Common Sense Journalism

That was the week that was - without AP

2009-11-03T17:58:00.004-05:00

You can be sure the wire service will be watching closely, and maybe nervously, next week as Tribune papers do without as much AP content as possible.

As Phil Rosenthal, the Chicago Tribune's media watcher put it on his blog:

Some newspapers have determined that shared wire content that is available to readers from many other outlets is worth less to them than unique, proprietary content, especially online. Coupled with reductions in the space allocated for news in print, papers are weighing whether there’s the same need for Associated Press content as in the past.

Or to put it another way, once AP sells it to Google, why does anyone else need to buy it?

This just goes to highlight the tough spot AP really finds itself in. Don't forget, it was not that long ago, in August, that I was quoting Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg on her view of what the wire service should do. Unique content was not part of her vision:

Goldberg, asked if the Plain Dealer and similar papers might go without AP someday, said "it's possible." There's a basic disconnect, she said: "I want them to cover the really boring meeting at the Statehouse so my people don't have to." But, she said, AP wants to do bigger projects and enterprise "that I have neither the desire nor the room to publish."

I think we'll all be interested to see what conclusions Tribune reaches.

Bad news, good news -quick hits

2009-10-29T15:30:00.002-04:00

Ah, I love the Web. In one day you can find:

The bad news

Sam Zell says things are so bad in the business "nobody can survive."
This takeout on Demand Media that ought to scare the hell out of every journalist. Sure, Demand, known to more people as eHow, isn't doing big-J journalism. It's simply doing the kind of "refrigerator journalism" that for years has seriously helped pay the bills. Only it's doing it for $15 an article for writing, $2.50 an article for copy editing and 8 cents a headline. The scary part, though, isn't the prices per se. It's this observation from Jason Fell at Portfolio (which sounds eerily like the arguments I was making here about commodity journalism long before the bottom fell out):
But what jumped out at me while reading the Wired piece wasn’t Demand’s soaring profits. It was how co-founder Richard Rosenblatt (former CEO of Intermix Media, the company behind MySpace) thinks other media companies, which have been trying to increase the value of their content to at least match the cost of producing it, have the equation backwards. As he’s done with Demand, Rosenblatt said the trick is in cutting costs until they match market value for your content.
Chew on that for a while.

The good news

In my e-mail this afternoon comes this. File it under "score one for the good guys":
The Arizona Supreme Court has held "that if a public entity maintains a public record in an electronic format, then the electronic version, including any embedded metadata, is subject to disclosure under our public records law." This is the first state supreme court opinion in the country to rule that metadata is available for public review. This is a big deal, not only for access to metadata, but for electronic records in general. Special thanks to ASU professor Steve Doig for his assistance with the amicus brief. http://www.supreme.state.az.us/opin/pdf2009/CV090036PR.pdf

Daniel Gross writes in Slate that before we start filling in the grave on newspapers, we ought to take a closer look at their finances and how they are restructuring their business models so that subscribers pick up more of the freight. He makes some interesting arguments worth considering.

All in a day's reading.

Newspaper video cuts

2009-10-17T13:30:00.008-04:00

There is a lot of discussion about the state of "newspaper video" on the Yahoo newspaper video group after the decision by the Las Vegas Sun to pull the plug on the innovative 702.tv.

The general meme is that those long features and other innovative projects that draw critical acclaim, but not necessarily lots of viewers, are falling by the wayside and that the TV staples of breaking news - fires, accidents, news conferences and the like -- are becoming the standard fare.

This is not surprising, but misguided, though Chuck Fadley at the Miami Herald says hard news and sports drive the paper's video traffic.

But if you are doing that, all you are doing is competing with every other outlet in the market - in short, you are back to commodity news. And if you thought it was tough making a buck in the commodity news market when your tools are primarily paper and pen, it's a whole lot tougher in video where the equipment costs thousands of dollars.

One person writes that his newspaper, which went into video "with a vengeance," has cut back to one stringer and that if anything breaks, there is no money to replace it.

Dirck Halstead writes that video ad rates "MUST come up." Michael Rosenblum responds that the rates aren't coming up, that the problem is in the ad departments and that we have to radically reshape how we sell online ads.

They're both right. While earlier Pew data, for instance, still showed the heaviest use of online video to be at upper income levels, the latest shows no difference among income or education groups. But various types of video are likely to draw different audiences, some more valuable than others (think golf on TV), and there's no reason to think that, if sold correctly and with data to back it up, some video might not command a premium.

But that means knowing how to sell it and having the data and tools. And Rosenblum is definitely right that the problem is in the front office more than the newsroom. As I've worked with news organizations -- and I've said this before -- their ad and business sides are essentially moribund when compared with most newsrooms. Unlike a newsroom, they are even more intimately tied to a business model, and I'm not sure how you extract yourself from that, both psychologically and sociologically.

I don't think we can downplay the amount of managerial fortitude it takes to make this kind of change. You are screwing with people's livelihoods and, in many respects, asking them to jump into the pit with no guarantee where the bottom is. The money at this point, such as it is, is still to be made in selling ink on paper, not pixels on screen. Yes, it will change, but human reaction to such things tends to be a lagging, not a leading, economic indicator.

This pullback in video is not particularly surprising for two reasons:

the general pattern of technology adoption
the way too many newsrooms appear have managed it

In general, adoption of new technologies, especially information technologies, has been on a steadily upward curve, with the slope becoming even steeper with newer technologies such as the VCR, microwave, cell phone and Internet. (The telephone and airplane seem to have a dip or plateau in the graphs in that article, but that would seem to be more an effect of World War II.) But the technology adoption curve really isn't necessarily continuous bell curve, as Rogers posited. Some project a gap between the early adopters and the early majority. (See also part three of that series.)

The case of online video, especially news-related video, is further complicated because it is, for lack of a better term, a "secondary technology." It relies on still-developing underlying technology. It's only relatively recently that high-speed Internet has been available in most areas (and one can debate what we call high speed vs. the rest of the world), but the cost in rural areas is problematic.

There is continued debate over effective streaming technologies, especially in the era of high definition, and the devices on which to play such video remain limited. This is unlike the VCR, another secondary technology, which was a quick and relatively easy add-on (jokes about programming them not withstanding) to a stable underlying technology.

And even though the Pew data show widespread use of online video, that number is based on whether the person has ever watched a video sharing site. When you look at regular use, however, the numbers drop sharply (89 percent of those 18-29 say they watch videos, but just 36 percent on a typical day).

Truly widespread adoption, the kind that leads to the monetization and ROI needed for sustainability for organizations like newsrooms, is unlikely until online video is widely ported to existing TVs or to some kind of mobile device that improves on the current small-screen experience.

Having said that, I still see or hear of too many cases in newsrooms where things like video are embarked on without a rigorous thought and management process. (Newsrooms are not alone - a marketing director told me recently her organization had hired a social media firm. Why, I asked. Because everyone tells us we need to do it, she said.) As a result, as the one Newspaper Video list correspondent noted, they jump in with a vengeance, only to be disappointed. This digital age requires a more rigorous way of evaluating and managing. Four key points:

At the outset you should ask "why?" Also "how" and "what": Why are we doing this. What do we hope to accomplish or learn? (In the case of online video, it might be to learn workflows, define audience, understand the technology). How will we define success and what will we do if we don't have success?
Monitor: Who will monitor comments? Workflows? Cost vs. benefit? Content? The online production system is different from the old rigid get-it-to-press model (not to mention the added dimension of interacting with your audience). Effective monitoring is critical.
Measurement: There's an old business saying - you can't manage what you can't measure. So how will you measure? What will you measure? (Are total views critical, for instance, or is it time on view? Demographics? Psychographics?)
Manage: Did we reach our goals? If not, why not? What should we do about it - kill it or adjust it? Or redefine the goals?

None of this need involve ROI. In fact, smart organizations realize that to grow and expand, everything can't be about ROI (in pure dollars and cents, unless you want to get into gritty cost-benefit analysis).

We don't need to be quite so down in the dumps about "newspaper" video. But we do need to understand that many organizations jumped out without the rigor needed to evaluate it. As a result, the pullback also is likely to be overstated. But, then, that just seems to be the nature of the business right now.

Sanitized war

2009-10-15T12:35:00.003-04:00

Photo District News through Editor & Publisher reports that one of the commands in Afghanistan has issued a directive barring photos of dead or dying military members.

This follows the controversy over the AP's running a photo of a dying Marine.

AP says the Pentagon has the policy under review.

Way cool tech think

2009-10-12T20:06:00.003-04:00

Sure, it's just a concept for now. But all I can say to 10/GUI is find someone to build this!

Seriously, take a look at this concept video for a 10-finger computer touchscreen control.

My only fear - I never could play the piano. How much practicing would I need for this?

(Thanks to Zac Echola for the pointer.)

Usability of RSS feeds, social networking

2009-10-12T19:09:00.004-04:00

It would be worth your while to spend some time with Jakob Nielsen's latest "Alertbox" usability column.

In it he details research done to determine how people interact with corporate postings in feeds and on things like Twitter and Facebook.

Some interesting stuff:

Businesses that post too often crowd out the user's real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.
Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what's appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.
RSS updates were viewed as more trustworthy and as more "official" sources than social messages. Users were also more likely to check RSS feeds at work, whereas they mainly accessed social networks from home.

No great surprise, either, is the observation that users don't go rooting around for postings in the stream they might have missed -- they are content to pretty much stay with what's on the page in front of them.

With "social media" being the hot topic in newsrooms lately, there's a lot to chew on here.

Quote of the week

2009-10-12T11:02:00.003-04:00

Best quote I've seen all week is from Leonard Pitts in his column about using some common sense in the court fight over a cross on public land -- in the middle of nowhere in California -- that originally was erected as a memorial to World War I soliders:

Principle absent human compassion is just intellectual masturbation.

Google explains news SEO

2009-10-12T10:11:00.004-04:00

Want to know how Google performs search engine optimization on news sources. It's explained (sort of - not all the secret sauce is revealed) in this video:

Google's "webmaster channel" has other good things, too.

And specifically for publishers http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/

Convergence Newsletter - HD streaming

2009-10-10T15:55:00.001-04:00

Latest Convergence Newsletter: Edgar Huang details work in evaluating best HD streaming technology http://bit.ly/FQmbK (free)

Numeracy: Perils of rounding

2009-10-10T14:18:00.001-04:00

Over at The Slot, Bill Walsh has some good advice on not overdoing it when it comes to rounding numbers.

ACES Scholarships

2009-10-10T13:46:00.002-04:00

Hard to believe given the drumbeat of news, but there is still money in copy editing, especially if you're a college student. It comes from the ACES Education Fund, an affiliate of the American Copy Editors Society

The skinny

Deadline Nov. 15
Juniors, seniors and grad students interested in careers in copy editing.
Students graduating in 2009 and who have or will have full-time copy editing jobs or internships are also eligible.
Among the criteria used by judges are commitment to copy editing as a career, work experience in copy editing and abilities in copy editing, as demonstrated by examples and recommendations.
The big prize: the $2,500 Aubespin scholarship, named for Merv Aubespin, a longtime journalist, a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists and the “godfather” of ACES.
At least four other candidates get $1,000 each. All the winners will be granted free registration for the ACES national conference in April 2010 in Philadelphia.

Full details http://www.facebook.com/l/b89db;www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm or
http://www.copydesk.org/scholarships.htm

Questions? Contact ACES Education Fund secretary Kathy Schenck, kschenck@journalsentinel.com.

Seminal readings in the new age of journalism

2009-10-10T10:30:00.008-04:00

At a great panel discussion at the Columbia Social Media Club this week, I suggested four seminal readings that, if you read and understand them, you will be able to filter out so much that is white noise these days.

As I think about it, there really are six, and I keep coming back to them because I think they stand the test of time:

The Next Great American Newspaper (2003), David Gelernter
He was trying to promote his own way to organize the Web, but in the process Gelernter hits on what I think is the essential point of the Web -- "story" becomes a slice in time, not a silo of text. We still don't get this particularly well. If we did, it might well upend the entire way we do journalism. I've built a Newsplex simulation around this called the "Acme Widget strike." It takes participants through various phases of the story, starting with the initial word at 11 p.m. (story's probably quick text, some file photos, etc. .... going to the first plant to walk out in Ireland overnight (story - wire service text) ... to having a video crew at the plant gates in the morning (the story is the video stream, later broken up into clips - why do we need much text if we just display those clips on the front page or on a microsite devoted to the strike? But the real game-changer is that midday your best reporter gets a database that lists everyone on strike. So what is your "story" now? The old way would be to go out and interview a bunch of people and write a "story."

But in the new world the best "story" might be a map - mouse over each neighborhood and get a summary of how many are affected, maybe links to video interviews or short stories, etc. Think about things like Halloween decoration stories, etc. A map is your best "story." Do you have enough kahunas next July Fourth to front a mouseover map of the local celebrations on your site (barring nothing blowing up, of course), instead of the usual rivers of text from the wire service and warmed-over features you've done. After all, isn't that why most people are likely to be coming to your site for those few hours?

The News Diamond (2007), Paul Bradshaw
Bradshaw has proposed a model that will really help you conceive of how journalism might function in the social media age. Of all the suggestions I've read and considered, Bradshaw's has the most clarity and potential of all. Still, you'll probably have to read it a couple of times to get its full import.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable (2009), Clay Shirky
A lot of ink has been spilled over this already, and as with many of Shirky's writings, you'll want to read it two or three times and let what he's suggesting roll around in the recesses of your brain. The takeaway for me, however, is his discussion of what Dan Conover refers to as the interregnum. Shirky is the first one I've seen to really crystallize the idea that much of our "problem" or confusion right now is that we are in the middle of this unknowable period, where technology is advancing and unfolding at a pace really too rapid for us to absorb and understand it.

While this is often portrayed as a time of great business opportunity, and it is, reality is that it is also deadly for long-term business survival - you know, the kind of thing most people, including journalists, count on to get them at least part way to their retirement. Shirky points out that we don't know a lot about what happened during the last great communications interregnum either, the years after Gutenberg perfected his press until the modern form of the book was invented. It was a 50- to 70-year period of upheaval, not unlike that we are going through today (one wonders if the monks issued warnings as dire as some journalists have).

But the approximately 150-year period of stability (and ossification) we have had in the communications industry was unnatural. I suspect the meteoric change we have now will, at some point, level off a bit and we'll coalesce around some technologies, at least for a few years. It will never - at least in the foreseeable future - be as it was, but I suspect we'll advance in a series of stair steps, or plateaus, maybe lasting 20-30 years, where businesses will be built around a dominant technology but with the knowledge disruption is always possible.

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News (2009), John Temple
Temple certainly is not without a hand in the collapse of the "Rocky" and some of the overall boneheaded decisions and assumptions made in journalism. But not only does he come clean here and not try to make himself look like a hero or martyr, he provides a valuable look at the decisions and assumptions, why they were made and why they didn't work. A must-read for journalism management classes, but really for everyone to understand how things can go horribly wrong. The money quote: The following quote explains the dilemma newspapers found themselves in. “We were not used to the market telling us how things should be. We were used to telling people what we thought they needed and how they needed it,” is how a Scripps marketing exec put it. That has to change.

The Future of Journalism in a Distributed Communication Archtecture (1996), John Newhagen and Mark Levy
Newhagen and Levy were among the first to "get it" -- to understand where this all was going. The fashionable thing these days is to talk about editors, such as they are, really being curators, leading people to the best material available and putting it in context, etc. Here's what they wrote - in 1996!

Controlling the amount and content of news on the Information Superhighway (a.k.a. data compression) is a current hot button for journalists, and the function to which editors cling with the most tenacity. Journalists increasingly reassure themselves that even cyber-journalism on the Net will still need editors to tell "audiences" what is important. ...

However, information compression is not particularly well- suited as a data reduction technique in a distributed architecture such as the Net. Computer science and engineering are focusing on more efficient forms of filtering than compression for this architecture. That implies complex and potentially egalitarian power relationships between information managers and end users. This might be manifest in the role of a pathfinder rather than agenda setter, with this later function falling back to the user, whether editors like it or not. Editors derive their power from being able to say, "because of my position in the architecture you have to pass through me to find out what's important." On the Net the pathfinder might tell the user, "tell me what you need and I will guide you through this complex environment."

Editor as "pathfinder." Sounds amazingly like "curator" to me. Again, remember this was a decade before the true implosion and at least five years before newsrooms really felt the first heat (and them mistakenly reassured themselves after the tech collapse of 2001 that this wasn't a real threat).

You should go back and reread this article once every year or so because Newhagen and Levy pretty much said in a couple thousand words what everyone else blathers on about. The article was included in The Electronic Grapevine, one of those books I'd recommend be in your library.

(In fact, I'd recommend you check out much of Newhagen's work at the University of Maryland's Advanced Media Technology laboratory. I don't think it's gotten the recognition it deserves.)

The Meanings and Implications of Convergence (2003), Rich Gordon
We throw "convergence" around a lot, but Gordon sat down and dissected it, said what does it really mean? Using a two-point framework, convergence in technology and in organizations, he came up with eight key frames. Under technology fall convergence in content creation, distribution and consumption. Under organizations are convergence in ownership, tactics, structure, information gathering and presentation. Considered that way, it's a Rubik's Cube of possibilities. No wonder we have such a hard time getting all the sides aligned. This is another article you should read periodically, first to stay grounded but second to let all the possibilities and implications roll through your mind.

Gordon's work appeared in Digital Journalism: Emerging Media and the Changing Horizons of Journalism, another book that really should be in your library because the articles in it have legs.

Plus ...

Add to your library Hamlet on the Holodeck: the future of narrative in cyberspace (1997). Janet Murray got it before most what the new ability to link would really mean for storytelling. This book is too often overlooked and lost in all the lather that has followed. At times a bit dense, this book still is a road map for what followed.

And I'd recommend you bookmark Conover's 2020 Vision: What's Next for News. I think he gets it much more right than wrong, and I have a feeling not too long down the road this will be on my seminal writings list. We are headed to an era where the narrative bias of journalism will be severely modified, if not blown up. And if you'd scoff, remember, Epic 2015 (originally 2014) bought a lot of snickering when it came out, too. Who's laughing now?

Temple's inside look at what went wrong

2009-10-07T23:41:00.003-04:00

If you have not read John Temple's recounting of what went wrong at the Rocky Mountain News, you should.

(His thesis: Management, including him, kept thinking it was a newspaper company and failed to realize the competition was everything out there. Combined with old-line attitudes, such as thinking they could dictate what people wanted, managers/executives let their one-time cmpetitive advantage slip away.

Temple covers the waterfront, from the early ventures online (note one error, it was 1996, not 2006 as in his text), to the exile of online staffs because of union concerns, to the flip-flopping over what, exactly, the Web site was supposed to be.

Excellent for management classes, but there are things in here that about any upper-level reporting or ethics class could have a good time chewing over. And, as he says, much of this can apply to othe media, too.

(It's worth pairing this with Alan Mutter's dissection of what went wrong with the two news sites that journalists opened to compete with the Dener Post.)

Hartsville Today - RIP, but being reborn

2009-10-07T16:12:00.002-04:00

Hartsville Today, the almost 4-year-old community news service serving Hartsville in eastern South Carolina died on Friday when the Amazon server (and it turns out the backup) on which it was being run went RIP.

HVTD, as it was known, was one of the first projects funded by J-lab in 2005. In many ways, it was a success, having grown to 1,900 registered members and at least triple that in unique users in a market area of 20,000. The "cookbook" about creating the site (link in the right rail) has been translated into Russian, we are told, has been downloaded more than 3,000 times from our servers and has been linked to by Yahoo's You-Witness News site.

In some ways, it wasn't a success, having never been integrated into the operations of The Messenger, its publishing partner that, in the middle of this, was sold to Media General (research report here, Grassroots Editor, Winter 2008 (pdf)).

Now, Hartsville Today begins a new life. It is being rebuilt by Media General using the Expression Engine platform instead of Drupal, which was our original publishing system. Some things will be different; we're not entirely sure yet. Of course there will be some differences in filing, but we're still looking at things like pictures, calendar functions etc.

A page-holder should be up shortly, and the first phase of the rebuilt site should go up sometime next week.

So now we have some potential new research. HVTD was a vibrant community. Can such communities stay together given this kind of disruption and digital tragedy? What will it take?

We'll see.

Social Media and Journalism

2009-10-07T03:48:00.004-04:00

I'm sitting on a panel this week on social media and the future of journalism being sponsored by the Columbia Social Media Club. It should be an interesting time with the likes of Dan Conover and Jeff Elder.

The organizers sent out a bunch of questions, and Dan's already expounded on his in a "virtual interview" (figuring that we probably won't get around to all this), so let me take a crack at some of mine here, too:

How is the institutional knowledge of a newsroom different than the collective knowledge of your readers?

Well, let's start with these two assertions: at least half of your audience knows more about a story than you do, but two-thirds of them really have no clue about much outside their own little world. In other words, the collective and institutional knowledge are complementary. If you don't acknowledge a lot of people know more than you do, all sorts of bad things result. You tend to write down to your readers. You tend to ignore nuances and oversimplify. You might miss valuable information.

But it's also hard to ignore the value of the newsroom veteran who remembers the mayor's second cousin's son's daughter is the wife of that contractor who seemed to get that sweetheart contract out of nowhere. Unfortunately, a lot of that institutional knowledge has walked out of or been shown the door in the past decade. That's compounded by newsrooms' inability to effectively capture most of the information they gathered anyhow. Do you know any other business that leaves 90 percent of its raw material on the shop floor?

Part of the challenge is how to effectively acknowledge and use the audience to broaden and deepen our journalism while understanding that the institution does not give us license to think we are delivering tablets from the mountain.

It's a tough nut for journalists because for decades the reinforcement has been institutional. "Credibility," such as it was, was institutional, not transactional. (In other words, the fact that you were from the local metro in itself imbued a certain gravitas and credibility. Now, it's a "show me" situation where more and more that credibility comes from whether what you've done holds up to scrutiny.) Awards were - and still largely are - institutional: journalists judging journalists. You don't have a "People's Choice" awards for journalism, and even if you had, chances are they wouldn't have carried much sway in the industry.

When it comes to the public’s role in journalism, can the public be trusted without introducing bias?

I don't mean to be rude, but that's a dumb question. Can journalists be trusted without introducing bias? No, starting with journalism's narrative bias and its other ingrained biases, such as that existing institutions and markets are largely good, or at least better than most alternatives, or that "officials" carry more credibility than "the public."

It is questions like this that leave us mired in the journalistic equivalent of "I'm great, you suck." And that leaves us unwilling or unable to consider the nuances and multifaceted nature of things. Sure, the public has biases. Among them is the tyranny of the majority (which is why we have set up institutions whose jobs ostensibly are to protect the minority from the majority). The public also has valuable information and insight. But it takes work to filter it and evaluate it, hard work.

How do community bloggers fit into the larger role of online sites and media companies?

Ideally, they help broaden and deepen the information and debate. They broaden it by dealing with areas that a community's journalism institutions just can't, either through lack of resources or lack of conviction (sorry, but there are sacred cows in every community). They deepen it by bringing into the conversation people who have specialized information or who are just willing to spend the time and resources necessary to burrow deep into a subject.

What could be the possible role of the hyper-local news bureau?

Oh, I don't know. I tend to think hyper-local is over-hyped at least in the context of most communities. In a New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Atlanta, maybe it has a place. Those areas are so big they are almost like aggregations of little states anyhow. There it might make sense. It made sense in Rhode Island when the Providence Journal-Bulletin had a bureau almost every town. There have been debates about how effective the coverage was sometimes - whether it was more process than revelatory - and the paper has now severely cut back. But I think it had a place.

But in a city like Columbia, I'm not sure you have the resources to set up and manage such a system. First of all, the neighborhoods are smaller (maybe not geographically but in population) than in those larger cities. Second, If you use the old 90-9-1 rule, that means you probably have darn few people willing to help cover those areas. And then there's the reality of how much of a news stream you have coming out of those areas.

For instance, some of the students in my public affairs reporting class are covering a neighborhood, Washington Park, just south of The State newspaper. No one covers Washington Park, a lower middle-class enclave wedged in a commercial/industrial area. But in just a couple of weeks down there they've found that the neighborhood may lose the eponymous park that is the center of the community. And residents want speed bumps because they say speeding cars threaten their children - but officialdom keeps passing the buck (one of my students is getting a schoolin' on the arcane S.C. "state highway" system under which cul-de-sacs can be designated state highways). Now, those are good stories, but you're not going to have enough going on there to really develop a hyper-local presence. Do you throw several neighborhoods together? Well, maybe, but it's not like highly contiguous urban areas, so can you find a person or two in those scattered neighborhoods to really watch all of them effectively; and then how do you manage this network?

Hyper-ocal is an organic thing, really parallel to social media. It has to grow naturally and be nurtured. There may be a few areas where it will work; you may just have to monitor the rest to see if they ever reach "critical mass." In the meantime, it may be worth your while to reach out to other institutions such as schools, nonprofits, etc., that might be able to help with coverage or at least monitoring.

What roles in the newsroom could papers crowd-source? Would a micro-payment service work for rewarding help?

I don't know that you crowd-source roles as much as you crowd-source aspects of stories and information gathering. Crowd-sourcing can be effective when you have a large amount of information to ingest and relatively few internal resources to do it. Or when you have the need to put information through a really specialized filter. The former is what I call the "ant" method - unleash the anthill as was done in tracking down earmarks or dissecting the U.S. attorney firings. The latter - marshaling expertise - is what Fort Myers used in tracking down problems with city utilities.

Crowd-sourcing, hyperlocal, they're both there to be used when they make sense, and not used when they don't.

Do we miss the point of hyperlocal? Should we be approaching communities from the ground up?

Hell, we should be approaching journalism in general from the ground up. Part of the problem is that we got away from being on the ground and instead relied more and more on handout journalism. That's not surprising; ground-up journalism is real, but it's also expensive and unpredictable. It takes staff, which we have less and less of these days. Top down is predictable - you can almost plan your paper out three or four days. It's also predictably boring.

When you approach communities from the top down, you seek to define them using all the preconceived notions and outside socio-economic measures at your disposal. When you do it from the ground up, you have to listen, watch, smell and hear first.

Seven recommendations - for failure

2009-10-02T03:01:00.004-04:00

OK, maybe not all seven, but as I was reading this summary on the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association bulletin of a speech by Galveston publisher Dolph Tillotson, it kind of crystallized for me why traditional newsrooms (aka newspapers, but I like to broaden the term) are struggling.

The title, Tillotson Offers Seven Rules for Cutting Costs, Finding Revenues, ought to give you a hint by the order of the way things are presented (costs first, revenues second). Here is his list:

Never do nothing: Some people are not acting simply because they fear change.
We are in a real emergency; we should act that way. He said, “We’ve got to act decisively and quickly.”
We can do things today that you could not do before and may never be able to do again.
Now is a great time to weed the garden. Tillotson referred to money-losing features and operations. Do away with things that newspapers do simply because they’ve always done them. Features that cost money with little benefit, such as TV books and old comics pages, can be cut now with far less outcry from customers because the economic environment makes those readers more sympathetic to change.
Getting costs in line should be the first step.
Focus on your company’s strengths: local connections, local news, local business.
Remember the power of personal leadership. Find the center of your operation and move your chair there. “I think the quality of leadership is what will make a difference in our industry in the future,” he said.

Maybe the bullet points don't do it justice, but I'm failing to see anything in there about innovation or investment. It seems to me the tone largely is cut, cut, cut.

No. 3, for instance, talks about doing things you could never do before and probably never do again. I'm betting he's not talking about totally rethinking your operation's structure, culture and ability to track and implement useful innovation. By the way, I say "operation" here and not just newsroom because much of the work to be done is up front, in the ad and business departments, where far too often it's still business as usual.

No. 4 - do away with things you do just because you do them. Good idea, but what about also do some things that you're not totally sure will work, but provide potential for good revenue opportunities? And then actually put the management muscle into measuring and evaluating them. Put another way, try leading your market, dang it.

No. 5 - I think this pretty much is the operationalization of all the other points.

No. 6 is good, but I'd sure feel better if it also had "and find new ways to broaden those strengths and reach new audiences or audiences in new ways."

I'm not sure you can have No. 7 if cutting is your primary stance.

Tillotson talked about creating "an atmosphere of hope." But if the focus is on cutting with little mention of innovation, where is the hope? It sounds as if he's hoping the storm, like Hurricane Ike, passes and dawn will come again, bluebirds will sing and all will be forgotten. And it may, but what happens if now the sun rises in the west, instead? All the cost-cutting in the world won't help if it still leaves you looking east.

Good business plan advice

2009-09-26T18:23:00.003-04:00

Colleague David Weintraub is teaching an entrepreneurship course in the j-school this year.

David's run his own photo freelance business for some time, and he has some good advice on formulating a business plan.

In this "every man for himself" era, probably not a bad idea to read and bookmark.

For some people, Mickey D's is a religion, but ...

2009-09-26T12:57:00.003-04:00

This headline over an AP story on Salon takes it a bit far.

Yet another reason to sometimes use a helping verb to prevent a "crash blossom."

Four myths of media

2009-09-25T16:58:00.003-04:00

According to "The Moguls' New Clothes" in the October edition of The Atlantic, the four are:

Growth is good.
Globalzation is good
Content is king
The cult of convergence

In an excerpt from their book "The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies," Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave argue that:

Most of the growth appears to have come from mergers and acquisitions done at prices that make their financial success unlikely.
The problem with going global is that it actually increases your competition because fixed costs are easier to justify relative to the possible overall gains. The global strategy also comes as consumers are turning inward for their information
Content isn't king because those who create it, not those who sell it, get most of the benefits. "Put simply, the core of any competitive advantage more often than not drives from the manner of aggregation, rather than the creation of content. It is no coincidence that Google ... is an aggregator, not a content company.
Convergence ultimately comes down to breaking down barriers and "[w]henever someone suggests that breaking down barriers to entry is good news, hold tight to your wallet."

Their conclusion? The way to make money in the media business these days is to, essentially, tend to your knitting. In other words, the money comes from running largely mature businesses efficiently.

There's another way to put that: Cut costs ruthlessly and don't invest in "a clearly dissipating franchise." Welcome to the first decade of the new (media) century.

Stupid Layoffs

2009-09-24T10:27:00.003-04:00

Add this one to the list -- Brian Throckmorton, copy chief at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald Leader.

Brian has been one of the leaders in the word business - thoughtful, insightful, fun to be around and always a great seminar to attend at ACES.

The gutting of the industry continues. May it rest in peace.

AP Style - International Space Station

2009-09-23T15:52:00.003-04:00

Finally!

After years of resisting it, AP today decides it will change and now accept International Space Station, capitalized, as proper style.

Some things just take a little longer folks ....

Microsoft tablet

2009-09-23T09:48:00.003-04:00

From Gizmodo on Microsoft's Courier tablet.

Take a look at the video. If the come-to-market (if it ever does) version does even half of this, imagine the possibilities. And imagine if video, not just stills, was integrated. Blows my mind ...

Convergence Newsetter - August

2009-09-22T14:40:00.003-04:00

The back-to-the-classroom issue of The Convergence Newsletter is out.*

Holly Fisher leads this edition with a look at what she'd wished she'd learned in j-school, and what she's glad she did, now that she has become one of the pink-slipped. David Weiuntraub has details on his new entrepreneurship for communicators course, including some good links to materials and some classroom exercises worth thinking about.

See you in September (in other words, look for the issue in your in boxes late this week or next). Our new editor, Matt McColl (I almost typed that McCool, which would have been very appropriate), has been doing a great job. Me, as exec editor, I just tear more of my already thinning hair out.

(*Yeah, it's the August issue in September - go figure. If you're buyin', I'll tell ya my woes.)

(And don't forget that if you want to get TCN when we do e-mail it, just send us a note at convnews@mailbox.sc.edu. It's free.)

We also welcome your articles, reviews, etc. We like to say TCN is a publication of first impressions bridging the academic and professional worlds. And if you want to comment on any of the material, go to the TCN blo g.

Democrat vs. Democratic - and other observations

2009-09-20T15:19:00.003-04:00

Sometime in the past two years or so, I suspect largely because the GOP made an issue of calling it the "Democrat" Party instead of the "Democratic" Party, news organizations suddenly seemed to adopt whole-hog the use of phrases such as "Democratic-controlled" instead of "Democrat-controlled" or "Democratically controlled."

I assumed it was the media once again shying away from anything having to do with the "other side," made my ~~piece~~ peace with it and abandoned teaching "Democrat-controlled," as it appeared to be out of fashion.*

(For the record, none of this is a political statement; I just happen to be of the mind that sometimes, when you can make the case that one usage has some grounding in common sense and clarity, you might consider sticking with it.)

So today, in an AP article about ACORN** and it's problems, we have this:

Many Democrats used to advertise their ACORN connections. Now, however, the Democratic-led Senate has voted to cut off the organization’s grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Democrat-dominated House does not want it to get any federal money — period.

(I guess things really are different in the House and Senate.)

Yes, let's stipulate this is picking nits, but I think it's a nit worth picking. The House is dominated by Democrats, and the Senate is led by Democrats, not "Democratics." In fact, the problem with "Democratic" is illustrated in this recent query to AP's "Ask the Editor" (you'll probably have to search for "Democrat" to find it:

Q. Should it be "the Democratically controlled Senate" or "the Democratic-controlled Senate"? – from Los Angeles on Thu, Jan 08, 2009
A. The second usage is customary.

The tendency with "ic" adjectives, when paired with another adjective form, is to go with the "ically" form as the stronger grammatical construct of an adverb modifying an adjective. But "Democratically," notwithstanding the capital D, then starts for some people to implicate derivatives of "democracy" in the broader sense than the party. (If you want to read an impassioned, down-and-dirty, name-calling argument over this, check here.)

As for using "Democrat" to modify the modifier, we have numerous cases in English where the noun is used as a descriptive, so I'm not sure the declension is incorrect in this special case.

Let's think about a parallel using "robot." If the world were controlled by robots (OK, stop the comparison-with-journalists jokes), we might be more likely to say it was "robot-controlled" than "robotic-controlled," even though robotic is the adjective form. "Robotically-controlled" would actually be the better form, but it also has the connotation of something being controlled remotely from afar, not necessarily by robots.

A quick Google search of the terms (not dispositive, but enlightening), shows 168,000 entries for Democrat-controlled and 226,000 for Democratic-controlled. But the usage troubles me. (There are also 105,000 for Democratically controlled, but just eyeballing it, those appear to have a lot more white noise from entries referring to the form of government.)

So, what do you say?
----
*I seem to recall first seeing this in an AP "Ask the Editor" question a couple of years ago when Norm Goldstein ran the stylebook and the Democrat/Democratic Party debate was full-tilt, but I can't find the entry I printed at the time.

------------------
Three other things while I am at it:
1) From the same article: "ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis" -- any reason she does not warrant having "chief executive" capitalized before her name?

2) Why do writers (and by extension desks) continue to use a comma with "and that" when the conjunctive phrase is used to link dependent clauses: The sheriff said Smith had escaped, and that his brother had helped? The sheriff said both things, so why separate with a comma. I argue against the comma in all but the longest and most convoluted phrases - in which case they probably should be separated by a period (or several).

3) Remember parallel constructions? From the ACORN article as edited in my local paper:

She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of such videos as manipulative smear tactics and blaming right-wingers "upset because they are out of power now." Try "blamed" instead.

But here's the original article:

She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of the video shot there and in other cities by the hidden-camera couple as manipulated to make it look bad.

Lewis on Friday said the attacks on the group are "really reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

"We understand that the Republican Party is upset and the right wing is upset because they are out of power now," Lewis said on New York City radio station WNYC.

So this editor was guilty not only of a grammatical error, but of being misleading since the edited version makes it sound as if the organization had issued a statement "blaming right-wingers."

So the correct edit would have been: She condemned the actions of the two employees who appeared in the Brooklyn footage, but ACORN also has portrayed segments of such videos as manipulative smear tactics, and Lewis blamed right-wingers "upset because they are out of power now."

For the 'peevologists' among us

2009-09-20T02:06:00.003-04:00

Excellent piece this week at On The Media -- on the anniversary of Samuel Johnson, father of the dictionary, it looks at how far we've come -- and how far we haven't.

Largely built around the much-despised Merriam-Webster's Third New International, now almost five decades old, the piece by Mike Vuolo is a common-sense look at what dictionaries are and are not and the never-ending disputes surrounding them.

What's that headline reference to "peevologists"? You'll need to listen to find out. Hopefully, you're not one. (If you are, that previous sentence probably will send you twitching.)