Common Sense Journalism

"15 items or less"? It's OK, Al, really.

2009-11-09T14:04:00.008-05:00

This video from Weird Al Yankovic is making the rounds and being praised in places like the Linked In Editors and Writers forum.

But you know what, Al's poking fun, methinks, not at the less/fewer conundrum but at those who would get all upset over it because you know what -- "xx items or less" is not wrong.

In this case, the phrase serves as an inflection point, really a binary condition, not a count situation. Listen to Wendalynn Nichols' podcast on this ill-advised rule (go to Stupid Rules 11 of Oct. 12). Or you can read it at her Copyediting tip of the week.

There is a lengthy discussion there of "continuous" vs. "discrete," but I side with Nichols on this. Garner, on the other hand, refers to the "linguistic hegemony by which less has encroached on fewer's territory" and concludes it is, indeed, the result of the checkout line kerfuffle, though he notes that "the occasional more literate supermarket owner uses a different sign" with fewer.

But then, in regard to percentages, he goes on to advocate "less," advancing the idea akin to continuity - that most percentages aren't whole numbers anyhow - and concludes: "And even if it were a toss-up between the two theories, it's sound to choose less, which is less formal in tone than fewer." I'd say the same idiomatic argument can be made at the checkout.

Now, let's open another sore point: Plastic or paper ...?

AP Style: Cross-country, the sport

2009-11-09T10:12:00.004-05:00

This is one that got by me at the time, and I was reminded the other day I needed to post this.

In 2008, AP changed style on the running sport to a hyphenated version, cross-country, instead of its long use of cross country, which conformed to the sport's governing bodies but not Webster's New World.

I'm not sure why AP changed (and did not even mention it in the updates section of its book - I went back and checked), but from what I've seen, it's being often ignored in the real world, as this example from our last weekend's cross country/cross-country high school races here.

So I guess you'll have to make your own decision on this. Personally, I think AP should have left it alone.

Worth reading over at "That's the Press, Baby"

2009-11-08T23:55:00.004-05:00

David Sullivan, a longtime journalist and fine thinker on matters of the press who doesn't get enough recognition, has picked up the digital pen lately and is on a roll on his blog.

His Nov. 3 A death in the desert about the announced closing of Arizona's East Valley Tribune is an insightful look into newspaper "mashups," which were all the rage in the 1990s and why they likely fall apart in an age when we can be so much more worldly because of the Internet but also can drill down to the hyper-local level.
Two days later, in What if ... again, he introduced me to a blogger I have already bookmarked - Judy Sims, who used to be in charge of the digital space for the Toronto Star. I had not seen her Top 10 lies newspaper execs are telling themselves. But it's one of those pieces every editor and newsroom exec should have to read numerous times. Her thoughts about whether existing ad staffs can sell online touch on one of the underdiscussed but most imporant topics.
And in How many axes can be made, his trenchant commentary to the comments on another blog's post asking whether the N.Y. Times should ditch its sports section highlight the difficulties of a mass market vehicle in this digital age. As Sullivan writes, "The question isn't that interesting, but the range of responses is, and really shows why our friend the newspaper is in such straits."

All are worth taking a spin. David writes sporadically these days, but I'd bookmark his feed because when he does write, it is very good stuff.

Convergence Conference: Thursday quick hits

2009-11-06T09:40:00.003-05:00

Quickly wrapping up some other interesting sessions:

Thom Baggerman, Capital had an interesting two-part presentation, first what is the archetype of a good multimedia site and second how is that being carried out by newspapers and in cases where there is newspaper and TV co-ownership in a market. His initial observations:
• People want control over their media
• Convergence requires "tool-neutral" storytellers
His archetype is the Las Vegas Sun. Because it is an insert in the larger Review, the Sun's been able to concentrate on the Web. "I have not seen many other sites that offer up their media so willingly for sharing." He says the NY Times and USAToday come close. But he hit the Washington Post for requiring registration to see comments, hits the LA Times for putting comments into a blog.

He also looked at six cases that he said rose to the top of cross-ownership examples, but he found little content sharing, especially video. The cases he looked at: Dallas, Tampa, Phoenix, South Florida, and Dayton and Columbus in Ohio.

Serena Williams of Arizona State detailed some of the struggles she's had in defining news quality and the extent to which citizen journalists follow it. To some extent she has concluded our traditional definitions of news quality needs a re-examination. She also noted that few news organizations explain (where it can be easily found) the principles/ethics under which they operate.

Traditional definition: large number of sources, diversity of viewpoints, identified sources and local information.

Citizen journalists tend to have more stories with a single viewpoint, but she wonders in the age of aggregation if this is necessarily a bad thing.

She also says there is a lot of research out there that can help as we look into citizen journalism – all the research that has been done into community journalism. Smaller papers tend to emphasize consensus over conflict and interpretation over straight reporting, she said, all useful in looking at citizen journalism.

There was a really good session on legal and regulatory issues that I could write several posts on, but time is pressing. So let me whet your whistle with two quick observations. I hope we'll be able to get more in the Convergence Newsletter:

Woodrow Hartzog of North Carolina, representing a team of five researchers that has carved off a piece of a larger project, said it might be counterintuitive, but that group has concluded that sites lacking clear terms of service tend to actually discourage outside contributions. The problem is that without a good TOS, privacy and copyright issues are murky.

Jeff Wilkinson of United International College (and one of my co-authors on "Principles of Convergent Journalism") says we are entering an age where the definition of "original" will become unclear. In short, if so much is on the Web and accessible, it may be impossible for creators not to have had contact with the same underlying patterns/structures that could show up in their work, even if they don't do it consciously. He calls it the "curse of the long tail."

Hope to have some more from Friday's sessions, but will be running to catch a plane after my panel.

Convergence Conference: All things Canadian

2009-11-06T09:04:00.004-05:00

Catching up on some things from Thursday's sessions, who would have thought we'd have so much about Canada? Good stuff, and it points out how we need to broaden our research perspectives (yes, folks, consider that a pitch to contribute articles to The Convergence Newsletter).

In separate presentations Kim Kierans, King's College and Marc Edge, Sam Houston State took at look at the Canadian media landscape and concluded that the amount of consolidation there is becoming dangerous to democracy.

Edge went so far as to say that "If you want to see the future of media convergence, look north."

They painted a picture of three companies, CanWest, Quebecor and CTV, that have control of much of Canada's TV and newspapers, but that gained that control by going billions of dollars in debt. CanWest, of course, recently sought bankruptcy protection.

Kierens tended to have an eastern Caadian perspective, but as bad a picture as she painted, Edge, who still has his roots in Vancouver, said it gets worse the farther west you go.

The big battle now is over the companies' demand for a 50-cent-per-subscriber carriage fee from cable companies. The big three have closed some TV stations and have threatened to close others if they don't get the fee.

Meanwhile, Robert Bergland of Missouri Western State outlined what he and Kirby Strider have found in an analysis of how much multimedia Canadian outlets are using, and the bottom line is a lot less than in the U.S. or the U.K. For instance, about two-thirds of Canadian media outlets use some form of online video. In the U.S. it's three-quarters and the U.K., 85 percent. However, there is more audio (40 percent of Canadian sites, vs. 20 percent U.S. and 10 percent U.K.)

There also are relatively few outside blogs on Canada's bigger papers and similarly low use of audio slide shows.

Bottom line: Interactive multimedia is a lot less common in Canada. Possible reasons: Management less oriented toward it, less training and different relationships with print and broadcast – more cross-ownership. But the biggest reason, he said, may be lower rates of broadband penetration. Many areas in the northern and western provinces have relatively little broadband yet.

Convergence Conference: Newspapers in Second Life

2009-11-05T17:57:00.002-05:00

Andrea Guzman just finished a fascinating session on research into newspapers in Second Life (example, the Herald).

She was trying to do a content analysis on the papers. I won't get into all the details, which look a lot better in graphs anyhow. But I did take away one thing that I think is worthy of note: There can be difficult methodological issues. Guzman, for instance, explained how she had to go through two pilot studies just to begin to get to acceptable levels of intercoder agreement. And even then, some of the stats were less than ideal.

Why are such issues surrounding virtual reality newspapers of importance?

First, slowly but steadily virtual worlds are becoming parts of young lives. Not so much Second Life necessarily, but massive multiplayer games, for instance. AP already has a newsfeed going into the Wii. It's not unreasonable to think that virtual newspapers in virtual worlds some day will be part of some folks' communications mix.

Second, I can see some of these same issues coming up as we get deeper into the atomizaton of journalism. Getting agreement on definitional issues is getting harder. We might learn something from what issues are emerging as we explore Second Life.

Convergnce Conference: Michigan as ground zero

2009-11-05T16:47:00.005-05:00

Dennis Jeffers, Carol McGinnis, Lori Brost, Sean Baker, Central Michigan

Wide variations, but one commonality – online, radio sites are a dead zone.

Why Michigan? Diverse media. Among worst economies in the nation, so media having to take more drastic steps.

Urban Dailies – canaries I the coal mine? Jeffers thinks so to some extent.
Gannett went to the Thursday/Friday/Sunday home delivery; seven-day e-edition; 24/7 Web site model.
Both (Newhouse) Made Ann Arbor Web only, is following the Gannett model in places like Flint and Saginaw, and is restructuring others.
• The focus has shifted to product, not delivery
• Trying to change people's behavior.
• There is some evidenced of cultural shift in newsrooms, living rooms, ad agency board rooms. In Detroit News newsroom definite evidence, matter of necessity.
But he sees this more as a stopgap model. E-edition is shunned by younger readers. So it keeps your older readers but does not attract new ones.

Uses/gratifications theory may be among the more useful of the theoretical models.

McGinnis looked at community papers. Generally have been defined by geography but more are being defined by community of interest.

Wide range of sites, from some that do almost nothing to full-featured sites. Only one Michigan county does not have a community paper. Ad revenue down 28.8 percent for larger papers and 18.7 percent for community papers. Michigan Press Association found recently that 54 percent questions read weekly papers and 58 percent read daily papers.

This leads in to Brose, who looked at online only sites. Many are new and there is no definitive list.
Lots of sites springing up in Michigan.

Ann Arbor is drawing the most interest
• Loved or hated
• A "river of news"
• Trying to be responsive to reader suggestions and complaints

Used to have active discussions for past month or two, but users said they just wanted past couple of weeks. Changed.
New, usable online calendar
Working on hierarchy of stories
Bloggers fill in the cracks, especially with things like parenting tips, etc.

Contrast with Ann Arbor Chronicle
Started by former Ann Arbor news writer about a year ago. More traditional news site. Little citizen journalism. Now reportedly self-supporting.

She is pretty sure we can say sites like this are the future of local journalism in Michigan.

(UPDATE: Adds broadcast sites)

Baker looked at 75 broadcast online sites across the state, limited to first news page. Used agenda setting and framing.

(Doug note: I think this research was important because it comes when, with newspaper cutbacks and now with talk of paywalls, TV and other news sites may be where the public increasingly turns for news.) Baker found wide variations, even in the same market.

Detroit: One station has a site that is well-constructed and indexed. Lots of RSS, text-based newsletters and interactives. Content has more local focus. Some new video. But two stations much less.

Grand Rapids: All stations very interactive. Lots of invitations to become part of the community. One has "publish yourself" tools, with blogging, photo galleries, etc.
Flint area- abysmal.

Radio: Sites have little local at all. Link to national news sources common. Seem to be more promotional vehicles than news sites.

Convergence Converence: Twiter Feed

2009-11-05T14:26:00.002-05:00

The Twitter Feed for the Convergence Conference is using the hashtag #cconf09

Convergence Conference: Radio's conundrum

2009-11-05T13:08:00.002-05:00

Tony DeMars, Texas A&M: HD Radio and local market broadcasting

Recent studies in general show:
• People are paying attention to digital radio
• People are interested in listening to online radio in car
• Younger people less interested in radio – tend to focus on personal music devices
• Two-thirds of those questioned are aware of XM/Sirius. Of those, most have made their decision whether to adopt. So unsure how much more product growth is available there.
• Only about a third of audience aware of HD radio

Media plans and developments
• Automakers are putting Internet radio tuners in cars
• Home wi-fi radio "tuners" emerging
• With Wi-Max rolling out, more opportunity to use these tech tools.

How do local radio people feel:
• Rights fee concern
• HD radio not viewed as profitable (few listen)
• Wi-fi radio is a concern
• Emphasis becoming on unique local programming vs. Clear Channel cookie-cutter model
• Putting niche programming on HD channels
• No longer talking about using stations to introduce "new music" because your audience probably already has found it through iTunes,, etc.

Problems
• Incremental costs vs. declining revenues
• SoundExchange fee problem: example, one station would pay $771 for 100 listeners at a time
• But Internet buyers paying $5/CPM (the SoundExchange model combines number of listeners with gigabyte downloads for total fee)
• Quote from one: By pushing people to wi-fi radio, "We are promoting our own self-destruction."

It's encouraging broadcasters to air fewer songs per hour. If a handful of your listeners are online, that's OK. But if it's half their listeners per hour, they can't survive.

Convergence Conference: Slide shows

2009-11-05T12:23:00.001-05:00

Jonathan Lillie, Loyola-Maryland: Newspaper journalists as multimediators

Exploratory study of audio slide show producers – ended up with 30 papers

• Most doing it are photojournalists (27). Others: multimedia specialists (16)
• Most self-trained
• Almost all use Soundslides
• On average create one or two a month

Slideshows were seen as an alternative to video, which management pushed but photojournalists resisted.

Almost all said it improved their reporting – more involved in the process. More competition with reporters to get good assignments.

Most see themselves using an "NPR" style more than a local broadcast style.

Other observations
• It does require extra work, and that cuts into the time for better photojournalism.
• But most do believe they are worth the extra effort
• There is pressure to "get it up" without necessarily an emphasis on quality.
• Pressure from management still to do video. Management believes video gets the most hits and that pressure is on for "hits."

Convergence Conference: News orgs still don't get it

2009-11-05T11:57:00.003-05:00

I'm at the "Convergence and Society" conference in Reno the next couple of days and will be trying to do regular updates (as long as the battery holds out).

The first session today is "The changing media landscape," but what we are finding is that not all that much is changing. I'm just going to post my notes here; no great attempt to make them into a narrative.

Tim Bajkiewicz and Marcus Messner: Engaging the future

Interviews with managers of nine news orgs. 30 minutes each. Use "convergence continuum" to return to integration of theory. Grounded theory: our findings are about their perceptions.

Major themes:
• Convergence not really right word. Just about engaging audience among platforms
• Business not ink on paper but bringing information to the community. But print is still the major driver.
• Not only depending on print, but everything it brings to the table.
• Cool Tools: They were aware of new, cool tools, but a disconnect. Managers seem to know what is going on, but it has not made its way into the business plan.
• Mobile is going to be the thing, but no one sure how to monetize
• Social media communities – trying to engage, but not necessarily the driving force

Conclusions
• No real new media strategies
• Disconnect with ground-level journalists
• Know what need to do but not doing it
• Cost hurdle, bunker mentality
• Conundrum: while trying to assimilate tech, more native-to-the-Web operations may eat their lunch.
• New media is still an experiment

That was the week that was - without AP

2009-11-03T17:58:00.004-05:00

You can be sure the wire service will be watching closely, and maybe nervously, next week as Tribune papers do without as much AP content as possible.

As Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune's media watcher put it on his blog:

Some newspapers have determined that shared wire content that is available to readers from many other outlets is worth less to them than unique, proprietary content, especially online. Coupled with reductions in the space allocated for news in print, papers are weighing whether there’s the same need for Associated Press content as in the past.

Or to put it another way, once AP sells it to Google, why does anyone else need to buy it?

This just goes to highlight the tough spot AP really finds itself in. Don't forget, it was not that long ago, in August, that I was quoting Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg on her view of what the wire service should do. Unique content was not part of her vision:

Goldberg, asked if the Plain Dealer and similar papers might go without AP someday, said "it's possible." There's a basic disconnect, she said: "I want them to cover the really boring meeting at the Statehouse so my people don't have to." But, she said, AP wants to do bigger projects and enterprise "that I have neither the desire nor the room to publish."

I think we'll all be interested to see what conclusions Tribune reaches.

Bad news, good news -quick hits

2009-10-29T15:30:00.002-04:00

Ah, I love the Web. In one day you can find:

The bad news

Sam Zell says things are so bad in the business "nobody can survive."
This takeout on Demand Media that ought to scare the hell out of every journalist. Sure, Demand, known to more people as eHow, isn't doing big-J journalism. It's simply doing the kind of "refrigerator journalism" that for years has seriously helped pay the bills. Only it's doing it for $15 an article for writing, $2.50 an article for copy editing and 8 cents a headline. The scary part, though, isn't the prices per se. It's this observation from Jason Fell at Portfolio (which sounds eerily like the arguments I was making here about commodity journalism long before the bottom fell out):
But what jumped out at me while reading the Wired piece wasn’t Demand’s soaring profits. It was how co-founder Richard Rosenblatt (former CEO of Intermix Media, the company behind MySpace) thinks other media companies, which have been trying to increase the value of their content to at least match the cost of producing it, have the equation backwards. As he’s done with Demand, Rosenblatt said the trick is in cutting costs until they match market value for your content.
Chew on that for a while.

The good news

In my e-mail this afternoon comes this. File it under "score one for the good guys":
The Arizona Supreme Court has held "that if a public entity maintains a public record in an electronic format, then the electronic version, including any embedded metadata, is subject to disclosure under our public records law." This is the first state supreme court opinion in the country to rule that metadata is available for public review. This is a big deal, not only for access to metadata, but for electronic records in general. Special thanks to ASU professor Steve Doig for his assistance with the amicus brief. http://www.supreme.state.az.us/opin/pdf2009/CV090036PR.pdf

Daniel Gross writes in Slate that before we start filling in the grave on newspapers, we ought to take a closer look at their finances and how they are restructuring their business models so that subscribers pick up more of the freight. He makes some interesting arguments worth considering.

All in a day's reading.

Newspaper video cuts

2009-10-17T13:30:00.008-04:00

There is a lot of discussion about the state of "newspaper video" on the Yahoo newspaper video group after the decision by the Las Vegas Sun to pull the plug on the innovative 702.tv.

The general meme is that those long features and other innovative projects that draw critical acclaim, but not necessarily lots of viewers, are falling by the wayside and that the TV staples of breaking news - fires, accidents, news conferences and the like -- are becoming the standard fare.

This is not surprising, but misguided, though Chuck Fadley at the Miami Herald says hard news and sports drive the paper's video traffic.

But if you are doing that, all you are doing is competing with every other outlet in the market - in short, you are back to commodity news. And if you thought it was tough making a buck in the commodity news market when your tools are primarily paper and pen, it's a whole lot tougher in video where the equipment costs thousands of dollars.

One person writes that his newspaper, which went into video "with a vengeance," has cut back to one stringer and that if anything breaks, there is no money to replace it.

Dirck Halstead writes that video ad rates "MUST come up." Michael Rosenblum responds that the rates aren't coming up, that the problem is in the ad departments and that we have to radically reshape how we sell online ads.

They're both right. While earlier Pew data, for instance, still showed the heaviest use of online video to be at upper income levels, the latest shows no difference among income or education groups. But various types of video are likely to draw different audiences, some more valuable than others (think golf on TV), and there's no reason to think that, if sold correctly and with data to back it up, some video might not command a premium.

But that means knowing how to sell it and having the data and tools. And Rosenblum is definitely right that the problem is in the front office more than the newsroom. As I've worked with news organizations -- and I've said this before -- their ad and business sides are essentially moribund when compared with most newsrooms. Unlike a newsroom, they are even more intimately tied to a business model, and I'm not sure how you extract yourself from that, both psychologically and sociologically.

I don't think we can downplay the amount of managerial fortitude it takes to make this kind of change. You are screwing with people's livelihoods and, in many respects, asking them to jump into the pit with no guarantee where the bottom is. The money at this point, such as it is, is still to be made in selling ink on paper, not pixels on screen. Yes, it will change, but human reaction to such things tends to be a lagging, not a leading, economic indicator.

This pullback in video is not particularly surprising for two reasons:

the general pattern of technology adoption
the way too many newsrooms appear have managed it

In general, adoption of new technologies, especially information technologies, has been on a steadily upward curve, with the slope becoming even steeper with newer technologies such as the VCR, microwave, cell phone and Internet. (The telephone and airplane seem to have a dip or plateau in the graphs in that article, but that would seem to be more an effect of World War II.) But the technology adoption curve really isn't necessarily continuous bell curve, as Rogers posited. Some project a gap between the early adopters and the early majority. (See also part three of that series.)

The case of online video, especially news-related video, is further complicated because it is, for lack of a better term, a "secondary technology." It relies on still-developing underlying technology. It's only relatively recently that high-speed Internet has been available in most areas (and one can debate what we call high speed vs. the rest of the world), but the cost in rural areas is problematic.

There is continued debate over effective streaming technologies, especially in the era of high definition, and the devices on which to play such video remain limited. This is unlike the VCR, another secondary technology, which was a quick and relatively easy add-on (jokes about programming them not withstanding) to a stable underlying technology.

And even though the Pew data show widespread use of online video, that number is based on whether the person has ever watched a video sharing site. When you look at regular use, however, the numbers drop sharply (89 percent of those 18-29 say they watch videos, but just 36 percent on a typical day).

Truly widespread adoption, the kind that leads to the monetization and ROI needed for sustainability for organizations like newsrooms, is unlikely until online video is widely ported to existing TVs or to some kind of mobile device that improves on the current small-screen experience.

Having said that, I still see or hear of too many cases in newsrooms where things like video are embarked on without a rigorous thought and management process. (Newsrooms are not alone - a marketing director told me recently her organization had hired a social media firm. Why, I asked. Because everyone tells us we need to do it, she said.) As a result, as the one Newspaper Video list correspondent noted, they jump in with a vengeance, only to be disappointed. This digital age requires a more rigorous way of evaluating and managing. Four key points:

At the outset you should ask "why?" Also "how" and "what": Why are we doing this. What do we hope to accomplish or learn? (In the case of online video, it might be to learn workflows, define audience, understand the technology). How will we define success and what will we do if we don't have success?
Monitor: Who will monitor comments? Workflows? Cost vs. benefit? Content? The online production system is different from the old rigid get-it-to-press model (not to mention the added dimension of interacting with your audience). Effective monitoring is critical.
Measurement: There's an old business saying - you can't manage what you can't measure. So how will you measure? What will you measure? (Are total views critical, for instance, or is it time on view? Demographics? Psychographics?)
Manage: Did we reach our goals? If not, why not? What should we do about it - kill it or adjust it? Or redefine the goals?

None of this need involve ROI. In fact, smart organizations realize that to grow and expand, everything can't be about ROI (in pure dollars and cents, unless you want to get into gritty cost-benefit analysis).

We don't need to be quite so down in the dumps about "newspaper" video. But we do need to understand that many organizations jumped out without the rigor needed to evaluate it. As a result, the pullback also is likely to be overstated. But, then, that just seems to be the nature of the business right now.

Sanitized war

2009-10-15T12:35:00.003-04:00

Photo District News through Editor & Publisher reports that one of the commands in Afghanistan has issued a directive barring photos of dead or dying military members.

This follows the controversy over the AP's running a photo of a dying Marine.

AP says the Pentagon has the policy under review.

Way cool tech think

2009-10-12T20:06:00.003-04:00

Sure, it's just a concept for now. But all I can say to 10/GUI is find someone to build this!

Seriously, take a look at this concept video for a 10-finger computer touchscreen control.

My only fear - I never could play the piano. How much practicing would I need for this?

(Thanks to Zac Echola for the pointer.)

Usability of RSS feeds, social networking

2009-10-12T19:09:00.004-04:00

It would be worth your while to spend some time with Jakob Nielsen's latest "Alertbox" usability column.

In it he details research done to determine how people interact with corporate postings in feeds and on things like Twitter and Facebook.

Some interesting stuff:

Businesses that post too often crowd out the user's real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.
Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what's appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.
RSS updates were viewed as more trustworthy and as more "official" sources than social messages. Users were also more likely to check RSS feeds at work, whereas they mainly accessed social networks from home.

No great surprise, either, is the observation that users don't go rooting around for postings in the stream they might have missed -- they are content to pretty much stay with what's on the page in front of them.

With "social media" being the hot topic in newsrooms lately, there's a lot to chew on here.

Quote of the week

2009-10-12T11:02:00.003-04:00

Best quote I've seen all week is from Leonard Pitts in his column about using some common sense in the court fight over a cross on public land -- in the middle of nowhere in California -- that originally was erected as a memorial to World War I soliders:

Principle absent human compassion is just intellectual masturbation.

Google explains news SEO

2009-10-12T10:11:00.004-04:00

Want to know how Google performs search engine optimization on news sources. It's explained (sort of - not all the secret sauce is revealed) in this video:

Google's "webmaster channel" has other good things, too.

And specifically for publishers http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/

Convergence Newsletter - HD streaming

2009-10-10T15:55:00.001-04:00

Latest Convergence Newsletter: Edgar Huang details work in evaluating best HD streaming technology http://bit.ly/FQmbK (free)

Numeracy: Perils of rounding

2009-10-10T14:18:00.001-04:00

Over at The Slot, Bill Walsh has some good advice on not overdoing it when it comes to rounding numbers.

ACES Scholarships

2009-10-10T13:46:00.002-04:00

Hard to believe given the drumbeat of news, but there is still money in copy editing, especially if you're a college student. It comes from the ACES Education Fund, an affiliate of the American Copy Editors Society

The skinny

Deadline Nov. 15
Juniors, seniors and grad students interested in careers in copy editing.
Students graduating in 2009 and who have or will have full-time copy editing jobs or internships are also eligible.
Among the criteria used by judges are commitment to copy editing as a career, work experience in copy editing and abilities in copy editing, as demonstrated by examples and recommendations.
The big prize: the $2,500 Aubespin scholarship, named for Merv Aubespin, a longtime journalist, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists and the “godfather” of ACES.
At least four other candidates get $1,000 each. All the winners will be granted free registration for the ACES national conference in April 2010 in Philadelphia.

Full details http://www.facebook.com/l/b89db;www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm or
http://www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm

Questions? Contact ACES Education Fund secretary Kathy Schenck, kschenck@journalsentinel.com.

Seminal readings in the new age of journalism

2009-10-10T10:30:00.008-04:00

At a great panel discussion at the Columbia Social Media Club this week, I suggested four seminal readings that, if you read and understand them, you will be able to filter out so much that is white noise these days.

As I think about it, there really are six, and I keep coming back to them because I think they stand the test of time:

The Next Great American Newspaper (2003), David Gelernter
He was trying to promote his own way to organize the Web, but in the process Gelernter hits on what I think is the essential point of the Web -- "story" becomes a slice in time, not a silo of text. We still don't get this particularly well. If we did, it might well upend the entire way we do journalism. I've built a Newsplex simulation around this called the "Acme Widget strike." It takes participants through various phases of the story, starting with the initial word at 11 p.m. (story's probably quick text, some file photos, etc. .... going to the first plant to walk out in Ireland overnight (story - wire service text) ... to having a video crew at the plant gates in the morning (the story is the video stream, later broken up into clips - why do we need much text if we just display those clips on the front page or on a microsite devoted to the strike? But the real game-changer is that midday your best reporter gets a database that lists everyone on strike. So what is your "story" now? The old way would be to go out and interview a bunch of people and write a "story."

But in the new world the best "story" might be a map - mouse over each neighborhood and get a summary of how many are affected, maybe links to video interviews or short stories, etc. Think about things like Halloween decoration stories, etc. A map is your best "story." Do you have enough kahunas next July Fourth to front a mouseover map of the local celebrations on your site (barring nothing blowing up, of course), instead of the usual rivers of text from the wire service and warmed-over features you've done. After all, isn't that why most people are likely to be coming to your site for those few hours?

The News Diamond (2007), Paul Bradshaw
Bradshaw has proposed a model that will really help you conceive of how journalism might function in the social media age. Of all the suggestions I've read and considered, Bradshaw's has the most clarity and potential of all. Still, you'll probably have to read it a couple of times to get its full import.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (2009), Clay Shirky
A lot of ink has been spilled over this already, and as with many of Shirky's writings, you'll want to read it two or three times and let what he's suggesting roll around in the recesses of your brain. The takeaway for me, however, is his discussion of what Dan Conover refers to as the interregnum. Shirky is the first one I've seen to really crystallize the idea that much of our "problem" or confusion right now is that we are in the middle of this unknowable period, where technology is advancing and unfolding at a pace really too rapid for us to absorb and understand it.

While this is often portrayed as a time of great business opportunity, and it is, reality is that it is also deadly for long-term business survival - you know, the kind of thing most people, including journalists, count on to get them at least part way to their retirement. Shirky points out that we don't know a lot about what happened during the last great communications interregnum either, the years after Gutenberg perfected his press until the modern form of the book was invented. It was a 50- to 70-year period of upheaval, not unlike that we are going through today (one wonders if the monks issued warnings as dire as some journalists have).

But the approximately 150-year period of stability (and ossification) we have had in the communications industry was unnatural. I suspect the meteoric change we have now will, at some point, level off a bit and we'll coalesce around some technologies, at least for a few years. It will never - at least in the foreseeable future - be as it was, but I suspect we'll advance in a series of stair steps, or plateaus, maybe lasting 20-30 years, where businesses will be built around a dominant technology but with the knowledge disruption is always possible.

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News (2009), John Temple
Temple certainly is not without a hand in the collapse of the "Rocky" and some of the overall boneheaded decisions and assumptions made in journalism. But not only does he come clean here and not try to make himself look like a hero or martyr, he provides a valuable look at the decisions and assumptions, why they were made and why they didn't work. A must-read for journalism management classes, but really for everyone to understand how things can go horribly wrong. The money quote: The following quote explains the dilemma newspapers found themselves in. “We were not used to the market telling us how things should be. We were used to telling people what we thought they needed and how they needed it,” is how a Scripps marketing exec put it. That has to change.

The Future of Journalism in a Distributed Communication Archtecture (1996), John Newhagen and Mark Levy
Newhagen and Levy were among the first to "get it" -- to understand where this all was going. The fashionable thing these days is to talk about editors, such as they are, really being curators, leading people to the best material available and putting it in context, etc. Here's what they wrote - in 1996!

Controlling the amount and content of news on the Information Superhighway (a.k.a. data compression) is a current hot button for journalists, and the function to which editors cling with the most tenacity. Journalists increasingly reassure themselves that even cyber-journalism on the Net will still need editors to tell "audiences" what is important. ...

However, information compression is not particularly well- suited as a data reduction technique in a distributed architecture such as the Net. Computer science and engineering are focusing on more efficient forms of filtering than compression for this architecture. That implies complex and potentially egalitarian power relationships between information managers and end users. This might be manifest in the role of a pathfinder rather than agenda setter, with this later function falling back to the user, whether editors like it or not. Editors derive their power from being able to say, "because of my position in the architecture you have to pass through me to find out what's important." On the Net the pathfinder might tell the user, "tell me what you need and I will guide you through this complex environment."

Editor as "pathfinder." Sounds amazingly like "curator" to me. Again, remember this was a decade before the true implosion and at least five years before newsrooms really felt the first heat (and them mistakenly reassured themselves after the tech collapse of 2001 that this wasn't a real threat).

You should go back and reread this article once every year or so because Newhagen and Levy pretty much said in a couple thousand words what everyone else blathers on about. The article was included in The Electronic Grapevine, one of those books I'd recommend be in your library.

(In fact, I'd recommend you check out much of Newhagen's work at the University of Maryland's Advanced Media Technology laboratory. I don't think it's gotten the recognition it deserves.)

The Meanings and Implications of Convergence (2003), Rich Gordon
We throw "convergence" around a lot, but Gordon sat down and dissected it, said what does it really mean? Using a two-point framework, convergence in technology and in organizations, he came up with eight key frames. Under technology fall convergence in content creation, distribution and consumption. Under organizations are convergence in ownership, tactics, structure, information gathering and presentation. Considered that way, it's a Rubik's Cube of possibilities. No wonder we have such a hard time getting all the sides aligned. This is another article you should read periodically, first to stay grounded but second to let all the possibilities and implications roll through your mind.

Gordon's work appeared in Digital Journalism: Emerging Media and the Changing Horizons of Journalism, another book that really should be in your library because the articles in it have legs.

Plus ...

Add to your library Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace (1997). Janet Murray got it before most what the new ability to link would really mean for storytelling. This book is too often overlooked and lost in all the lather that has followed. At times a bit dense, this book still is a road map for what followed.

And I'd recommend you bookmark Conover's 2020 Vision: What's Next for News. I think he gets it much more right than wrong, and I have a feeling not too long down the road this will be on my seminal writings list. We are headed to an era where the narrative bias of journalism will be severely modified, if not blown up. And if you'd scoff, remember, Epic 2015 (originally 2014) bought a lot of snickering when it came out, too. Who's laughing now?

Temple's inside look at what went wrong

2009-10-07T23:41:00.003-04:00

If you have not read John Temple's recounting of what went wrong at the Rocky Mountain News, you should.

(His thesis: Management, including him, kept thinking it was a newspaper company and failed to realize the competition was everything out there. Combined with old-line attitudes, such as thinking they could dictate what people wanted, managers/executives let their one-time cmpetitive advantage slip away.

Temple covers the waterfront, from the early ventures online (note one error, it was 1996, not 2006 as in his text), to the exile of online staffs because of union concerns, to the flip-flopping over what, exactly, the Web site was supposed to be.

Excellent for management classes, but there are things in here that about any upper-level reporting or ethics class could have a good time chewing over. And, as he says, much of this can apply to othe media, too.

(It's worth pairing this with Alan Mutter's dissection of what went wrong with the two news sites that journalists opened to compete with the Dener Post.)

Hartsville Today - RIP, but being reborn

2009-10-07T16:12:00.002-04:00

Hartsville Today, the almost 4-year-old community news service serving Hartsville in eastern South Carolina died on Friday when the Amazon server (and it turns out the backup) on which it was being run went RIP.

HVTD, as it was known, was one of the first projects funded by J-lab in 2005. In many ways, it was a success, having grown to 1,900 registered members and at least triple that in unique users in a market area of 20,000. The "cookbook" about creating the site (link in the right rail) has been translated into Russian, we are told, has been downloaded more than 3,000 times from our servers and has been linked to by Yahoo's You-Witness News site.

In some ways, it wasn't a success, having never been integrated into the operations of The Messenger, its publishing partner that, in the middle of this, was sold to Media General (research report here, Grassroots Editor, Winter 2008 (pdf)).

Now, Hartsville Today begins a new life. It is being rebuilt by Media General using the Expression Engine platform instead of Drupal, which was our original publishing system. Some things will be different; we're not entirely sure yet. Of course there will be some differences in filing, but we're still looking at things like pictures, calendar functions etc.

A page-holder should be up shortly, and the first phase of the rebuilt site should go up sometime next week.

So now we have some potential new research. HVTD was a vibrant community. Can such communities stay together given this kind of disruption and digital tragedy? What will it take?

We'll see.