Here is a chance to do something completely different.
GateHouse Media is looking for two ambitious, entrepreneurial individuals to help us reinvent local journalism.
The ideal candidate:
A recent college graduate (or graduating this spring)
At least six months experience blogging
Capable of shooting and editing his or her own video
Ready to do more than sit in an office and make phone calls or pull the latest agenda item from a city council meeting and try to turn it into a story
Believes in local news and local community and sees a role for journalism in helping a community communicate and learn about what is happening in that community
In this job, you will have a chance to define a new role for community journalists. You will be doing more than trying to shove five W’s and an H into an inverted pyramid. This job is about figuring out what a community of people really wants from its local community site.
What we’re looking for is people who can work on their own, willing to try new things and not be bound “that’s how it’s always been done.” You will be expected to be responsible for coming up with new ideas for your site, both in coverage and presentation, and for growing audience.
We will provide you with the technology and tools to get the job done. We will expect you to grow readership and participation.
Chances are you will be required to relocate.
Applicants should e-mail me at howens -at- gatehouse media (oneword) dot com.
Local music: It’s a logical avenue into reaching a younger audience. It helps reflect what’s really going on in the community you’re sworn to cover. It ads depth of coverage to your newspaper.com.
And who doesn’t love a good music video? I’ve long suspected that the reason many reporters get excited about shooting video is they’ve watched a lot of MTV.
But you don’t see many music videos on newspaper sites.
The reason is simple, really. To do music video well takes time, and lots of it, good equipment, and costs can add up quickly, as well as real talent.
What you’re really looking at is significant expense and time away from doing the core business of covering news.
Yeah, but wouldn’t it be fun to make a music video?
The Canton Repository (a GateHouse Media paper) found a great lo-fi approach. During the photo shoot for its upcoming Battle of the Bands (a competition open only to bands comprised of high school students), the Rep filmed band members milling about the newspaper building, and in the photo studio.
The results are simple, elegant and engaging. The keys to success are good editing and well-composed shots of kids aspiring to the spotlight. All the videos are a reminiscent of Hard Day’s Night.
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.
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.
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. …
The post I just did gave me a thought — now that we’re getting wider distribution and participation from our news sites in our video strategy, I should highlight some of the better, more interesting videos our reporters shoot.
My intention is to do a video of the week, but given how busy I can get some times, I doubt I’ll be that deligent some times, or that posting will be evenly spaced.
I’ll start, though, this week with two I just found on YouTube (where most of our papers post their video).
Here’s a nice, complimentary post about the GateHouse Media video strategy from a local political blogger.
Cool. I don’t know the guy. He’s not part of the professional media crowd, as far as I know (he posts anonymously). He’s what some might call a “citizen journalist.” And he gets it.
He recognizes the difference between our FasterMore strategy vs. Gannett’s BiggerBetter strategy (see Ryan).
The Messenger-Post took an entirely different tack. They give their print reporters cheap cameras and had them add video to their stories. The M-P treats video as a complement to the print story. One good example is yesterday’s coverage of an accident at a local ice warehouse. Here’s a better one: a feature on a local sword swallower. You don’t have to watch the video to understand the story, but if you’re interested in the story, watching the video adds more detail. It’s not always done perfectly, but the sword swallower piece is as near a perfect fusion as I’ve seen.
That sword swallower video certainly is something to see … and I, for one, really don’t need to see that shot with a Canon XH-A1 (or even the Sony camcorders Gannett issues) and then have it over edited.
And I’ve got to say, MP is doing a great job with our video approach. They get some good pieces that fit well with their stories and are conscientious about shooting lots of video.
If you want to see more GHS video from all over the country — the good, the bad and the ugly — click here.
A couple of weeks ago, we brought Cyndy Green into Canton to train photographers and reporters on video basics.
The photographers were working with Canon HV20s, and the reporters with Casios.
The staff in Canton continues to consult with Cyndy, and Cyndy is sharing some of the things the staff is learning and dealing with. Here’s her latest post.
I know that a lot of journalists object to the video strategy I advocate, because it doesn’t stress “quality.” But as I told the Canton staff when I met with them a week or so before Cyndy’s training — you’re not going to be like TV, don’t even try, especially since that isn’t what the online audience wants or expects. You’ve got to learn video before you’re ever going to produce quality video, and we’ve got to start at whatever level we start at, so we’re embracing the low end (inexpensive equipment and quick-to-produce videos) with a commitment to grow.
Cyndy did a great job and it’s going to be fun to watch Canton grow as an online video team.
GateHouse Media New England launched a new Wicked Local last night.
For those not familiar the Wicked Local project, it was launched as a small-town “hyperlocal” experiment in 2006, before GateHouse acquired Enterprise Media.
Because of the success of the initial sites, we wanted to expand it to all of GHMNE.
That said, we also wanted to move the sites onto a unified platform of our own conception and redesign and restructure the sites.
Admittedly, the sites still need some polish. We didn’t finish “submit an article” and “submit an event” in time for launch (for business reasons, we had a hard deadline to meet), so these are mailto links. The UGC platform is also in early beta stages. We have a lot of tweaks, changes and additions planned.
One of the interesting discussions we had is what to do with www.wickedlocal.com. In the old TownOnline.com model (now completely replaced by WL), the home page was a collection of top headlines from all of the weeklies in the GHMNE group. This did not prove to be a terribily effective traffic driver. Since WL is a collection of 160 sites, not just one newspaper, the typical home page strategy of a newspaper.com seemed inappropriate.
I wish I could take credit for it, but that credit goes to Anne Eisenmenger, VP of Interactive for GHMNE.
The blog, too, needs some spit and polish yet. We’re also going to make video a key feature of the page once we work out some issues with that implementation.
I’ve only mentioned by name two key people involved in this project, but there were dozens and dozens of people involved in the planning and execution of this launch. Many, many people put in extra hours. Everybody’s hard work is greatly appreciated.
One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that to some extent, technology is a commodity.
What I mean by that if you laid out a web site strategy, chances are every piece of technology you would need — a CMS, participation tools, multimedia — already exists, and it’s available for free.
Why write code from scratch when you can download everything you need all ready to install?
At GateHouse Media, we have two online businesses to run. We have our core, enterprise business (meaning the primary newspaper.com) and we have lots of side projects that we want to pursue.
For the core, we use Zope4Media from Zope Corp. For a company the size of GHS, we simply must have enterprise level software that scales to our scope, and the world class development team that Zope Corp delivers. Zope is building great products for us and it’s a great relationship.
We keep Zope very busy developing new tools for Z4M.
That means, of course, that their developers aren’t available to chase down every wild idea we might want to let loose on the web. And for some site ideas, it just makes more sense to run those projects as an independent skunk works.
Recently, we told the handful of developers working for GateHouse that we want them to learn Drupal. This was a significant policy change for us. Our original development policy put the emphasis on developers working in whatever environment they knew best.
After further thought, that simply didn’t make sense. It would be unwieldy to support over the long term multiple and diverse projects written in an alphabet soup of languages.
And what if some project, written by one lone coder, became a big hit, and then that coder left, and nobody else in the company knew either his language or his methodology?
By centralizing on Drupal, we solve that problem. We also tap into a robust open source community, with a lot of newspaper industry support already, and our own developers can more easily share code.
In time, I believe Drupal will give us the ability to more rapidly deploy web sites. My dream is that on a Monday morning, a publisher will call us and say he’s launching a new woman’s magazine in his market and he needs a web site ASAP. And he wants all the bells and whistles, such as user blogs, video and comments. Instead of saying, “We’ll get to that in three or four months,” we’ll be able to say, “Great. We’ll have that up for your launch.” How will we do that? Because we’ll have established a standard Drupal installation for that scope of project, so we’ll make a couple of localized changes and deploy it.
Drupal, with all it’s modules, will allow us to adjust the content strategy for such sites as needed.
The other advantage is that we make better use of the development talent in the company. Only our larger newspapers — and not all of them — have local developers. Our smaller newspapers will never have developers. With everyone working on Drupal projects, we can more readily deploy and support one-off sites for the smaller publications.
If we get to where we need to be (with both Zope and Drupal), we’ll be in a place were we’re innovating around content and advertising ideas instead of trying to invent new technological solutions. We can iterate off of what already exists and move quickly to solve problems and create opportunities.
We’re then treating technology as a commodity and concentrating on what we do best — delivering content to users and results to advertisers.
RRStar.com launched on a new site design last night. We call this template the “Rockford template.” Previously, we launched a template on chicagosuburbannews.com that we now call the “Kiowa template.”
Next month, a third generation GateHouse Media template will hit the web. I won’t tell you just when, where and what yet.
We will also continue to iterate on these templates. We are especially eager to incorporate some upgrades to the Kiowa templates. Our plan is to have a series of highly modular, customizable and flexible templates for our newspaper sites to pick from. We’re taking what I would call a very object-oriented approach with the idea that behind the scenes we have the benefits of being cookie cutter, but from a retail view (the side users see), no two sites really look the same. That will take time to develop and perfect, but we have a good foundation in place now.
There are, of course, issues with RRStar.com to tweak and fix, but as is our motto: “We’ll get there. It will be fine.”
We also have a long list of features and functionality to roll out that will help us archive our community-focused goals. We’ll get there. It will be fine.
Note, we don’t have our own video player yet. We’re still using YouTube. We expect to launch our own video player in just a few more weeks. That will improve placement of the video on the story page.
UPDATE: I forgot, more GateHouse jobs listed on the GateHouse Newsroom site. This page will show you journalism openings from papers all over the country.
One of the things I love about working at GateHouse Media is how many great, smart, talented, driven, passionate people I meet. There are a lot of such people with GateHouse.
Last week, I was sitting in office of Linda Grist Cunningham, our editor at the Rockford Register Star, talking about all of the work we have ahead of us and the transformations hitting our industry. The subject of Myers-Briggs came up and Linda made an interesting observation about the personality types you typically find in newsrooms and the kind of personality types best suited to our more turbulent media environment. They’re very different people.
As we talked, I thought, “This would be a great topic for a blog post.” But it was clear that Linda knew both more about Myers-Briggs than I do, and had far greater insight into the topic than I could muster.
So I asked Linda to write a guest post, and happily she agreed.
Here is her post:
Here’s what we’ve got: Thorough, exacting journalists who are systematic, hardworking, careful with detail; who want things to be grounded in fact and analyzed logically. Journalists who can thrive in chaos — as long as most of the things around them is structured and well-organized, preferably with deadlines. Journalists who can gather information steadily, then reach an assumption quickly. They’re prone to being comfortable with one (or, maybe) two interpretations of an idea or event, and “two sides to a story” is a religion. They work best with others who are realistic and focused on facts and results.
Here’s what we need: Journalists who are innovative, strategic, versatile, analytical and entrepreneurial. Journalists who enjoy working with others in start-up activities that require ingenuity and unusual resourcefulness; who create innovative, logical, organized and decisive strategic plans around valid concepts — and who can get them done. Journalists who can see a dozen possibilities when others can see only “two sides of a story.” Journalists who delight in a “slippery slope” just for the rush of the slide, and who then figure a way to bring it all together and get it done.
With apologies for a taking liberties with the Myers-Briggs personality type indicators, which I pretty much lifted verbatim above, the men and women whose styles and personalities have been the strong foundations of our print newsrooms struggle to meet the expectations of the “cyber-fiber” integrated newsroom.
I once heard the statistic that 80 percent of our newsrooms were ISTJs (that’s Myers-Briggs shorthand for a version of the “what we’ve got” above.) I can’t cite the stat, but after almost four decades in newsrooms, I happily accept it as true. The ISTJs fiercely uphold the First Amendment, get things spelled right, get the facts, send the bad guys to jail, get the press started on time, and don’t screw up grandma’s obit. They keep their own counsel and aren’t particularly inclined to be openly enthusiastic.
(Think I’m kidding? Ever watched a roomful of journalists listening to a particularly rousing speaker? Nary a one nods, and heaven forbid that they applaud. I have watched 900 editors at an American Society of Newspaper Editors convention sit without a single clap of hands, not even a polite one, at the conclusion of a presidential — that’s U.S. president — speech. When those same editors gave Richard Nixon a standing ovation — years after he “retired” — I was sure I was at a publishers meeting.)
That’s who we are, and that made us a formidable force when we were exclusively about the two-dimensional print newspaper. That’s not going to get us into the new media world. We need — again apologies to Myers-Briggs — a whole bunch of ENTJs and ENTPs (see description above.) Since we can’t and shouldn’t replace the ISTJs, which would be not only insane, but impossible, and since personality styles are non-transferable (we’re born that way, folks), how do we go about building the newsroom staff we need?
Lobotomies are out. So, we do three things:
Capitalize on the strengths of those exacting, fact-driven “traditional” journalists’ brains.
Hire the innovative brains when the openings occur so we move toward a diverse mix of thinking styles and personalities.
Teach new tricks.
*Capitalize: Just because they aren’t the first ones to grab the wireless laptop and video camera doesn’t mean our journalists can’t or won’t transform themselves into the new-fangled models. They will, and they’ll do it well. But, we can’t dump it all on them at once. Customize the explanation and the training; detail the facts and show the logic behind what we want them to do; explain the whys and the pros-and-cons. Develop realistic time lines and implementation plans. Create order and structure around the disruptions to the things they’ve been doing for years. Give them plenty of time to ponder and mull, read and research, ask questions, absorb and analyze. Challenge them to suggest other methods and solutions to arrive at similar goals. Give them plenty of time and room to let go of the past. They’ll get to the same place as the innovators; it just takes longer.
* Hire: We shouldn’t have to spend much time on this one since we’ve said it for decades. Let’s just do it: Instead of filling positions with the same kinds of people and job descriptions as the ones who vacated them, decide what you need to get the new jobs done, and hire for that position, not the one that’s open. None of us are going to get a bunch of additional bodies, so we have to hire smartly, and that may mean no more ISTJs for a while.
* Teach: Your “early adopters” and even your “early adapters” are going to be jazzed by the possibilities multiple platforms bring to “doing news.” They’ll be your leaders and drivers. But, give the ISTJ-type folks a chance. Grab a handful of the undesignated newsroom leaders — those reporters, photographers and copy editors who toil over the traditional print newspaper and to whom everyone listens no matter what. Hold them close. Bring them into the first brainstorming sessions. Give them the cool, new, expensive equipment. Challenge them to try it. Tell them that you need them to help lead the newsroom into the future. Instead of lamenting their lack of enthusiasm, make it important that they be among the leaders — and give them the opportunities to do some serious journalism with some nifty technology. It will work. And, once they find out that they can have fun and do serious stuff at the same time, they’ll tell the rest of the newsroom. Think of it as “Mikey likes it….”
If you haven’t taken Myers-Briggs before, I recommend it. It can be pretty insightful. It’s best if you take it through a professional environment where experts can help you understand better what it means and how to apply what you learn. That said, you might be able to find a free Myers-Briggs test through Google, which can still give you a basic idea of your personality type.