Archive for January, 2011

What universities can do for journalism: Innovate!

Jan 20, 2011 in Education, Journalism | comments(7)

Thanks to the enthusiasm of David Cohn, a.k.a DigiDave, the Carnival of Journalism has been resurrected. Somehow I missed participating the first time around several years ago, but with a name like that it must be fun, right? So I’m in this time.

The Carnival revolves around a monthly topic, with a bunch of smart people in the journalism field presenting varied points of view, usually on their own blogs, but republished and/or linked to on the Carnival site. David chose as this month’s topic: “The changing role of Universities for the information needs of a community.”

OK, I’ve got some strong opinions on that, especially now that I work at the University of Colorado Boulder running its fledgling Digital Media Test Kitchen program, which I founded.

David asked us to ponder a Knight Commission recommendation to “Increase the role of higher education … as hubs of journalistic activity.” (He also wrote: “No box here to write inside of.” … Good, otherwise I’d probably go outside of it.)

It’s all great that some university journalism programs are putting students to work as reporters in new forms of news media. Their work makes up for some of the journalism that’s been lost in recent years as mainstream news organizations laid off thousands upon thousands of professional journalists. And students get to learn in a dynamic, innovative new news environment, rather than a depressing old-media newsroom in decline.

Some students at UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, for instance, work as interns for the non-profit Bay Citizen news website in a joint partnership which also includes an innovation initiative. The City University of New York (CUNY) Journalism School is collaborating with the New York Times and has students producing neighborhood (or “hyper-local,” if you prefer) news for The Local. Fantastic.

However, I want my university and others to go further — or more specifically, to look further into the future.

My focus of late has been on identifying emerging technologies that will or might have significant impacts on journalism and the news industry. Actually, the most fun part of my current job is scanning the horizon, spotting some fledgling technology or oddball Internet or mobile start-up, and thinking, “That could be really useful as a journalistic tool!” or “There’s a business model that might work in the news field!” Often, the technologists and entrepreneurs I run across do not have news or solving the news crisis on their radar screens.

At CU, I’ve been lucky to have the student-run news website (nope, there’s no print edition) to work with in experimenting with new technologies on both the editorial and advertising sides. The CU Independent’s editors have been eager (or at least willing to be persuaded) to try new experiments. (Since they make the decisions, it’s the editors’ call whether or not to try what sometimes may seem like crazy new ideas.)

They’re trying things like website and mobile social gaming tied to news to increase reader engagement and news awareness. … The editor-in-chief is starting a video channel where she’ll answer student text questions with short video answers, as a way to better interact with the campus community and put a human face on the CU Independent brand. … A couple of graduate students are working with me to develop a premium membership model for collegiate media, and the CU Independent is going to try it out when it’s ready. … And more.

The student editors also are encouraged to innovate by their staff media advisor, Gil Asakawa, a news and new-media veteran who joined the CU Journalism School last fall after most recently working for MediaNews Group.

Gil and I talk and collaborate a lot, and he recently remarked to me how refreshing his new job has been in terms of trying new innovations. Where implementing a new technology at MNG more often than not took months of meetings and deliberation, in the university media environment, you just do it. Now.

I think that’s where university journalism programs — and especially student media — can push old news organizations forward. We can run with ideas that a prudent and more conservative newspaper publisher would put off. And in fairly short order, we can tell that publisher and the rest of the news industry how it turned out, and if others should follow our lead.

Bless university student journalists, but their work in covering their local communities is often not as good as that of experienced professional journalists (many now in other careers, unfortunately). That’s not an insult, just a fact.

But I think that beyond producing community journalism, where student journalists and Journalism Schools can best serve their communities is by innovating (dare I say) radically where the traditional media serving their cities or towns innovate too conservatively or hardly at all.

Communities need better information, as the Knight Commission has concluded. Journalism schools and journalism students can provide it, in a roundabout way, by teaching professional news organizations (old and new) how to leverage new and emerging technologies and techniques to create a better-informed citizenry (and perhaps make enough money to afford to cover their communities adequately).

The Knight Commission is correct in urging universities and their Journalism programs to do more for their communities in these tumultuous days of media transition.

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#photoaday with an iPhone4 … My rules explained

Jan 16, 2011 in Blogging, Phones, Photography | comments(0)

(NOTE: I posted this at my Posterous blog, which I use exclusively for photos and for my iPhone Photo-a-Day project. Reposting here as few people have yet to discover http://steveouting.posterous.com!)

So, I’ve made it 15 days straight so far with posting (to my Posterous photo blog) a photograph a day, using only my iPhone4 and its built-in camera. As I’ve gone forward with this little side project, I’ve made some decisions about self-imposed “rules” for my daily photos:

  • I will only post photos taken with my phone; no “real” cameras. (This presumes that I don’t lose my phone during the year, and that it doesn’t stop working and require an overnight visit to Apple for repairs! In that case, I’ll switch to my point-and-shoot camera temporarily.)
  • I can use any number of iPhone photography and image-manipulation apps.
  • Photos will be posted to Posterous from the iPhone and never will their pixels land on my Macbook laptop or any other device before landing on my Posterous blog.

Why am I doing this? Well, I remember giving a talk quite a few years ago to a group of journalism educators and touting the idea that the fledgling, low-quality cameras showing up on mobile phones at the time would, soon enough, become ubiquitous and that the phone-cameras’ quality would improve to be useful as journalistic tools. In those days, I was met with some incredulous looks.

But in 2011, we’re there. The iPhone4 that I carry does not have the best-quality camera among the smartphones on the market, but it’s decent. So I hope to prove that you can produce pretty-good photos with a phone-camera, aided by a number of photography apps that make manipulation and enhancement of photos possible and downright easy on the phone itself. So far, I’ve used these apps:

  • Camera+
  • ColorSplash
  • ToonCamera
  • PS Express

And I just purchased SlowShutter and am looking forward to experimenting with blurred-motion effects.

It’s been a worthwhile experiment. At the least, it’s reignited a long-ago interest in and passion for photography. And when I go about my daily activities, I now observe what’s around me looking for photo opportunities — dispensing with my too-often former obliviousness to my surroundings.

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Boulder could now use a downtown news coffee shop

Jan 16, 2011 in Ideas, Marketing, News | comments(0)

Here in Boulder, Colorado, our dominant newspaper is moving out of its long-time home in the heart of downtown. Next weekend, the Daily Camera is vacating its home at 11th and Pearl Streets — where it has been downtown’s longest-operating business — to an office in a business park in east Boulder.


The Daily Camera building on Pearl Street

It’s a sound business decision. The Camera building sits at the west end of the Pearl Street Mall, a four-block pedestrian-only shopping area that is the heart and soul of the city and a major tourist draw. The building afforded reporters close proximity to municipal government and the county courthouse, plus many of Boulder’s most prominent companies, including many in the city’s thriving tech start-up scene.

In other words, the land that the Camera’s building sits on is very valuable real estate, and with fewer employees and the paper’s printing presses long gone from the premises, it made sense to unload the property and move to smaller, less-expensive digs. The Camera and its owners, MediaNews Group of Denver, sold the building to Los Angeles-based Karlin Real Estate for $9 million last August. Now it’s time to move out.

But wait!…

Particularly for a city like Boulder, where the downtown area is more special than most (stated as an adoring resident of this college town), it is not a good thing that the primary news source no longer has a physical presence in the heart of town. This is a loss to the community.

I’m not going to gripe about the move, or suggest that the Camera’s executives reconsider their decision to move to an impersonal office park. Rather, here’s my suggestion to editor Kevin Kaufman and publisher Al Manzi — to turn a negative into a positive:

  • Lease shop space on the Pearl Street Mall and open a coffee shop (or move in with an existing popular coffee shop as a partner).
  • This might be an independent shop run by people in that business, in partnership with the Daily Camera. (Boulder has several tony coffee shops that are favorites of the tech crowd: Ozo’s, The Cup, Atlas Purveyors…)
  • Or it could be a deal with a chain like Starbucks or Pete’s, where cohabitation of the space is negotiated.
  • Brand the Pearl Street coffee shop with the Daily Camera name: e.g., Daily Camera’s The Cup, or Ozo’s at the Daily Camera.
  • Expand the notion of a typical downtown coffee shop to include:
    • Plenty of comfortable furniture for casual work and reading while partaking on pricy coffee drinks and pastries.
    • Print editions of the Camera available (of course), as well as digital tablets that customers can check out (credit card imprint for deposit, please!) to read the Camera and other websites using free wi-fi.
    • Coffee shop loyalty programs or memberships, which give members special privileges (such as discounts on drinks and food, or hassle-free check-out of digital tablets).
    • Meeting/lecture space for periodic newsmaker lectures and public discussion events, with free events subsidized by sales of those expensive drinks. Or low admission prices but free admission to coffee shop members.
    • An editor (or two) stationed at the coffee shop, available to interact with the public but also physically positioned to respond quickly to report downtown news events. (And with a desk to perform normal newsroom duties.)
    • A couple public computers designed to solicit story ideas, news tips, and feedback for the office-park newsroom dwellers.

If I were in Manzi or Kaufman’s shoes, I’d worry that the Camera brand would suffer by the loss of a physical location in the heart of the action downtown. A trendy coffee shop co-branded with the Camera could alleviate that problem. And if the partners running the drink and food side of the business know what they’re doing, the co-branded business won’t cost the newspaper company anything — and might even bring in some new profits.

Old (left) and new (right) Daily Camera offices


View Daily Camera old and new locations in a larger map

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A few wishes for 2011 (media edition)

Jan 2, 2011 in Business models, trends | comments(1)

2010 was such an interesting, eventful year in the media business. But I expect that 2011 is going to bring even more change. Indeed, I hope for more change. Here are some of my wishes for the news and media worlds for the year ahead:

I wish… for Murdoch to fail, quickly

Here's why...Hey, if GOP House Leader Mitch McConnell can wish for President Obama’s entire presidency to fail in order to advance his own conservative causes, then I can wish for News International tycoon Rupert Murdoch to fail in just one segment of his media empire. I hope that his “hard paywall” experiments on such newspaper-website titles as The Times, Sunday Times, and News of the World fail spectacularly, and fast. The exaggerated paywall (users see nothing but homepage headlines without paying) is a dumb idea when comparable news content is available free from equally credible web competitors (i.e., the UK’s other national newspapers’ websites, the BBC site, etc.). Let Murdoch prove once and for all that the small number of paying subscribers he’ll win over with the hard paywall will nowhere near make up for the loss in ad revenue that will result as the sites’ low traffic numbers causes advertisers to go elsewhere, AND the loss of some of the papers’ best editorial talent as top journalists despair of their loss of influence and get tired of speaking to a small audience.

 

I wish… for NYTimes.com’s “metered” paywall to flounder

Here's why...The New York Times Co.’s decision to put a “metered paywall” on NYTimes.com is not an awful decision in the way that is Murdoch’s “hard paywall.” Most infrequent NYT web visitors won’t even notice, since they won’t view enough articles in a month to even know it’s there. But regular, heavy users of NYTimes.com, I expect, will split on whether to pay up or not. For those deciding to pay, the Times well may see decent revenue numbers — and declare the experiment a success. BUT, a good percentage of heavy users of NYTimes.com will decide that they won’t pay, but will switch to a credible alternative once they’ve used up their free NYTimes.com quota — say, WashingtonPost.com, which has vowed (for now) to stay free on the web with its news content. If enough of those people decide that the Post, for example, is a good-enough alternative to the NY Times online, then NYT will prove the loser, despite decent revenue numbers from the metered-paywall approach. I hope that this become obvious enough, quickly, that NYTimes.com tweaks its pay strategy to something softer-still than the metered paywall model.

 

I wish… news publishers will wake up to the membership model, and learn to SELL

Here's why...A principal reason that I don’t like paywalls for (most, not all!) news websites is that it’s an attitude of unreasonable publisher entitlement. “You should pay us because we deserve it for the quality news we produce, which isn’t cheap and serves to protect democracy!” I MUCH prefer a strategy that says, “Pay us because we are providing you with a product/service that is valuable to you, and here are the wonderful benefits you’ll get by becoming a paying customer!”

I remain bullish on the “premium membership” model for news websites. I.e., keep non-niche news free online (since it’s been free for many years already, and good luck changing consumer attitudes) and create a program (or tier of programs) with extra benefits for the paying customer. I’m not going to go deep on what benefits in this short article, but the idea is to have something special to SELL to the large audience that’s already visiting a news website that’s free. If the news industry put some serious brainpower and resources into figuring out what lots of people would pay for instead of what they should, and got really serious about marketing and selling, that makes so much more sense than the alternative message that we see from too many news publishers: “Pay because we deserve to get your money for what we do.” This will require that news publishers actually work their butts off to sell, rather than sit back and expect people to fork over money “just because” everyone should support journalism. … No they don’t, as long as comparable free alternatives are a click or two away. (If a news publisher’s content has no credible free online competition, fine: go for your paywall.)

 

I wish… that Wikileaks and mainstream news providers learn to get along

Here's why...One of the most disgusting media outbursts of 2011, for me at least, was CNN’s Wolf Blitzer railing against Wikileaks’ disclosure of classified documents and basically begging the U.S. government to better prevent journalists — like him! — from getting access to state secrets. That was just the most blatant display of much of the mainstream (i.e., corporate) news media painting Wikileaks as a villain despite not breaking any laws and uncovering a chestful of government, military, and corporate wrongdoing and mistakes in its short history. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald cites numerous other examples. As many other pundits have pointed out, if our government and powerful financial institutions succeed in putting Wikilieaks founder Julian Assange in an American jail and shutting down the ability of Wikileaks to receive money from supporters through the financial system, respectively, those will be terrible precedents for the rest of the press. If Wikileaks can be banished and censored, then so can mainstream news organizations that similarly unearth state and business wrongdoing that powerful interests want squelched.

My wish is for corporate-owned media institutions’ leaders is to grow a spine and support Wikileaks, because a bad outcome for Assange and his organization (what Jay Rosen aptly describes as the “first stateless news organization”) will mean bad times ahead for the rest of the press and new powers by government officials to censor embarrassing and bad stuff that they don’t want revealed.

And Wikileaks is but the first of the new genre of whistle-blower enablers. Even if Wikileaks were to go away (which is doubtful), its successors will multiply. Instead of viewing this as a negative development, I wish that more journalists and especially news executives would see the whistle-blower sites as partners and an increasingly useful tool in helping them do their jobs. Revealing state secrets can be done in an irresponsible manner which does real harm. But Wikileaks and its ilk working in concert with news organizations can reveal institutional wrongdoing in a way that reveals misdeeds and protects secrets that legitimately need to be kept from the public.

 

I wish… that many newspaper executives will retire

Here's why...Let’s face the facts. The newspaper industry has had over a decade and a half to figure out how to transition to the digital age, and overall it’s failed miserably. I don’t place the blame as much on those who work or have worked on the digital or new-media side of newspaper companies, but rather on top newspaper executives too often unwilling to listen to their digital managers’ advice and make bold decisions that would have set their companies on paths toward profiting from the digital transformation of the last decade and a half, even if it meant hurting the core print product. To those still sitting in the executive suites, retire already and let someone else make the hard decisions.

This is not an age issue, for there are some older news executives with attitudes open to radical transformation of their businesses. Young or old, newspaper CEOs who still spend the majority of their time on the print product should go. Boards of directors: Why aren’t you forcing these people out?

 

I wish… that the cost of developing mobile apps will fall greatly

Here's why...Too many news publishers seem to think that the tablet (especially Apple’s iPad) will provide them with a magic business model to make up for the failure of the web to adequately fund news organizations as they’ve been accustomed. They can do this, the thinking goes, because creating news apps for digital tablets is an expensive proposition, and allows them to create digital “editions” that are but modernized versions of what they’ve produced for many years. And consumers have exhibited a willingness to pay for apps, so the concept of the iPad app as the modern-day magazine or newspaper holds appeal to news folk who cling to old ways of thinking.

But there’s a major problem looming. Developing sophisticated apps will, in time, become easy and inexpensive enough that anyone will be able to create a professional-looking mobile app to compete with apps from big-name media brands. Just as blogging platforms (Blogger, Typepad, etc.) and no-cost open-source content management systems (e.g., Wordpress, Drupal, etc.) allowed anyone to become a publisher and, with enough talent, to produce web publications that rival the quality of traditional media companies, the coming wave of simple mobile-app production tools (including tools to create HTML5 mobile websites with the same capabilities as stand-alone apps) will repeat history for publishing to smartphones and tablets. The sooner this happens, the sooner that the news industry will be forced to figure out a viable business model to support production of serious journalism by well-staffed newsrooms.

 

I wish… that non-profit investigative news organizations have a GREAT year

Here's why...Count me as one who believes that, by large measure on some of the biggest issues of our time, the American press has failed. As explained in yesterday’s blog post, the trend seems to be that a weakened and smaller American news media has gotten too close to being friend of those in power rather than adversary, especially among national media. That would explain many celebrity journalists railing against Wikileaks, which is doing the job that they should be doing. My hope is that the wave of non-profit investigative-reporting entities now scrambling to find sustainable business models will stop this trend, and steer all of the news media back to its proper adversarial role with the powerful individuals and institutions that dominate American culture.

 
What are your media wishes for 2011?

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How could journalists disagree with Assange?

Jan 1, 2011 in Journalism | comments(7)

Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder, during a Democracy Now interview:

“We have clearly stated motives, but they are not antiwar motives. We are not pacifists. We are transparency activists who understand that transparent government tends to produce just government. And that is our sort of modus operandi behind our whole organization, is to get out suppressed information into the public, where the press and the public and our nation’s politics can work on it to produce better outcomes.”

(Hat-tip to Peggy Holman of Journalism That Matters for pointing this out.)

Hmmm, a slight variation would sound like a worthy goal for … the news media!

As we begin another year of media transformation, I can’t help but feel a bit depressed about the state of the (mainstream) news media here in the U.S., and the American reaction to Wikileaks’ action is a big part of the problem. As the federal government and many politicians line up for the scalp of Julian Assange, support for Wikileaks seems to be coming mostly from overseas, and American journalists’ support is far weaker than I’d like to see.

  • The editor of Spanish newspaper El Pais has written a wonderful essay: “Editor Javier Moreno explains the decision to publish the State Department cables, which expose on an unprecedented scale the extent to which Western leaders lie to their electorates.” … A highlight: “The incompetence of Western governments, and their inability to deal with the economic crisis, climate change, corruption, or the illegal war in Iraq and other countries has been eloquently exposed in recent years. Now, thanks to WikiLeaks, we also know that our leaders are all too aware of their shameful fallibility, and that it is only thanks to the inertia of the machinery of power that they have been able to fulfill their democratic responsibility and answer to the electorate.”
  • A Romanian news organization has given Assange a Press Freedom Award. Previously, he has won the Economist Index of Censorship Award (2008) and the Amnesty International UK Media Awards (2009). He also won the Sam Adams Award in 2010; that’s a U.S. award granted annually by retired CIA officers to honor an intelligence professional who has taken a stand for integrity and ethics (often awarded to whistleblowers).
  • Le Monde (France) named Assange its “Person of the Year.” Meanwhile, U.S.-based Time magazine named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg its “Person of the Year,” despite Time’s own website reader poll coming out clearly in favor of Assange as the best choice. (Time magazine managing editor Richard Stengel’s statement in an interview, “Assange might not even be on anybody’s radar six months from now,” is telling of how old-media journalists don’t seem to grasp the impact that Wikileaks and its successors have and will continue to have on altering their profession.)
  • In Australia (Assange’s home), hundreds of journalists, lawyers, and academics loudly condemned the prime minister for calling the leaks “an illegal act” and suggesting that Assange’s Australian passport be revoked.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a lawyer, has been a stolid supporter of Wikileaks and Assange, but as a frequent TV guest on American news programs he’s complained, “From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks — the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy — have been … America’s intrepid Watchdog journalists. … It just never seems to dawn on them — even when you explain it — that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be … what they do.” (Emphasis mine.)

And it’s not just that bizarre point of view that’s a problem. Many of America’s “finest” news organizations (and some global ones) have been guilty of laziness and/or carelessness in their reporting on Wikileaks. Normally, I love NPR, but the latest column from its ombudsman has me losing some faith. Alicia Shepard tells of how NPR was guilty over a prolonged period of misstating the number of diplomatic cables that Wikileaks had published — with multiple reporters and anchors stating that it had published or released “thousands” when the real number is 1,947 or less than 1% of what Wikileaks has in its possession. It took a dogged complainer weeks to get NPR to issue a correction.

Worse yet, Louisiana State graduate student Matthew Schafer has discovered the same mistake being made by the Associated Press, New York Times, Politico, UPI, The Economist, Mashable, BBC, Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others. All of those news organizations have implied in their reporting that all 250,000-plus State Department documents obtained by WikiLeaks had been published or released.

What could explain this odd behavior by much of the mainstream news media? Certainly there are multiple forces at play, but I have to think that one of them is the overall decline in the quality of journalism in the last couple of years — a result of a horrible economic climate on top of the digital transition for news companies which has resulted in the loss of so many editorial jobs.

Could it be that those remaining in jobs with mainstream “big-media” companies tread lightly and seem more in tune with government and corporate interests than the “new whistleblowers” because they want to keep those jobs?

Whatever the reason, it’s pathetic.

Perhaps the hope for American news media in 2011 will be the newish wave of non-profit investigative reporting entities that don’t need to behave in such an obsequious manner to those in power.

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