OJR front page archive for October 2010
Joining the online news bandwagon
October 28, 2010
Howard Kurtz, Peter Goodman, Jim VandeHei, and Richard Johnson are just a few of the many reporters voluntarily exiting the legacy media to join online news ventures.While many are scratching their heads wondering why these and other talented reporters are leaving the perceived luxurious lifestyle of the traditional media, those who work in the journalism industry have come to realize that online news ventures provide great opportunity to grow as a reporter and work on the cutting edge of journalism. In fact, increasingly, straight-shooting journalists are leaving the newsroom and joining online journalism organizations that provide journalists the opportunity to investigate the news and reemerge as the beat reporters from yesteryear.
The mass exodus from the traditional media comes at a time when the newspaper industry is struggling. Figures released this week by the Audit Bureau of Circulations show average daily circulation fell 5 percent in the April-September period, compared with the same period a year earlier. A March 2010 report from the Pew Research Center's annual Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that 2009 was a devastating year for the traditional news media. Among Pew’s findings were that newspapers currently spend $1.6 billion less annually on reporting and editing than they did ten years ago and over the last three years 15,000 full-time reporting and editing jobs were lost.
And while newspaper circulations and ad revenues are plummeting, a June 2010 Pew Report found that roughly a third (34%) of the public say they went online for news and 44% of Americans say they got news through one or more internet or mobile digital source. Both of these statistics are considerably higher than those who said they turned to their local newspaper for their news coverage.
However, the growth in popularity of online news is only one of the many reasons why reporters are leaving traditional media outlets for an online news project.
At many of the legacy media outlets, reporters feel quite limited due to orders coming from the top down, with very little collaboration. The immeasurable levels of bureaucracy that a reporter endures at a tradition media operation to get his or her idea heard were not only a burden but deterred creativity. Online journalism, particularly in a small organization, means very little bureaucracy and more innovation. It means being able to collaborate and communicate with everyone in the organization. And that leads to more ideas for stories and better journalism.
Letting go of the rope: Why I'm no longer a newspaper subscriber
October 27, 2010
As of this week, for the first time in my life, I am no longer a newspaper subscriber.My wife and I let our Los Angeles Times subscription lapse this week, after years of watching that once-vital newspaper decline into, at worst, self-parody. We held on much longer than we should have. As a former Times employee and a life-long advocate for journalism, I didn't want to be part of undercutting something I once considered a vital civic asset.
But I've also come to see that my subscription to the Times wasn't an act of support for journalism, it was an act of co-dependence for sick and troubled organization. In its current form and under its current leadership, there's simply no way that the Times will again become the force for community enlightenment it once was, and continues to pretend to be.
Incremental change will not save newspapers. The time is long past when that could have helped. Even at newspapers where management hasn't engaged in conduct as outrageous and irresponsible as at the Tribune Company, continued newsrooms cuts and additional reorganizational task forces won't restore mid-1990s profit margins as more independent online publishers begin to provide viable alternatives to the daily newspaper.
It's past time for newspapers to blow it all up and start over. By dropping my subscription to the Times, I'm casting my vote as a consumer for Tribune and the Times to do just that. When I subscribed to the Times, I was effectively supporting its publication and corporate management and encouraging the decisions that they made for their company and this newspaper. I don't wish to continue doing that any longer.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage sexist and lewd behavior by people who, by their positions, ought to be community leaders. (I know that Lee Abrams and Randy Michaels are gone. But Sam Zell, their ringleader, remains.)
I don't want to keep paying to encourage financial corruption by a corporation that ought to be devoted to exposing and building outrage against corruption by others.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage cheesy and deceptive front-page ads.
I don't want to keep paying to encourage the Times to move its front-page deadline before 6 pm.
Tips and tools to innovate with during election night coverage
October 24, 2010
In our world, there is no better story that reflects the power and value of good journalism than an election.Regardless of the medium, election stories can and should be as varied as investigative pieces, people profiles, contextual stories, and, because politicians are so colorful, stories of the weird.
Put these under an umbrella of breaking news and see us do our thing.
The midterm elections are just around the corner and they are more than promising a newsy season. By now many of us have established a general plan for election night coverage.
But to help foster innovation and advancement in journalism, last's week #wjchat, a weekly chat about Web journalism held through Twitter, had its first Elex Exchange where we shared ideas and tools to help with this year's coverage.
Inspired by the chat, here's a list showing how to take advantage of the latest technology to make election coverage more powerful and dynamic:
TWITTER // reporting + distribution
It's a basic tool that should be part of your daily journalism routine, but Twitter is still best tool for covering a real-time news event, especially when covering breaking news or an election.
As written before, Twitter is the tool to help you find sources and trends in real-time. Either by zip code or by topics/keywords, make sure you are using and monitoring Twitter throughout the election. Use a Twitter-client like TweetDeck with predetermine searches that you occasionally check on.
The Inigo Montoya approach to search engine optimization (plus, the word of the week)
October 22, 2010
A few OJR readers verbally jumped me last week for my first Inigo Montoya feature. So I'd like to take a moment of your day to explain why I think nit-picking about language remains important.First, allow me to admit that I'm a dreadful candidate for the office of language cop. If it weren't for gym, grammar would have been my least favorite subject in school. If your readers can figure out what you meant to say, you done wrote good enough, in my view.
But getting your readers to understand what you're trying to say is just part of your job as a writer online. You've got to lure new readers with your words, too. Your current readers can help, by retweeting, liking, sharing and blogging your articles. But, for many of us, the bulk of our new readers arrive via search engines.
Search engine optimization [SEO] rewards obsessive attention to language - English as well as hypertext markup. Writing for my own website, without a copy desk to save my reputation, has forced me to think more carefully about the words I use. That's why I started looking up the definition of at least one word I thought I knew in each article I post.
This new habit is changing the way I write. I'd like to think that it is helping me use adjectives more precisely, but at first it just made me afraid of them. Discovering how little I knew about the alternate meanings of words such as "incredible" disturbed me.
So what did I do? I stopped using so many of them. Rather than take the time to look up all those adjectives and adverbs, I just cut some of them out. Those I kept, I meant.
Sure, the language can expand to accommodate slang and idiomatic meanings for many words. But do you need to burden your writing with them?
Search engines reward articles with a high percentage of relevant keywords. Stripping extra words from your work leaves you with a higher percentage of those keywords in your remaining copy. If you want to use an adjective in your work, then make it carry some weight. If a word doesn't work on multiple levels, it's not doing enough work for you. Pick another one, or do without it.
Five questions you should ask about your online brand
October 20, 2010
Following Robert Hernandez's piece from Monday, I'd like to talk a bit more about branding yourself online.Whether you like it or not, and whether you intend to or not, you build a brand online with your first public post. Given the ubiquity of information available about people from a very young age today, I'd even argue that *not* posting anything about yourself suggests characteristics for your personal brand (i.e. you're a technophobe or maybe just highly protective of your privacy).
Don't allow inaction to define your brand. If you want to maximize your audience, your social impact and your economic value online, you should build your brand actively, and with intent.
So here's your first question:
What is my brand name online?
What's the name that you use (or will use) online, the one by which the most people are most likely to know you? (See Robert's piece, linked above, for some great backstories on how a few online journalists came to their online brands.)
Your given name is an obvious choice, but it's likely not unique. (I remain thankful to this day that I registered my daughter's name as a dot-com domain before a bikini model of the same name could get to it.) Nor are given names always short and easy-to-recall. Which are you more likely to remember? "Markos Moulitsas"... or "Kos"?
Don't worry too much about this question, though. If Internet users can come to regard "Amazon" as an online store instead of a river in South America, almost any word can be branded to almost any purpose.
For what does your brand stand?
Here's where we get to the important stuff. What do you want people to think of when they think of your brand?
For writers, the answer might be your area of expertise - the beat you cover. Or it might be a specific tone, an attitude, if your subject matter tends toward the eclectic. When I worked at Disney, trainers drilled into my head that our brand stood for consistently high-quality family entertainment. Choose whatever you want. Just choose something. Don't let inaction or a lack of thought define your brand.
Your brand name provides an initial opportunity to define the meaning of your brand, but what you do under that brand name will have far greaterin influence on your audience. But before you think about how you'll do that, envision what it is that you want people to think or feel when they encounter your brand.
What's in a name? Backstories to some personal brands
October 17, 2010
By now we've all heard that the journalism game has changed and we need to take our careers into our own hands: Get a domain, embrace social media and start managing your brand.But to start, it all begins with one of the most common questions I routinely get. What the heck do I call myself? What's the name of my brand?
For some lucky folks, their name is unique enough that they are able to secure it as their domain, Twitter handle and more. But for the rest of us, we have to be a bit more creative and invent a new digital identity.
Many times these personal brands are inspired from the most odd places. I know someone whose handle was from Spaceball's "gone plaid" scene.
Here is a small, somewhat random, collection of personal brands and their backstories.
Digidave // David CohnIt was (from) my college freshman dorm roommate.
This was in 2000 and he was much more technically savvy than me. Granted - at the time this just meant he was on AIM all the time and used his computer as an alarm clock.
I, on the other hand, was going through my hippie phase and believed that we needed to break away from computers, man, and just, ya know, free, man.
He kept telling me to embrace the digital-dave. That became Digidave.
The joke name then lay dormant until I became a tech-writer (the irony) and fully had embraced the digital-dave. After I chose it as my handle on Digg in 2004 - it stuck.
writepudding // Liana Aghajanian"writepudding" is meant to be a play on the delicious treat, "ricepudding." It's rather silly really. When I first started blogging around five years ago, I wanted a name that stood out. I thought to myself, "I really love rice pudding and I obviously love to write," so I just combined the two and came up with writepudding. It sounds more like an inside joke than I'd like it to, but it feels comfortable and it's just stuck with me through the years.
The Inigo Montoya word of the week: 'Incredible'
October 15, 2010
This week's post is for all the independent publishers and bloggers out there who don't have an in-house grammarian to advise them, but would like some inspiration to think more carefully about the words they use in their posts.So I'm kicking off this feature in honor of the character from William Goldman's The Princess Bride who utters this famous line in the Rob Reiner film version:
For those of you not clicking the video link, here's the quote: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Too often writers type superlatives without care for the subleties that the individual words they select offer. This week's Inigo Montoya word of the week is "incredible."
Folks typically use this adjective to suggest a positive quality, but it actually means "not credible," that is, something not worthy of belief, confidence or trust. As a journalist, pretty much the last word you want someone to use in describing your work is "incredible." :^)
And yet... here are a couple of examples from the past week's news where someone missed the definition:
How journalism can promote civic engagement - or undercut it
October 13, 2010
Recently, my wife spoke in person with a reader of her website.He shared with her his frustration that other readers on the site were writing about what he considered inferior products, but that no one was bringing up what he knew to be a superior alternative.
"How are people going to know the truth?" he asked.
Let's leave aside the question whether this reader's opinion about a product did, indeed, reflect the "truth." He had information that he wanted the site's readers to see, and he wanted the site's editor to write about that.
My wife, however, suggested that the reader de-lurk and write up his point of view, himself. The reader was flummoxed.
And here we have yet another culture clash within the transformation of journalism online.
This reader, who was older than the average reader on the site, was operating under the old model of journalism, where gatekeeper reporters did the work of reporting information. As a reader, he tried to make his views known by appealing to the editor of the publication and asking her to devote more time toward reporting the issue that concerned him. That's the way it's been done for generations, so that was the approach he took.
My wife, however, tried to get this reader to see a new model, where readers directly engage in reporting and discussing information. If readers see holes in coverage, they should fill them by contributing their information to the site.
The second model, of course, is not exclusive of the first. My wife, like many independent online news publishers, does plenty of original reporting for the website. But her website would have only a small fraction of the pages it now offers if her reporting were the only work published on the site. The new model of interactive journalism, empowering readers to become reporters, is allowing the public access to far more information than it had available to it under the old way of reporting.
Of course, that raises questions about the accuracy of all this new reporting, which is why it becomes important for journalists to engage and recruit knowledgeable readers to participate in this new information marketplace.
I've written before that journalism in this decade is an act of community organizing. But what I haven't addressed is how this change in reporting models can change community organizing itself.
Storify's Burt Herman on the evolution from reporter to entrepreneur
October 10, 2010
NOTE: We did the Q&A-style; interview over a collaborative document and one of my favorite tools: typewith.me. You can see the raw interview and play it back here: http://typewith.me/ep/pad/view/ojrqa01-bherman/latest
Burt, you have an incredible journalistic background and really, in my opinion, you truly represent the new type of tech/entrepreneur journalist we've all heard about. Tell me a little bit about your background at the Associated Press and how you evolved from reporter to entrepreneur.
Thanks, you're too kind :)
Yes, I started off in a fairly typical journalism role -- I went to work for the AP because I wanted to work overseas as a foreign correspondent, and they had the most opportunities to do that. So after graduating, my first journalism job was as a temp hire at AP and things went from there -- a couple years in Detroit and then a post as an editor on the International Desk in New York before I was sent overseas to Berlin. From there, I went to Moscow and then to Uzbekistan to start a new bureau for AP covering the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. My last AP job was a bureau chief in Korea. In between, I covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Asian tsunami, Pakistan and many other stories.
I returned to the US in late 2008 for a Knight fellowship at Stanford, where I had gone as an undergrad. With all the changes in journalism, I wanted to explore the secret sauce of innovation in Silicon Valley and see how that could be applied to journalism. I took classes at the Graduate School of Business, Design School, computer science department and explored how this could be applied to journalism. In the end, I wound up deciding to extend my sabbatical from the AP to have a go at doing a startup on my own, building a company around the future of storytelling and digital publishing from a clean slate.
Thinking about starting an online news business? Here's your start-up checklist
October 7, 2010
Have you been thinking about starting a news website? Are you considering "being your own boss" as the next step in your journalism career?You can stumble your way into entrepreneurship, but you'll likely find a greater chance of success if you start with a plan.
Starting a news website requires its own step-by-step process, sharing some steps with the launch of any new business, but including several steps unique to either journalism or online publishing.
Based on my experience launching and running news websites, here's a checklist that I would recommend to anyone thinking about starting an online news business. I hope that you will use this list to help you along with the process of launching your site - or at least to give you a fuller sense of the work that would be involved, should you be considering this step.
This isn't meant to be a complete guide to starting a news publishing business - that would fill a book - but simply a checklist for you to use as you proceed.
The name
☐ Select a name for your publication
You'll want a name for which you can obtain the ".com" domain of the publication name, without spaces or special characters such as hyphens. It should be easy to spell when pronounced phonetically, and while including a keyword that potential readers will be searching for is helpful that's not as important as the other criteria.
☐ Register your domain name
Once you've selected a name, don't hesitate to register it with a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions. Don't bother adding any of the hosting or e-mail options they'll try to sell you. You'll figure out that later. Just get the domain.
☐ Open a business checking account
No, you don't have any income yet, but you'll want a bank account as soon as you have a business name. Separating your business account from your personal from Day One will help you with accounting, taxes and projecting a professional image to your customers.
☐ Register a fictitious business name.
Banks often can help you do this when you set up your business checking account, which is another reason to take that step immediately.
☐ Trademark your name
I didn't need a lawyer to trademark my website's name. I simply followed the steps on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. All of the paperwork can be filed online. Once you've applied, the process takes months, but the earlier you start, the earlier you will have your trademark in hand.
Getting operational
☐ Select a calendar app or system to record deadlines, meetings and assigned tasks
Once the work of establishing your name is complete, it's time to get operational. You do not want to be relying on memory, or little random slips of paper to keep track of key dates and tasks as you move forward.
Two new social media tools to watch for use in Web journalism
October 4, 2010
Think about it. Two or three years ago most people had never heard of Facebook. Tweets still mainly were owned by birds, not limited to 140 characters. FourSquare was some vague game from elementary school.In general, most people had written off social media as some sort of high school fad.
Well, you should know by now, Web-based social media is not a fad.
If you still doubt this, temporarily remove your head from the sand and go talk to one of the more than half a billion people who spend hours and hours sharing news, photos or running a virtual farm. (For the record, I am not a fan of FarmVille.)
In its constant evolution, though, technology routinely leapfrogs past itself as it innovates and disrupts the status quo.
In other words, you ain't seen nothing yet.
What's next? It's geolocation paired up with augmented reality, in my opinion.
Those creating these new tools typically don't have journalism as a possible application in mind. But I, an admitted tech/journo/mad-scientist geek, can't help but apply the journalism prism to some of the latest tools and technology.
So, in that vein, here are two emerging tools I've came across that I think are worth keeping an eye on. They might not be perfect now, but I encourage you to experiment with these and see if there is a journalistic application here.