Author Archives: Kevin Anderson

10.14.07
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Duty to buy a newspaper?

Roy Peter Clark at Poynter certainly has kicked off an interesting discussion with a column on the journalism centre’s website in a call to journalists to dig into their pockets and buy the newspaper. His full argument is worth a read, but the essence is:

I owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere — and to the future of journalism — to read them. It’s no longer a choice. It’s a duty.

And here’s why: There is one overriding question about the future of journalism that no one can yet answer: How will we pay for it? Who will pay for good reporters and editors? Who will pay to station them in statehouses, or send them to cover wars and disasters? Who will finance important investigations in support of the public’s health and safety?

Poynter has done a great service in collecting some of the blog posts that comment on the column. I’m not going to take aim at the original column. There are plenty of people who have done that.

My information diet

I’ll be honest. I can’t remember the last time I actually bought a physical newspaper. I get them from time to time on flights and at hotels, but the last time I put down money and bought a newspaper. I’d have to think hard about that. I think I bought a Guardian right before I joined the newspaper.

But I’m drowning in information. If this diet were food, I’d be the size of a small block of flats. Super-size me. I actually have to do a lot just to filter and sift the massive amount of information available. I’m constantly looking for signal in the noise. No one news source does it for me, and I compare a lot of news sources because they all have a point of view.

Before I leave the door, I have Sky News and BBC Breakfast on the laptop TV, more for background noise than information to be honest, although it’s good to know what the domestic (read British) media and press are exercised about today. I can’t filter TV news so I don’t ‘use’ it much. It’s too time consuming for what I get out of it. To be brutally honest, sometimes I get so pissed off at TV news for wasting my time I flip the channel to Everybody Loves Raymond. The BBC TV news podcast isn’t updated until I’m at work or else I’d just watch that and skip the fluff. If there is a good piece of video, I’ll see it. If a politician or presenter says something of note, I’ll see it repeated a million times during the day or in the papers.

Now, on my half hour commute in the morning before I hit the Tube, I listen to the NYTimes Front Page podcast and the hourly NPR news update downloaded to my iPod via iTunes. I just can’t find a good top of the hour headlines podcast in the UK. I haven’t checked the BBC lately. I wish they would produce a World Service headlines podcast. If I have time, I also listen to podcasts from On the Media, the Economist, the BBC’s Pods and Blogs (which I used to contribute to) and This American Life (although Suw and I usually listen to that together over breakfast on the weekend).

On the Tube, I usually skim stories from four newspapers: The New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald-Tribune and the Guardian. If I see something I need to read, I’ll mentally bookmark it for when I get to work. I also check on the headlines the BBC News website and do a quick check on CNET and Wired. I’ve been doing this for years on my Palm handheld using a service called Avantgo. The screen is great, and I don’t really have this fetish about paper. It’s just information, and it’s easier to organise this way. And it’s much easier to deal with on the Tube. I also have an RSS reader on my Palm, QuickNews, which I wish was better. That gives me headlines from Marketwatch and a half dozen blogs.

Most everyone else on the Tube reads the Metro free-sheet. I don’t. It’s just a rehash of what I’ve already seen on Sky and the BBC, and unlike most everyone else, I’m not interested in celebrity news. Besides, I never have to go looking for celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere. I also have an environmental issue with all of those free-sheets. What a waste.

When I get to work, I fire up my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, and look through the blogs and traditional news sources. I check Popurls.com to get a quick filter of social news sites, video sites and aggregators. I usually have NPR on in the background and give a quick check to NBC’s evening news via iTunes. I get e-mail newsletters from the Washington Post – my old hometown paper – and the NYTimes. I also get an e-mail from NewsTrust and SimplyHeadlines.com, aggregators of different sorts. I also get a morning e-mail from Global Voices giving a great roundup of global blog buzz. Friends are always sending me links via Del.icio.us, mostly to do with new media journalism, and I get things passed along directly via IM.

A former colleague at the BBC said that someday everyone will consume their news like me. I’m not so sure. Very few people actively seek out as much information as I do. I don’t extrapolate my own behaviour too much. I am a very wired news junkie. It’s my job to know what’s going on. But there are a lot of people doing one or more of the above.

But as some people in the Poynter discussion have pointed out, lack of information is not my problem. Lack of time and a limit to the amount of attention I have is more of a problem. I still don’t think this is an issue that most journalists have grokked. There’s who, what, where, when and why, but too many journalists don’t seem to think they need to explain to readers, viewers, listeners: Why should I care?

Relevance

Again, this is one of the posts where the comments are worth reading. Steve Yelvington in his post, A troll in scholar’s clothing, echoes one of the sentiments in the post which is that news has to be relevant to consumers, the audience in order for them to buy it. Steve says:

Quit blaming the Internet. There’s nothing wrong with paper. It’s your journalism that isn’t relevant. … We’re not going to get meaningful content and services from journalists who spend their time reading each other and sniffing around each other’s scents like a pack of dogs.

Don’t compare your journalism with that of another newspaper. Compare it with the needs of the community.

Amen brother. As Steve has often pointed out, newspaper audiences (in the US), have been declining since the 1970s, when the Internet was still in the lab.

I love the depth of the style of journalism that newspapers have traditionally done. That’s not to say that television is not capable of it. TV documentary units in Britain and long ago (and long since dead) in the US have produced some excellent journalism. But now, what is the business model for this content? What pays for this relatively expensive work? That’s the crux of the original post.

For a number of reasons, most people aren’t like me. They don’t see the reason in their busy lives to seek out news and information like I do. I grew up with newspapers and watching the evening news every night with my parents. I knew that to make economic, political and any of a number of other everyday decisions, I needed quality information. But I am in the minority, and as long as I am in the minority, newspapers and the kind of journalism that they represent will be in decline in the developed world.

I think the issue of relevance is at the heart of newspapers decline. Why should most people care about news? Journalists take it for granted, but I fear that it’s only occasionally obvious for our audiences.

When I was back in Washington this March, I struck up a conversation about world affairs with an IMF employee on the Metro. She got off a couple of stops before me, and an African-American man had overheard us and came up to me after she got off. It was after the wobble in Chinese markets had sent stocks swooning the world over. He wondered how something in China could affect the US economy because suddenly it had affected him. I had to get off at the next stop and didn’t have time to say that the Chinese and Japanese held a majority of the United States’ foreign debt. Anything that impacted the appetite for the debt would hit the US, possibly hard. And that’s just one link between the two countries. China and the US need each other economically for a myriad of reasons. China has its own finely tuned balancing act in terms of growth, inflation, internal stability, resources and the environment.

The man on the Metro represents, to me, a failure of journalism. It was a failure by journalists to explain to everyone in our communities why the story was important. Until our journalism really is essential to people’s lives and we make that case, newspapers will get crowded out by a dizzying array of information and, yes, entertainment choices.

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10.12.07
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links for 2007-10-12

10.11.07
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links for 2007-10-11

10.10.07
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‘A nerve has been hit’

Jack Lail said former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley CEO Alan Mutter definitely hit an ‘organisational nerve‘ with his post about the ‘Brain Drain‘ happening in journalism. The post was hard hitting, quoting from a number of anonymous digital savvy journalists in their 20s and 30s looking for their exit at their newspapers and possibly out of the media full stop. Alan writes:

But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.

This is one post where you need to read the comments, like this one:

The large MSM paper I work for has had virtually 100% turnover in it’s online operations in the last 18 months. I’m not talking about the Podunk Daily News either, you’d know the name. … I just don’t understand it, there are people in the mix who really are trying to save this industry but who are battling of all things, this industry.

This comment pained me:

I have reporting experience and two journalism degrees, but I frequently have dinosaur reporters and editors treat me like IT support staff and dismiss my ideas because I’m not “one of them”.

For many journalists, ‘real’ journalism is still about the format, not the content. It’s as if their words, which they wrote on a computer, were somehow less important because they never quite made it off of a computer. Hopefully, when confronted by their own argument, these journalists will see how paper thin it is. Somehow I doubt it because they’ve held to this line for most of the 10 years I’ve been an online journalist, but one can hope for some sort of poetic justice. If they learn some HTML, maybe they’ll find work in the future.

And this isn’t necessarily about age or experience. This isn’t just fresh out of college grads with, as one blogger said some outsized sense of entitlement. One commenter is leaving a major newspaper’s online wing after seven years. That’s a lot of experience lost.

Patrick Beeson, a web project manager for the E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group in Knoxville, Tennessee, called the post “among the most revealing portrayals of what’s wrong in most newspapers. Namely, legacy newsfolk not allowing for often-younger journo-technologists to play a guiding role in that paper’s strategy going forward.” This isn’t about turning your newsroom over to your youngest staff, but it is about having the humility and the vision to know what you don’t know.

As Alan says, some of this is about territory and turf, short-sighted management more concerned about owning the change than achieving change. And I’ve spoken to a lot of online news veterans who also struggle with the transition as the flat, collaborative environments of their newsroom meets the rigid hierarchies in traditional newsrooms. Integration isn’t the problem. It’s the terms of that integration. As Jack said, “This may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways.” This is an organisational issue as much, if not more, than a generational one.

Journalism professor Mindy McAdams points to a great post by young journalist, Meranda Watling, who gives her experience of being involved in discussions about new products “that there is no way in hell would float with my peers.” (Great blog Meranda. Nice design, and I do hope you do that education Tumblog.)

Mindy’s post is titled “We need a tourniquet”, and she said Alan is:

…talking about a legion of Merandas who are giving up and leaving because it’s so obvious to them that management has no clue what readers want or respect. The comments back him up, again and again. (That persistent sound you hear is our lifeblood leaking out.)

This post has kicked off a great conversation in the online journalism community, a community I’m proud to be a part of. It’s worth looking through the trackbacks to Alan’s post.

But to quote Rob Curley, this isn’t about skillset, it’s about mindset. It’s not about age or experience. I’ve spoken to some journalism school grads who talk as if it’s the 1940s, not the 21st Century, and I’ve worked with seasoned journalists who humble me with their digital knowledge and foresight and remind me that I have a lot to learn, like Steve Yelvington.

Steve and I shared dinner and drinks in Kuala Lumpur earlier this summer after we finished three days of workshops on citizen journalism with Peter Ong and Robb Montgomery, and he told me about coding a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in the mid-1980s. Steve’s a pioneer. Steve knows his technology and his journalism. He had this to say about Alan’s post:

We are at a critical turning point for American newspapers. We can’t afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. The Internet not a publishing system, a Web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we’ve been doing for the last century is not going to work. We need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.

Most of us are just impatient for the future that we know is there to be grasped. But we won’t wait forever. If the industry can’t or won’t do it, we’ll do it on our own.

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10.10.07
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10.09.07
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links for 2007-10-09

10.03.07
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links for 2007-10-03

10.03.07
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Corporate IT: Touch our firewall and we fire yo’ ass

I wrote a post for the Guardian’s Technology blog about fascist IT policies and IT departments, but it’s something I feel very strongly about. One of the bottlenecks in companies is Corporate IT policies meant to ensure security but go too far and cause inflexibility. I don’t know how many friends had to run ‘trojan mouse’ projects with servers hidden their desks because corporate IT wouldn’t or couldn’t move fast enough. Too often, I’ve felt caught between a rock and a hard place – my manager wanting something done now and IT policy or rights issues that prevent me from getting my job done.

Territorial IT departments who view the computers as ‘their’s’ and other employees as the problem are now a serious problem. When I was with the BBC, several clue-ful field staff carried two computers – one with the corporate desktop for e-mail and wires and one ‘clean’ computer for getting their job done.

If your journalists’ computers are so locked down that they can’t file from the field, game over. Don’t laugh or dismiss that. I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t join WiFi networks because they didn’t have sufficient rights, and I’ve had to help friends who couldn’t file audio because their IT departments didn’t have the MP3 filters installed to compress the audio. It doesn’t matter how sexy your website is, if they can’t file, they’ll be back in the bad old days of phoning in copy and more often than not, getting scooped by the competition.

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10.03.07
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Don’t be afraid of Creative Commons

Suw wrote about the case last week when Virgin Mobile Australia used a Creative Commons licenced photo in an ad campaign. She called it an abuse of goodwill. Now Robin Hamman has warned people to think twice about re-using Creative Commons licenced photos. Virgin Mobile Australia kept to the letter of the law in terms of the Attribution Creative Commons licence, but, as Suw said, they are guilty of “flagrantly abusing its spirit”.

I’m a huge advocate of Creative Commons licenced content, and I’m trying to increase the use of CC audio, video and images at the Guardian. At the moment, Guardian management has taken a cautious approach, worrying that even if people have licenced their works allowing commercial use that people might think twice if a media company uses their images, audio or video. I wasn’t involved in those discussions, although I would have liked to make a more pro-CC argument. (Part of me wonders if there were union considerations as well. But as I said, I wasn’t privy to the discussion so that’s only speculation.)

But I’ll provide a couple of quick examples of how acting with goodwill and keeping both to the letter and spirit of the law can be a way to increase engagement with your community and broader, more distributed online communities, even if you are a commercial media company. On the Guardian’s Food Blog Word of Mouth, editor Susan Smillie set up a Flickr group and encourages blog fans to share their photos. Anna Pickard used a picture from Flickr on a post about sweets that people bring back from their holidays abroad.

I used a picture from Flickr to illustrate Republicans hatred of Hillary Clinton on our new US-focussed blog, Deadline USA. I take care to link back to the original photo, credit the user and link to their profile and make sure that it is clear that this is CC-licenced content, not content under Guardian copyright. If I have contact information, I let the photographer know that I used the picture. This morning, I got a nice message from the Flickr user who created the illustration, azrainman. He thanked me for making the extra effort, and even gave me a little link love.

This is what blogging and social media is about, knowing the social norms and taking part in this global conversation as an equal even if you do work for a big media company. If you’re looking to boot-strap your community on your site, it’s always good to plug in and play (nice) with established digital communities.

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