. You need to find good stuff on the web, Digg it, and build a reputation for finding good stuff. You should also Digg your best stuff. Digg, especially, has powerful SEO juice, so even one Digg can help your story get more traffic.
5. Make vlogs about your best stories and upload them to YouTube and other social video sites. You don't need to make fancy productions. You just need a web cam and something to say -- if you have a Macbook, for example, you can shoot your video with Quick Capture with no software or extra equipment and upload it to YouTube quickly and easily. A good title and keywords, and you're giving your story some good SEO.

These SEO ideas are just a few of the things every reporter could do to help his or her site grow traffic, and thereby help the site grow revenue. Imagine if half the people in your newsroom cared deeply enough about their jobs to get this involved, what it would mean for traffic and revenue?

This post inspired by the SMARTS marketing video.

Chris Tolles, CEO of Topix, sent me a note and said:

I got sick of reading all the hand wringing by various newspapers around anonymous comments and had our development guys run some stats comparing anonymous comments vs. registered users’.

And that led to this blog post.

While anonymous posts have a roughly 50% higher kill rate, they also account for 3X the comment and commenter volume. If one asks, “where are we getting the most acceptable comments from?”, the answer is clearly the non-registered user base. As pointed out above, that there are as many registered users on Topix is partially due to offering anonymous comments

Also, its important to note that the ability to manage “anonymous” commenters and “registered” commenters is equivalent from a moderation standpoint. It’s just as easy to identify someone by their IP address for the most part as it is through a registration system. While a 50% difference is certainly something to look at, it’s not an order of magnitude, and we’re also looking at a grand total of way under 10% of total commentary.

Some quibbles:

I think there is a difference between "acceptable" and "accepted." What the Topix numbers show is 3x as many "accepted" anonymous comments. That does not mean they were "acceptable," if you define acceptable as A) adding to the civil discourse (as opposed to empty, ranting blather); B) providing useful information that advances the storyline of the article, which is the beauty of a really good user comment string.

Both A and B should be the goal of a newspaper.com adding comments to a story.

That's not to say that there isn't value in a Wild-West approach to comments. The open conversation is better than no conversation. I would simply rather see newspaper.com interaction evolve to a higher level of utility. We catch glimpses of that sometimes in some anonymous comment strings now.

I have a great faith the the majority of a newspaper.com audience to be civil and intelligent, and that providing some tools, techniques and encouragement, we can draw more civic mindedness out of more people. Anonymity does encourage, I have no doubt, a certain level of glibness if not outright bad behavior.

I'm willing to accept some lesser level of participation in exchange for better conversations.

That said, I totally part company with those (referenced in Chris's post, but original articles no longer available (now there are some newspapers using a bad CMS)) who say there should be no comments unless we enforce registration. At GHS, we're building a registration-based system, but in the meantime, we're using an anonymous system. I would rather have the conversation than not, even if that means we have to weed out some junk.

Chris is right on this point:

The “anonymous” issue is just a red herring. Really, what these journalists are threatened by is the nature of truly public discourse on the web. These people are not barbarians that appeared one day the net went up.

They’re your audience

I agree. You simply MUST enable the conversation on your web site (just don't outsource it to Topix). And you must be a part of it. And you must learn to deal with it. That's part of being a journalist these days. If it's not already in your job description, it should be.

You simply must engage your audience. The benefits far outweigh the periodic bad actor post (one of the benefits of the Topix report is that it statistically demonstrates how little actual really bad stuff is part of the submission flow -- journalists should be able to deal with this trickle as part of their duties).

One thing that would be interesting is if Topix ran an A/B test on registration vs. non-registration. Of course, it would only really be useful if we had some way of measuring the civic value of conversations, not just how many posts were banned. Also, I would like to see the test involve registration that sets some sort of expectation for real identity. Topix, at least, has the volume of participation to make such a test statistically valid if run over a long-enough period of time (and maybe in a couple of different periods). The A/B test would involve using the same content to spur conversation, but route half the people to an anonymous-allowed site, and half to a registration site.

Some of my favorite multimedia packages have been retrospectives on past major news events. The Rockford Register Star (a GateHouse Media paper) has done a nice one for the 40th anniversary of a tornado that hit Belvidere, Ill.

As a Scripps alum, I think that the E.W. Scripps company is one of the finest newspaper companies -- a long, proud tradition of quality journalism and community service.

It would be an honor, I think, to win an award with the Scripps name on it.

Once again, the Scripps Foundation is offering a web reporting award.

Jack Lail has the details.

Askimet thinks I'm a spammer.

Thankfully, Scott Karp, among others, knows I'm not a spammer. But he has had to hassle four or five times recently to fish my comments out of Askimet's spam bucket. That led to this post.

On any blog that is using Askimet's spam filter, if I leave a comment, my comment goes into the spam bucket.

Why? Apparently, it's related to the fact that my site was hacked twice. One of those hacks involved putting a redirect page in one of my directories, and then the spammers sent traffic from hundreds of other hacked blogs to that page.

That was great for my technorati ranking, not so great for my reputation with Askimet.

I've written to Askimet and asked to be taken off the back list. So far, the request has been ignored.

I pretty much hated spammers before these incidents. My inclination to think they should all be shot on sight is hard to resist, even as much as I strongly believe in full and fair trails for all accused criminals. Here's to hoping people like Alan Ralsky, assuming he's convicted, get punished to the full extent of the law. We need thousand more prosecutions like this, but then I suspect most spammers reside in countries where the government could careless. Hopefully, someday, those governments will join the civilized world and come to hate spam as much as the rest of us do.

UDPATE: Afternoon of Jan. 9, 2008.  I just got an e-mail from Askimet saying I've been unblacklisted.

Long-time readers know that I've tried my hand at songwriting a few times, and have been audacious enough to torture those good readers by posting my MP3s on this blog.

I haven't done it in a long time. I haven't finished a song in a long time.

Coolness arrived with the new year, though. My friend Kevin Featherly liked one of my songs well enough to record it with his band.

Here it is: Trouble and Turmoil.

Credits: Bruce Featherly, vocals; Scott Maida, drums; Kevin Feathery, all other instruments, production and mixing; words and music by Howard Owens.

You can read the full story of "Trouble and Turmoil" on Back Channel.

In a piece about data portability, John Battelle shifts into a discussion about the difference between a business that competes on price vs. a business that competes on service. He says:

An example. My local market charges far more for a good bottle of wine than many shops that are nearby. But there's a wine guy who works at that market who knows wine cold, and who I trust. Also, the market is close to my home, and I have a personal relationship with the fellow (OK, here's the reference to the book I'm working on - I have a "conversation" going with this merchant). Those factors, combined with a certain ambiance at the store that I really like, all lead to one result: I buy my wine at the more expensive store. Why? Because the store competes on more than price.

Ironically, I just found a booze store near my house that not only has great prices, but also great service -- an owner who knows his booze (not just wine) cold. But that's beside the point.

Battelle is absolutely right. He's talking about differentiation. He's talking about competitive advantage.

The newspaper industry is awash in talk about disruption and innovation. I do it, too. It's important. We've had API do NewspaperNext. But there's more to saving this industry than coming up with new ideas. I want to know when API is going to do NewspaperBetter.

All of the evidence suggest that ever since the Woodstein era began, readership and circulation have been in decline. Now, there are lots of reasons for that (subject of a future post), but there's also little doubt that there is something about American newspaper journalism since the 1970s that is turning people off.

We're not even winning the content battle on the web, so it isn't just about delivery, convenience or changing lifestyles. It's also about something that we're doing or not doing.

Through all of the debates we've had about video, there is a "quality crowd" that seems to think the only thing I care about is slapping up a bunch of crappy videos just to make video.

That totally misses the point.

The point is about reinventing newspaper journalism, and I believe video is going to be a big part of newspaper journalism from here on out, and reinvention is all about doing it better.

The quality crowd doesn't seem to understand, or doesn't seem to care, that quality isn't about the camera you carry, the software you use or how much time you spend in an editing bay (if you're using an editing bay, by the way, you're in overkill mode). Quality is about the skill, knowledge, experience, understanding, talent and intuition that helps you get bits of interesting stuff -- the stuff people really care about, want to read about, or want to see and hear.

It's the content, not the presentation, that matters most.

Again, I point you to Ira Glass on getting good.

Getting good at any creative endeavor is hard work. It takes time. I don't care how smart you are, it takes time. Getting good isn't about equipment. It's about heart and soul.

So the best thing to do to get good is to do it. Get started. Explore and discover and feel free to fail. You must make yourself create things and not be afraid of some of the crap you will create along the way.

That's also what my posts encouraging journalists to dive deep into the online social life and conversation are all about.

To be a great modern journalist, you MUST be a wired journalist. You must GET online. That doesn't mean you just know how to do a Google search, read a few blogs and send a few e-mails. It means you get the culture, the attitudes and the expectations of the online crowd.

Until you do it, you'll never understand that there is a difference. That's why I don't take very seriously the critics who say this call to action is a lot of bunk. They haven't done it. They don't know what they're talking about, or what we're talking about.

During one of the football games I watched last week, the announcer referred to an interview he did that week with a first-year NFL coach. When asked what was different about the NFL than he expected, the coach said that what he expected to find in the NFL was a group of professional football players, and he was shocked to find just how few professionals there were in the league. Very few players in the NFL, he said, are professionals. They don't go about their jobs and their routines the way a professional would.

I submit that if you're a professional journalist, you've already done most of what I put in my suggested MBO plan. And if you don't think you need to do those things, than I question whether you're really a professional.

It is time for newspaper journalists to set up and start creating the competitive advantage that will help us win. Current newspaper journalism is pretty much a commodity. When what you produce becomes a commodity, you can no longer win on price (and some journalists think we should be charging a fee for what people are already telling us doesn't much interest them). You can only win on a competitive advantage. For journalists that should be doing a better job of story selection, presentation and interaction with the people in their communities.

If you don't believe me, go read Mindy McAdams. She's got it exactly right. I wish I had written that post. It could be the primer for an API NewspaperBetter project.

It's not unusual for me to eat my lunch at my desk and watch some video.  It turns out, I'm not alone.

The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.

Not surprising.

The other day, Dan Telvock of Fredericksburg.com sent me an e-mail and told me about his potential new job -- he's may become a MoJo, or Mobile Journalist.

Cool job, if you can get it.

While not asking for advice, per se, my sense was Dan would like to know what I think about the job.

My response to that, however, would be in the form of advice.

If I were going to have a MoJo at one of our papers, this is what I would expect.

First, the area you cover is your beat. But you can't approach this like a beat reporter. For most beat reporters, the beat is something you do during the paid hours, and afterwards, you go home and kiss the wife, pet the cat and watch TV.

But if you're going to be a serious online journalist, you need to be passionate about what you cover.

This is taking a pixel or two from blogging.

All of the best bloggers are passionate about the topics they cover. You need to be passionate about your beat in the same way. For the MoJo, the town is the beat. You need to LOVE the town. You need to love it's people, it's identity, it's good things and its bad things (and be discerning enough to recognize the differences). You need to be the foremost expert on your town -- know all the history, all the people, all the things that make it the marvelous place that it is.

Second, you need a blog. You need to blog your town. Most MoJos are assigned the task of finding news updates for the home page of the newspaper.com.

That's all well and good and part of the job, but the main task should be blogging the town. If in the process of doing that, some news item worthy of the home page comes out of it, then let an editor make that decision. The editor can pull the blog post and promote it to the home page (re-writing the post, if necessary, to be more "news style," though, frankly, I see no reason to do that).

Of course, you'll always have a video camera with you, but your job isn't to be a video storyteller. Your job is to document what's going on as you see it. You should be after the small bits of video that are interesting, amusing and occasionally newsworthy.

Sometimes, you might produce the story video, but the more time you spend shooting and editing video, the less time you're spending with the people in your town.

You should spend a lot of time with the people in your town. You should be better known around town than the mayor or the leading business owner. EVERYBODY should know you, know who you are and what you do. If you do that well, they will clamor to give you information and maybe even show up in your blog, or you home page story, or your front page story.

You should carry plenty of business cards, all with your blog URL front and center, bigger than the newspaper name, and they shoulbe handed to every person you meet.

You need to spend more time with people than you spend driving around.

The classic image of a MoJo is a reporter sitting in his car, filing a story. Certainly, you must spend time doing that, but the less time you spend actually driving that car, the better. You need to be out and about, on foot, with people.

Your job isn't to find scandal or hard-hitting news. Your job is to unlock the life of your town in a way that print journalism hasn't done consistently for generations.

It's all about people.

So that's my advice.

Dan sent along this example of his first MoJo piece, which is a fine piece of writing, reporting and producing related video.

And it's a fine thing to do for a MoJo.  It's perfectly suitable. Sometimes, that's exactly what will come out of being a great MoJo, but mostly you will be the blogger of your town.

Here's an example of a GateHouse Media reporter who isn't afraid of the new medium, is entrepreneurial and forward thinking -- Jessica Gaspar, a reporter for our weekly in Hennrietta, New York, has started her own section on an independently run town bulletin board.  She calls it Jessica's Corner.

Jessica uses here posts to ask for story tips, get feedback on articles and promote her own weekly as well as the MPNNow.com web site.

Her posts are fun and lively and some of them generate a bit of conversation.  She includes all of her contact information in all of her posts.

Many towns these days have these local bulletin boards that are usually frequented by the biggest news junkies and gossip hounds in town.  It makes a lot of sense for a reporter covering that beat to become part of that community.

If Jessica happens by this blog post maybe she will leave a comment about how this has all worked out for her -- the upsides and downsides and what she's learned.

(via RottenChester)

How many times I have a written about the need for new attitudes about online in our newsrooms?  It feels like hundreds, but maybe only dozens.

Online-news deep thinker Steve Outing asked a bunch of his industry contacts if he had a magic wand to change any thing, what would be their wish.

The consensus: Change newsroom culture.

I guessed that I'd get a variety of responses. But what's interesting is that one theme kept coming up. What we'd like your magic wand to do, news industry people kept telling me, is change the culture at our company and in our newsroom, because it's holding us back and ensuring our ultimate failure.

Outing was kind enough to include my quote, as well.

One of the things none of us who pontificate on video ever talk about is how to get a good quote.

As any experienced reporter knows, getting a good quote usually requires asking a good question.  Good questions come when a reporter is both a good conversationalist and well prepared (either by dint of preparing for the specific interview, or knowing his or beat really, really well).

As an advocate for short, quick-production videos, I also believe that what works best for online video, as for most good journalism, is people, people, people -- get tight shots of people talking about something of interest and you have engaging video ... if you ask good questions.

I'm infamous for saying most newspaper video should take no more than an hour to shoot and produce, but here's where I think some ROI can be achieved by stretching that time -- in preparation.

If you prepare, not only will the couple of minutes of video you shoot have a better chance of being engaging, you will also need to spend less time editing.

Prepare like Charlie Rose. Prepare like James Lipton.

Watch this video:

[youtube zaL8Ca9E_R8]

(via Peter Zollman)

It seems like there are lots of new journalism/newspaper blogs popping up.  It's great to see, but I can't keep up.

If you own a blog focused on media, especially newspapers and newspaper-style journalism, I would be happy to add you to the blog roll.  And I'll also subscribe to your feed.

A link back to howardowens.com is always appreciated.  You can subscribe to the howardowens.com RSS feed here.

I can be reached at howard owens (oneword) at gmail dot com.

Here's another plea for news sites to require registration and some expectation of real identity from site participants.

But if news is moving from being a lecture to a conversation with readers, then readers must be as transparent and play by the same ethical rules as the media. Certainly, unfettered, ugly, racist, personal and similar sorts of rants do not contribute to civic discourse, but rather undermine it.

If we believe that professional journalism, however it might evolve, has value in the modern media world, then we need to accept a role that goes beyond merely posting the news.

We need to:

• Start conversations -- conversation starters includes our journalism, the things we relate and report, but we should also be offering context and questions that help guide conversations;
• Participate in the conversation -- be active in the conversations we start, adding context, information and clarifications as necessary;
• Set standards -- We make the rules, we enforce them, we offer guidance (including providing some ethical context) for civil, constructive participation, and we set the example for participation.

If we do these things, pre-screening comments becomes largely unnecessary. Healthy moderator participation -- and I've had a lot of experience doing this -- squelches most uncivil participation.

Technical solutions also play a role:

• "Require" real identity (100 percent enforcement impossible, but the effort will go a long way toward keeping people civil;
• Use reputation tools, such as thumbs up/down on posts and hiding unpopular posts;
• Tie participation to socially networked profiles, which brings about greater transparency on identity and persona;
• Make first-time participants go through moderation and e-mail validation;
• Let banned users post, but hide their comments from everybody but themselves.

Part of the new responsibility of the modern journalist, of the wired news organization, is to foster a locally focus online community. It is our job, the way I see it, that we should be hosting all of the most important discussions in our communities. This isn't just an audience growth strategy (though it will do that), it is part of our charter. In a way, it always has been.

The people in our communities know stuff. They're smart. They have insights. They often have a greater institutional knowledge than many of the people on a newspaper staff. They can help other members of the community -- including the paid journalists -- grow, learn and understand. They can help us all make better decisions, whether it's about who to vote for or which charity to support.

The whole community can become smarter through the conversations we host.

Isn't it appropriate that a journalistic organization, which I've always believed has an obligation to illuminate and inform, should be the hub of community conversation?

If we look at online conversation from this higher-responsibility prism, then don't we have an obligation to not only host the conversation, but to ensure we do our level best to keep the conversation civil and constructive.

If that is the case, then we need to do everything we can to keep the bad actors, the disruptors and the trolls out of our conversations.

This is why I support real identity for participation. And this is why I believe that every journalist has an obligation to be digitally literate. Real identity is necessary to a journalisticly sound conversation (it's a matter of ethics and transparency), and only digitally literate journalists can be master conversation guides, leaders and participants.

And being a participant should be henceforth written into every reporter and editors job description.

UPDATE: I forgot to include appropriate credit -- link via Martin Stabe.

Happy New Year!

Here are the most viewed posts from 2007.

1. Twelve things journalists can do to save journalism
2. 2008 objectives for today’s non-wired journalist
3. Let’s stop putting the entire newspaper online
4. Eight historical mistakes the newspaper industry made
5. A better list of Top 10 Newspaper Sites
6. Jim Romenesko, please link to this post
7. The culture of infallibility inhibits newspaper innovation
8. Covering naked and jogging college students is good community journalism
9. Eight reasons to be hopeful if you work for a newspaper company
10. Rob Curley answers questions about OnBeing

Most commented on posts:

1. Twelve things journalists can do to save journalism
2. 2008 objectives for today’s non-wired journalist
3. We can’t let the newsroom turtles impede progress
4. Let’s stop putting the entire newspaper online
5. Jim Romenesko, please link to this post
6. New standards needed for judging online video
7. Bannish boring slideshows
8. 2007 HowardOwens.com best newspaper web site awards
9. Eight historical mistakes the newspaper industry made
10. The practical side of point-and-shoot for reporters

Top ten referring blogs

1. poynter.org (This would be mostly Romenesko, but also E-Media Tidbits)
2. journerdism.com
3. newsvideographer.com
4. Howard Weaver
5. Lenslinger
6. Andy Dickinson
7. Innovation in College Media
8. Shooting By the Numbers
9. Brian Cubbison
10. Cyndy Green

Top ten search keywords that did not include my name:

1. isaac cubillos
2. "washington post" "on being" video rob curley
3. ghs
4. Johnny Cash
5. gatehouse media blogs
6. bree walker
7. ortopilot
8. anthony plascencia
9. media blog
10. personal journalism

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.

[youtube 3aB93DWgkiA]

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).

1. 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).
2. 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.)
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.

Here's the video.

[youtube 7FkQO5VUx5A]

I'm reading an interesting book right now called Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages.

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.

A couple of weeks ago, Victor DeRubeis left a comment on a post highlighting a couple of GateHouse Media videos.

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.