Oct 13, 2008
J-school wants geeks, will pay
J-schools are far from blameless for the lagging state of modern journalism, but at least Medill is doing something about it. Through an ad in the free version of Twitterific, I just saw that the school is actively recruiting programmers to apply for scholarships:
Medill believes that journalism is a key foundation for a functioning democracy and that in the 21st century, programmer/developers are enormously important to the future of journalism. So we have partnered with the Knight Foundation to create this scholarship program for people with strong technology skills who are interested in pursuing a journalism master’s degree at Medill.
“The skills and insights that technology developers have are increasingly important to the analysis, delivery and accessibility of information needed in a democracy,” said Rich Gordon, who teaches interactive journalism at Medill. “At the same time, the journalistic skills learned at a place like Medill can yield important ideas for applying technology in ways citizens will find relevant and engaging.”
These are full scholarships to an expensive and prestigious journalism school and are the result of a partnership between Medill and the Knight Foundation. If you’re a coder – or know one – this is definitely worth checking out.
Oct 10, 2008
If you had a working Wayback Machine, what would you tell yourself in 1998?
Pat Thornton, who blogs as The Journalism Iconoclast, posted a fun thought-puzzle the other day: If you could jump into the time machine and go back ten years, what would you tell yourself in 1998 about journalism, and where it’s headed.
Here’s my list, which is in no way complete. What’s on yours?
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I love time machines. I’m assuming I can take supporting documentation back with me to make the case.
The more obvious things are, well, obvious (Go live sooner. Link out liberally. Refer to the web from the paper. Put email addresses next to bylines. Don’t waste years thinking about paid content and registration). What follows are the tweaks I wish I could go back and make.
1. Save everything. Stop throwing away stories after two weeks. You’re burning history. And take a screen shot of the site every day. You’ll be glad you did.
2. Find geeks who love news. Pay them well. Ask them to start thinking about how to make all that saved data accessible and findable.
3. Establish a $50 fine for anyone in your organization that uses the phrase “capture eyeballs.” The web is not television. Though, you’ll be surprised to hear, it becomes a very efficient delivery device for video. Full-screen video. Does that make you think of possibilities? It should.
4. Don’t listen to the Big Iron guys in IT when they argue the relative merits of Sybase and Oracle. Ignore them, and don’t spend a penny on these programs. Instead, insist on free My SQL as your database.
5. Stop thinking about articles. Think data. Break articles into chunks of data.
6. Read Dave Winer. Pay close attention. He’s a bit of a nut, but if it’s 1998, almost everything he’s saying is right.
7. Digitize and curate your photo library. It’s a local treasure and worth tons of traffic. (This tip valid in 2008, as well)
8. In fact, open up the entire library for free searching. (”Preach The Long Tail” years before it’s written.)
9. Establish another $50 fine for the term “lock in.” The web is open and slippery. And that’s a good thing that will benefit you in the long run.
10. Teach your reporters to blog. Use Romenesko as the gateway drug.
11. Insist that each story created by the newsroom have attached meta-data, including topic keywords and location. Let the guys from #2 use it in amazing and surprising ways.
12. Repeat after me: “Publishing online counts as publishing. You don’t have to save it for the paper.”
13. You’ve incubated the web group separate from the newsroom to allow a culture and a business to emerge. Good. But now you need to start planning to merge into one news operation that publishes for multiple platforms. Don’t wait much longer for this.
14. Google these names at least weekly in the next few years: Craig Newmark, Jimmy Wales, Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Mark Cuban, Kevin Rose. Whatever they’re up to, pay attention, don’t scoff, and borrow liberally.
15. Talk to your users. Add bulletin boards. Attach comments to stories. Participate. That “connection” you’ve always wanted with your readers? The one you pay focus group leaders thousands of dollars to fake? It’s yours for the asking, and it’s free.
(SunSpot.net grab actually from 1997. See what I mean about saving your screenshots? I stopped before 1998, and the actual Wayback Machine has broken images on most of the pages.)
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Got a better list? Go to Journalism Iconoclast and add to the discussion.
Oct 3, 2008
Greenslade: Don’t blame newsrooms for the decline in readership
The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade often can be counted on for an interesting and accurate take on the state of journalism.
Just not today.
Today, in a stunning and sweeping mea non culpa, Greenslade, a journalism professor and former reporter and editor, looks at the shrinking audience for newspapers and echoes The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi in a clear and ringing voice: “Don’t blame us!”
There cannot be any doubt that journalists themselves – the reporters, sub-editors, photographers, feature writers, columnists, page designers – cannot be held responsible for either the financial woes of the industry nor for the public turning its back on the “products” that contain their work.
In case that’s not clear enough, here it is more succinctly, in his own words: “It isn’t our fault.”
Greenslade correctly points out many of the other factors that come into play – including the general economic turmoil, bad management and changing media-consumption habits – but for him to say that the content itself has no part – no part at all – in the decline strikes me as ludicrous, and a marker for how deluded some still are.
Any other business with declining market share since The Eisenhower Administration would at least consider that the product might be part of the problem.
Otherwise, you’re just blaming your audience for being too stupid to appreciate all you’ve done for them.
UPDATE: Steve Yelvington, as usual, has a thoughtful and reasoned take on this topic:
The deck is stacked against the newspaper, but newsrooms are not powerless victims in the grip of some irreversible cosmic force. There is still high demand for effective local mass advertising solutions. Newspapers can be that solution — in fact, they could be the last mass medium standing.
But you can’t do it with a 20 percent market penetration, and that’s what you’ll have if you continue producing a 1968 newspaper in 2008.
Sep 24, 2008
A peek behind the curtain at Curley’s lasvegassun.com
In a post that seems to have largely gone unnoticed, Rob Curley wrote a detailed summary last week of what goes into a typical day’s work at the innovative lasvegassun.com. The paper itself is just a few pages – with no ads – inserted into the competing Las Vegas Review-Journal. So the web site has a lot of ground to cover on its own.
A local newspaper filled with lots of local journalism that matters and no ads. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Hell, it’s probably the craziest thing any of us have seen in regards to local media.
One of the things that we’ve found since being at the Las Vegas Sun is that a lot of that amazing journalism that works so well in the print edition (it’s essentially a kick-ass “A” section of all-enterprise local and state stories) doesn’t always translate to big online traffic numbers.
Because of that, our new-media journalists and editors have a ton of focus on writing lots of breaking news stories and essentially the other sections of a typical newspaper (metro, sports, entertainment/lifestyle). Those are all stories that because of the JOA, the Sun just doesn’t cover in print like a typical newspaper.
What that means, with the exception of all of the crazy alternate delivery and multimedia we do, is our new-media news team is about as old school as it gets.
It’s a long piece, rich with detail and examples. If you’re at all interested in the intersection of traditional and digital journalism, there’s much of value here.
Sep 17, 2008
Best in Baltimore
I don’t work there anymore, but I put a quarter of my life into it, so this makes me smile:
baltimoresun.com was just named Best Baltimore-Related Web Site by The Baltimore City Paper.
Poke around Baltimoresun.com for an hour and you’ll find the mark of the city, its moods twisting like so many threads of anonymous rants. You’ll find good web-only content, such as the documentary videos that sometimes accompany stories, and a blog lineup that doesn’t cast too wide a net.
To me, this is better than a nod from NAA or ONA or E&P or any other navel-gazing journo-award, because cp.com is a whole lot more representative of Baltimore and its readers.
Congratulations to the team at baltimoresun.com.
Sep 17, 2008
Turning reporters into curators to improve journalism
A conversation started this week by Scott Karp and carried forward by Terry Heaton has me thinking about why news organizations are so skittish about linking out from their web sites.
It’s as if they think that creating a cul de sac will make readers forget they’ve got a Back button on the browser.
And when you layer that conversation onto Chris Anderson’s pith about amateurs noted below, you come to one of my favorite topics: journalists as curators.
It’s simple: Journalists need to stop thinking exclusively like content creators and start acting also as content curators.
Even today, years after the arrival of the social web, the internet might as well not exist to most news organizations, except as a broadcast medium for a one-way conversation.
But what if we took a step back and acknowledged that, in 2008, not only is pretty much everyone capable of being a journalist , many of them are already doing it. They maintain blogs. They post photos and videos online. They build and host popular and active discussion boards. They ask questions and they get answers.
Honestly, this isn’t a revelation, but you’d think it was based on most metro news web sites.
It’s no longer sufficient for a reporter to remain plugged into the happenings in his beat but report only the most significant. The reporter as curator takes on the role of the the most plugged-in guy in the room about a particular area of interest and uses that knowledge in multiple ways:
- Report, of course
- Blog on their beat. All beat reporters should maintain a blog that becomes the most reliable source for information and discussion around their topic area.
- Be an active participant in communities of interest, online and off. This means real-name participation in blogs, user groups and discussion threads online and participation in real-world organizations and events.
- Build, maintain and grow a real-name social network on at least one of the major platforms, involving peers, readers, experts, etc., around the beat topic(s). Learning from and model the successes of Jay Rosen’s BeatBlogging project.
- Point readers to the best of the rest. As good as our reporters are, they’re not able to cover everything. Linking frequently to other coverage of their beat is essential, as is asking readers to share their recommended links.
- Ask questions of readers. Chances are, many readers know a whole lot about the topic area, too.
- Embrace crowdsourcing as a reporting tool.
- Participate in the conversation. Every story that’s published has a comments thread. This is an opportunity to connect better with the audience and to cement our roles as the go-to source on the topic.
- Maintain an “about me” page that lists all recent articles and blog posts and relevant background and links out to related areas of interest.
This requires an investment in time, but the payoff in reader engagement will be worth it.
(Thanks to Scott Anderson who contributed much to this list back when we both worked for Tribune.)
Me, elsewhere