Archive for January, 2009

This afternoon I took part in the first-ever recording of the “Journalism Now Podcast,” which is a weekly online roundtable discussion covering “multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news.”

Podcast founder and host David Stanton, who teaches digital journalism at the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, has invited eight digital media and multimedia experts to a weekly chat about the media issues of the day. I’m sure all of us won’t make it every week (Steve Yelvington went missing today due to a firewall issue with Skype), so it’ll be a rotating cast of characters.

I’m not exactly sure when podcast No. 1 will go up, but Stanton thought possibly as early as Sunday. I’ll let you know.

The podcast is a joint project of U of F and the Poynter Institute. Representing Poynter on the panel is Ellyn Angelotti, the Institute’s interactivity editor. And there are a couple Poynter staff alums: Paige West, now at MSNBC.com, and me. (Full list of panelists are listed on the main podcast page.)

My latest column for Editor & Publisher Online was posted this morning:

The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future

It’s my take on what a newspaper that’s decided to completely ditch its print edition but survive and reinvent itself as a digital-only local news entity will look like. I envision a news operation that still has enough left to be a force in the community and an effective watchdog, and run as a profitable business.

It’s looking like we’ll see that happen soon. Top candidate is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which owner Hearst Corp. has said will either be shut down soon or become a down-scaled online-only news organization. That’s of course if no buyer is found. In this economic landscape? Not likely.

Similar situations are possible in other U.S. cities.

Please discuss. … What do you think a surviving and reinvented digital “newspaper” will look like?

It’s one of those thoughts I can’t believe hasn’t crossed my mind till now. (Though I’m certain it’s not original.) But I just noticed that lots of journalism schools at universities are still called the “School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”

Don’t you think it’s about time that they all get rid of the unneeded and outdated word “Mass”?

After all, it’s the “mass” part — the old news industry model of one-to-many — that is fast being usurped by the many-to-many and social model that is so much a part of the digital world that journalism is transitioning to.

I’m not sure they need to replace Mass with another word; just remove it. “School of Journalism and Communication” fits today’s media reality.

To the many journalism schools that still have “Mass” in their names, why is it still there?

This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:

“Dear Parents:

“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat had been phoned in to the Police Department regarding the King Soopers at Broadway and Table Mesa. BVSD and the Boulder Police Department determined that this was not a serious threat. Nevertheless BVSD asked Summit, Fairview High School and Southern Hills Middle School to go on a heightened alert status as a precaution and we (at Summit) did so for the last couple of hours of the school day. This involved students passing only in the hallway, locking all outside doors and having administrative staff and faculty outside during passing periods and after school to increase our level of supervision. The day ended without incident.

“Please call the school if you have any questions.”

I’m happy to get these kind of alerts from the school, and this one was somewhat timely, though I would have preferred to learn of it earlier since the initial threat was received by the school at 12:45 p.m. (Previous similar instances at my kids’ various schools have seen the e-mail parent alerts come much — often, annoyingly — later.)

The principal’s note made me think that our local newspaper could better serve the community by tapping into information like this and quickly sharing it with the community at large and, in a more in-your-face way, with anyone connected to the schools affected.

When I checked the Boulder Daily Camera website about half an hour after receiving the e-mail, there was nothing about the incident at the King Soopers grocery store or the school lockdowns. I don’t mean to fault the Camera; it sounds like it ended up being not much of a story, and/or they may not have gotten word as quickly as I, as a parent, got it.

But here’s my point: Local newspapers should be plugged in to alternative news and information sources such as alerts coming out of schools. This is how I’d imagine it:

• News editors ask to be put on parent-communication e-mail lists, so reporters will learn about incidents like the above right away.
• When an alert like this comes in, post it as “breaking news” on the newspaper website. Today’s school incident might warrant nothing more than a tiny blurb on the homepage, but a more serious incident like a school shooting in progress will get prominent website play plus e-mail and mobile news alerts to subscribers.
• Ultimately, this sort of information is of most use to those connected to the schools involved: parents and relatives of kids who attend, teachers’ spouses, etc. So here we get into the notion of the “personalized news service,” where registered users of a newspaper website have filled out a profile with information including where their kids go to school. (Explain, of course, that the information is used only to provide personalized news and information.)

This afternoon’s little incident may have been so inconsequential that a news editor wouldn’t deem it worthy of publishing a write-up in the print edition or the website. Even so, it’s significant news to those people in the community associated with the three schools that were locked down. This would be an opportunity to alert just those who care about a small story. (I’d include this in what I call “micro-personal news.”)

Yes, in this case the schools themselves got the word out in a timely enough manner, given the low significance of the threat. A more serious incident — say, a gunman being hunted in the neighborhood near the school — would demand more immediate news alerts, especially to parents. In that case, the newspaper staff most likely will spread the news faster than the school principal will get around to e-mailing parents.

A personalized-news feature that will send me special digital/mobile alerts when they involve an institution that I have an interest is an element I hope we’ll see offered by local newspapers soon.

We are, after all, in the age of instant news.

I think this post by Robert Scoble today deserves a reading by all journalists: “Steve Jobs’ bad news heralds the real-time web age.” The A-list blogger was watching his Twitter and Friendfeed streams for news from people about the Steve Jobs announcement of the Apple CEO taking a medical leave, and he was amazed at the amount of instant chatter and information being shared about the announcement.

Posted to Twitter & Twitpic

For any reporter and editor when an important event occurs — especially a local one — watching Twitter and/or Friendfeed is a great information-gathering tool. Yes, as Scoble notes, there’s a lot of noise and you don’t necessarily know who to trust. But the more you use Twitter and/or Friendfeed, the more you’ll come to know the people who you follow — so over time you can pick up a sense of what sources of instant Twitter/Friendfeed news you might trust.

Anyone can do this, of course. When the US Airways plane crashed into the Hudson River earlier today, lots of people posted to Twitter, or added eyewitness photos to Flickr, or other social networks. For an editor sitting in a newsroom overseeing coverage of this event, monitoring the social media stream of eyewitness reports could be a useful addition to the staff reporting arsenal already assigned to the crash and calling in details.

Scoble is a fan of Friendfeed, and it is indeed a useful service for something like this plane crash, since it scans a number of social media outlets. For example, check out this Friendfeed search for “Hudson crash”, which includes all sorts of stuff — from short reports by people who witnessed the crash, to an eyewitness on a ferry who took a close-up of the plane being evacuated and posted it to Twitpic via a Twitter post. (The photo became so popular that it overwhelmed the tiny Twitpic service.)

I think Scoble is correct in saying that the now wide popularity and use of services like Twitter and Friendfeed are the front lines of news. Most of the time for unexpected events, like plane crashes, eyewitnesses are going to be there before professional journalists.

A new role for journalists is to tap into this instant stream of eyewitness accounts. Editors can perform a public service by filtering out the best and most accurate of these early “citizen” reports, saving online users the trouble of combing through all the junk to find the nuggets.

Over on my site ReinventingClassifieds.com, we’ve just announced the winners of a couple Best Idea contests — one for media professionals and one for students. The idea for the contest was to tap the power of the crowd to come up with creative new ideas for reinvigorating newspaper classifieds and getting them growing again.

Here’s the announcement of the pro winner, David Kiessling of the New York Times Regional Media Group in Florida. He took an old concept and reintroduced it for the new-media age. The article also includes several other good ideas we received from other entrants.

For our student contest, Will Sommer of Georgetown University is the winner, for his idea to turn newspaper classifieds from dull to entertaining. He calls his concept “Laughs and Facts” and presents his ideas in a multimedia slideshow. Take a look.

Kiessling and Sommer will each be receiving $500 from ReinventingClassifieds.com and FutureOfNews as reward for their creative thinking.

Plenty of people have commented on David Carr’s piece in the New York Times, “Let’s Make an iTunes Model for News.” I’ll try not to repeat arguments already well made by others. (Rich Gordon has done a nice job refuting Carr’s ideas on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits; also see Mathew Ingram’s trashing of Carr’s idea.)

Carr’s idea that news organizations can suddenly start charging for news is a non-starter. News companies experimenting online have tried and failed many times, going all the way back to the mid 1990s. The reason is simple enough: There’s too much other free news content online to substitute for what you’re trying to sell, unless it’s really, truly unique and a rather thin vertical topic slice. Newspaper content? No way.

The argument that the news industry could collude and all agree to start charging is unworkable and impractical. If I’m in a 2-newspaper market and my competitor starts to charge for access to content, fantastic! I can stay free and eat their lunch in terms of audience and grow a digital service unbothered by a direct competitor that represents a threat.

For a 1-newspaper town, charging for website access opens you up to new competitors, both entrepreneurs and existing media companies. There are lots of laid-off journalists out there right now, and they won’t all go into PR; some will band together to create alternatives (successors) to the newspaper. The local newspaper charging for access plays right into their hands.

Other competitors to sole newspapers will be other media companies who will smell opportunity if you wall off your news. TheBatavian.com is an example of what you’ll see: Gatehouse Media entered Batavia, New York, with a digital-only news service, sensing an opportunity to go up against the local newspaper, which had been fairly clueless online, with a low-cost and free digital local news service.

So go ahead, charge for your news content. Your newspaper will be out of business that much faster and you’ll have more time to refine your golf swing.

What can you charge for? SERVICE, not content, in general. I’d focus your what-can-we-charge-for to adding convenience to the consumer. Several newspapers charge monthly subscription fees to read their Kindle e-reader editions. (Though I think the pricing is too high, and when e-readers like the Kindle are more mainstream, a much lower price point — or bundling of news brands for a set monthly fee — will gain more subscribers and make more money.) Others charge for PDF or digital-replica editions; I’m no fan of them, but some people are willing to pay for the old newspaper format rather than go to the paper’s free website or use RSS feeds or e-mail newsletters.

Especially as smartphones become ubiquitous in the next year or two, I suspect that news organizations may find that they can package services that people will pay for. Personalized news is especially promising for charging, but such services need to be better than what online users can get for free from Google and others. Mobile alerts of news and events within a few blocks of your house, for example, might be a service worth paying for. Ditto for the personalized mobile news service that incorporates into your personal news feed what I call “micro-personal” news from people within your personal social networks.

The “let’s charge for content” argument keeps rearing its head, but get over it. Let’s focus instead on “let’s charge for services” that are valuable enough to the news consumer that he or she is willing to part with some money.

A couple stories in recent days remind us that the days of privacy are over.

Example 1: The naked upside-down skier
Surely you saw the story about the unfortunate man skiing with his son at the Vail resort in Colorado. There was a problem with the chairlift seat, and he fell through; but instead of falling to the ground, one of his skis got stuck in the chair and he ended up hanging upside-down — sans his pants and underwear which had been pulled off. So the poor guy was hanging under the chair, with his son watching from above, for 7 or more embarrassing and frightening minutes while Vail staff rescued him.

Of course there were photos. This was at the bottom of the lift, and other skiers waiting in line snapped photos of the embarrassing and odd scene with cell phones and digital cameras. Some ended up on the web, and they spread like wildfire — worldwide. The photos that most people saw online were from a professional photographer — skiing on his day off — who could get fired for taking the shot.

I noticed that the websites of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News did not run the photos (which just showed the skier’s butt, not his genitals), but both did link to sites that carried the pictures. A Vail newspaper did publish the photos. But despite the majority restraint of the traditional press, the poor guy became a joke on websites and in e-mail boxes around the world.

Vail executives no doubt didn’t want those photos published anywhere, and according to one news story I read, they rescinded the photographer’s season ski pass. But that’s absurd. Any number of skiers with cell phone cameras could have gotten the same shots — and even posted to Twitter or Flickr directly from the slopes. The resort’s best efforts at saving the naked skier’s dignity could not have prevented the images of the scene from going viral online.

Example 2: Judge tries to squelch pics of released murderer
Along similar lines, a story out of Ireland is about a judge ordering local newspapers not to publish photos of a convicted murderer who had served his term and was getting day releases to be in the community. The judge’s reasoning was that publication of what he called unbalanced articles plus the photo could result in violence against the ex-convict.

That’s not unreasonable thinking, just as is Vail wishing to protect the dignity of the skier (and make it less likely that he’ll sue their pants off). But again, the judge’s ruling only goes so far in protecting the man from reprisals. Someone else will take a photo of the man and post it on a blog, or photo-sharing site, or Twitter, and his identity will be revealed.

That’s today’s reality. Neither of the guys in those stories should have their photos posted around the web, it can be argued. But nothing will keep the photos hidden away. Human nature and the Internet won’t allow that.

No doubt you’ve heard the “big” news that the New York Times has added an advertising spot on the front page of its print edition. Shocking, eh? The New York Post in covering the news says in a graphic accompanying its story, “New York Times Publisher Arthur ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger is smashing the paper of record’s vaunted Chinese wall between news and advertising by peddling front-page space.”

Puleeze. First, kudos for NYT making a move that might bring in some badly needed serious money to its legacy business. Second, plenty of other papers do front page ads (including in the U.S., USA Today and the Wall Street Journal), though it’s more common outside the U.S. I don’t believe for a second that ads on the front page will have any effect on editorial content. The worst that can happen is some embarrassing juxtaposition of a page 1 ad for a company that’s covered on the front page for some wrongdoing. But I suspect the Times’ editorial and ad departments are both plenty smart enough to avoid that.

My point in writing this item is merely to remark on what a big deal some folks are making about this move. Unfortunately, this kind of move (“OMG! Ads on the front page!”) passes for radical innovation in much of the newspaper industry. Compared to innovation in the online and mobile communications worlds, this is just a tweak. Compared to the kind of bold innovation that newspaper companies will need to make to survive in 2009 and beyond, ads on the front page — even of the New York Times — is not even worth a raised eyebrow.

I sincerely hope we’ll see so much newspaper-industry innovation in 2009 that in year-end wrap-up stories, this will barely merit mention.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column is up: “Need to Make Profits Online? It CAN Be Done.”

It’s a follow-up to my previous E&P column, which advised newspaper CEOs on 11 key strategies to reinvent their enterprises. But since I didn’t focus so much on the money angle in that column, this time I tried to put my head around how the suggested adaptations by a newspaper company to survive in the digital age can be used to boost revenues.

There’s no silver-bullet solution (I only wish I was that smart), but I hope newspaper folks will find some useful ideas in the column.