Writers Getting Paid

Reporters Borrowing from Themselves

Matt — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 05:31:58 +0000

Here’s a great example of how journalism isn’t necessarily all about going out and getting a fresh story — sometimes, it’s just re-writing what’s already been reported.

I was researching watersheds a few months ago and I came across a story about San Francisco’s creeks in an issue of the Examiner from 1989. Then I found another one from 1998 that was awfully similar. Like, verbatim.

Turns out, this isn’t exactly plagiarism, since the same reporter (Lisa Krieger) wrote both stories, a decade apart. Here’s a comparison:

Who knows what prompted the Examiner to do a rewrite on a story that hadn’t changed much in 9 years, but it sure is thrifty of them. I wrote to Lisa to ask for details and she never responded.

Here’s the articles themselves:

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Welcome to What May or May not be the Future of Journalism

Matt — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:15:18 +0000

I would like to make a few points, and to do so in a somewhat rambling fashion.

Tomorrow, I am speaking on a panel at the annual meeting of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. The topic is one of my favorite subjects: THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM. The reason that it’s one of my favorite subjects is because it’s so completely unknown, like exploring Mars. Who knows what we’ll find? Maybe Bigfoot.

That having been said, we’re not exactly fumbling around without a map. (Well, some of us, anyway.) Even though the Internet has completely upended the way we gather, distribute, and experience news, there have been some successes (and a lot of failures) that can serve a signposts for an industry seeking equilibrium. I’m going to use this post to organize a few of my observations.

My advice in a nut shell

Social
Personalize
Aggregate
Users

You want to succeed? Make it social. Make it personalized. Aggregate. Make what users what, not what you want.

You’ll need to spend big on the technology, so I hope you’re rich.

How to detect snake oil

If someone says one of these three things, treat anything they say with extreme skepticism. They are either crazy, a scoundrel, or a genius.

I’m quite certain that this new idea will change everything. (Nothing is certain, especially new ideas.)
I don’t work in the industry, but I’ve studied it extensively. (For an industry predicated on explaining complex phenomena, journalism is surprisingly ineffable.)
We’re going force users to change their behavior. (Users don’t like changing their behavior. They’ll just go someplace else, like your cat did when you tried to make him wear reindeer antlers.)

Can readers be made to move from online to print?

Yes and no. I know, that’s not a very satisfying answer. But there’s really two questions there:

In the future, will people use the print products in any form? (Yes.)
In the future, will people use the same print products they do today? (No.)

There will always be demand for print, just like there will always be demand for live theater, handwritten letters, and other old-timey methods of communication. But plays and letters of today are very different from those of a hundred years ago. (For one thing, the sentences are shorter.)

There are some things that the Internet simply does better than print, and reporting on breaking news is one of them. When the 2032 presidential election rolls around, I would not expect many people to wait for the following morning to read who won on the front page of the New York Times.

But there are still a few things — very, very few — that print does better than online. For now.

When I was a kid, I would unfold the Sunday comics section on the floor of the living room and read every single panel of every single comic, including Rex Morgan M.D. The pleasure that one derives from such an experience simply cannot be duplicated by a screen. (For now.) That’s why I loved Marvel’s Wednesday Comics experiment: for twelve weeks, they printed a serial anthology of various comics, written and illustrated by various artists. It was such a pleasure to unfold a huge broadsheet and hold it up in my hands or lay it down on the floor. The massive pages gave them an opportunity to play around with some very inventive layouts, and to create some massive panels. I hope more publishers do this.

My God, just look at these photos of people reading print. Actually reading print! Like it’s the 1920s or something!

Another area in which print excels: creating fetishy objects, like Butt Magazine. Sure, you can read it online. But owning a physical copy is tempting in a way that owning a physical copy of Instinct or Out is not. Why is that? What is that about? Is it simply because Butt is attractive and unique? I guess that’s what fetishism is.

Also, the content on Butt’s site is very different from the content on Butt’s paper. That’s key: your print and online properties shouldn’t be mirror-universe versions of each other. Online will (almost) always win if that’s your strategy. Instead, tailor your content to match the strengths of that format. For example, the current issue of Butt is collectible and otherworldly, the kind of thing you want to hold and share. Sometimes they have tear-out posters. The website has recent news, community profiles, and archives.

Also of note: some of Butt’s content is only available in print. And have you noticed that they sell physical items?

Those Darn Kids

I really enjoyed the Younger Thinking research conducted by Christopher Sopher. Now, I’m breaking one of my snake-oil rules a bit here by featuring the work of a person who’s done more studying than working. But I’ve gone through his work and it’s backed up by research by the Pew Center and the Columbia Journalism Review, which is about as trustworthy as research can get, so I’m willing to entertain his conclusions, particularly because they confirm my own.

Some of Sopher’s noteworthy observations:

Young people want immediacy, to graze on news, to be social, and to get just the highlights (pg 6)
Social features improve engagement (pg 10)
Knowledge of news is a form of social capital; users want news to be organized, not expanded; and personalization is key (pg 14)
News sites — especially local news sites — are not so good (pg 29)
Search drives a lot of traffic (pg 35)
Users may respond favorably to “wisdom journalism,” whereby a reporter takes advantage of their in-depth knowledge to provide insight and analysis (pg 82)
Avoid information overload (pg 86)

What a State

Did you read that massive report from Pew about the state of the news media? I didn’t. It’s 700 pages for crying out loud! But I did read the overview and the section on online news. Some observations of note:

About 60% of news consumers get their news online.
About 60% of internet users use social media.
Social networks are used to filter and organize news (pg 3)
News consumers spend 3-4 minutes on most sites. (pg 12)
Aggregators are popular, but so new that the word isn’t in my spell-checker. (pg 12)
Niche readers are not very loyal, with two exceptions: Kos and Drudge. (pg 14)
Within niches sites, political sites get the most engagement. Having an ideology helps. (pg 20)
Classifieds are losing big. (pg 23)
Display ads are bringing in less. (pg 23)
Search revenue is big, and most of it goes to aggregators. (pg 23)
Some experiments in revenue generation, all of which I expect to fail because they don’t offer enough value to users: Journalism Online does micropayments, CircLabs makes a desktop news app, ViewPass LINK collects demographic data. (page 27)
Social social social social social. “News is a social currency.” page (31)

Top Apps

Hey, check out the top news apps in the iTunes store.

Major news orgs: CNN, PBS, Chicago Tribune, NY Times, Fox News, USA Today, MSNBC.
Also, aggregators: like Pulse News Mini, Mobile RSS Pro, Reeder, Instapaper iReddit.
Two niche apps: Drudge (of all things) and ModMiy, which is about Apple news.

In conclusion, I have no conclusion

So there you have it. That was a bit rambling, wasn’t it? Hopefully the panel talk will organize these thoughts a bit and gel them into something a little more cohesive. In the mean time, perhaps you will like these two presentations I recently put together: 14 Things Bloggers and Broadcasters can Learn from Each Other, and The Lifecycle of a Blog Post.

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/

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Twenty Years Ago, Grindr Would Have Been a Section in a Newspaper

Matt — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:35:37 +0000

I just wanted to take quick note of a survey (conducted by a company that stands to benefit, so take with a grain of salt) that indicates the LGBTs are particularly likely to use blogs and social networking for news. Well yes, obviously, we are always ahead of the curve, whether it is with hairstyles or news or something more risqué.

There’s two things that really catch my eye here — one is to wonder what all those straight people are doing. Why are you not getting your news on Facebook, you weirdos? And the other thing is to feel a little annoyed that newspapers and journalists are not taking more advantage of this phenomenon.

I mean, look at Grindr. Here’s a wildly popular mobile app that gay men use to find each other for sex. Now I’m not that old, but I do remember a time when people used newspaper for that. Remember? It seems crazy to say, but people used to put tiny little advertisements for themselves in the back of newspapers, and then they would scrutinize all the other peoples’ ads to try to find a match.

Why did our ancestors newspapers for this? Because newspapers are location-specific and widely distributed. These are things that the internet does even better than paper, so now people do it online. But there’s no reason that news organizations couldn’t still be doing it! It kills me that Grindr was invented by just some guy, and not by a newspaper.

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Newstilt’s Fascinating Branding Advice

Matt — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 06:27:52 +0000

Well, bon voyage, Newstilt. The venture that I featured here on the site a few months ago (and tried using on three different occasions) has officially bitten the dust after not much time at all.

Well.

Now that Newstilt’s fading away, I thought it might be fun to take a little peek at the branding advice that I got from Paul, the site’s founder. I was using the brand name “mattymatt” on the site, since it is the name I tend to go by online. Paul wrote to me to ask if I wouldn’t rather use something else. The problem, he pointed out, was that if I ever hired additional writers, it would look weird to have multiple people writing under my own personal brand.

Well, okay, that’s true, I suppose, even though I don’t have any intention of hiring anybody. But, I asked, what would be a brand name that covers all of the topics that I write about? Science, LGBT equality, comic books, transit, etc.

Paul responded, “The best thing would be to pick some generic words that resonate with you, something like idavar.”

(“Idavar” was the brand name being used by another Newstilt writer, whose real name happened to be Iran Davar Ardalan.)

So! Make of that what you will. When branding online, don’t use your nickname; use some generic words, something like your nickname.

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Who Will Save the Gay Press? Nerds.

Matt — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:45:57 +0000

Gosh there is just so much to say about Michael Lavers’ piece in the Village Voice about the decline facing the gay press. There’s been an immediate response — and I think Matt Comers’ reaction might actually be even better than Lavers’ original piece — so I just want to boil everything down as simply as possible.

The Problem

Readers are leaving newspapers all over the place; but it’s a particular problem in niche markets since they’re so sensitive to fluctuation — the canaries of the news industry.

Where are readers going? The Internet, obviously.

Why are they going there? Because they like it better (obviously).

What’s the solution? Ah, that’s not so obvious. But I have a good guess.

The Solution

The Internet does some things really well. (Breaking news, community, multimedia.) Print does some things really well, too. (Selling ads.) This is why I have a whole presentation on what old-timey and new-timey writers can learn from each other.

I love what Matt Comers says about not thinking of yourself as a newspaper with a website, but a multimedia company with two properties. Yup: from where I’m standing, with one leg in blogs and one leg in newspapers, success will lie in having content for diverse platforms, and playing to those platforms’ strengths.

Got a video clip? Put it online. Got a story about new tire technology? Put it in the newspaper, and then have the advertising department call Big O Tires.

Smart entertainment companies are already diversifying content according to the strengths of different platforms. NBC puts the sitcoms in primetime, webisodes on Hulu, and local NYC programming on videoscreen in taxi cabs. (I just got back from a fabulous trip to Brooklyn, BTW.)

In a few months, I’m going to be speaking on a panel at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists’ Association’s LGBT Media Summit. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the new ways that people consume news today. I can’t wait.

The Innovations

Everyone agrees that news has to change somehow in order to survive, and I think it’s really weird that very few people are talking about the role of nerds in all this.

Or more specifically, engineers, designers, coders … you know, the people who made the Internet for which everyone’s deserting newspapers.

I think that when we see really successful news organizations, a major component of their success will be technical investment. These organizations will need to have as much emphasis on having an A+ platform as on having A+ content.

For example, an old-media organization like Village Voice Media has a slew of problems on their site that act as pageview-repellent. It’s cluttered and “un-Internetish,” for one thing. There’s a special widget for changing the font size at the top of the article — WTF? Does that really get enough use to justify making it as tall as the headline? The site’s showing me ads for places in New York, which would be fine if I wasn’t in San Francisco. The article is paginated, which is simply rude. The comments are hidden by default! And they don’t support HTML! And the CAPTCHA breaks! You can’t subscribe to comments! The RSS is truncated! The social media badges are at the end of the article (rather than up top, with that font-size doohickey). Disastrously, all of the links in the article are simply to search results for keywords on VVM’s own site. And frustratingly, even though the illustrations on the site can be quite nice, there doesn’t seem to be a way to purchase a physical print.

Worst of all: the site looks the same to everyone who visits. I see the same Village Voice as everyone else, no matter what articles I’ve read in the past, what I’ve commented on, and what Facebook says my interests are. IT IS CRAZY. So, I don’t understand why everyone is so baffled by newspapers’ shrinking numbers.

I know The Village Voice isn’t a gay paper, necessarily, but it’s easy to pick on and I see these mistakes repeated throughout the gay press. And, for that matter, every other press.

So anyway, publishers: with all that money you’re saving by firing reporters, maybe you could give some thought to hiring a few techies. It’ll be just like the old days, when you had to hire someone to run your printing press. Remember?

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Video: Where Your News Comes From

Matt — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:47:44 +0000

Here’s a video that I made today of my process for sifting RSS feeds to find news stories. This is about 20 minutes of work, time-lapsed down to 1 minute. I start the day with a few thousand items to read, and I very quickly pour through them, looking for trends or controversies or new developments in high-profile stories. I copy down the URL of anything good that I find, and then over time start to pair together those URLs to synthesize a unique news article. It usually takes about an hour to gather up ten to twenty good stories.

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Fourteen Things Bloggers and Broadcasters Have to Learn from Each Other

Matt — Sun, 02 May 2010 17:29:06 +0000

This is a presentation I’m giving May 2 at the RemakeCamp Unconference at the University of San Francisco. I’m posting it here so it’s available online — but sadly this version doesn’t include any of the glorious Keynote animation or the melodious sound of my voice, so you’ll just have to imagine.

The gist of the presentation is that news is more interesting now than ever before — largely because of those same technological changes that make it harder to pay for — and the only way to create value now is to combine the tricks of classic-journalism with the platform rules of new-journalism.

Whittling this down to five minutes was not easy.

Fourteen Things Bloggers and Broadcasters can Learn from Each Other

View more documents from Matt Baume.

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Why CBS5′s Brittney Gilbert Loves the Newsroom

Matt — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:08:29 +0000

Photo by Julie of i live here:SF

“It has a lot of energy,” said CBS5′s Brittney Gilbert of the TV station’s newsroom as we sat down to lunch at Sai’s Vietnamese Restaurant, just down the street from the office. She added, “but it’s also really loud in there.”

Brittney’s one of those lucky few bloggers on the inside who gets to work in the thick of the hustle and bustle of news-gathering. Though she’s pajama-blogged from home with her own personal just-for-fun writing, her work with CBS is all pro.

Getting Access

I think most bloggers would be willing to sacrifice a little peace and quiet for the access granted by working in a major newsroom. Any online writer who’s ever gotten a brush-off from a publicist or government official can appreciate the doors that open when you say the magic words “mass market.”

“CBS’s name helps get access,” she said, mentioning a recent story her station recently did about Foursquare (in which reporter Mike Sugerman uses the word “cyberspace”). The story features appearances by Gavin Newsom, a social media expert with funny glasses and various local merchants — what blogger would have time or access to cram all those things into a five-minute post?

But is it News?

Of course, that access can breed complacency. If the Sugermonster really wanted to DO SOME NEWS, he could have mentioned Please Rob Me, a site that I personally feel is kind of dumb but has at least gotten people talking about the dark underbelly of location-based checkins.

Not to mention — Foursquare? Really? That’s news? I mean okay, sure, lots of people don’t know about it and would be interested, so I guess that’s the definition of what “news” is. But when the thesis of your piece is “here is something that exists,” well, heck, why not just ask your 15-year-old cousin what’s popular with the kids these days?

Aaaaaaanyway. Back to Brittney, whose news-gathering chops led me to compare her to Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.” (Which she confessed to never having seen! Put it on your instant queue RIGHT THIS SECOND.)

The fun of being in a TV newsroom, she explained, is seeing the sprint of breaking news. It’s a different atmosphere than what you’d find in print: “You’re not going to have breaking news at a paper, unless it’s on the web,” she said. And even then you might not!

Money Talks

I also asked her what she thought of Spot.us and NewsTilt, two new sites for journalists who are looking to ply their writing. On Spot.us, you pitch the story and then write it once donors provide funding; on NewsTilt, you get paid (if you’re lucky) after the story is written. Though she hasn’t used either, Brittney favored NewsTilt’s model, pointing out that with Spot.us, a wealthy donor could fund the stories that match their ideology.

“Whoever has the most money gets the stories they want,” she said of the system. “Powerful interests can manipulate news. … NewsTilt seems more merit-based.”

But money manipulating news isn’t anything new — just look at how many stories about cars are served up by news outlets funded primarily by automotive companies.

Keeping advertising and editorial in separate rooms is battle that’s been fought for decades — and it’s just the sort of fight that veterans know more about than the up-and-comers, which is why it’s a mistake to dismiss legacy journalists simply because they’re not on Twitter.

Smack dab in the middle of good-old-fashioned pavement-pounding and police scanners and choppers, applying lessons shared by news-veterans to the shiny new landscape of today — It’s exactly where any journalist would want to be. “I love it here,” Brittney said.

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When should writers take their words offline?

Matt — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 17:29:41 +0000

A startling success story: CaliforniaWatch attracted readers to their exposé on seismically unsound UC Berkeley buildings by distributing fliers. On paper. To humans. In meatspace!

It’s a strategy so obvious (to anyone who lived pre-Internet) I’m surprised we don’t see it more often. Yes, of course, when you’re writing about an issue of local interest, you can connect directly to local people! That’s something that internet-marketing simply can’t do.

Of course, similar tactics have been tried: I’m thinking of The Daily Blog, an absolutely ridiculous project that combined the worst of newspapers with the worst of blogs to produce — believe it or not — a regular mass-distributed physical printout of a few webpages. It lasted for about as long as it takes for an electron to orbit a nucleus.

But that’s a case where physical presence simply doesn’t make sense. A person can occupy a geographic area like the UC Berkeley campus, so giving them physical media in that location and about that location is logical. But The Daily Blog was about a whole city as a gateway to the whole internet!

So, what’s the moral of all this?

There’s a lot of talk about hyperlocal online news these days. I like that. But as long as we’re being hyperlocal, it’s important that we don’t miss out on those unique opportunities for offline connections.

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When is Taking an eBook Stealing?

Matt — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:31:28 +0000

The NY Times ethicist advises a reader that downloading an illegal, pirated version of a book is not unethical as long as you’ve paid for the physical version.

People who like reading books are delighted! People who like getting paid for books are pissed!

I have a feeling I’m coming down on the side of the book-seller on this one — in other words, I don’t think I can agree with The Ethicist. Yeah, it’s super-inconvenient that the publisher decided not to sell an electronic version of their book. But it’s their book, after all; and if they want to be annoying about it, well, again, it’s their book. Just because you want something doesn’t mean you can feel good about taking it.

That having been said, I don’t think it’s that unethical. One download — of a product that wasn’t being sold online — is a drop in the bucket of piracy. (Uploading it for thousands of people to take, on the other hand, I would consider to be far worse.)

A single download is only a little bit different from borrowing a stranger’s copy rather than buying your own. If it was me, I’d have gone for the download, illegally and unethically. And rather than trying to rationalize it and talk myself into not being a bad person, I’d just have been satisfied to choose an unethical act over senseless self-deprivation.

How about you?

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