Monthly Archives: December 2009

12.11.09
by

Poynter asks: Are journalists giving up on newspapers?

The Poynter Institute in the US hosted an online discussion asking if journalists are giving up on newspapers after high-profile departures there including Jennifer 8. Lee, who accepted a buy out at the New York Times, and Anthony Moor, who left newspapers to become a local editor for Yahoo. Moor told the US newspaper trade magazine Editor & Publisher – which just announced it is ceasing publication after 125 years:

Part of this is recognition that newspapers have limited resources, they are saddled with legitimate legacy businesses that they have to focus on first. I am a digital guy and the digital world is evolving rapidly. I don’t want to have to wait for the traditional news industry to catch up.

This frustration has been there for a while with digital journalists, but many chose to stay with newspapers or sites tied to other legacy media because of resources, industry reputation and better job security. However, with the newspaper industry in turmoil, now the benefits of staying are less obvious.

Jim Brady, who was the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com but is now heading up a local project in Washington DC for Allbritton Communications, said on Twitter:

A few years ago, the risk of leaping from a newspaper to a digital startup was huge. Now, the risk of staying at a newspaper is also huge.

Aside from risk, Jim echoed Moor’s comments in an interview with paidContent:

Being on the digital side is where my heart is. Secondly, I think doing something that was not associated with a legacy product was important.

In speaking with other long-time digital journalists, I hear this comment frequently. Many are yearning to see what is possible in terms of digital journalism without having to think of a legacy product – radio, TV or print. There is also the sense from some digital journalists that when print and digital newsrooms merged that it was the digital journalists and editors who lost out. In a special report on the integration of print and online newsrooms for Editor & Publisher, Joe Strupp writes:

Yet the convergence is happening. And as newsrooms combine online and print operations into single entities, power struggles are brewing among many in charge. More and more as these unifications occur, it’s the online side that’s losing authority.

It’s naive to think that these power struggles won’t happen, but they are a distraction that the industry can ill afford during this recession. In the Editor & Publisher report, Kinsey Wilson, former executive editor of USA Today and editor of its Web site from 2000-2005, said that during the convergence at USA Today and the New York Times:

We both had a period of a year or two when our capacity to innovate on the Web stopped, or was even set back a bit

Digital models are emerging that are successful. Most are focused and lean such as paidContent (although it has cut back during the recession, I’d consider its acquisition by The Guardian, my employer, as a mark of success) and expanding US political site Talking Points Memo. There are opportunities in the US for journalists who want to focus on the internet as their platform.

Back to the Poynter discussion, Kelly McBride of Poynter said during the live discussion:

I talk to a lot of journalists around the country. I don’t think they are giving up journalism at all. I do think some of them have been let down by newspapers. But a lot are holding out. They are committed to staying in newspapers as long as they can, because they are doing good work.

It’s well worth reading through the discussion. I am sure that many journalists have some of the same questions.

What was the verdict? Poynter discussion - Are journalists giving up on newspapers?

12.11.09
by

links for 2009-12-11

12.11.09
by

News organisations miss opportunity to build community with online photo use

As Charlie Beckett, the director of the politics and journalism think tank POLIS at LSE, points out, the Daily Mail is getting a lot of grief for using pictures, mainly from photo-sharing site Flickr, without the permission of the users or in violation of the licencing on those pictures. Charlie’s post is worth reading in full, but here are some of the questions he poses:

At what point does material in the public domain become copyright? the people who published these images didn’t do so for financial gain. There is a genuine, if very slight, news story here which feels worthy of reporting. If I link to those photos am I also infringing people’s copyright? Might it be possible that they will actually enjoy seeing their work on the Mail’s website where it will be connected to millions of other people?

I don’t want to dwell on the copyright issue too much, apart from saying that if the newspaper industry is fuzzy on copyright on the internet, it undermines their arguments with respect aggregators, ‘parasites’ and ‘thieves‘ online. I’d rather make the case that there is a benefit to news organisations in not only respecting the copyright of others but also in being good participants in online communities like Flickr. Here’s part of the comment that I left on Charlie’s post:

Leaving (the copyright) issue aside, this is another example of the news industry missing an opportunity to build community around what they do. When I use Creative Commons photos from sites like Flickr, firstly, I honour the terms of the licence. Secondly, I drop the Flickr user a note letting them know that I’ve used a photo on our site. It’s not only a way to use nice photos, but it’s also a way to build goodwill to what we’re doing and do a little soft touch promotion of our coverage. It takes a minutes out of my day to create that email, but instead of a backlash, I often get a thank you. They let their friends know that the Guardian has used their picture. It’s brilliant for everyone. Their are benefits to being good neighbours online, rather than viewing the internet as a vast repository of free content. As a journalist, I wouldn’t use a photo on Facebook without permission. Besides, the photos on Flickr are very high quality, and with the common use of Creative Commons, I know exactly what the terms of use are. As a user of Flickr who licences most of my photos under Creative Commons licence, I also feel that whatever photos I use, I’m also giving back to the community. It’s a much more honest relationship.

Last year during the elections, I found an amazing picture of Democratic candidate John Edwards on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution licence that allows commercial use and used it on a blog post on the Guardian when he dropped out of the race. I let the photographer, Alex de Carvalho, know that I used his photo, and he responded:

Thank you, Kevin, for using this picture; I’m honored it’s in The Guardian.

Result:

  • Great picture.
  • Credit where credit is due.
  • Mutual respect for copyright. Creative Commons clearly states the rights wishes of the photographer.
  • Light touch outreach to promote our work at the Guardian.
  • Building community both on our site and on the broader internet.

That’s what we mean at the Guardian about being of the internet not just on it, and this is why I believe that social media is about creating great journalism and building an audience to support it.

12.11.09
by

Professionalism

First we caused the twin evils of poor communication and inability to learn from each other through our systematisation and bureaucratisation of the world of work. We devalued relationships and trust as twin pillars of human endeavour. Then we made it worse by sticking plaster on the wound, adding layers of “professional” intervention on top in the form of “internal communicators” and “knowledge managers” in our attempts to make things better. We buried the people trying to do things under increasingly collusive layers of “grown ups” pretending that this is the way things have to be.

And then… (Euan is a great read – if you’re not already subscribed, he’s well worth it.)

Professionalism is, at best, a veneer of objectivity. At worst is a false persona that distances us from our colleagues, complicates collaboration and erodes trust. Social media turns all this on its head – instead of being “professional” we can be ourselves, we can have genuine relationships with colleagues that promote trust and understanding. We can finally acknowledge that we are real people with real emotions and that those emotions matter.

12.10.09
by

danah boyd and digital anthropology

There’s a great interview with digital anthropologist danah boyd in The Guardian. I love danah’s work. We so desperately need more people like danah who take a calm and evidence-based view of the way the internet and social tools are changing society (or not, in some cases). She proved to be an essential source for my work on digital natives earlier this year, and her work should be essential reading for everyone in recruitment and HR.

The article says:

Lately, [boyd’s] work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behaviour we see online, and understanding that the context of online activity is often more subtle – and more familiar – than we first imagine.

Last week she outlined some examples at the Supernova conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying to a prestigious American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of gangs and violence, but the admissions officer was appalled when he discovered that the boy’s MySpace page was plastered with precisely the violent language and gang imagery he claimed to abhor. Why was he lying about his motivations, asked the university? He wasn’t, says Boyd: in his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.

This is possibly an extreme case, but an important illustration. There are so many examples of people who have been fired or had job/univiersity offers withdrawn because of their behaviour on social tools. As a society we need to be really careful about how we handle the occasional mismatch between what we see and what we want to see. Sometimes it’s just more complicated than it seems and people deserve to have that complexity examined before people leap to a conclusion.

Social tools bring into the light behaviours that were previously hidden and we risk making very poor HR decisions if we don’t examine the nuance of each scenario individually. Is it right that employers expect a potential hire’s Facebook page to reflect the employers’ values rather than the reality of the new hire’s life? How long do youthful transgressions linger? After all, how many managers making hiring decisions have an entirely unblemished past? The fact that their mistakes are buried in the mists of pre-technological history doesn’t mean that they didn’t make the same ones that we witness young people making online now.

12.10.09
by

links for 2009-12-10

12.09.09
by

Landrush for local: NowPublic, Everyblock and now Outside.in

A common joke amongst journalists is that all we need is two examples to proclaim it a trend, but we’ve got much more than that when it comes to rush to build local media empires in the US. In June, AOL bought two local services, Patch, which provides news to small towns and communities, and also Going, which provides a local events listing platform. MSNBC.com bought Adrian Holovaty’s hyperlocal aggregator Everyblock in August. In September, local news network Examiner.com owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz‘s Clarity Media Group bought citizen journalism site NowPublic. Now, we have another major move in hyperlocal with CNN and others investing $7m in aggregator Outside.in. CNN will not only invest in the site, but it will also feature feeds from Outside.in.

Outside.in founder Steven Berlin Johnson called the investment and content deal:

a vote of confidence in the platform we’ve built at outside.in, but perhaps more important it’s an endorsement of hyperlocal and the ecosystem model of news that many of us have been championing for years now.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and the principal of Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Outside.in, and he makes the passionate case for people covering their own communities.

My unwavering belief is that we will cover ourselves when it comes to local news. We are at the PTA meetings, the little league games, and the rallies to save our local institutions, so who better to cover them than us? This is what hyperlocal blogging is all about and it is slowly but surely it is gaining steam.

CNN’s partnership with Outside.in can be seen as a simple response to a competitor, but with all of the deals in this space, I guarantee that 2010 will see additional deals and development. Add to this location based services and mobile, and you’ve got somethig very interesting happening.

The promise of ‘pro-am’

As Fred says, people will cover their own communities, and we have seen some interesting hyperlocal projects including the pro-am projects of MyMissourian in Columbia Missouri and BlufftonToday in South Carolina or hyperlocal projects here in London like William Perrin’s Talk About Local. I personally like pro-am models where professional journalists cover the official life of the community – council meetings, crime, sports, schools and other local issues – while the site provides a platform for the community to cover itself and the full range of lived experience there. As Clyde Bentley, who set up MyMissourian, found out, readers didn’t want to write about politics as much as they wanted to write about religion, pets and the weather. Here are the lessons he learned from MyMissourian:

  • Use citizen journalism to supplement not replace.
  • UGC isn’t free.
  • Online attracts the eager, but print serves the masses.
  • Give people what they want, when they want it and how they want it.
  • Get rid of preconceptions of what journalism is.
  • Every day people are better ‘journalists’ than you think.

Lessons learned from failure and success

Despite all of this energy and experience, hyperlocal has still seen more high profile failures than successes such as Backfence and the Loudoun Extra project by the Washington Post. Even in those failures, there are lessons to be learned. Mark Potts who was behind Backfence said that one frequent mistake of hyperlocal projects is that they aren’t local enough.

He believes the key is to focus on a community of around 50,000 people. Covering a bigger area makes it harder to keep people interested. “You care less the farther it gets from home.”

The difficulty for Loudoun Extra was integration with WashingtonPost.com and a lack of community outreach, according to Rob Curley who headed up the project.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t have success stories, but again, the secret to success seems to be a laser light focus on niche topics and keeping the hyper in hyperlocal. Crain’s New York just profiled Manhattan Media, which has seen revenue grow fivefold since 2005 and even more surprising is that ad revenue has continued to grow in the midst of the Great Recession. It’s a multi-platform, multi-revenue stream model with newspapers and websites, and their events business now contributes 20% of their revenue.

The lessons I take away is that newspapers trying to be all things to all people with no sense of place or focus are suffering mightily during the recession. Focus is key both in terms of topic and geography, and seeing as this is about engaging not only a virtual but very real world community, I’ll add my basic advice about blogging and social media: Be passionate and be real.

Whether we see a strong recovery in 2010 or not, local will be one growth area, and journalists looking for new opportunities should watch this space for ‘help wanted’ signs.

12.09.09
by

Incentives in social media

I found myself explaining to a client the other day why incentives don’t work very well for encouraging people to get involved in social media. Indeed, incentives can have the very opposite effect so must be handled with extreme caution.

This excellent video from Dan Pink explains very succinctly why incentives do not work for anything other than simple mechanical tasks, and goes on to examine the importance of autonomy.

You should also read Johnnie Moore’s blog post Incentives, innovation, community which adds yet more flavour and context, including lots of quotes from and links to studies in the same area. And you might also like my post on incentives from earlier this year.

It’s unsurprising that these flaws ‘business operating systems’ affect the way that social media projects are rolled out, as companies try to remake social media in their own image. But it’s also interesting to (sometimes) see how the more autonomous processes of social media can rub off on business culture. Might social media even be a powerful enough force to change the default settings under which business operates? I hope so.

12.09.09
by

links for 2009-12-09

12.08.09
by

links for 2009-12-08