OJR

Newspaper columnists ought to be the perfect bloggers. So why aren't more doing it well?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:41:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Newspaper columnists ought to be the perfect bloggers - the best write in a lively voice and forge a strong connection with their readers. Their work build an ongoing conversation with the communities they cover. Frankly, they've been blogging (in print) since long before anyone other than academics and soldiers went online.

So why aren't more making a successful transition to online publishing? Why are so many columnists living under the same fear and uncertainty that's consuming their newsroom coworkers? Those are a couple of the questions that I sought to address last weekend when I spoke to the annual gathering of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

This year's conference theme was "Survive and Thrive." (Well, we've drilled down to the basics now, haven't we?) My talk was "Tips on Branding Yourself," and I was joined by Erika Stalder of ABC Family.

I told the group that your brand in the Internet era is the public's perception of its relationship with you, a sentiment that Erika concurred with, citing a similar quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room."

Anyone writing online needs to come to this understanding: That what matters most in determining your online success is how your work is understood and acted upon by its audience - more than what your intention with the work was or the process that you used to create it. You can do work you believe to be great, but if no one reads it or no one who does cares, what was the point?

We talked during the session about Twitter, Facebook, discussion forums and website comments. Several columnists expressed their frustration with the number of tools that they're now being asked to wield - and the the time that's taking away from reporting and writing.

"Why should I spend half my time updating a Twitter feed if all that's reaching is, like, 27 readers?" one columnist asked. "I've reached hundreds of thousands of readers in print. Has my audience shrunk to this?"

If you have fewer than 100 Twitter followers, you have a problem. But it's not with having too many social media tools to manage. You've not developed your audience into an online community, one that can sustain your "brand" online even if your print gig fails.

You've got to start where you are at. And the same principles that apply for print columnists apply to all online and offline writers, as well. Start by explicitly inviting your readers into an ongoing conversation - then give them multiple avenues through which to contact you. These can include a Facebook page, e-mail account, blog comments and Twitter account. Your columns should include the URLs of your blog (if your column appears elsewhere, such as in print), Facebook page and Twitter feed. (Alternate them to keep the shirttail fresh, and short.) If you haven't registered yourfirstnameyourlastname.com and made it the home of your blog, do it now.

But simply asking readers to a conversation won't be enough to engage them. You must initiate the conversation with engaging questions. Smart columnists have been doing this for years, so it shouldn't take much effort to get these flowing. Ask your readers questions about their own lives - what are they doing and seeing that affects the community around them?

I warned the audience against asking readers what they think. The Web has more then enough places for folks to vent their opinions. What you want to elicit are experiences - first-person accounts that other readers might relate with, drawing them into the conversation as well.

Another columnist asked about time management - a very valid concern for anyone writing online. Heck, I almost never watch TV anymore, and can't imagine having to give up an hour or two each day to the commute I made when I didn't work at home. I held up my iPhone and told the audience how I use it to check e-mail, read Tweets and monitor comments in every down moment I get, whether I be waiting to pick up the kids from school or in line at the grocery. True downtime is a scheduled luxury in the online publishing business.

So, I said, you've got to be writing about a passion. Find issues within all those in your community about which you are most passionate, and write about them. Solicit first-person accounts from your readers, and reward the best of them with a personal public response and follow-up questions. Soon, your audience, which craves your attention, will learn to deliver the quality and insight that you want. Only writing about a passion will elicit the energy and stamina that you will need to remain relevant in a hyper-competitive online information marketplace. And only your passion will animate your voice to level required to help your work stand ahead of others'.

Finally, don't be reticent about joining other, established online communities in order to expand your audience beyond what you've attracted via your existing newspaper or website. One audience member commented about the trouble of getting health insurance as an independent writer (one that I share). Given the current politics around that issue, I responded that a great place to write about that would be in a political community such as DailyKos. A following developed in those communities eventually can be lead to follow you on other sites and in other forums, as well.

Social media tools are just that... tools. Don't become so obsessed with learning the latest and most fashionable that you forget the job you're trying to do with those tools - to build your audience into an online community.

Once you've engaged a few readers in a meaningful conversation on a topic about which you are passionate, you'll find continuing that conversation across multiple media a engaging pleasure, not a time-sucking chore. Readers will see that, and want to jump in themselves, if only just to watch. Your success will elicit more success and your online community will grow.

That's how to brand yourself online. Share your passion, and ask your readers to share theirs with you.

A free-lance prototype: multimedia and entrepreneurial

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:10:00 MST

By David Westphal: The University of Virginia prepared Jason Motlagh very well for his career has a free-lance foreign correspondent.

When he applied to take a journalism elective course, he was rejected because he wasn't an English major. When he applied for a job as food columnist at the school paper, he was also rejected.

But Motlagh persisted, and eventually won a spot on the school paper as travel columnist. His specialty: Travel to fascinating world spots on very low budgets.

Voila. Today Motlagh has five years of free-lance foreign correspondence under his belt and, in many respects, he is the prototype for the journalist of the future: a free-lancing, multimedia correspondent who knows how to market his work and live on a tight budget.

I found Motlagh through my friend Jon Sawyer, who runs the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and who has made Motlagh, 28, one of the workhorse reporters for his up-and-coming nonprofit. Jon confirmed one of Motlagh's most attractive traits: his "doggedness."

In the last two years, Motlagh has covered for Pulitzer the massive flooding in south Asia, the Maoist Naxolite rebels of north-central India, the Nepalese Maoist groups, Sri Lanka's fight with the Tamil Tigers and, more recently, civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

But that rendition of Motlagh's recent work doesn't get at the heart of what he does or what makes it work. Here's what's telling:

He's a multimedia journalist. Motlagh doesn't just write stories. He shoots still photos. He shoots and edits video. He does audio. He blogs. He narrates slide shows. And because he does all of those things, he says, he has a huge advantage over free-lance foreign correspondents working in a single medium. Having multiple media skills is "still unusual," he said. "There aren't a whole lot of people yet who have gotten up to speed. If you are, you can make clients an offer they can't refuse."
He's an entrepreneur. This isn't a new part of a free-lancer's life, but it's becoming increasingly important as traditional clients fall by the wayside. In the last two years he lost two important outlets in the San Francisco Chronicle and U.S. News & World Report. But landing work at the Pulitzer Center, and increasing billings through his multimedia work, fills the gaps.
He lives modestly and accepts that there may be periods in his work where he'll have to do something besides journalism to pay the bills.

This question of compensation is something that bedeviled my class at the USC Annenberg School for Communication last semester. Students were thrilled with Jon Sawyer's presentation about the Pulitzer Center � some of them were ready to go abroad immediately � but were stumped about how they would live when Pulitzer essentially pays only travel stipends (usually $1,500 to $5,000).

One answer for the foreign free-lancer, Motlagh said, is that you can live abroad much more cheaply than you suspect. "I was paying less than $500 a month for a very, very nice place in Delhi," he said. "Even had a house-cleaner. You can do what I do and live well. You can buy insurance, get an apartment."

Motlagh was a few years into his free-lance career before hooking up with the Pulitzer Center. He began with a six-month stint in West Africa, came home to work for UPI for about a year, then made a decision to go abroad full time. Over the next three years he focused his work on south and central Asia, producing mostly newspaper stories and photos.

Then, about two years ago, another example of Motlagh's never-say-die trait played out. He pitched an idea to the Pulitzer Center. Then another. Both were rejected. Finally, the center said yes, and Motlagh has become one of its chief contributors.

He acknowledges that his multimedia skills are a big reason. One of Pulitzer's key partnerships has been with Foreign Exchange, the weekly public broadcasting show. Now Motlagh and other Pulitzer free-lancers were being asked to produce short video documentaries that could air on the show. He needed to learn video and shooting, on the fly.

"One of the things I'd tell students is if I can do it, the sky is the limit," he jokes. "I'm comfortable with it now. I can shoot and edit my own video."

In addition to giving him free-lance assignments and a productive nudge on the multimedia front, Pulitzer maneuvered to connect Motlagh with other possibilities: He's done a couple of IWitness webcam interviews for Frontline/World � work for which Pulitzer pays him $1,000 per interview. It also put him in touch with Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways, resulting in a 7,500-word article on the Asian ethnic insurgencies. (Another Virginia Quarterly Review piece, on the anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, is forthcoming.)

Perhaps most rewarding to Motlagh have been the campus lectures he's done for Pulitzer's schools outreach program. Pulitzer made his India work the focus of its schools program last year, and created a Web site that includes lesson plans plans and an interactive chat room. The school visits, to Ohio University, Southern Illinois University, Washington University (St. Louis) and several St. Louis high schools, produced a $500 honorarium for each trip, but also gave Motlagh an emotional charge.

"It's very satisfying," he said. "You get more mileage for the work you do; you get feedback, dialogue. You get students interested in foreign concerns."

I asked Motlagh to circle back to the questions of my students, wondering if their interest in foreign reporting can square with financial realties.

"I feel my case is evidence that this is very possible for young journalist to do," he said. "As grim as it might look, there are opportunities out there� The other thing I'd say is just go if you think this is what you want to do. Sometimes it's just being there that creates the opportunity."

At least for Motlagh, being there is what he wants to do. After a brief stateside visit, he's heading back to Afghanistan.

Michael Jackson's death and its lessons for online journalists covering breaking news

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:49:06 MST

By Robert Niles: Every major breaking news events offers its lessons to the news organizations that covered it. And today's death of singer Michael Jackson should lead newsrooms to reexamine how they handle breaking news in a hyper-competitive, instant-publishing environment.

I wrote last week about how news consumers used Twitter to express their displeasure, in real time and with a critical social mass, with CNN over the news network's coverage of the developing election protests in Iran. Yesterday, Twitter again became the forum for a global event, as millions gathered on the microblogging site to share rumors about, then to confirm, then to mourn Jackson's death.

AOL's celebrity gossip site TMZ appeared to have been the first to report the singer's death. Other news organizations, appropriately, waited to confirm Jackson's passing themselves before reporting the news.

But thousands of Twitter users did not wait for additional confirmation before retweeting TMZ's report, or sending out their own tweets about Jackson's death. Even after the Los Angeles Times confirmed the passing, other news organizations held back before publishing the news to their Twitter feeds and e-mail alert lists.

Digital journalism leader Steve Buttry nailed the problem, appropriately enough, on his Twitter feed:

Should Washington Post and NY Times rebrand their news alerts as news "reminders"

This, after previous tweets:

Half hour or so after Twitter told me Michael Jackson died, Washington Post email alert caught up. Still waiting for NY Times "alert."

@semayer & @conniecoyne The surprise isn't that Twitter or TMZ are first, but the time lag between them and WaPo & NY Times "alerts."

News organizations do not need to fall in line behind sources such as TMZ when a report like Jackson's death breaks. The Twitterverse's been wrong about alleged celebrity deaths before. But in this situation, smart news organizations should acknowledge to their followers and readers that they know the report is out there and that people are talking about it, and report where the organization is with its own reporting.

How hard would it be to tweet: "TMZ reports Jackson has died. We cannot confirm. Working on details"? Or "No confirmation on rumors about Jackson's death. We're in contact with authorities"?

The trouble is, of course, that it's hard for the person making the calls to confirm the story to take time to tweet it. Or to update the website. Not to mention the site's discussion forums, e-mail lists or Facebook page.

Which brings me to my first lesson from Jackson's death:

In a breaking news situation, assign some to report and some to publish. But don't ask anyone to do both.

Perhaps a few hyper-efficient bloggers can work the phones, monitor the Twitterverse, update social networks and write for the website... all at the same time. But newsrooms with multiple staffers on hand at any given moment shouldn't have to rely on a single person to step up and assume the role of multimedia superstar. Large staffs (even diminished ones) remain traditional newsroom's competitive advantage during breaking news. Why waste it?

Editors should divvy assignments, putting one staffer in charge of monitoring and updating Twitter, another to handle forums and Facebook, and others to work the phones or scene to report. The team must communicate clearly and continuously so that information flows swiftly and the paper's readers and followers remain as up-to-date as anyone in the newsroom.

Yes, this means acknowledging rumor. But, as Twitter showed today, traditional newsroom silence on rumors don't make them go away. Engaging with the audience in these confusing moments helps establish to your readers that your news organization is plugged in, responsive and working for them. No, you shouldn't be reporting unconfirmed reports as fact. (And I haven't suggested that anyone should.) But the worst thing you can offer you readers on Twitter is silence. Report on your reporting, if that's all you have. Readers will appreciate the transparency.

So let's go to lesson number two, and something that readers will not appreciate:

It's time to drop e-mail as a breaking news medium

E-mail remains a great way to communicate with readers who prefer that medium. Many readers love to get regular updates on what is available on a website, so that they can keep in touch no matter whether they're able to check the site on their own or not. And e-mail's also an excellent choice to let readers know about enterprise stories or other exclusives that the news organization is breaking.

But doing as Buttry described, and sending a "breaking news alert" hours after everyone from Helsinki to Honolulu has been tweeting the news just embarrasses the news organization. There's no better way to reinforce the message, "Hi, just to remind you: We're clueless and slow!"

Better not to send the e-mail at all. Twitter's become the go-to medium for breaking news. It's past time to retire the e-mail "breaking news" list for these kinds of minute-by-minute events. Leave e-mail as a follow-up to expose readers to truly unique reports and perspective, once you have them reported and available.

Growing pains, part 2: Can grassroots journalism help underserved communities?

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:29:00 MST

By Emily Henry: Part one - Life after death: newspapers and the re-invention of paper technology

While the newspaper industry struggles to find new definition in an Internet age, the population most at risk of being left behind is low-income communities. Local newspapers are suffering significant losses in the industry, and yet the medium is still heavily relied upon as a source of information for poorer areas where Internet access is minimal. Many of these communities are already under-served by the media, and as their newspapers disappear, the void is likely to widen. Eventually, these communities may benefit greatly from the communication tools the Internet and mobile news delivery will provide. But during this period of turbulence the digital divide could impede progress. In affected areas, the wealthy will be gaining a medium while the poor are losing one. Meanwhile, in areas with more universalized Internet access, impoverished communities will be given access to news on a scale never before extended by traditional media.

Community Journalism and Hyper-Local Markets

Communities in South Los Angeles have long been starved of media attention. Since the collapse of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1989, the newspaper industry in Los Angeles has been dominated by a single, powerful newspaper. The Los Angeles Times overshadows local newspapers such as the Los Angeles Wave and the Los Angeles Daily News, creating a monopoly on news coverage that favors broader stories over community-sensitive pieces. Stories from South Los Angeles are rare, and the Los Angeles Times has been criticized for limiting its coverage of the area to tragic or violent breaking news stories.

"The LA Times covers breaking news that they deem worth covering," said Don Wanlass, news editor for the Los Angeles Wave, one of three newspapers based in South Los Angeles that makes an effort to cover news significant to residents in cities like Compton, Watts and Inglewood. "There's a lot of sentiment out there that the Times only reports bad news, like political corruption scandals and shootings. They don't go into the small communities and get some of the stories that are there to be had."

In the mid-1990s, the Times established suburban sections, including the City Times section, as a response to the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was partially due to the consistent lack of South L.A. coverage by the mainstream mass media that the riots were provoked, according to Henry Watson, a South L.A. resident and one of the "LA Four" responsible for beating a white truck driver almost to death on April 29, 1992. "April 29th allowed the world to come into South Central for the first time and take a look around and see," said Watson.

The Los Angeles Times responded by attempting to bridge the information divide between L.A.'s diverse communities and extend conversation across cultural barriers. Since then, not only has the Times folded its suburban city sections, but it has also shut down its California section, folding its remaining local news into the "A" section of the paper. Watson says that lessened local coverage in the mainstream media inevitably breeds more tension in South Los Angeles. "The media only want to show the negative," said Watson. "But they need to come here and see the positive." It would not be inconceivable, he warned, for a repetition of the 1992 riots to emerge if South L.A. continues to be consistently ignored. Another resident, Tony Falley, says that the lack of balanced media attention has left the area to physically stagnate. "Our environment needs to be built up," said Falley. "As far as Florence and Normandie, where the riots happened, we don't have anything but the same stuff: a gas station and a liquor store."

In some South L.A. cities, the Los Angeles Wave and other small community newspapers have attempted to fill the coverage gap, but declining circulation is threatening to destroy these smaller institutions faster than their national counterparts. "We try to cover the community the best way we can with the man power we have," said Wanlass. "We have 21 cities and two reporters."

Ironically, it is not for lack of reader interest that smaller newspapers are struggling. Although every traditional, offline news medium is suffering losses, a recent study of media consumption shows that local newspapers are more valuable to the public than national newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the public are still consuming local newspapers compared to 18 percent reading national dailies, according to the global public relations firm Ketchum. This makes local newspapers the second most valuable of the traditional journalistic mediums behind major network television, while national newspapers lag behind in 8th place. Local newspaper readership also reaches a wider age breadth, with 34 percent of people under the age of 24 reading community newspapers compared to 11 percent of the youth population reading national dailies. The disparity is dramatic in every age range, but perhaps the most extreme statistics are for the age range with the highest consumptive rate of national newspapers. A total of 26 percent of men and women between the age of 55 and 64 are dedicated to national newspapers, while 81 percent are reading local dailies.

In possession of a seemingly dependent readership, community newspapers have lost circulation at a slower pace than has, for example, the Los Angeles Times. The Daily Breeze, which serves South Bay Los Angeles, saw a 4 percent drop from September 2007 to September 2008, while the Los Angeles Times suffered a 5 percent cut in circulation. Another community newspaper, the Glendale News Press, saw a 3 percent decline, and the rural Antelope Valley Press, maintained its readership without loss.

But one of the major concerns for newspapers serving poorer communities, like the Los Angeles Wave, is the slow pace at which they are migrating into the virtual realm. Their online resources are minimal when compared to newspaper companies that serve more affluent parts of Los Angeles, and their readership still relies heavily on the print version of the newspaper. In South Los Angeles, in the urban, low-income areas that newspapers like the Los Angeles Wave serve, more than half of the residents do not have access to the Internet.

And yet, the Internet is the perfect medium for under-served communities craving attention. Already, local groups are finding ways to fill the historical media gap in their cities from the ground upward. "There are all kinds of blogs springing up in small cities," said Wanless. "It's becoming more and more a trend and way for people to keep up with what their city government is doing." Blogs such as Lynwood Watch, which aggregates news from the city of Lynwood, have encouraged a new level of dialogue to emerge between residents. "It steers people to news they might not normally know is out there and encourages commentary," Wanlass explained.

As a communication tool, the Internet has the potential to unite and integrate isolated communities with wider society and bypass some of the barriers traditional news organizations encounter, such as language. In Los Angeles, diverse cultures are alienated from the traditional media. "There's a language barrier," said Wanlass. "There are a lot of recent immigrants from Mexico and South America." Not only are many of these immigrant communities cut off from media streams but, according to Wanlass, their isolation makes them more vulnerable to inaccurate or unreliable information. "They don't speak English and they fear government intrusion," said Wanlass. "They're also willing to believe anything anybody tells them, and sometimes the rumors on the street aren't always accurate."

Being able to interact easily with one another in their own language could benefit these under-served communities greatly. In Lynwood, for example, the main form of communication is ground mail, and with so few reporters covering the area, lobbyists and politicians have seized the opportunity to exploit the lack of public awareness. In 2006, when the city government was contemplating a deal with a redevelopment agency to uproot thousands of families and build a football stadium, real estate agencies began mailing the community offering potential buy-out deals. According to one resident, some families sold their homes for fear of being evicted when the redevelopment agency took over. However, the deal with the agency was never completed. Instead, government officials were indicted for misappropriating public funds and the incomplete contract for development was overruled. Yet, a year after the indictment proceedings, Lynwood residents were still living in fear. The informational void had not only left the community "out of the loop," but was seriously threatening their way of life. Families were contemplating selling their homes, and some already had, for lack of up-to-date news. Up to a year after the contract had been overthrown and the threat of a football stadium abolished, real estate agencies continued to play on public ignorance and scare them into quick sales.

The same thing happened during local government elections in 2007. Accurate information about the candidates was virtually non-existent, and instead, political action committees inundated the community with mudslinging campaign fliers. One candidate was accused of being a drug dealer. Another was accused of tax evasion and harboring illegal immigrants. Whether the accusations had basis in truth, it didn't matter. Without a viable "watchdog" presence in the city, the uninhibited PACs could publish anything they wanted. Coupled with a lack of information from any other sources, these materials became the sole influencers in the campaign for much of the community. Unshakable rumors became ingrained in the public mindset, and still form much of the basis for opinion today.

Eventually, blogs may become a platform for under-served communities to create much-needed public dialogue, but until then, local newspapers remain the most important source of information for lower-income communities. Almost 50 percent of people with incomes lower than $25,000 rely on local newspapers as their main source of news, according to research by the Norman Lear Center at USC. Right now, Lynwood Watch is simply a news aggregation site, using newspapers like the Wave to provide content for users to comment on. Although it has been successful in encouraging more interaction between residents and local news topics, the site does not produce original content and much of the commentary is driven by rumors and bickering. The site is also controlled by a completely anonymous source. "The problem is that nobody knows who's behind it," said Wanlass. "You don't know where they're coming from or what their biases are."

Grassroots Journalism

According to the blog search engine Technorati, a new blog is created every two seconds, bringing the running total in 2009 to more than 200 million individual blogs. One million blog posts are published across the world every day, and as the world of online publishing continues to flourish in accessibility and mass, a new species of journalist has emerged with it. The "citizen journalist," belongs to no formal media outlet, has usually had little or no journalism training, but reports on the world he knows and self publishes his findings. Many mainstream media outlets have embraced this new journalistic democracy as a means of increasing the breadth of information. By syndicating reporting done by the general public, traditional media have access to a seemingly infinite store of content. Breaking news can be more fully reported immediately, thanks to photographs, video and information provided by "citizen journalists."

"I think it's marvellous," said Geneva Overholser, director the journalism school at the University of Southern California. "The free press is a medium of democracy and involving people is terribly important. I like to believe in a collaborative, participatory process that will enrich the news report wherever you find it."

Opinions vary as to the rights and qualifications of Citizen Journalists. Some, like Overholser, believe that the term "journalism" automatically assumes a certain set of ethics and practices. "What's the point of calling someone a journalist unless they're attempting to be reliable in their gathering of facts, attempting to present a picture as close to the truth as they can, and attempting to be transparent about their newsgathering, as well as making themselves accountable?" asked Overholser. But others say that any form of journalism, whether adhering to the formalized standards of most professional journalism or not, is better than nothing at all. "It's just good that people are willing to participate in journalism and are interested in finding information," said Marc Cooper, associate director of USC's Institute for Justice and Journalism and former editor of The Huffington Post. "The more voices there are, the less oppression there will be."

Catch-all websites, targeted at a more generalized audience in a way that emulates traditional mass media, will not replace disappearing newspapers. Instead, the future of community journalism lies with the citizens themselves. The "mass" in mass media is quickly vanishing and being replaced with niche markets and hyper-local news services. Newspapers hoping to migrate online will need to become hybrids of their former selves, involving the community they serve by opening up the news process with citizen journalists and becoming forums for public discourse. "Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community, says Robert Legrand, contributor to the PBS and Knight Foundation-sponsored ideas lab, Media Shift. Community news coverage is fast becoming a two-way street, an intersection between those who tell the stories and those who live them.

Life after death: newspapers and the re-invention of paper technology

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:30:00 MST

By Emily Henry: The threat underlying the transition to a paperless, Internet world is, in itself, ironic. Firstly, the illusive space of the online sphere is being filled with a cacophony of "voices," many of which are echoing the content produced by the traditional media. The Internet speaks in a language of reaction; meanwhile, the some of the catalysts themselves are being destroyed. Journalists are worried about the future of the profession, and the media industry is fearful of its own demise. Secondly, while information is exponentially increasing online, the first areas of journalism suffering the threat of extinction are among the very forms that attempt to make sense of extensive information. While sites like Twitter ask users to define their world in 140 characters or less, and speed � above accuracy or content � is the competitive force fueling online news outlets, some contextual, interpretive and analytical modes of journalism are fading away.

Investigative and literary journalism are among the forms in danger. Both rely on deep-dive reporting methods: the former usually tackling political and economic institutions and the latter focusing on sociological trends. As such, these long-form species fall into the category of "deeper understanding" and are a means of information management � a way to navigate � according to Barry Siegel, former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and head of the literary journalism program the University of California, Irvine. "I'd describe it as a form of subterranean news," said Siegel. "We're writing about human nature, the nature of our community, and about the things that are most important in those communities, which are not always the obvious breaking news headlines." Literary journalism, which Tom Wolfe described as journalism that reads "like a novel," concentrates on context above immediacy, and as a result, requires more time and resources than hard news. Siegel says that he spends four months to a year on his own pieces.

In a world of infinite information, it would seem that providing context is more relevant than ever. Investigative journalism, the detective agency of the people, has acted as a "watchdog" presence, independent of government and big business, since its inception. Literary journalism, often bundled with terms like "long form" and "feature," has meant sociological understanding and on-the-ground experience of the human condition in all its varying colors.

Tightened revenue streams have encouraged quick fixes, such as re-assigning long-form journalists to cover "short-form" news and reducing funds for contextual reporting. But for the newspaper industry, this could be a counterproductive move. The entire experience of narrative story telling is changing, according to Sue Cross, an AP news executive who oversees the wire service's digital operation. Video and audio are feeding the experience of long-form journalism online, and instead of attempting to emulate the speed of the Internet, the newspaper industry should be embracing the change and using technology to enhance deep-dive reporting. By cutting immersive journalism in favor of less expensive, superficial forms, the newspaper industry risks losing everything that has made it a valuable medium for 300 years.

Subterranean News

Newspaper companies are in consensus about the solution to all their problems: they must shed the cellulose pulp and find a way to make content work online. But perhaps forms like investigative and literary journalism, which both have roots in print technology, are more attached to their traditional medium than innovators would like to accept. At a very basic level, the connection between these journalistic forms and the technology from which they arose has been overlooked.

What both investigative and literary journalism have in common, beyond their immersive reporting practices, is the attention they require of their audience. Even more than investigative journalism, literary pieces ask for a level of dedication from the reader that the Internet as a medium does not seem to facilitate. "Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice," Nicholas Carr examined in his July 2008 Atlantic article Is Google Making us Stupid? "But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking." This new style of reading is one based on productivity, gleaning as much information as effectively as possible. For Siegel, this newly formed habit poses a threat to journalism that requires more concentrated attention. "The bigger problem is that people in this instant age might be losing the ability and inclination for the kind of sustained, focused effort that long-form reading requires," said Siegel.

The traditional print newspaper, as a medium, is especially at odds with this new style of information consumption. Compared to the multiplicity of the Internet, the technology of paper is a highly inefficient medium. Content is limited, and readers are trapped within the confines of the pages themselves, rather than being able to browse through various links and sources. The efficiency and expedience provided by the Internet are qualities well-suited to a medium of mass communication. Accessibility and expansiveness succeed in attracting the broadest audience. But in many respects, paper still serves as the best medium for "subterranean news."

According to a study of online reading habits in the U.K. by University College London (UCL), Internet users do not read online the same way they do with print media. "There are signs that new forms of �reading' are emerging as users �power browse' horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts looking for quick wins," the study surmised, adding: "it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense." This form of "horizontal information seeking," as UCL labels it, is indicative of a medium that lends itself to quick and shallow information consumption. For journalistic forms that require patience, concentration and time, it would seem that the Internet is not as adequate a medium as print. By reading predominantly online, we "may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace," writes Carr, referring to the conclusions deduced by Tufts University psychologist Maryanne Wolf. "When we read online, [Wolf] says, we tend to become �mere decoders of information.' Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged."

While newspapers desperately struggle to compete with the Internet and breed their own online forms, the difference between the two mediums is being underplayed. The "horizontal" reading habits inspired by the Internet, coupled with the sheer volume of information available online, could potentially increase the need for printed, "subterranean" news. Long-form investigative and literary journalism, journalism that exists to "make sense of the world" on a deeper level, may be the answer to balancing the unmanageable amount of information unlocked by the Internet. And navigating information, learning context and studying deeper implications requires a level of reading concentration that only the print medium seems able to inspire. So while the newspaper industry attempts to shed its long-form content and emulate the Internet, the fact that sales of non-fiction books have been continually increasing seems to have gone unnoticed.

Traditional mediums are not being eliminated, but updated. Journalistic forms that appear to be disappearing, may just be trying to find a new comfort zone in a broadening landscape. In order for the print medium to do this successfully, it must embrace the qualities that make it unique, not similar, to other mediums. Paper is, after all, a technology. And after 300 years, competing mediums may be calling for a re-invention, rather than elimination, of the form.

A New Model

There is no telling what Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern will look like when it arrives in the mailbox or at the local book store. It could be a palm-sized journal made from ominous, grainy material with fold-out parts, complete with lock and key, or an epic piece of art with Asian patterns illuminating the broad jacket, a magnetic strip concealing dozens of tiny manuscripts. The quarterly literary journal, started in 1998 by author Dave Eggers, prides itself on utilizing the medium of paper in the most creative ways possible.

"I've always thought that if something is going to be on paper, if it's going to be a physical object, it has to earn that existence and at least take into account the features and specifics of that existence," said publisher Eli Horowitz. "But it's not just preciousness; it's also about taking advantage of things that you can do with paper. There are still things that you can do in a book that you can't do on a computer screen."

Rather than hastening the extinction of printed newspapers by moving attention away from the physical product to the online counterpart, Horowitz suggests that embracing the uniqueness of the paper form may serve to revive the industry. The future of print journalism is more likely to follow a philosophy closer to McSweeney's than The Los Angeles Times. The literary journal survives solely on subscriptions and maintains a loyal readership, according to Horowitz. McSweeney's also serves as a publishing house, selling books from affiliate authors through its website. Despite the competitive force of modern technology, such e-books and e-readers like the Kindle, the company continues to focus on producing high-quality, printed material. "We're still trying to do things that the Kindle can't give you," said Horowitz. "Large things or folding things or cut-out things, things with textures� We're always thinking: what are we making? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities?"

Creative printing options are spawning. One of the most exciting is the development of CreateSpace.com, which has the potential to turn the newspaper industry into a specification-based medium, like the Internet, without ceding its distinctive form. Currently, this on-demand printing service allows users to create their own books, free of charge. Every copy ordered through the website or through Amazon.com is printed on-demand and shipped to the consumer. The author earns 60 to 80 percent of the royalties for each sale, depending on whether the sale comes directly through CreateSpace.com or through Amazon.com.

What businesses like CreateSpace.com suggest is that on-demand printing is a very tangible possibility for the future of print journalism. For example, a new model for the newspaper industry could include customized printing, which would allow readers to pre-order the sections of the newspaper they would like to receive, the types of articles they wish to read and even the frequency of the printed edition's delivery, minimizing waste and maximizing niche markets. Taking the specifications even further, users could choose their content by author, thus selecting to donate royalties specifically to the content-provider rather than the publication. Journalists would then, in themselves, become commodities. Even advertising could become more effective in this environment. The traditional model of print advertising, preferred by many advertising agencies, could still apply to this customized publication, but readers would be receiving news in a similar manner to which they seek it on the Internet: by interest and not obligation. Advertisers, too, could target a much more specific audience based on the selections made by the user. The process could potentially fuse the best of both print and Internet technologies: the ability for customization and the delivery of content through a traditional medium.

In honor of the possibilities for the print journalism industry, the next issue of McSweeney's, Eggers announced, will be in newspaper form. "The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive," wrote Eggers in an public email to anyone who needs "bucking up" about the industry. The future of newspapers, Eggers says, begins with "creating a physical object that doesn't retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print." The result will be a medium that not only allows space for the forms intrinsic to its centuries-long dominance, but that embraces a traditional economic model: using quality, not quantity, to encourage sales. "To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web," said Eggers. "Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they'll pay for it."

View this article on A Day Like This.

Coming Wednesday: Growing pains, part 2: Can grassroots journalism help underserved communities?

Lessons for online journalists from #CNNFail and the Iran uprising

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:54:46 MST

By Robert Niles: As Iranians took to the streets over the weekend to protest the country's recent election, thousands of users of Twitter were staging a protest of their own: against CNN for not devoting as much attention to the Iranian situation as Twitter users wanted.

The hashtag #CNNFail became one of the top trending topics on Twitter Saturday night, as Twitterers expressed their outrage over CNN airing repeats of feature interviews instead of live coverage of the protests.

On Saturday, I retweeted this comment from @pinoy2com: "#CNNfail is 4th most Tweeted keyword. A turning point for audiences signaling what they wanted covered by mainstream?"

Indeed. The virtual protest provided several valuable lessons for online journalists who wish to retain the respect and loyalty of their audiences in an increasingly interactive world. Here are 10 lessons from #CNNFail:

1) People still want news

Let's not forget amid the culture of failure that's consuming our industry that people still crave news about their community, and their world. They care. Don't buy into the stereotype of modern individuals living in their own high-tech media cocoons.

That said, just because something runs in a newspaper or on a news website doesn't make it newsworthy to the public. People are turning away from print editions and evening news broadcasts because they have more choices and because the information offered by traditional news outlets too often doesn't measure up in information quality. Don't mistake a public rejection of lazy reporting by over-stretched newsrooms that didn't hire enough reporters with expertise in their fields as a rejection of the news. It is merely a rejection of cheap journalism conventionally packaged as news.

2) People want international news

Community news may be the foundation of traditional news reporting, but with the Internet linking like-minded people from around the globe, and immigration bringing people from many lands into readers' hometowns, the geography of "community" is expanding for many readers. As immigration and the Internet introduces us to people from around the world, readers are more likely to feel a personal connection with news from those communities.

Again, don't buy into a stereotype that people, especially Americans, don't care about the world beyond their nations' borders. They do... when there is real news to be told. (See point 1.)

3) People will get upset when they don't find news where they expect it

On one level, #CNNFail speaks to the esteem with which many viewers held the news network. They expected CNN to cover this story, as it developed.

They didn't expect that from Fox News, a propaganda arm of the Republican party's right-wing with no track record of providing accurate and credible original reporting. Nor did they expect it, as much, from MSNBC, which is more widely known for its U.S. domestic political commentary (in the mornings from the right and the evenings from the left) than for international reporting.

CNN has delivered sharp international reporting in the past, and people expected the network to deliver it again. Once you've established a reputation for high quality, you have a responsibility to continue living up to that or else have your once-loyal consumers turn on you.

4) People will go wherever they need to get news

With CNN delivering reruns and feature interviews during the first night of the protests, people turned to what sources did deliver the news they wanted. And that turned out to be... each other, enabled by social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook. By using retweets and hashtags, the public became a virtual distribution networks for what information did trickle from Tehran that evening, either from amateur sources on the ground, or traditional news outlets such as the BBC that were feeding substantial coverage to the Web.

The challenge for news organizations, or even for solo publishers online, is to be able to provide that news channel when the public wants it, in a forum where people can find it. Fortunately, for cash-strapped newsrooms, we have lesson 5...

5) People want to participate in the news

People don't just want news, they want to engage with it. This lesson should be obvious to any writer: Our craft is saturated with advice about "engaging" readers and "drawing them in" to a narrative. The best news doesn't leave the reader as a passive observer, but brings him or her into the story, so that he or she can relate to it.

The Internet allows journalists to bring reader participation to an explicit level. The lure of Twitter lies in its invitation to the reader to become an actor in its narratives, to use their own status updates, retweets and replies to become one of the story-tellers, rather than remain a passive consumer.

Not everyone engages this option. But the fact that it is there, and one can see others engaging it, empowers even those who never tweet themselves.

So why not take advantage of this, to cover for your news organization's lack of resources?

6) If you can't afford to cover the world 24/7, empower your viewers and readers to help cover it for you

Yes, the devil's in the details here in decided how such a system might be implemented, but too many news organizations today aren't yet ready to even consider the idea of empowering readers to determine coverage. Let #CNNFail teach them the hazards of failing to do that. Yes, in an ideal newsroom, a robust network of foreign bureaus would stand ready to cover the news whenever it happens, and even small local papers would staff 24/7, but let's face it, too few news organizations have that anymore.

I'm not suggesting that you merely turn over a section of your homepage to reader tweets. Or simply employ a Digg-like voting system to allow readers to move content toward the top of the page. Potential for spam and abuse is strong, and if there's a lesson we've tried over the years to drive home to you on OJR, it's that journalists need to cultivate communities before they should expect any meaningful content to spring from them.

So, let's move to lesson 7.

7) Create and test a system for reader submissions and page editing before a crisis happens

A newsroom's own employees must be the initial members of its online community. Empower them to post to the site directly, and to vote up others' posts. Then extend that power to thoughtful commenters and other site visitors as you scale this feature to the point where it can be open to all readers, with the community policing itself.

Find how people try to abuse the system, then adapt the environment to withstand that. It takes time and programming skill - don't pretend it won't, and don't shy away from paying for that. But the power you unleash with a well-designed and carefully cultivated reader community is the power to prevent #CNNFail and to provide the forum that readers want during important news events, no matter when or where they happen.

That brings me to two lessons not directly related to #CNNFail, but very much following the uprising:

8) Plan for rerouting news to the public should a medium fail or be blocked

If you want to be a force in your community, whether that be a single town or the entire world, you must be able to deliver your content. You'll lose your audience if a government can block your website, or a lightning strike can take our your server.

The beauty of the Internet was its design as a distributed network, one that could route around any single point (or multiple points) of failure. Proxy hosting can help for large sites, but take this opportunity to rethink your approach to services like Facebook and Twitter, as well. These shouldn't be afterthoughts in a promotional strategy. They can provide alternative distribution networks at times when circumstances force your news off the Web.

9) Plan for rerouting info from the public, as well

Information flows both ways now, especially so once you've engaged a reader community to start providing substantial content. In the weeks to come, I expect to see detailed analyses of how Iranians were able (or not) to overcome government efforts to block the flow of information within and out of the country. Someone in your organization should be geek enough to find and understand them, because these will be the additional lessons you must learn.

Another message I retweeted on Saturday, from @TeteSagehen: "Iranian regime tries to shut down Twitter, but API structure allows for endless workarounds by clever ppl. APIs = Freedom"

10) Close the loop by reporting on your efforts

You don't need to do this on your own. Readers can, and will, help news organizations when those readers feel that their thoughtful input is welcomed, and respected. Tell them that you're hearing the lessons from #CNNFail and want to learn from them. Report upon your progress in this process to involve your readership and create a distributed 24/7 news source that can't be lost or blocked, by ill will or by Mother Nature.

There are great stories, and great resources, in any community. Let's take #CNNFail as a reminder that we need to find them, and embrace them, before circumstances give our once-loyal readers and viewers another excuse to turn away.

How can we better teach journalism students to manage reader-driven content communities?

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 09:36:00 MST

By Robert Niles: When I was teaching online journalism, the most difficult aspect of the craft for me to teach was its most unique: online journalism's ability to harness the collective reporting power of its audience.

Sure, I could lecture all semester about moderating discussion forums, eliciting thoughtful reader comments, recruiting guest bloggers and structuring a crowdsourced reporting project. But instruction provides just a small part of the learning experience. Learning demands exercise, repetition and feedback, as well.

Journalism educators traditionally have done well to introduce their students to a professional working environment. Students initially turn in their work, on deadline, to an instructor who serves in the role of an editor. Later, students move into actual newsroom environments, working for student newspapers and broadcasts, under the director of more experienced students, and sometimes, faculty advisors. They practice their craft, interviewing sources, reviewing documents, working with editors and producing work for public consumption. Feedback from editors and instructors completes the loop, preparing students for professional life in a newsroom.

The academic calendar, unfortunately, frustrates efforts to extend that model to online publishing. We can publish newsroom-produced reports just as easily as we could in print and on air, but one semester (or worse, one quarter) rarely provides enough time to build an audience large enough to create a significant amount of user-generated content [UGC].

So we cheat, and ask our students to "be the audience" for our online UGC work. Or we ask them to recruit their friends. While better than nothing, I've found a fatal flaw in this approach - the students too often talk offline with their classmates and friends about these projects, leaving the "UGC" to be little more than online recreations of this offline communication.

Online journalism educators shortchange their students when they fail to provide realistic practice in creating and managing online communities. We've got to find a way for students to engage with an audience that they will not meet with, nor communicate with, offline.

How can we do that, in the limited time of a single academic term?

If we can't turn to students on our own campus, then the next option ought to be... students on other campuses.

Here's my pitch to the online journalism educators among us: Hook up with instructors at two other schools and team-teach your classes together. This way, each class will have a larger pool of student participants to draw from when eliciting and managing "user" generated content. And with the majority of available participants from other campuses, the bulk of the communication among participants really will be online.

This wouldn't be necessary for all online classes. I can imagine several courses, from basic online production skills to developing online news databases and applications, that would not need a strong UGC component, and therefore, would not need the distance learning elements I'm describing today.

But effective management of UGC is one of the distinguishing characteristics of many successful online publishing efforts, and must be part of any comprehensive online journalism curriculum.

Here are my goals for "Introduction to User Generated Content Management:"

Students should have a basic understanding of the scope and history of user participation in news media before the Internet.
Students should be able to describe, compare and contrast the various forms of online UGC, including blogs, discussion forums, commenting, polling, wikis and crowdsourcing.
Students should demonstrate the ability to question an online audience in ways that will elicit responses revealing the audience's collective areas of experience and knowledge.
Students should be able to determine how that audience knowledge can best be applied to the reporting of relevant news stories.
Students should create an online community environment that encourages reader participation in the reporting of the news. This requires the selection of the most appropriate form or forms of UGC, installation and maintenance of those publishing tools and the development of rules of engagement for the community.
Students should demonstrate how to encourage and reward useful contributions from their online communities.
Students should demonstrate how to discourage, deter and delete illegal, misleading and distracting contributions from their online communities.
Students should show how to grow an online community through the recruitment of additional, useful voices to the community.

That's quite a bit to do in a single academic term. But it can be done, if students are thrown into an online community, and shown by an instructor how their previous engagement in social media has prepared them to understand and lead a community of their own.

Let me also say that I define "news" broadly, as any nonfiction information in the public interest - not just simply the government-driven reporting work typically found on a newspaper metro desk. Much of the financial promise of online publishing lies in niches, from consumer news to lifestyle reporting to the work of the trade press.

Instructors would need to work with colleagues on the same academic calendar. Instructors at schools such as Columbia would need to work with other online journalists teaching at schools on the semester system, and folks at a place like Northwestern would need to find colleagues whose schools teach on quarters.

After taking a couple lectures to lay out the history of the UGC and some relevant examples to provide context for the course, I would work with the other instructors to set up a Ning network for the students, and instruct the students to start their work there. They will need to introduce themselves, and describe the areas of their expertise and interest.

From there, each student will need to decide on what topic and in which form they will pursue their UGC project. They can choose to work in pairs or teams, so long as no more than one student from each campus is involved. But they will need to choose a topic and forum in which a large number of students will participate. (And I leave the specific definition of "large" to the instructors.)

Individual projects will be developed outside the Ning network, through students may choose to develop their own Ning networks if they choose that the most appropriate medium for their projects.

Students should be graded on both the quality of information that they elicit from their communities and the tone of that conversation, as well as the quality and content of information that they provide to other communities within the classes. Instructors should provide feedback to their students, one-on-one and in person, on these points every couple of weeks throughout the project.

Students deliverables would include:

A UGC-driven news website, populated with a mix of original UGC and student-reported content
A final version of the participation policy for UGC on the site
A written analysis by the student explaining why methods used on the site were selected, as well as what other UGC forms were available and why they were not selected for this specific project. This analysis should include the student's evaluation of the effectiveness of the UGC in advancing the project's reporting.

I would leave the students to determine the structure of their projects independently. They shouldn't need specific drills on posting to discussion forums, commenting on blogs, etc. Almost all of today's journalism students have worked with the majority of current forms of online social media and UGC. What they need is prodding to think explicitly about that experience, and an instructor's help to make an intellectual connection between that experience and its potential service to journalism. If an instructor needs to jump in with working lab sections on how to set up and manage UGC publishing systems, those can be scheduled at convenient class times.

Long term, this approach can provide only an introduction to UGC in journalism. More substantial experience must come through internships or employment with larger-scale UGC-friendly news websites, and journalism schools must remain vigilant in seeking such opportunities for their students.

I don't have a teaching gig anymore, otherwise I would test this concept myself, and report the results for you. So I'm offering instead the idea as an "open source" concept, available to anyone who would like to give it a go. (And if you'd interested and would like additional thoughts and assistance from me, give me a shout. I'd love to help create a better online journalism curriculum.) If you've tried this approach in the past, please share your experience in the comments.

Journalism students face a brutal job market and will need skills currently lacking in that market to have any reasonable chance at landing a job (or creating one) in today's journalism field. Recent j-school grads rarely can compete with the traditional reporting and writing skills offered by award-winning industry veterans who have been laid off and are looking for any work. But very few individuals in our field have the skills and experience to rally a large, thoughtful UGC community. If we can train our graduates to offer that skill, many of them might find a professional home in journalism, after all.

How metro newsrooms can recapture their local dominance

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:18:00 MST

By Tom Grubisich: Proliferating blogs and micro-sites are producing so much local news, hard and soft, that the continuing shrinkage and even death of metro papers will leave no troubling void in metro coverage, Mark Potts concludes in an extensively linked post on his Recovering Journalist blog. Potts comes close to putting metros collectively in the past tense. They can't make a successful transition from print to the Internet, he says, because all they offer are �your basic one-size-fits all metro newspaper Web site.�

But in this case the one size � large � is the right one. The metros' problem is they don't know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can't do nearly as well or at all.

A story crying out for attention is what's behind America's broken health-care system. Most health-care coverage comes out of Washington, but the real story of waste and profiteering is taking place in thousands of communities around the U.S. In its June 8-15 issue, the New Yorker zoomed in on health care in one community � McAllen, a city in southern Texas near the Rio Grande River border with Mexico whose metro area has a population of 750,000. The article, by Atul Gawande, said that in 2006, Medicare spent an average of $15,000 on each of its McAllen enrollees � twice the national average and well over the $12,000 wages of the average McAllen resident.

One big reason is that McAllen's physicians are entrepreneurs as much as they are healers. One local hospital's medical campus is packed with state-of-the-art health-care centers (specializing in surgery, heart cancer, imaging) owned by the hospital's doctors.

Yet Gawande, a writer and also physician, wrote there was no evidence that this gold-plated care makes McAllen residents any healthier than people elsewhere. In fact, the outcome was just the opposite: �Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen's five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso's.�

What's especially fascinating about Gawande's piece is that it's not built mainly around statistics � the way the media usually cover health care. Its old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting � the kind that one-person and other small websites can't and don't usually try to do. But that's exactly the reporting that metro newspapers, despite their shrinking staffs, still have the potential to do well. Size matters.

But first, metros should quit wasting resources trying to cover everything, and thereby serving up, every day, the same thin reportorial soup that satisfies no one. Leave local restaurants and related coverage to Yelp! Don't try to compete with on the local-local news front where Web-ified weeklies and micro-sites have firmly planted their flags. And why should papers hire clever typists to review movies � like the bankrupt Minneapolis Star-Tribune ? Where a blog or micro does an especially good job on one aspect of community coverage � like Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Crime two sites cited by Potts -- metros can partner with the site or just link to it with a Huffington Post-style promotion.

On Monday, June 8, the Miami Herald went public with a feature recognizing the role of community blogs. Typically for how newspapers fail to use the Web creatively, the Herald is just aggregating blogs without trying to promote the best ones -- a la Huffington Post.

By shedding coverage that's redundant in the market, the average metro should be able to re-deploy enough reporters and editors to do big, long-term projects with major local impact.

Health care, which consumes close to 20 percent of the gross domestic product, is an obvious place to begin. A refocused metro staff would starts its homework by gathering all the data pertinent to the local area (as Gawande did for McAllen), but then reporters would use their shoe leather to translate the often-eye-glazing metrics into compelling narratives populated by people impacted by the broken system � something that Gawande, with just two feet, wasn't unable to do. The other day, I learned that a nephew of mine eloped with his girlfriend in part to become a beneficiary on her employer-provided health coverage. With the national jobless rate pushing above 10 percent and many small businesses scrapping their employee health coverage, I doubt my nephew is an anomaly. Imagine the stories that would pour in to a well-built, interactive metro website that chronicled the health care crisis so close up and personally?

Reuters reports that �medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years,� and that most of those driven into bankruptcy actually had insurance � but it wasn't enough to cover costs that exceed overall inflation. Metros can repurpose that story in thousands of people-specific ways.

Newly deployed reporters would talk to local doctors who set up the mall-like health-care centers that Gawande says are a major cause of the super-high cost of care in places like McAllen. These stories, too, would generate a lot of interactivity with the community � pro and con, to be sure.

Not all the coverage would be negative. Gawande cites communities � Rochester, MN, home of the Mayo Clinic and Boulder, CO, among others � where health care hasn't become a profit center and doctors are trying to forge care- as opposed to cost-driven treatment. Metros would talk to the patients in care-driven treatment to find out how they benefit. Interactive discussions would draw more patient response � and maybe entrepreneur-doctors defending the system.

This smarter coverage would generate more traffic and give metros a strong shot at re-establishing themselves as a dominant news medium in their communities. More than that, it might, if enough metros got on board, help force policy makers and legislators to confront the real reasons behind the health-care crisis.

Metros could use their new playbook to cover other long-term stories with high social impact, including all those under the umbrella of an economic/financial crisis that is likely to continue for many years. Right now metros do report-and-run stories on foreclosures and business closings, but they don't use their resources to show how these events are reshaping entire neighborhoods and maybe the American dream

How is the $800 billion from the federal stimulus legislation being spent in each metro area? Who are there winners and losers, and why? How much waste, fraud and conflict of interest are occurring? Report-and-run stories won't answer those questions.

Metros must become like Gulliver � not the shipwrecked Gulliver who came to his senses to discover he was ensnared by the six-inch-high Lilliputians, but the Gulliver who later outwitted his captors and escaped to freedom.

Gulliver got smart. Will the metros?

Industry chaos provides reporters with an opportunity to rethink standards

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:21:35 MST

By Robert Niles: The impending collapse of many news organizations is providing thoughtful journalists with an opportunity to reinvent the practice of their craft. What should be newsworthy? What should be the impact of a news story? Working for their old employers, many journalists paid little attention to such questions. When they did address them, too often it was with simplistic answers that had little relation to how the public actually perceived their work.

As old newsrooms shrink, or close, journalists now can address these questions in the context of new opportunities, whether they be self-publishing or working with other journalists in new, online start-ups.

Let's look at this within the context of a personal example. Recently, I attended an awards ceremony for the winners of a Los Angeles County student writing competition. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa presented awards to nine students in three age categories, winners of a writing content open to all public and private school students in county. Before the presentation, panel of four professionals gathered on stage at the city's Zipper Concert Hall to talk about writing and take questions from the audience, which included the classmates, families and friends of the winners.

The panel included an Academy Award-winning movie producer and screenwriter, a novelist, an academic and a metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times. The LAT reporter faltered when challenged by the parent of one of the winners about the timing of a recent Times story about LA Unified school teachers. The story, about teachers who were paid not to teach in lieu of being fired, ran during Teacher Appreciation Week at many schools throughout the area.

The parent (not me, by the way) asked: Why did the story run that week? Was the Times trying to insult teachers, the majority of whom work hard and do well? Why doesn't the Times run stories about successes in the schools as often as it runs stories about failures?

The Times reporter, who had written the story in question, responded that neither he nor the paper had an agenda. He'd been working on the story for some time, and that just happened to be the week that it was ready to run. He and the other reporters at the paper have a lot of stories to cover, and report the ones that seem "newsworthy."

So what is newsworthy?

Perhaps it says something that no story about this event appeared in the LA Times, or, as far as I've been able to tell, any other newspaper in the Los Angeles area. Clearly, in the eyes of local journalists, a twice-a-year essay contest, with winners honored by the mayor, is not newsworthy.

Fair enough. But what, then, is?

Apparently, having 160 teachers and staff idled while awaiting discipline is newsworthy. And that's fair, as well. Since I'm a geek about such things, let's look at the math, shall we?

On one hand, you've got 18 students each year, out of a million-plus in the county, winning writing awards in the Mayor's competitions. On the other, you have 160 teachers and staff out of thousands in the LA Unified District sitting idle and getting paid. Basic math, then, dictates that the essay winners are more unusual, and by one definition, "newsworthy" than the accused teachers.

Is being simply out of the ordinary a good definition for newsworthiness? Should we look only to the edges of the bell curve for news stories?

Maybe there are stories in the middle of the bell curve, as well. How newsworthy should it be, for example, that a child of professional writers wins a writing award? Frankly, that doesn't sound all that unusual. Sports fans can list plenty of kids of pro athletes who went on to play sports. Every year at the Academy Awards, fans see several sons and daughters of actors who have followed their parents' path into the craft. Not that big of a deal, right?

Perhaps it is a big deal, after all. Look through the immense number of studies done about school performance and you'll find that the dominant predictor of student success is... the education and income of their parents. Middle and upper-class children of English-speaking parents with advanced degrees overwhelming do well, regardless of where they go to school - public or private, city or suburb. And low-income kids of poorly educated parents with few English skills struggle, again, regardless of where they go.

Reporters who spend their time at the edges of the bell curve, and fail to tell the story of what is happening to the vast majority of the residents in their communities provide a warped narrative, one that readers may find less and less relation with over time. Reporters who write stories from just one end of the bell curve (just the bad stuff, or just the good stuff) provide an even more warped view.

So what is newsworthy? The edges of the bell curve or the middle?

I haven't told you, and I won't. That's a decision that each publisher must make. But be aware that your decision about newsworthiness will make an impact in your community, and it might not be the effect you intended.

Publish a story knocking teachers - even ones who deserve it - during a teacher appreciation week, without running any items lauding teachers from the other end of the bell curve, and you should not be surprised to elicit accusations that your publication doesn't support teachers. Or education. That might not have been your intent, but if your concept of newsworthiness leads you to publish such a line-up of stories, the public's perception of your intentions will become the public's reality.

Smart reporters ought to anticipate what affect their reporting will have upon the public, and tailor their work so that it will not elicit an undesired effect. "Throwing it out there," with no thought toward where it lands, is, literally, irresponsible reporting.

And let's retire the naive rule that journalists ought not to have an agenda. To write without an agenda is to write without purpose - a sloppy exercise by an unskilled scribe. Any writer should be able, and willing, to articulate what he or she wants to accomplish when putting reporting in front of the public. Let's be transparent. Know for what you stand.

If we want people to read, respect and perhaps even pay for our work, we need to treat them with respect, in return. We need to think consciously about newsworthiness and consider the impact of those decisions. We need to articulate to the public the intent behind our work and acknowledge, even apologize, whenever our work creates an unintended effect. We can't insult the public's intelligence by claiming we write without an agenda, nor should we insult our potential influence by claiming the same.

The disruptions wreaking our industry provide us an opportunity to break some habits, as we try to launch new news publications, or to save old ones. Let's not simply fall into the same habits that helped get our publications into the messes they are in today.

On a personal note, I wanted to express my support for Current TV journalist Laura Ling, with whom I spoke on a panel at a news conference in February 2008. Ling and colleague Euna Lee are on trial in North Korea, after having been arrested while shooting a story on Korean refugees.

Thought Leadership drives local media revenue

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:50:00 MST

By Dave Chase: In an earlier piece "Local media survival depends on Low Cost Sales Models," I detailed the favorable economics of pursuing a broader base of advertisers if you employed a sales model appropriate to the size of ad budget. McKinsey had done some analysis that echoed the experience we have had setting up low-cost customer acquisition models using telesales-based approaches. A critical facet of developing this lower cost model is having very cost effective lead generation.

Today, most of what I have observed with local media is they are using phone-based sales methods akin to the uninvited and irritating telemarketing methods that can interrupt our evenings. Not surprisingly, these "script readers" have had very low yield. Script readers can be fine for simple things like setting appointments but that's a far cry from closing meaningful business. The successful alternative is to become invited and to establish a relationship with prospective customers through high quality lead generation.

There are many different tactics for lead generation but the one I've seen perform the best has been the organizations that establish thought leadership in their field of expertise. In the earlier piece, I highlighted the thought leadership opportunity available to local publishers.

The disruption caused by what Jeff Jarvis has called The Great Restructuring has created demand on the part of local businesses to accelerate their understanding of Internet-based marketing. Local publishers have an opportunity to fill that void by establishing themselves as thought leaders in digital marketing.

With my publication (www.sunvalleyonline.com), we have combined a series of seminars and a how-to guide to digital marketing to stimulate demand for online marketing that my site fulfills. The seminars and how-to resource are being used both for customer acquisition and retention purposes.

Seminars
Increasingly, local publishers have found value in inviting in 3rd parties such as Greg Swanson and Mel Taylor to present to current and prospective customers. I have done many of these as a veteran marketer myself. Ironically, I get a stronger response when I'm an "out of town expert" than when I present in my own home market. We also draw better when bringing in a 3rd party. When we had Greg present, it was our best-attended seminar.

These are terrific opportunities to position a publication as the source of great insights regarding digital marketing. While some business is driven immediately, there is a longer-term benefit we are starting to realize. Today, when a customer thinks they need to do some Internet-based marketing, we are top-of-mind. As sellers of media know, this is where you want to be.

I have created a dozen or so different presentations from Search Marketing to Website Conversion to Email Marketing. While they all help establish thought leadership, there is one that is particularly well suited for publishers that they take for granted. That is, what does it take to be a successful online publisher. Businesses of many shapes and sizes should think of themselves as mini-publishers around their field of expertise. A lightweight version of what we do as publishers is germane to them whether it is how to come up with an editorial plan (e.g., they may send out weekly/monthly e-newsletters) to how we use tools like Twitter and Facebook to how we look at analytics to measure our success. One publisher had me keynote a paid-for seminar that allowed them to defray the costs of putting on the event. They used their own customer lists, house ads and a few other tactics to drive attendance. This all keeps down the costs of acquiring new customers.

How-to resource on small business digital marketing
We continue to expand upon this resource we have used with our publication but have begun to make this available to 3rd party publications. The following is a description of the resource that provides the rationale why a publisher would want to offer something like this:

The ways to reach prospective and current customers have radically changed in the last 15 years. Most small businesses have done little to change their ways beyond having a website. They are often overwhelmed at the broad array of tactics available to them. This how-to resource is designed to demystify the digital marketing tools as well as address how their offline efforts can support their increasingly digital marketing endeavors. Each section will provide an overview of the marketing area along with steps, tips, templates, best practices and pointers to additional resources.
One of the ways this resource will be used is by publishers and technology companies targeting this audience as a lead generation tool early in the sales cycle (e.g., requiring registration to get a free chapter). Later in the customer lifecycle, it can be used as a retention vehicle. For example, the publisher may pay for the advertiser's subscription for as long as the advertiser is an active account. If the advertiser no longer uses the publisher's marketing tools, they would also lose access to this valuable resource.

I like to say that establishing and maintaining thought leadership is a journey, not a destination. In other words, if you want the accompanying lead generation to be a renewable resource, it takes ongoing effort. The following is how to look at it from a daily, weekly and monthly basis to ensure success if you are a publisher:

Daily: Having a library of how-to resources available on demand to customers enables them to draw on your expertise without taking an inordinate amount of your staff time.
Weekly: Some publications generate weekly tips and tricks emails that draw from the know-how captured in the how-to resource as well as topic things going on in your community of interest to advertisers (e.g., some community event might lend itself well to a particular marketing tool you offer).
Monthly: Regular seminars or webinars can go into more depth on a particular topic and offer face-to-face contact with customers normally dealt with over email or phone. Recording these can make them available upon demand.

Challenging economies are a great time to recalibrate a business. There's no more impactful area to affect the bottomline than your customer acquisition and retention practices. Is your organization taking advantage of this opportunity?