Category Archives: Media 2.0

09.03.08
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Conventions, journalism workflow 2.0 and Chrome as a Web OS

Suw and I are still bedding in, so to speak, with the brilliant new WordPress-powered Strange Attractor, and one of the things that I haven’t quite set up is Del.icio.us auto-posting (although ‘auto’ might be a stretch seeing as the feature seems to work when it wants to). Until we get it working again, I’ll just have to post some of the things that catch me eye.

Convention opportunity costs

I’ve already written about my views on the excessive coverage of the US political conventions. It doesn’t take 15,000 journalists to cover a four-day informercial by the political parties. I would be thrilled if the 15,000 journalists actually cut through the stage-managed crap and told the American people and the world what these candidates actually planned to do, but they don’t.

Jeff Jarvis has much the same view and put it excellently both on BuzzMachine and his weekly column at the Guardian (my day job):

The attention given to the conventions and campaigns is symptomatic of a worse journalistic disease: we over-cover politics and under-cover the actions of our governments. We over-cover politicians and under-cover the lives and needs of citizens. . . .

We don’t need the press to tell us what the politicians say; we can watch it ourselves on the web. We don’t need pundits to tell us what to think; we can blather as they do on our blogs. The rise of mass media – primetime TV – ensured that conventions would never surprise again: they became free commercials. The internet then took away the last reasons to devote journalistic resources to the events – there’s nothing we can’t see and judge on our own.

Brooke Gladstone at On the Media flagged up the childish behaviour of the on-air ‘talent’. At FoxNews, Bill O’Reilly petulantly complained about a newspaper that had insulted him, and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews had a go at colleague Keith Olberrmann for making a ‘yackity-yack’ hand gesture for whittering on. I agree with Ms Gladstone when she says:

After Obama’s speech, true to form, the pundits told us how to feel about it. This week, the cable news talkers told us that Obama had to reveal himself, but so did the news channels. They all saw this week as promotion for themselves, as much as Obama, and they tried to tell us how to feel about them.

But I don’t feel that good, frankly, because they got in the way of the story, because they made themselves the story. Because if this truly was the historic event they kept telling us it was, then they all talked way too much.

Pundits are getting in way of the story. They think we need them to tell us how to feel or think. I don’t think I’m alone in resenting when people try to tell me how to think or feel. Besides, now if I feel the need to entertain myself with anchors behaving like children, I can always watch it the next day on YouTube.

‘Lifecycle of a New Story’

Alison Gow wrote an excellent post of how the journalism work flow differs now in the age of the social media. She expertly and succinctly walks journalists through traditional reporting and how things can be. (I originally wrote have changed, but this is a work in process.) Every step of the reporting process can draw on new social media tools and tap into a broader range of expertise. I’ll flag up one of her five steps:

Step Two

Reporter researches story (Web 1.0)

Phones/meets contacts to verify information; searches Google for background/experts; finds expert and emails questions; includes response in article; sets up photo opportunity with picture desk; writes article and sends to newsdesk.

Reporter researches story (Web 2.0)

Crowdsources idea using social networks; uses blog searches and blog translators to find posts and experts worldwide; uses own blog to post developing and ask for input and suggestions from readers; sets up online survey and poll (promotes these using links to it from own blog, Facebook page and online forums); posts links and questions on specialist messageboards; searches social bookmarking tools for related issues; uses video discussion site to seek views; records telephone interview for podcast; collates findings and discusses package with print and digital news editors; films video report; begins writing detailed, analytical article for print product, accompanied by quality images – some found by picturedesk searching photo-sharing websites’ Creative Commons pool.

It’s a great post. Keep it handy. Distribute it to your staff, and flag up her conclusion. “I had no idea when I started doing this how thin the ‘old’ opportunities for investigating stories would look compared to the tools at our disposal now; it’s quite stark really.”

Read the comments. Alison talks about the tools she uses.

I’ll be writing more about the tools that I plan to use to manage all the work I will be doing on my upcoming US Election road trip, mentioned in my post about how to geo-tag photos. The blog launches next week, but I’m already reaching out into the social networks that I am part of.

Chrome as a web operating system

Steve Yelvington consistently writes insightful posts about new media, the newspaper business and community. Steve is a journalist through and through, and he also has an excellent grasp of the web and technology. Last year, he told me over dinner how he wrote a Usenet news reader for the Atari ST in 1985.

Steve sees Google’s Chrome not simply as a web browser but as a ‘Web operating system’.

The vision for Chrome, as documented in a 38-page Web comic, is to create an environment that optimally manages and coordinates Web-based applications. That sounds a lot like the classic definition of an operating system: “An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the resources of the computer. The operating system acts as a host for applications that are run on the machine.”

He sees Chrome as a game-changer.

NOTE: People have taken issue with the EULA, saying that by using Chrome you give Google “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license” to do what the search giant wants to do with content submitted using the application. Gizmodo says that Google is updating the EULA to ‘be less creepy‘.

08.28.08
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Unconscionable political convention coverage

In May, as part of the Carnival of Journalism, Ryan Sholin asked:

What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?

I have another take on that question, and it is one that more news organisations are being forced to ask. What can news organisations no longer afford to do? What is your news organisation doing that is either too costly or provides so little value to your readers/viewers/listeners that it’s no longer justifiable? Or put another way, if it’s not unique and it’s not really uniquely relevant to your audience, is there something else that you should be covering that is? What is the opportunity cost of covering that event that everyone and their dog, cat, sister, brother and third cousin covering? What are you foregoing to cover that event?

Why do I ask this question? I give you 15,000 reasons, which is the number of journalists covering the US political conventions. That is 3.75 journalists per delegate. It might be defensible if those 15,000 journalists was actually doing something unique in terms of coverage. But they aren’t. Furthermore, that is 15,000 journalists covering an event that the New York Times aptly described as “effectively a four-night miniseries before an audience of 20 million people or more”.

During a planning meeting, I was asked what kind of news we could expect. I responded: None. The entire goal of the conventions is not to make news, not to have surprises. They are carefully choreographed, scripted and stage-managed. Yes, the candidates will make an acceptance speech that is newsworthy, but the rest of the evenings are designed to net as much free air-time and coverage as possible to launch the candidates’ campaigns.

Political conventions are like class reunions for American press corps. I’ve covered two, and they are great fun and great theatre, but they aren’t great news events. Ted Koppel left the 1996 Republican Convention early, complaining that it was little more than a picture show. This year, he’s there as an analyst for BBC America. His assessment of the coverage is pretty damning:

Amy Gahran, writing for Poynter, called the numbers of journalists covering the convention an unconscionable waste of news resources in light of the current state of the news business. Mark Potts said:

At a time when news budgets are being slashed because of declining revenue, how can a news organization possibly justify sending a raft of people to the conventions? (I suspect the numbers for the Olympics are about the same-and just as ridiculous.) …

What stories are they going to get that the AP can’t supply? Hijinks of the local delegates? Inside info about what the candidates hope to do for the economy back home? Local color on Denver and St. Paul? It’s really hard to understand the need for this kind of bulk coverage.

And I couldn’t agree more with Michele McLellan of the Knight Digital Media Center who says that news organisations must focus on what is unique to their franchise. As I often say, the danger of Google News for news organisations isn’t that it steals your traffic but that it shows how little is unique in most coverage, how much re-packaged wire copy we re-produce. That’s the real danger, and it’s why the average news website visitor views about 2 pages per month. And Michele echoes my concerns about opportunity costs:

I also am frustrated when I thinking about all the stories that thousands of reporters might be covering closer to home as the conventions unfold. With the troubled economy, mortgage foreclosures, health care, the federal budget deficit and rising energy costs, I don’t think it’s possible for journalists to be developing enough stories about the impact of these issues on their communities and the people who live in them. Not to mention creating and linking to resources for people in trouble and holding officials accountable for their share of the problem (or explaining why they have no share).

At the end of the day, the Columbia Journalism Review lays out the naked truth, of the 15,000 journalists:

7,500 aren’t doing much at all. This isn’t surprising. Only a small number of reporters actually have a reason to be here. The rest are conventioneering—seeing old friends, eating Democratic-themed menu items (“Barack Obama’s Turkey Chili”) in pandering local restaurants, brandishing their press passes at all comers, looking for free things, and spending about 14 percent of their time trying to rustle up enough stories to justify their presence to their editors. These reporters are the ones mostly writing about themselves, or their friends, or their experiences exploring Denver with their friends (“I was enjoying some turkey chili with David Broder yesterday…”). At least they’re open about the fact that they’re enjoying themselves.

And I blame journalists as much as their editors. Yes, trips have always been used by editors to reward good journalists, but there are journalists who have come to treat the profession like their own personal travel bureau. They come up with the flimsiest pretence for extravagant travel that is of little journalistic value and of little benefit to their audience, who in the end are footing the bill.

No journalism organisation has ever had unlimited resources, and now, newspapers are fighting for their very existence. It is not a time for profligate spending, as if it ever were. If we are true to our word that journalism is essential to a healthy democracy, then we have to use our limited resources judiciously and for the benefit of our audience. If we provide them relevant information, then, hopefully, they will support our efforts. If we continue these wasteful ways, then our lofty arguments about our essential democratic role will be seen as disingenuous and self-serving.

Disclosure: Yes, I am taking a trip in October to cover the US Elections. But I am keeping a close eye on the bottom line. The quality of coverage is not directly proportional to the cost. I use digital technology to undercut the traditional cost basis of journalism. It’s what we all need to do. We must use disruptive digital technology to reduce the cost basis of what we do. It will give us more resources to do journalism and to innovate.

I have one prediction that I am reasonably confident in making. In 2012, there will not be 15,000 journalists. Not because news organisations finally come to their senses but because so many have ceased to exist.

08.27.08
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Major and minor reasons for US newspaper crisis

Tip of the hat to Martin Stabe for highlighting this link as he does with so many must-read media stories. Vin Crosbie has a lengthy and thoughtful post, nay essay, on why the US newspaper industry is in dire straits in two parts, see Part 1 and Part 2. Vin’s prediction is this:

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies — namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print.

Predictions like this might seem common, but what is unique is the rational argument that Vin presents. He goes through an extensive examination of media history and media economics. The conclusion is that newspapers have violated the principle of supply and demand and failed to adapt its core product.

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about ‘data smog‘.

I’ve said this before. So many journalists that I meet still believe that there is something exceptional about what they are doing and producing. They still operate on the assumption that information is scarce, which is why the industry has largely failed to adapt to the information and media-saturated society that we live in.

And for journalists angry with the internet. That anger is misplaced. Half of the newspapers’ decline relative to readership and population happened before 1991, a few years before public access to the internet and awareness of interactivity and multimedia. In the US, readership began to decline in the 1970s. As Steve Yelvington has said, “Even if the Internet had never happened, newspapers — especially big-city papers — have long been headed for a dangerous inflection point at which their market penetration would not be sufficient to sustain a mass-media business model.”

I don’t think that the news business in general and newspapers in particular will make the changes necessary to survive until they come to grips with the new reality of information consumption. The printing presses of newspapers are no longer a licence to print money.

This is not necessarily about the emergence of the internet or the development of multimedia as both Vin and Steve have said. I think that Steve summed it best, when he said, “It’s a problem of content relevancy in an increasingly rich media mix, and not specific to the emergence of the World Wide Web.”

If it’s not about adopting new technologies, then the questions become more fundamental and problematic. They are not questions about platforms and integration but rather about core assumptions about journalism. Newspaper editors select stories based on two criteria, Vin says:

1. Stories about which the editor thinks everyone should be informed.

2. Stories that might have the greatest common interest.

Vin challenges some core journalistic beliefs. Pardon the lengthy quote, but I think it’s an important point:

Newspaper editors’ use of those two criteria to select stories for publication has become so ingrained after 400 years of analog technology that few editors or newspaper executives are able to fathom any other possible or apt practices for story selection.

Moreover, they came to believe that producing a common edition for everyone is their raison d’être, forgetting it arose as a limitation of their technology. Fitting psychologist Abraham Maslow’s statement that “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail,” the editorial production limitation of Gutenberg’s technology has led most newspaper editors to believe that they set the ‘common agenda’ for their community and likewise that their community’s readership is somehow homogenous because it reads the same newspaper edition on any given day.

Vin says that newspapers general-interest product has become obsolete. People aren’t going online to consume news and information but to seek out information and entertainment that the generic package of information produced by the news industry doesn’t provide. I’ll leave you to read Vin’s essays and his conclusions.

‘Muted response’, but required reading

I agree with Mark Hamilton. I’m surprised that response to Vin’s post has been so muted. Vin’s two posts are more than just a recounting of the bleak state of the US newspaper industry. We all know the statistics both in terms of media consumption and economic trends. Vin’s posts go further and provide a very clear and cogent analysis of the why.

Why the lack of response? Mark quotes Scott Karp or Publishing 2.0 who said on Twitter:

…(there’s) a lot of searching for a new model that validates all of the old assumptions about the practice of journalism.

Mark expands on Scott’s comment in his own post:

It seems to me, that encapsulate a lot of what Vin is writing about, as well as a lot of the current angst (and blindess) that prevails in the newspaper industry. The idea that things will be all right once the economy picks up, or once someone (else) figures out this online thing is still fairly rampant in a lot of the mediascape. So is the idea that newspapers only need to find a way to keep doing what they’ve always done and everything will be okay.

Vin sees not a Dark Age for American journalism but a “Gray Age”. Amy Gahran, writing at Poynter doesn’t agree.

It seems to me that the nature of news and journalism are transforming. It’s not just about the “news business,” and definitely not just about “newspapers.” It’s possible that the era of traditional journalism may be on the wane — but does that mean that people will do without news or information? As I wrote last week: I don’t think so.

On another post at Poytner, Michelle Ferrier echoes Vin’s call for customisation and greater relevance:

At its core, what Crosbie states is that news values are changing — what used to not be a story now is a story, to someone. It’s this long tail of highly diverse, niche content (often produced by community members) that newspapers should be concerned about, rather than getting the right story mix on a dying page 1A.

It is like the famous comment that if all the deer have guns, you better get into the ammunition business. Most newspapers should radically shift to focus on their unique selling point: Local information, and build a platform (or multi-platform strategy) on which staff and the community can co-create news that suits their needs.

08.21.08
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Howto: Geo-tagging photos for an easy map mashup

Next month, I’ll be heading to the US to travel across the country and to talk to ordinary people about the issues that are important to them in the presidential election. I did similar trips for the BBC in 2000 (that’s me behind the floppy hair) and 2004, and I often credit the BBC’s Steve Herrmann for encouraging me to blog. This time I’ll be travelling with James Ridgeway and the Guardian Films team. Jim and I will be vlogging, blogging, Twittering and Flickring our way across the States. I’m keen to geo-tag as much as possible to give people another way to follow the story.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, both in terms of miles and in terms of the journalism so I’m looking for all sorts of time-saving ways that we can give the kind of rolling road trip coverage that is expected in the age of internet journalism. I want readers to feel as if they are there with us in the car. I plan to use Twibble mobile and Twittervision to geo-tag our Twitter updates. That’s tomorrow’s work.

Today, I’ve managed to figure out a way to easily tag and post all of my photos. I’ll be using a Nokia N82, which has an amazing 5-megapixel camera, brilliant (in every sense of the word) xenon flash and built-in GPS. Right before Suw and I left on our walk last week, I discovered the Nokia Location Tagger application. It automatically adds geo-data to the EXIF file of your photos. Nokia recently stopped work on the application, but there are rumours that it will be added to an upcoming firmware update for the N-series. UPDATE: Ricky Cadden, from Symbian Guru, says that the firmware has been updated. I’m still hunting for the setting to enable it, but it’s there.

UPDATE 2: Ricky comes up with the goods and how to enable geo-tagging with the updated firmware:

The setting is admittedly a bit hidden, you should open the camera and then press the left softkey to open the options submenu, and go into the settings. There you will be able to activate the geotagging feature. You can confirm this as a small satellite icon will appear in the bottom left corner of the camera viewfinder, so that you can easily see whether or not you have a good GPS fix.

It took from a few seconds to almost a minute for the Location Tagger application to acquire a location. I used assisted GPS, which triangulates using geo-data from mobile phone masts (cell towers) to help increase the speed and precision of the GPS. UPDATE: Ricky also said that the A-GPS works slightly differently in the N82 and other new S60 devices, using the data connection to off-load positioning tasks to a server to speed the GPS lock. The positioning information embedded in the photo files turned out to be scarily accurate, showing the outlines of churches where we took photos.

My next challenge was how to easily get the embedded geo-data into Flickr and out of the EXIF file. When I first uploaded photos, I found I had to cut-and-paste the geo-data from the additional EXIF data in the photos. That was too cumbersome. However, Flickr has a not quite, but just about, hidden setting to ‘Automagically import GPS information as geo data‘. Tick the box ‘yes please, that would be lovely’, and you’re laughing. I can even upload directly to Flickr from the N82, although my Pay-as-you-Go data tariff quickly becomes pay-through-the-nose so I rarely do that unless I’m near a WiFi hotspot. I usually wait and upload from the phone via USB cable to my computer.

With that problem solved, the photos were plotted on a map. You can now see an extra ‘Map’ option below each geo-tagged photo.

Flickr with geo-tagged informatioin

Also, at the bottom of your Flickr photo page, you’ll see feeds that have geo-data embedded in them, a geoFeed and a KML feed, the latter which can be used on Google Maps and Google Earth. (A Google Maps representative told me that a browser-based version of Google Earth is on its way, although it will initially only work in Internet Explorer.) UPDATE: Keir Clarke, from Google Maps Mania, says: “A browser-based version of Google Earth is already available. It isn’t restricted to Internet Explorer but is restricted to Microsoft operating systems.”

GeoFeed and KML feeds from Flickr

Now, this will show you the last 20 items in your full feed, and I will be travelling for more than a month and hope to shoot hundreds of pictures. How am I going to create some kind of archival map? Adam Franco has developed a wonderful script to generate a KML file from an entire Flickr photo set. Thanks Adam, it’s a brilliant piece of work with some basic options. You’ll end up with a KML file based on the name of your set. You can then upload the KML file to your server and either use Map Channels or Google My Maps to generate the map.

If you only want the most recent photos, you can just use the KML or geoFeed from Flickr and use that URL. If you only care about the last 20 photos in a set, you can get a geoRSS feed simply by adding &georss=1 to the end of the feed URL. Google My Maps even has an import feature if you can’t host the KML file yourself. (Or for some reason the powers that be won’t give you access to a server. Not as if that ever happens.)

You can choose whether you want a satellite or map view. If you can’t use an iFrame in your CMS, throw it into a widget on Widgetbox. You can usually find a code format that your CMS will like (or allow). And voila. You now have lovely map ready for embedding using an iFrame. These are pictures from our recent walk along the Offa’s Dyke Trail.


View Larger Map

08.08.08
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Multi-platform thinking: Focus on users

It’s been three years since I first heard Ulrik Haagerup speak. He helped transform a regional newspaper to a multi-platform business, or media house as he called it. If US newspapers want a model for a multi-platform business, they have a good model in Denmark. He helped transform Nordjyske from a sleepy regional newspaper to a local 24-hour television channel, a radio station, a website and a premium SMS business. How do they juggle the demands of these multiple platforms? They focus on the exclusive strength of each platform and what service it provides to users. From his address to the AOP in London in 2006.

They now have a multimedia newsroom. They don’t have newspaper reporters or radio reporters. They have reporters. They create story for all media, but not all stories are created for all media. He broke it down this way as media and their strengths:

  • TV- feelings
  • Radio- here and now
  • Web- searchable and depth
  • Mobile- everywhere
  • Traffic paper- find time
  • Weekly- to everyone
  • Daily- stops time

I heard Ulrik Haagerup speak at an IFRA event the year before, and he broke down how they would cover a breaking news story. The focus was on the platform closest to the user. If a large lorry (truck) crash, closed a major roadway, they would send a breaking news alert to their premium SMS subscribers while they provided a breaking news alert on the web, TV and radio networks as they scrambled a team to the scene. They provided live video and post a story on the website as soon as possible. The focus was on the user, not the platform.

Why do I recap this story? The Philadelphia Inquirer started quite a furore yesterday after a memo saying that they were going ‘print first’ for their investigations and enterprise stories. Managing Editor Mike Leary:

Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print.

‘Print first’? Is this a retro-grade step? Steve Outing called on the industry: Don’t go backward, newspapers!

What’s long held back the newspaper industry and gotten it in the current mess has been holding back online innovation that might impact the legacy product (print). The kind of serious innovation that might have avoided the turmoil we’re now seeing among newspapers (especially larger metros like the Inquirer) could only take place with an attitude of “Let’s completely forget about the print edition and just try to build the best damn online service possible.”

Steve quoted Jeff Jarvis who said on Twitter:

Insanely, suicidally stupid. If we keep out the gas stations, we’ll force them to ride horses, damnit.

Jeff expanded on his Tweet with a post: A stake through the heart of the has-been Inquirer. Steve Yelvington doesn’t think that holding exclusive stories is the problem, but he takes issue with the ‘us versus them’ tone of the memo. This isn’t multi-platform thinking. As Steve says:

Our job is to serve the public, not advance one medium and oppose another.

A publication plan for “signature investigative reporting” should be one that’s designed to bring the largest possible group of people into the strongest possible engagement with that piece.

But even more than that, the memo drew the print newsroom into opposition to the website. Steve added: “In his memo, Leary wrote: ‘We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now ….’ Well, gee. That’s so nice of you. Us and them, the great divide.” That is a retro-grade step. There are no print reporters, radio reporters or online reporters in a multi-platform world. As Ulrik says, we’re reporters. Period.

Howard Owens doesn’t think that it’s necessarily a bad idea. Online news still hasn’t developed a business model that will sustain current newsroom operations.

Even while penetration/circulation declines have been beguiling to the industry, they didn’t begin with the internet. There is something larger, sociological, or potentially a problem with journalism itself (as I’ve said before), that’s going on.

It might be foolish indeed to expect online to save American journalism, given those trends. So why insist now that a metro newspaper must, must put its entire edition online?

I agree with Howard that we shouldn’t shovel content from one platform to another, and it’s right to understand the economics of the platforms. I think a successful multi-platform strategy will focus not only the economics of the platforms but user needs. Meet the needs of users by leveraging the unique strengths of multiple platforms and one can start to see the basis of a successful information business. The Inquirer move, especially when read in full, retreats in areas of key strengths for online and looks like a defensive strategy. The memo continues:

But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand. … For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson.

In that light, the button has printed on it ‘Self-destruct’.

08.07.08
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Become a better citizen, journalist

Andy Dickinson has posted this thought-provoking illustration on his blog. To sum up the illustration: The community feels used. The audience feels ignored, but the journalist? “I got what I needed.” Andy promises more thoughts soon, but the post alone is a great beginning for a conversation.

Maybe the problem isn’t about creating citizen journalists but re-awakening the citizen in journalists? Steve Yelvington has often mused that possibly one the unintended consequences of the professionalisation of journalism is that we’ve become isolated from the communities that we serve. Put succinctly, he said:

Arrogance is the cancer of professional journalism, and we need to stop it.

A few years ago, colleagues asked me why bloggers responded to my interview requests when they had trouble getting a response. The problem was, they were often sending out form e-mail interview requests and treating bloggers, usually ordinary people, as if they were members of government or industry spokespeople. I usually started my search for a blogger through a blog search engine like Technorati. When I found a relevant post, I would quote the post and ask them if they wanted to join a discussion about the topic they had blogged about.

I also use Creative Commons licenced pictures in Guardian blog posts (Attribution licence that allows for commercial use). Unless, I’m really pressed for time, I send the Flickr user a short note and a link. They always thank me for being a good member of the community, and the sometimes even blog about the post. I’ve acted in good faith, and they have reciprocated by flagging up their photo on a Guardian post. We can be good members of both virtual and real world communities, and I think it’s one of the things that can rebuild journalists’ relationship with the people formerly known as the audience. Becoming better citizen journalists might just save professional journalism.

07.29.08
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NPR’s On the Media and ‘Comments on Comments’

As I’ve mentioned before, National Public Radio’s (US) On the Media is part of my weekly podcast diet. It was an interesting look at three different views on internet comments on articles and radio programmes. Host Bob Garfield interviewed This American Life’s Ira Glass, ‘professional writer and critic’ Lee Siegel and Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant. It spawned a round of very interesting blog posts and comments – Comments on comments on comments, as Jeff Jarvis put it. It soon spilled out onto Twitter from with an interesting discussion between Jay Rosen and Kevin Marks.

Kevin Marks comments on NPR's On the Media

Jeff says:

But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.

The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published.

And I have to agree with Jeff that it’s a bit rich for Gawker to be arguing against comments on newspaper sites. On the Media linked to the post, and Gawker sounds like many in the newspaper industry who pine for a simpler time when newspapers enjoyed a near monopoly when it came to people’s time and attention. Channeling their inner newspaper nostalgist, Gawker says:

Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.

Of course, comments are OK on Gawker because they’re a blog, they argue. Might the mighty Gawker be a suffering a crisis in ComScore with all the competition?

Of the three points of view, I almost said Amen out loud as I travelled on the Tube when Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant said, that she was surprised that newspaper are still having this conversation.

It’s not the Wild West. I don’t believe in putting comments on every story. … I thought we had this (conversation) in 2002, and papers are getting in this conversation and acting surprised that there is this ugliness out there.

She then goes on and lays out a considered approach to comments and communities online. After the Virginia Tech shooting, they originally put up their standard message board. They took it down when it devolved into a loud discussion about gun rights and replaced it with a tribute site from Legacy.com (in the interest of disclosure, a good friend of mine works for Legacy), a site that powers the obituaries of several newspaper sites. The message boards are moderated by Legacy.com, and she said that the tribute site is still active.

Derek Powazek also wrote an excellent post criticising the On the Media segment. The main problem he saw with the piece was that Bob Garfield “lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal”. He says:

Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness. …

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem.

I’m with Derek. The media never focus on positive communities online, but it’s not just the media’s coverage of online communities that needs to improve. Most online communities hosted by media companies could use some improvement, but as Derek points out, there are tools and a lot of experience out there. Unfortunately, most of it is either outside of media organisations or was lost when digital departments at news organisations were gutted after the dot.com crash.

Some of the solution to improving online communities and conversations on websites is using the best technology, but there are also content and culture issues to be aware of. Kevin Marks shares wisdom and lessons learned about online spaces. For people who are part of internet culture, some of this is well known, but it’s not common knowledge in media companies. (I’m fortunate to work with one of the best in the business, Meg Pickard, our head of communities at the Guardian.) Kevin highlights some great work done in terms of online communities and some common traits of those communities that don’t work:

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.

News websites were never a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition, especially in today’s distributed world, and in the rush to build communities so that they will come, news oganisations are building the spaces but sometimes not preparing for when people come. Get enough people together online or offline, and not all of the experience will be positive or pleasant. The response shouldn’t be to shut down the community and bar the door.

News organisations need to look outside of their immediate area of experience and find communities that have worked and learn from them. This isn’t an area of blue-sky experimentation. There is a lot of experience and expertise out there. With a lot of this, news orgs will just have to look beyond other news orgs. There’s a big world out there on the internet, but it’s not always scary.

UPDATE: As Jay Rosen says via Twiter: “Jeff Jarvis tells Bob Garfield to join the conversation, and points out how many people online did the homework he didn’t.” Jeff highlights not only posts but excellent contributions from Doc Searls and Tish Grier in his comments. There is a lot of history to be learned from, and news organisations don’t need to re-invent the wheel or feel that they are starting from scratch.

In defence of news orgs, I not only believe but have said publicly, that when the media adds community features, they need to be ready to manage that community from day one because they already are dealing with large amounts of traffic. They often run into teething problems that most communities don’t reach until much later.

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07.28.08
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John Zhu’s top tips for encouraging cultural change

After I responded to John Zhu’s post about battles lines in the recent ‘curmudgeons’ versus young journalists flap, John left several thoughtful comments. John said in his first comment:

I’ve found that the only way to defeat the resistance and win over the skeptics is to keep at them and continuing to engage them. Can it be frustrating as hell? Yes! Does it always work? Of course not! But it works more often than if you just give up. Treating skeptics as your enemies will in fact turn them into enemies.

I’ll admit it. I first bristled a bit at John’s comment, but as I recommend to other journalists, I never respond to a comment in anger. I bristled because as I said in response:

If there was a moment where I stopped short reading your post, it was because I felt it was a call for digital staff to keep putting out more effort to engage than sceptics. Yes, it’s still the reality we live in, but it’s not a fair or realistic expectation for digital staff to be more magnanimous, especially when we’re often in the weaker political position in our organisations.

And I drew a distinction between sceptics and obstructionists, saying: “I don’t even see this as sceptics versus digital natives conflict. Journalists are all to some extent paid sceptics. I see this as a problem with obstructionists.”

I’m glad I waited to respond until after we had exchanged a few e-mails, and I had a chance to understand where John was coming from. He responded with some really good advice on how to win over the sceptics and not only achieve short term goals but encourage cultural change. It’s a great comment, well worth reading in full. He gives a specific example of project he worked on and the lessons he learned:

  • Become intimately familiar with the processes that you are trying to change before changing them.
  • Be sure to get input from the people who will be most affected by the changes you’re considering.
  • Do your homework on your plan. The more detailed, the better. Vague pronouncements tend to draw more skepticism for being impractical. Play the role of the skeptic and assault your plan for all its shortcomings so you can anticipate some of the criticism and devise solutions/responses.
  • As much as possible, pitch your plan from the perspective of how it will benefit the people who will have to change their routines to make it work. The biggest motivation anyone has for changing their routine is how it will help him/herself (aside from the “do this or your job is in jeopardy” thing, which is a threat, not a benefit). Your plan’s main goal may not be to benefit those people, but as long as it gets their support, who cares?!
  • Be willing to make some compromises as long as they don’t jeopardize the major goals of what your plan is trying to do.

Thanks John for sharing some really good advice.

I think one of my biggest challenges in the last few years has been shifting from a journalist with licence and autonomy to innovate to being an editor with management responsibilities. I’m going to keep these tips handy.

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07.26.08
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‘Brick walls let you show your dedication’

I thought I had shown this video to Suw. The link is probably in her inbox, but she hadn’t seen it. And I hadn’t watched it the whole way through. But when I saw the story that Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch had died from cancer, we sat down and watched it together. What a loss in so many ways, but his ‘Last Lecture’ is such a gift from a talented and dedicated teacher, husband and father. It’s an hour and 16 minutes long, but it’s worth every minute.

I took two things away from the video. One, I’m even more dedicated to enjoy every minute that I have with friends, family and with Suw. Condolences to Randy’s wife, children, friends and colleagues.

Two, Randy said several times that brick walls give you the opportunity to show how much you want something. Sometimes in my work as a journalist, I feel frustrated as I push against brick walls. The simple equation for calculating work is:

Work = force x distance

Sometimes, when you’re pushing against the brick walls, the equation looks like this:

Frustration = force x resistance

And sometimes it seems that frustration reaches an infinite level because the resistance increases in direct proportion to the amount of force applied. But throughout Randy’s talk, he kept coming back to the ‘head fake’, the Jedi mind to help you achieve your goals. For example, his team has worked on a programme called Alice that will ‘trick’ students into learning computer programming. They will learn programming through telling a story. I am hoping to download it myself, and Suw is planning on showing it to our niece. It sounds like a truly great professional legacy that he is leaving.

Thanks Randy for reminding me to focus on my dreams and dedication and not the obstacles. I’m taking stock of my dreams and thinking new ‘head fakes’ for the dreams that I am working on now. Bis vivit qui bene vivit

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07.24.08
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Local can work, complete with facts and figures

In the recent round of virtual mud-slinging in the ‘curmudgeons’ versus digital journalists, one of the arguments by way of assertion is that hyper-local doesn’t work. It is, of course, a reductionist argument, lumping together a wide range of strategies. A lot of the assertions are short on facts, but Vickey Williams at the Readership Institute highlights two dailies that are succeeding in creating local community. From the Bakersfield Californian:

My thought is that it’s because this paper lives up to its role as an essential connector and network builder. Some stats from Molen this week: 1,192 individual Bakersfield.com blogs launched since the newspaper’s site began hosting weblogs two years ago this month; 314 updated within the last three months. Add in the newspaper company’s nine other sites (including MasBakersfield, NorthwestVoice, NewToBakersfield; and their newest, RaisingBakersfield.com) and the number goes to 2,780 blogs launched, of which 655 have been updated in the last three months.

That community content represents about 18 percent of Bakersfield.com’s traffic and 25 percent of total traffic throughout the local network of sites, Molen said. “It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us.”

Another interesting metric is the number of people who have created public profiles in the company’s online social network, and in doing so, essentially endorse its brands. For Bakersfield.com, the number is 16,792; across all 10, it’s 31,868.

I would be curious to see their frequency numbers. What is the average frequency of their visitors? Is it better than the average visit of two pageviews per visitor per month?

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