Category Archives: Media 2.0

06.30.13
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Journalism innovation: A team effort

At the recent release of the Reuters Institute Digital News report, I got to catch up with an old friend and colleague, Alf Hermida. Alf and I worked together on the BBC News website back at the beginning. He was there right at the start and I joined not long after as the BBC’s first online journalist posted outside of the UK. It was a golden age of digital journalism, a rare opportunity to work for was was essentially a well-funded start-up inside of a big company. We had the resources (not limitless by any means) to experiment. We had the freedom and autonomy to really push the boundaries and create a new medium, and we had a team of managers, designers, developers and journalists all focused on one thing: Creating the future of journalism.

From 1998 to 2005, I enjoyed doing frontline journalism innovation with the BBC whilst based in their Washington bureau. We used big stories like presidential elections, the Oscars and the coverage after the 9/11 attacks to try new techniques including letting our audience set the agenda, 360 degree panoramas, webcasts and blogging. Long before smartphones and widespread mobile data, I made sure that I could take online journalism out from behind the desk and into the field. We were doing social and mobile journalism long before they were future of journalism buzzwords.

My role at the BBC in Washington was one of a number I’ve had where part of the job was to create a new position and work with my managers to figure out how it fit into the rest of the organisation. That last bit is really key and possibly the most challenging part of the innovation positions that I’ve had. As digital technology has become easier, more accessible and lighter weight, developing innovative journalism projects has become much easier, but the process of integrating innovation back into the beast is still hard work.

When I was in Washington, integration was a easier for a number of reasons. The Washington bureau of the BBC was exactly the right place to develop the position: It was small enough for me to easily work with my radio and TV colleagues, but well resourced enough that they had the time to work with me. I also contributed to radio and television coverage so it seemed natural that my radio and TV colleagues contributed to online coverage. The position developed into a multi-platform one organically.

The other thing that really worked at the BBC News website was that innovation was central to what we did and was driven by innovative managers. It wasn’t about sitting in Washington coming up with crazy dot.com era ideas, it was more about working collaboratively with editors and colleagues in London to refine and execute their and my ideas. One of the keys to the success of the BBC News website was its methodical way of testing and refining digital reporting and interactive presentation techniques. We had metrics for success and we built on the techniques that met those metrics.

I also learned what doesn’t work. In 2003, I was asked to do an innovation project in which I would be a backpack multi-media journalist. I had a digital video camera and I was supposed to help produce multi-platform video pieces. I had done video work before, but there is a long, steep learning curve between setting up a camera for webcasts or doing simple online video packages and shooting packages of sufficient quality for the main BBC news programmes. I did learn, however, and the video did reach the quality where it could be mixed into traditional packages. The big problem wasn’t the video but the lack of a process to use that video. The BBC was years away from multi-platform commissioning. A senior colleague suggested that we should have worked directly with a single programme, and we should have. That would have made things much easier and more successful. It would have more effectively integrated innovation into the traditional workflow in a much more manageable way.

The very next year, I blogged the 2004 election based on a suggestion from my managers in London. It started out as a test during the political conventions, and it grew and grew until I carried on through election day. It was a roaring success and it lead to my work in social media journalism for years to come. It was successful because it had a lot of support from London and my only regret, looking back, is that I didn’t simply carrying on blogging from Washington. However, I came to London in 2005  to write a strategic white paper on blogging which fed into a lot of other efforts across the BBC including efforts by BBC Scotland. Not long after, a blogs steering committee and blogs pilot was launched.

I soon realised that innovation works when it’s integrated into the organisation. I’ve had projects where, in essence, I’m been tasked with being innovative but had no real way to connect with colleagues. Predictably, while these projects might have been interesting, they didn’t have a lot of impact, either with the audience or with the rest of the organisation.

Having an innovation position sounds great on paper, but unless that position is properly integrated, it is unlikely to deliver the results the organisation wants. And from a career progression point of view, innovation positions often don’t have a clear chain of command and rarely have much advancement potential. It might sound great to be outside of the org chart and have the chance to break institutional logjams, but it rarely works. If you’re the new hire, you simply don’t have the political capital to break through the cultural blockages that have prevented the company from getting to where they want to be. In a sense, you are an innovation-shaped sticking plaster, you’re not the shot of antibiotics that’s really needed to change the direction of the organisation.

Fortunately, some things have changed in the three years since I last worked on staff at a news organisation. Digital teams have been built, through a lot of hard, persistent work. And I have deep respect for friends and fellow travellers who have fought the battles and paved the way for real, meaningful progress. But whilst I look back at my time with the BBC News website as a golden age of digital journalism innovation, I know that  those organisations that have integrated innovation are now entering a new era where the gains will be more durable.

When you’re filled with enthusiasm and dying to get projects moving, working through such cultural and organisational issues is maddening. But over the last few years, I’ve worked with some organisations that have focused not just on innovative projects but also on changing their organisations. This is going to unleash even more innovation and a new golden age, and I can’t wait to be a part of it.

02.22.12
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Social media: One-to-some communication that needs amplifiers

Ethan Zuckerman had a great insight yesterday at the Knight Foundation event looking at the information needs of communities.

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/andrewhaeg/status/172021672419926016″]

Ethan pointed to the coverage of Tunisia and how the video of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation was uploaded to Facebook, one of the few such sites still accessible in Tunisia. Exiled Tunisian Sami ben Garbia covered the early stages of the revolution on her personal blog and also Nawaat.org, but Ethan noted at the time that there was precious little coverage, especially in the US. The video and story of Bouazizi’s self-immoltion was then picked up by Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera became the amplifier.

In the early days of social media, social media an traditional media were portrayed in conflict. In the US, the mainstream media became referred to as the lame-stream media by some bloggers, usually by bloggers on both the right and left that were frustrated that traditional journalists didn’t present the world as viewed through the bloggers’ partisan prism.

However, as both social media and traditional media have evolved, a complex, symbiotic relationship of filtering and amplification has developed. It’s a great insight, and I think one of the biggest challenges for all of us as Ethan has been pointing out for years is to seek views outside of our own circles. That’s a fascinating challenge for journalists. How do we open up echo chambers rather than amplify them?

02.20.12
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Journalism: It’s about people

It’s not often when in the flood of social media about journalism a new theme comes out so clearly, but today, the theme I’m hearing is about people. Steve Yelvington, of Morris Publishing in the US, flagged up this post by his colleague, Derek May, an executive vide president at the group. Like John Paton‘s Journal Register Company, Morris is embracing a digital first strategy, but May quoted Billy Morris at length of the challenge facing his company, well known challenges. Morris said that “digital first” was a good first step, but he announced a new strategy: “Audience First”.

What does “Audience First” mean? It means the people come first. What the people want in digital form, we provide in digital form. What they want in print, we give them in print. And what it takes for businesses to reach the people, we provide – both print and digital.

They are setting ambitious audience growth targets, to double their news audience and quintuple their “total audience”. They believe that:

In the digital era, doing a good job on news gets you only a very small slice of the digital audience.

This is really interesting, and as a journalist, it’s something that I’m going to have to digest. On one level, I understand perfectly what he means. The newspaper has always been a bundle that included a lot more than what I might call public service journalism. I guess it begs the question: In a digital era, what is the bundle of information, products and services that creates a sustainable business to support itself, including public service journalism? It’s a fascinating, platform agnostic way to frame a solution to the problems facing news organisations right now.

I’ll tell you another reason why I like the idea of Audience First. In the near term, the next five years, at newspapers, print and digital will still have to co-exist. As much of a digital journalist as I am, I know that simply shutting off the presses would require most newspapers to gut their existing news operations. You only have to look at what happened at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that went digital only and went from 165 journalists to 20. (Note, I’m not suggesting that digital first advocates, especially as I count myself as one, are advocating shutting off the presses.) A counterpoint to the Seattle PI is The Atlantic magazine, which sharpened both its print and digital offerings. In 2010, it turned its first profit and a decade, and in October of last year, The Atlantic announced that its advertising profits were up by 19%.

It takes a village

The next story of people-focused journalism comes from a former college classmate of mine, Cory Faklaris, who works for Indianapolis Star.

In the US, the newspapers that really have really taken an economic beating in the last seven years are the big city metros, and the papers in Philadelphia are a good case in point. The Philadelphia Inquirer, part of the Philadelphia Media Network, is up for sale for the fourth time in six years.

Chris Satullo at Philly public radio station WHYY worked at the Inquirer for 20 years. Satullo notes that another former ‘Inky’ reporter, Buzz Bissinger (name straight out of central casting) asked in the New York Times, “Who will tell Philadelphia’s story“. Satullo responds: The rest of us.

But, please, don’t waste too much breath asking the wrong question: What will happen to the ink-on-paper artifact called a newspaper? That one’s settled: Newspapers will shrink into a graying niche.

Your real worry should not be whether newspapers survive. What you should worry about is the future of newsrooms, those buzzing, resourceful dens of collaboration that make everyone who works in them better than they could be alone.

Satullo points out a truism, as true in the glory days of newspapers as it is now: Great journalism is collaborative. Amen.

Put the audience first regardless the medium, and win more of their precious time by not only giving them great journalism but engage them in doing it. This sounds like a winning strategy.

 

02.08.12
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Sky News and Twitter: Do news organisations trust their journalists?

With all the hullabaloo about Sky News’ new draconian Twitter policy, I am actually more interested in the why rather than the policy as it was reported by The Guardian.

  • No retweets of rival journalists or “people on Twitter”.
  • Stick to your own beat.
  • Don’t tweet about personal or non-professional subjects on their work accounts.

First off, “people on Twitter”? People on Twitter? This reminds me of the old debate we had about quoting bloggers years ago. Yes, a lot of blogs were personal musings, but experts blog about topics including the US Supreme Court, arms control and volcanoes, important if a volcano in Iceland shuts down your airspace. People on Twitter include US President Barack Obama (although usually a member of staff. Tweets from the president end with BO.), the Secretary General of Nato Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Noriyuki Shikata, a Japanese cabinet spokesman tweeting in English, providing at least the official view of what was happening at the stricken nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

A good journalist, such as Sky News’ digital news editor, Neal Mann, builds up a network of verified sources using Twitter just as any journalist does with more traditional sources. I follow more than 700 people on Twitter, and I can tell you sourcing information about almost all of them. Any journalist worth their salt knows the sources on their beat, and for savvy journalists like Neal, Twitter is just an extension of those sources.

Why would a news organisation do this in 2012? I can understand that they want to make sure that tweets by their journalists aren’t completely outside of their editorial process, but they shouldn’t be. What even precipitated this? This question is especially important when their digital news editor, Neal Mann, is the kind of exemplar of how a journalist should use Twitter.

When the Washington Post had a bit of a Twitter clampdown in 2009, it came after a bit a controversy with personal comments from then digital and feature managing editor Raju Narisetti. The Associated Press revised its Twitter policy last year specifically to address the issue of retweeting to include:

Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying.

And much as with Sky News’ policy, the AP says in its full policy (available in PDF form by the link above):

Don’t break news that we haven’t published, no matter the format.

Last week, I chaired a social media and journalism panel at Journalism.co.uk’s News Rewired conference that included Neal;  Katherine Haddon, head of online with English, AFP; Tom McArthur, UK editor of Breakingnews.com; and Laura Kuenssberg, business editor with ITV News. Laura summed up Twitter best practice succinctly:

If you wouldn’t say it on air, don’t tweet it.

Certainly there are some specific considerations for social networks, but frankly, this sums it up. If you can’t trust someone on social media, how can you trust them on air, on your site? There should be one standard of journalism regardless of the platform. Rather than clamping down on Twitter, why don’t news organisations incorporate tweets from their journalists more effectively? The Guardian does this quite effectively on its site. Why don’t broadcast news organisations selectively incorporate tweets from their correspondents in the on-screen crawl or ticker?

Fundamentally, this is down to trust. At The Guardian, when I was blogs editor, we allowed some journalists to publish their own blog posts directly to the site. With live blogging, you have to have trust in the blogger. It was a privilege earned by writers who produced clean copy quickly.

Instead of such self-defeating policies, why not train the staff and when they have proven themselves, then their Twitter accounts are incorporated directly in the site. You can also have it so that tweets only appear on the site when a special hashtag is used. There are so many practical, smart ways to deal with this rather than the retrograde repression that Sky News has chosen. When things like this happen, it says volumes about who is in charge and how little they trust their own staff.

Other posts covering this story:

 

 

02.03.12
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Liz Heron of New York Times: How to be distinctive in social media

I’m doing my News Rewired blogging a bit out of order because I’m also doing moderator duty.

Liz Heron, the social media editor for the New York Times, kicked off News Rewired.

She succinctly summed up the goal of the New York Times with social media as:

Engaging users without wavering from our high journalistic standards.

She started by talking about how social media had moved into the mainstream in newsrooms. In 2010, she and her team were focused on evangelising, but in 2011, her team was in demand due to events such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Some 400 New York Times journalists are on Twitter, and she said that 50 journalists had enabled the subscribe feature in Facebook. She said that a Times’ reporter reached out to Facebook users for a story about students and depression. The reporter interviewed dozens of people on Facebook and had a sidebar focusing just on the comments on Facebook.

She gave another example of using social media to enhance New York Times’ journalism. On the recent story that they did looking at labour conditions at Apple contract manufacturer Foxconn in China, they translated the story into Mandarin and released this on Chinese social media, gathering comments there that then supplemented the main story.

As social media has moved to the mainstream of journalism she said it was becoming more of a challenge to become distinctive. Adam Tinworth, who has an excellent live blog of the session, had this great insight from Liz:

The question is no longer “wether to engage” on social media, but how to distinguish themselves from  others doing it. And how do they scale as new platforms emerge?

In focusing on being distinctive, she said that they had to pick and choose from new platforms. She said that Google+ originally “flummoxed” them. She said Google+ had a “very exciting but very uncertain future”. However, they have found that Google+ has some deep discussions and a “potentially revolutionary feature” with Hangouts.

The Times is also evaluating Tumblr and Quora.

Her three tips for news organisation social media success:

  • Be strategic.
  • Be different.
  • Strive for meaningful interactions. “Don’t be content to skate on social media’s surface.”

The first question came from Darren Waters of MSN who asked how to measure success.

A lot of people will focus on traffic, but they were looking more at engagement metrics. She also said the Times asked:

Did we get something out of journalistic value? Were we there first with the story? Did we start an excellent conversation? Did we get our content out there in the global conversation?

 

02.03.12
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NewsRewired: Tom Standage of Economist ‘Digital is not a zero-sum game’

I’m at NewsRewired again doing a bit of live(-ish) blogging about some of the talks that I find interesting.

Everyone wants to be The Economist because it has managed to increase both its print and digital subs over the last few years, and unlike most publishers, it has see its readership and revenue grow through the recession. Speaking at Journalism.co.uk’s NewsRewired conference*, he gave some insights into its success.

In the current environment, for any publication that acts like a filter the noisier the media environment gets the better you do.

Standage also sees The Economist brand this way that if someone was stranded on a desert island and had to choose one publication so that they believe they are informed that they would choose The Economist. That’s a great statement of how The Economist sees itself.

Their attitude to digital is that it is not a zero-sum game. About a third of their print readers are also using their digital apps. From their own market research, they realised that they needed to cater to their readers who wanted a digital experience for two reasons.

  1. Readers see digital as more convenient. The biggest reason that readers give when they cancel their print subscription to The Economist is that they don’t have enough time to read it.
  2. In their own market research, currently, readers prefer print to digital by a ratio of 80% to 20%, but asking them what they will prefer in two years.

Standage says:

We sell this content bundle, this feeling of being informed when you get to the end of it. That is what we sell. That is essentially the proposition. You can still sell this in a mobile environment.

Some observations: How many other publications have the clarity about what they provide? How many other publications have the clarity of the value proposition they offer?

Standage also gives us this nugget of golden insight. In the past, The Economist’s archive was hidden behind a paywall. The result:

Before 98% of our content was invisible to Google.

They have shifted to metered paywall similar to the Financial Times and the replicated by the New York Times. Any reader on the web gets 5 stories a week free to read. The Economist’s traffic actually went up. Some pay for a digital only subscription, but print subscribers get access to the digital content.

The metered paywall plus all access to print subs is a great model. You get users used to paying for digital.

He added this caveat. “This will not work for everyone. You need to know who your readers are.” He said that such a model would be difficult for The Guardian that sells most of their print copies through newsstands, and he said that The Guardian  doesn’t know about its readers. The Telegraph is starting to build a database of reader information, but he sees The Guardian as behind in this effort. (Any Guardian folk want to take issue with that?)

He closed by saying that there is not one new model but many new models. However, we’re beginning to find some ideas that work. They might require a change to your publishing business – especially in getting to know your readers much more – but we have some elements of a working model.

UPDATE: Adam Tinworth has live blogged this session and adds other details, especially with respect to the media app economy.

* Disclosure: I conduct data journalism courses for journalism.co.uk

01.24.12
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Is a lack of trust really what ails newspapers? Not the British tabloids

I’m going to mix apples and oranges here a bit, mixing the US newspaper industry and the British industry. If you think that isn’t fair, then you can click away now.

Some have argued that the decline of newspapers has been down to a loss of trust. A couple of examples of that point of view. James O’Shea, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times said in 2008:

“(the) main problem journalism now faces is the lack of public trust in journalists.”

O’Shea feels that for newspapers to thrive and prosper they “have to figure out how to deliver journalism that makes the public believe we once again are a public trust, something of value and something they won’t hesitate to pay for.

When The Economist asked Jay Rosen last August what the biggest problem was with the news media in the US, he said:

Another example is the decline of trust. In the mid-1970s over 70% of Americans told Gallup they had a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the press. Today: 47%. Clearly, something isn’t working. But revisions to the code of conduct that has led to this decline would be seen by most journalists as increasing the risk of mistrust. I’ve tried to argue that the View from Nowhere—also called objectivity—should be replaced by “here’s where we’re coming from.”

The other problem he identified was that the bulk of revenues still came from print “but cannot provide a future”.

For those who argue that the decline of the newspaper industry is down to a loss of trust, I’ve never been convinced that this is the fundamental issue. It might be coincidental, but I’m not entirely convinced that it is causal. To me, the decline of newspapers is down to competition from other media for attention, disruption of display and classified advertising and changing media consumption habits. Did they move to other platforms for news because they had more trust or were those other platforms simply more convenient? Do people in the US trust TV news anymore than they trust print?

Roy Greenslade at The Guardian makes the point forcefully today that trust and reading a tabloid in the UK have little to do with each other. “Trust and the red-tops? It’s irrelevant to the millions who read them“, pretty much sums up his point. At the risk of quoting a bit too much from Roy, in terms of the trust=readership argument, at least in terms of print circulation in the UK, that doesn’t really match reality.

Yet, as the print sales figures show, those red-tops – The Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Star – together sold 4.2m copies even in the dismal sales month of December (with a probable readership of 12m plus readers).
To put that in perspective, sales of the other seven national titles – the middle market pair and five quality titles – collectively totalled roughly the same as the three red-tops.
In other words, though we might think trust plays a crucial role in the decision about media consumption, it is not the defining factor for the regular red-top reader.

To put this in stark terms, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun had a circulation of 2.5m, -6.85% YoY, -3.56 MoM, compared to The Guardian which had a circ of 230,108, -13.11 YoY but fortunately up 1.61% MoM. The Sun has more than ten times the circulation of The Guardian.

I’m not saying that I like this reality. Frankly, I’d rather that trust guaranteed financial success for newspapers, but sadly, the world doesn’t seem to work quite that way. The tabs are easily digestible entertainment, and they show their readers the world they want rather than an accurate picture of reality. However, to argue that a decline in trust is the cause of declining readership and the decline in fortunes for newspapers, doesn’t quite square with reality.

I’m not saying that trust and credibility aren’t important. They are core to my professional identity. However, when it comes to answering the business problems of newspapers, it’s probably down to a collapse in traditional sources or revenue rather than simply collapse in trust.

01.14.12
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Journalists: Create your own career

Richard Gingras, head of news products for Google, was talking about the disruption in the journalism industry at a recent seminar for Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford and made this observation:

Perhaps in journalism it will be like it was in music for a long time: there are a lot of people doing great stuff, but only a handful, the stars, will be able to make a good living out of it. Most will be doing it for a nickel and a dime, out of passion instead of profession.

There is no doubt that newsrooms will be much, much smaller in the future. At a future of news event at NESTA (National Endowment for Society, Technology and the Arts – an innovation NGO here) in London a couple of years ago, I threw out the figure that I thought there would be 40% fewer jobs in journalism than in the past. Charlie Beckett of the POLIS think tank at LSE disagreed. His figure? 80% fewer.

Low pay isn’t a huge change for local journalists, especially journalists just starting out. I made $2000 less than a first year teacher when I started as a journalist in a small town in Kansas. (Sadly, a first year teacher is a benchmark for low pay in the US.) Of course, my pay at the newspaper was high compared to some of the junior producers at local TV stations. A differential in pay isn’t new either, especially in TV, but increasingly in newspapers and other news organisations. People all assume that journalists make huge salaries, but that has always been only for a few – star columnists, television anchors and executive editors.

I won’t take issue with Gingras. I think he’s simply making an observation, and I made the same observation a couple of years back, around the time that I took a buyout from the Guardian. Furthermore, the star system is a fickle game. It’s media fashion, not journalism. I don’t want to pin my livelihood to being the media flavour of the month. I know how the media love to build up stars only to take equal zeal in destroying them in short order. I’ve seen the media eat its own over and over, and I have no interest in it.

Also, my primary interest in journalism is public service, and the media star system is built on totally different values with totally different priorities. Having said that, I’m honest enough to know that money isn’t made in offering a public service, just ask teachers. The real money is made by the media not public service journalism, and the media is about framing debates and entertaining readers with comment on the events of the day. Twas ever thus.

However, as my journalism professor Bob Reid told us:

Know what your price is.

A precious few get rich from journalism, especially public service journalism. At the end of the day, we all have bills to pay and personal goals, like a home and time with friends and family. You have to balance what the profession will provide and what you want from life. As 2012 starts, I’m asking myself a lot of questions about career-life balance.

Moreover beginning in the dot.com boom and continuing to this day, my digital skills have always been more valuable economically than my journalism skills. However, if there is one thing that I have learned since I took a buyout: I’m a journalist. I love it. My passion is still journalism, and not only journalism, but practically exploring the new opportunities created by digital journalism. I still get up every day excited about creating a new medium for journalism.

Gringas is right on two counts. Journalism is fuelled by passion, and an increasing number of journalists will struggle to make their living solely based on journalism. In the future, I think more people will do what I have done the past two years. Former colleagues don’t read our blog and don’t follow me on Twitter ask what I’m doing these days. My standard response is:

I’m doing things to support my journalism habit.

I’m frequently asked to write for free on someone else’s site, and I respond, when I write to write for free, I write on my blog. They say that it will be good exposure for me, and I can understand why it might be for some. However, most of these sites are comment sites. Their interest isn’t in public service journalism, and therefore, it’s not in my interest.

More broadly though, I realised years ago that I didn’t need someone to make me a star for me to have a career in journalism. When I was researching for the BBC how we could use blogs for journalism, I started to realise that not only could I take responsibility for my own profile and my own career, I should. I’m not naturally self-promotional, but I’ve never seen what I do here as promoting me. I’ve always seen my blogging as allowing me to talk about my passion for digital journalism.

It has meant that our blog is the centre of our business. As Suw often says, we don’t make money with out blog, we make money because of it. However, in the new world of post-industrial journalism, we’re going to be more responsible for our own careers, and we can rely less on the organisations that we work for to create opportunities for us. I say post-industrial journalism because we’re just suffering the same displacement that so many in the West have gone through in the post-industrial age. The news factories of yore are down-sizing, and mini-mills are taking their place. We’re going to have to take responsibility for our retooling and for nurturing our own profile. If that seems unseemly, I see my blog not so much as a single-minded exercise in career building. It has been really important in network building, and as I’ve navigated the wrenching changes, it’s been a lot easier with the friends and professional contacts I’ve made here.

This is all to say: Carpe diem! Some digital models rely on free content, and it might seem like a way to get exposure and build your profile. I’d still argue, set up your own site, a blog works very well, and take ownership of your own career. It’s hard work, just as hard as trying to stand out on the comment for free sites, but in the end, it can be a lot more satisfying and rewarding.

01.11.12
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Digital has changed reporting

Jay Rosen has an interview with Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton, who said in a recent column that the Post might be guilty of innovating too quickly, and as Jay highlights, Pexton says:

I am not a person who thinks the fundamentals of journalism have changed that much, despite social media. Of course it’s more conversational, engaging. And the online world has changed reporting somewhat, but not fundamentally.

I couldn’t disagree more. Certainly, there are reporting formats that haven’t changed much since the rise of digital. However, in saying ‘online’, Pexton is merely thinking of digital as the internet and thinking of the internet as nothing more than a publishing platform. I also think that he doesn’t see any change in reporting because he sees reporting as a fundamentally text-based project. Furthermore, reporting is part of the journalistic process, a very important part of it. It’s the raw material of story-telling, but digital has fundamentally changed how we tell stories. In short, he’s not thinking of digital as mobile or multimedia devices or services.

I’ve spent most of my career as a field journalist. I continued to report from the field as an editor at The Guardian, and I’ve seen a revolution in reporting in that time. Casting back to my first job at a local newspaper in the US, digital was already changing my job. I had a mobile phone then, although it was what we called in the US a bag phone. It had a simple modem, and we were testing how to use it to file. Our sports reporters used TRS-80 Model 100 portables to file stories from remote locations. Explain to me how that didn’t change reporting? This allowed reporters to remain in the field, report the story and file without having to read a story down the phone.

When I covered the 2000 US presidential elections for the BBC, we used satellite equipment and an small, inexpensive digital video camera to conduct live webcasts where we took questions from our readers around the world. Two years later, I covered the one-year anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks with colleagues. I shot video and edited it on my laptop, compressing it so I could file it over a modem to London. During the same assignment, I had an early mobile modem capable of a then blistering 128kbps, and I worked with my colleagues to cover the concert in Central Park. We took pictures with digital cameras, wrote the text and filed all from park before Billy Joel finished New York State of Mind. My colleagues told me that someday all journalists would work like this.

Then in 2008, my main reporting tool was my mobile phone. I used Twitter to bring readers along with me as I journeyed across the US with a Guardian Film team in the lead up to the election. I filed updates and pictures via Twitter. I could report and file pictures as people celebrated outside of the White House in the wee hours of the morning. It was a watershed moment for me. I didn’t have to leave the scene of story to keep reporting. Explain to me how that hasn’t changed reporting.

Beginning in November 2010, I began working with Al Jazeera, training hundreds of producers, correspondents and staff on how to use social, mobile and digital tools. Their work stands on its own as proof that digital has changed reporting.

Since 1996, I have worked as a digital journalist. I have never pushed change just for the sake of it but because that is where I knew my audience was going. They were going online. They were getting their news via social media and engaging directly with journalists and sources.

Many journalists have have been working to adapt to this change for a long time now. We’ve been fighting for a long time, and only recently, did I feel like the conversation was starting to move again. After a lot of innovation in the 1990s, we lost a lot of great young digital journalists to the dot.com crash. After rebuilding in the last decade, we sadly lost a lot of excellent digital veterans to the integration wars.

As former Sacramento Bee editor Melanie Sill said recently:

Most newspapers are stuck in the late 20th century formulas, scarcely varied across the country, for section concepts (even names) and types of coverage. These conventions, moreover, carry over into digital forms, and only in the past couple of years have we begun to see new forms made only for digital channels.

I can see green shoots again. Leaders are rising to meet the change rather than to rehash the tired arguments of the last 15 years. It’s heartening, and I’m starting to get the itch to get back into a newsroom after being independent.

I’ll agree with Pexton that we don’t pursue innovation just for the sake of change. As journalists, we pursue it because it can serve our audiences better, engage them more deeply and, with innovation on the business side too, generate revenue to support our journalism. In 2012, I’m looking for the next big challenge and for like minds to meet that challenge with.

01.09.12
by

Newspaper innovation: Not too much but too little

If you’re a newspaper editor, and you want some much needed inspiration, you’ll want to add the blogs of Melanie Sill and John Robinson to RSS feeds or daily reading, and follow both John and Melanie on Twitter. John recently stepped down as the editor of the Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina, and Melanie recently made a similar move, leaving the top job at the Sacramento Bee in California. John wrote an excellent post about rebuilding a newspaper’s relationship with its community last week, and in her most recent post, Melanie looks at newspaper innovation. It comes after the ombudsman at the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, agreed with some readers who thought the Post was innovating too quickly. (As someone who lived in Washington for seven years and considered the Post my local paper, it was always a schizophrenic place with a lot of digital innovation under Jim Brady while the print offices in Washington tried to change as little as possible.)

Melanie’s thoughts on the pace of innovation?

Most newspapers are stuck in the late 20th century formulas, scarcely varied across the country, for section concepts (even names) and types of coverage. These conventions, moreover, carry over into digital forms, and only in the past couple of years have we begun to see new forms made only for digital channels.Amid legitimate struggle in newsrooms to make this outdated formula work with vastly reduced staffs and greatly increased production demands, there’s not enough attention on creative breakthroughs — the kind of conceptual innovation needed today. What should a print edition do in a 24/7 news world? How is it differentiated from other platforms in content, format and organization?

Yes! Digital is different. It’s something digital folk have been saying since the 1990s. It’s not enough to shovel print content onto the web just because both print and the web are largely text-based. Just as reading a newspaper out on TV would seem silly (although there is some value in the newspaper reviews common on European television), simply copying text to the web was always an approach lacking imagination.

  • How is digital different?
  • What is possible in digital, on the web and via mobile, that isn’t possible in print?
  • How does this change audience expectations about news and information?
  • How do we meet those expectations?
  • How can use those differences to come up with new opportunities for revenue to support the work we do?

This is what I’ve been thinking about since I first became an ‘internet news editor’ in 1996. We’re at a pivotal time, and it’s great to see leadership from veterans like John and Melanie. I look forward to working with leaders like them in the future.