The Modern Journalist

40 Questions: Who Should Run Your News Website?

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The high profile split between part of the Washington Post’s digital team and the paper has certainly sparked a conversation. There seems to be two camps: those (like me) who see this is another colossal failure on the part of traditional media and those who believe the experiment failed because of the digerati running the show.

I’ve worked at three different places — online, television and a magazine — where I was either in charge of, or a part of, building a unique brand of content separate from what we did (online, I worked with audio in 2000; at the cable network, we developer user-created content; and at the magazine, I built a daily, online news website) and at each stop I had the exact same conversations.

I’ve even had some of those same conversations again the past few days.

There is a sense, at least in the traditional media world (and the online news source was run by a traditional print editor who I happened to like very much), that the Web doesn’t fundamentally change things and that the knowledge people have in the online world doesn’t fit with the idea that the Web doesn’t fundamentally change things.

It’s quite maddening.

I wrote about the Innovator’s Dilemma in May, but I felt the need to revisit the conversation because so many people have chimed in on this Washington Post case — but many (and possibly myself included) shouldn’t be chiming in.

The simple truth is this: traditional journalists have no business making decisions about how the web and digital properties should be developed; they should certainly be at the table, helping inform the decisions of those who know best (and knowing best doesn’t mean reading a traffic report or surfing the blog with their RSS Reader), but the decisions need to be left in the hands of those who get the emerging field.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is. But I know — and I’m thankful — that my magazine editor never invited me in to discuss how we should lay out the book because frankly, other than a layman’s opinion, I had no idea how the damn thing should look.

If I ever went into him and said “Jason, I read magazines all the time. I love magazines. Here’s what you should do because that’s how I like them,” he would have fallen out of his chair. Why? Because it’s silly to design a magazine based on my use even though I’ve been reading magazines since before I was online in 1984.

There is a language and an expectation that people have. I know this because experts in the industry have told me so (and there is a common language because we know where to go to find features –> the middle — the commentary –> the end — the TOC –> the beginning — the short news –> just after the TOC.

Yet we assume online is easy because, well, everybody surfs.

Wrong. If newspapers assume that they can train a copy editor to run a news site, they really will fade into the sunset as technologically innovative sites come along.

Listed below are 40 questions that determine whether you know enough to make decisions about a newspaper website.

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Pegasus News: Community-Driven News in Dallas

I first stumbled upon Pegasus News at South by Southwest Interactive and I wasn’t very impressed. To be fair, it was near the end of the event and we were crammed in the back of the Lucky Lounge. I was tired and exhausted.

Clearly this was another case where my better judgment decided to take a holiday because they have deployed several very cool, web-centric ideas that seem to be getting this whole modern journalism thing right:

We start with the idea that what happens in your neighborhood — to your family and in your niche areas of interest — is more important to you than things happening on the other side of town, and certainly far more important than what’s happening elsewhere. For that reason, we customize content and advertising for each individual user, in a mechanism we call The Daily You™.

Once you register for the site, you can:

1. create your own home page
2. set your neighborhood to customize information
3. search for specific topic areas covered at the site

But the really revolutionary idea stems from their content partners.

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Marketing Shift: Mobile Chips, Search and RSS Plus the Value of Networks

This week on Marketing Shift:

New Chips, Apple Take the Mobile Web to the Brink: A new class of hardware device, the Mobile Internet Device, will soon power a variety of handhelds and mobile computers that can access the Internet and not much else.

Google, CBS Tackle RSS and Video Advertising: CBS is moving whole hog into the video space, syndicating its content; meanwhile, Google tackles the RSS advertising market with Feedburner.

Time Warner Tests Metered Internet: The days of flat-fee access may head the way of the Dodo if Comcast has it way. The cable giant is testing a pay-per-bit metered service in Texas.

Games Ahoy: CBS Openly Courts Fantasy Sports Market: The US Supreme Court ruled (by not ruling) that fantasy sports leagues didn’t need licenses to use the names of players; now, CBSSportsline.com is jumping whole hog into the market.

Google Customizes Search: In its continued move towards Web-based applications, Google launched an enterprise search product.

Polling in the Electronic Age: Mobile phones and other communication devices have made traditional, land line polling less accurate.

Chris Brogan: The Value of Your Social Network: Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble have been discussing — separately — the value of large social networks.

E-Trade, Google Keeping it Real with Stocks: Mobile devices may soon change the way we buy, trade and sell stocks thanks to the Security and Exchange Commission’s decision to relax rules on real-time stock reporting.

Cell Phones: Not Just for Calling Anymore: Americans have typically asked for less complicated mobile phones (think the iPhone). Nokia is banking that people want more.

Bad Design is Death Online: It’s the user’s stupid. It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if your customers can’t figure it out, you’re dead in the water.

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Tribune Publisher: The Model is Broken

The publisher of the Tribune Company sent out a memo to his staff that said, in short, the current newspaper model is broken, it doesn’t serve the readers and the industry needs to rethink itself.

Sam Zell, the man behind the memo, isn’t a journalist. He’s a billionaire investor. He’s not tied to any particular model of journalism, but he is — one would suspect — tied to making money. And his analysis of the industry is that unless there is a radical change in the industry, newspapers will not only be irrelevant, they will be gone. On top of that his message is that people primarily want localized data, lists and information that is relevant to their lives in the community and mapped to help visualize.

First, our publishing business — and to reiterate, it IS a business — needs to retool itself to a customer-centric model. We have now reviewed dozens of reader studies done by Tribune over the years, and they present clear and consistent findings. Readers want:

• Unbiased, honest journalism
• LOCAL consumer and community news
• Maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats

The memo is quite interesting to read, but what’s so interesting to me is it feels like the industry is reaching a tipping point, a moment where the traditional journalists and managers are starting to face the reality that the business is about to radically change.

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Stocks and Finance 2.0

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I’m not a big finance guy so I’ve never been keenly attracted to the business pages of a newspaper, but I can see the value in having a strong editorial presence.

In a modern world, it’s important to rethink how newspapers cover business.

I’ve written a bit about what the Business 2.0 section should look like with predictive markets that use their stories (along with aggregation tools to give people comprehensive coverage from other sources) to engage their readers. One of my fondest memories of middle school was the stock market game. I never spent more time reading the business pages than I did then.

But there are more opportunities to make money and engage the readers, I think, particularly as the SEC relaxes its hold on real-time stock quotes.

Here is some news that should interest every financial reporter and editor:

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When Hyperlocal Isn’t

The story of the demise of the Washington Post’s big “experiment” with hyperlocal content is going to matter to exactly one group of people: reporters.

But I fear that the story will be framed in the way The Wall Street Journal (normally my favorite paper to read because of it’s writing) choose to go instead of the way I think the story should have been told, which I’ll get to in a minute.

First, the back story. A group of tech-minded journalists from Lawrence, Kansas gained notoriety for building a massive online presence at the local paper. They were big news. A few years back at South by Southwest Interactive, they were all the rage there. The Washington Post decided to poach them in order to launch its own hyperlocal sites, essentially building its local audience through increased coverage of its suburbs.

The experiment did not go as planned. The modern and traditional journalists had — from what I’ve read — a culture clash. Since you’re reading this, you can imagine who won that battle. It wasn’t the digital guys.

Now, the team has jumped ship, heading to Vegas to work at a new paper while the Washington Post reshuffles its online operations. It hasn’t been pretty and the press loves not pretty.

Here’s the Journal’s lede:

For believers in the power of rigorous local coverage to help save newspapers, the Washington Post’s launch of LoudounExtra.com last July was a potentially industry-defining event.

If one of my students turned this lede in, I would have chucked it back for a variety of reasons: too many adjectives, too much pompous inflation and a premise  you can’t possibly deliver upon. In my gut, though, this sounds like a straw-man set up to knock down: this whole Internet thing can’t save papers, see?

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Bloomberg: A Model Modern Newsroom

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I’ve been enamored with the Bloomberg journalism model for several years. As far back as my days at Berkeley in 1998-2000, the reporters I knew who worked there told me stories of working across multiple mediums. For them, it wasn’t a choice — it was the job.

One friend, who occasionally joined a streaming radio show I did during my time at Wired News, said their were workstations with a computer, video camera and microphone so they could file a story, go live on the television and conduct radio interviews.

Yikes. That’s cool.

I can’t imagine trying to implement such a system in most news room without serious push back from the journalists. Maybe that’s too harsh, though. I’ve got a skewed view of journalists after 15 years in the industry.

But I’m not the only one who believes Bloomberg has it write. Paul Goldberger, a writer for The New Yorker, gave an interview the other day where he discussed a piece he wrote last year about two different news room: The New York Times and Bloomberg.

First, the Times.

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A (Partial) Model for Modern Media

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Ever since I wrote the link journalism post a few days ago, I’ve had an idea percolating in my head. I’m not sure that it’s fully formed, but I wanted to get it out into the wild because I have a feeling there are those who have already thought this through.

One of my main points has been this: in a modern world, people will go directly to the source for information and can easily bypass more traditional outlets (re: newspapers) to get the news they most need.

That notion is partially built on the idea that URLs are so important. Modern outlets realize that search-to-find is vitally important. If you’re looking for the weather report, you go to Weather.com

Clearly that’s what people are doing, at least some of the time. Here’s an analysis (PDF)of Weather.com’s solution to its traffic spike’s during disasters and other anomalies. There are some terrific traffic numbers here:

1. 15-20 million page views per day
2. 70 million page views in one day during the back-to-back hurricane’s in Florida
3. From 2002 until 2004, peak page views during hurricane season grew from 26 million to 70 million

So what does it all mean?

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Ad Age: Death of Bloggers

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In the interest of fairness, my perspective on technology and the news is skewed because I first got online in 1984 and I didn’t start writing professionally for another 10 years. I spent my formative years tooling around on networks and such for most of my childhood.

I’m writing this because it’s important for me to convey that I’m not someone who thinks all old journalists should be taken out behind the shed and shot. I don’t. My mentors are those old journalists. But I’m also not of the opinion that just because you’ve been doing something for a long time that it qualifies you to lead in a new age.

It’s the Silicon Valley quandary: young tech heads build start-ups that blow into the stratosphere, have no idea how to run a business and then battle with venture capitalists for control of their company as the money folks try to install more traditional businesses.

When the dotcom “crash” hit in 2001, I had been working for Wired and Wired News for a few years. I was smack-dab in the middle of the whole mess, writing about it every day. Since then, I’ve been trying to explain to people that the “crash” that people spoke about wasn’t a crash at all. That decade-or-so year period of innovation fundamentally altered near every aspect of our lives. Sure, some ill-conceived companies went out of businesses, but overall, that was the most successful crash of all time.

The lesson: There is a forest and there are trees. Do not mistake them.

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Better Data, Less Information is Key to Young Readers

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I’ve always rejected the notion that my generation — and the ones behind me — are less interested in reading and have short attention spans when it comes to the news.

I’ve found that logic to be condescending and arrogant, telling people that they are consuming their news and information in correct ways. Turns out, it’s not just me blowing smoke: a new research study, albeit a limited one, found that people between the ages of 18 and 34 have become completely overwhelmed with the sheer volume of information sent out by newspapers, causing them to turn away from these outlets.

The results, which were implemented by the Associated Press, helped the organization retool its news delivery to include more relevant, multi-platform news:

That includes what the AP calls “1-2-3 filing,” starting with a news alert headline for breaking news, followed by a short present-tense story that is usable on the Web and by broadcasters. The third step is to add details and format stories in ways most appropriate for various news platforms.

I wouldn’t call that a breakthrough in thinking because it still has a component of the news that’s directed by a small group of people; however, it’s not a bad step in terms of creating news that can be delivered most easily across a variety of platforms.

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