An iPad strategy is only as good as the information flow

Posted by Matt on March 8, 2010  | 

I’m not going to point any fingers because I think everyone has the best of intentions, but I fear that calls for community newspapers to have a strategy for the iPad are misguided — with one caveat, which I’ll get to.

Apple’s new touchscreen device kind of looks like an e-reader and, chances are, it’ll excel at that function. But to expect that old print-centric information architecture and design will be rescued by an e-reader in everyone’s bag is like tilting at windmills. That train left the station a long time ago, folks.

The iPad, rather, is an extension of the mobile ethos of information delivery based on locality and specificity:

What information do I need to know about where I am, on topics of interest, from people I trust.

Now, if an iPad strategy is a wholesale reinvention of the newsroom and means development of a brand new content strategy, I’m all for it. Because in reality (maybe more than Steve Jobs wants to admit), the iPad is just a big mobile phone that doesn’t make phone calls.

My concern is that newsrooms — especially small community newsrooms — aren’t prepared to provide information in an always-on mobile world anyway. And to focus on one aspect of a product (the e-reader) but miss the real power in its connectivity is going to be devastating.

I remain cautiously optimistic.

Got multiple calendars in print? Make a go-and-do column instead.

Posted by Matt on January 6, 2010  | 

A lot of posts about doing modern journalism are surrounded by technological solutions. That’s fine, since there are so many new and pervasive tools to choose from. But sometimes making a connection with a networked, busy reader involves simply tweaking the process of news to fit a modern lifestyle.

One reader recently suggested that our local news organization would do readers a much better service if we focused more on events that were upcoming rather than on what happened at the event.

“Instead of covering what happened in the news, which people are seeing all over on facebook, Twitter and online, for a small town, cover what will be … All too often we miss events from not seeing them and increasing publicity might be a good thing all around.”

About half the work of covering a beat is preparing advance stories that tell people what to expect from meetings and forums and entertainment events. But they’re not always written as regularly as they could be (they’re not very sexy) and they aren’t given any real prominence (no news is broken in them).

What this reader suggests is that the only thing that’s really important with some items is when, where and who. Online calendars (when they’re updated religiously) can put events, meetings and shows front-and-center. But in print, that information gets scattered all over the place.

Long-time readers might know to cruise through the fine-print notices for local land-use hearings or understand that a cute name for calendar like “News and Notes” holds relevant information, too. But for people who adhere to the mantra “if news is important, it’ll find me,” it’s not enough.

I’m in favor of a standing column in print that pulls out events and other go-and-do items. And maybe while we’re at it, we can start calling calendars by their rightful name.

Video: So now you’ve overthrown the tyranny of reporters. Now what?

Posted by Matt on December 21, 2009  | 

Thanks to the folks at IGNITE Corvallis 2 for taking video and posting my presentation from the event.

So I submit to you my mini-manifesto for why I think the best times for journalism are right now:

The elephant in the college town: university news and communications

Posted by Matt on November 23, 2009  | 

Some of us within the news organization I work for and a sister organization nearby (both owned by Lee) have been talking about how we’d remake our news products and news-gathering.

One of the things that has come up, though not with any kind of serious consideration yet, is the impact that a land-grant university’s news machine has on a small-town newsroom.

The Gazette-Times is in Corvallis, OR, population 49,807. We’re also the home of Oregon State University, home to 21, 969 students and 2,918 faculty.

That means that just a few blocks from our newsroom is another team of communicators in News and Communication Services working 40 hours each per week to promote the university and its mission. Their OSU Web page lists as many full-time staff as we have reporters.

One of our former reporters who is now working for OSU send a tweet today that spurred some thinking (and this off-the-cuff post): the university is using Skype to connect news organizations with faculty experts. Cool idea.

But the bigger question here is how we as a tiny newsroom should cover the university. Is anyone looking to us to break stories about research breakthroughs in our town? We already cover the hell out of athletics, but can only pick and choose about the rest of the work happening on campus.

I’ve been starting to think that we use the well-crafted science reporting directly from the university. Build a science page in the paper and link to news releases online.

Obviously, the news and communications crew has a pro-university slant that they’re working with the marketing department to put forward. Why is that so tough to swallow when it comes to news about research, but we readily gulp it down when it comes to athletics?

I’m not saying that we stop covering budget impacts, town and gown issues and on-campus enterprise reporting. I’m suggesting we emphasize that over the half-hearted (and often half-understood) science churnalism that we’re often reduced to.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave them in the comments.

Using twitter for journalism panel

Posted by Matt on October 15, 2009  | 

I’m really pleased to be part of an interesting panel discussion happening this afternoon on using Twitter for journalism. The discussion was put together by University of Oregon Assistant Professor Tiffany Derville Gallicano (@derville) and Instructor Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) and features a great range of folks.

Gulp. I just dropped the last two newspaper headline feeds from my reader.

Posted by Matt on September 30, 2009  | 

In a small fit of clutter reduction this morning, I made the command decision to drop the New York Times and Washington Post national news feeds from my RSS reader, two long-time daily reads that began years ago before I discovered feeds at all.

Today, I monitor some 150 feeds daily (of course — and thankfully — not everyone publishes that often) and I just realized that in a week of news consumption, I’m more apt to just mark the feeds as read than to actually read, let alone click through to, anything on it.

Most interesting is that I’m not really missing anything. Between twitter, other blogs and news alerts there’s just not much new information in either feed by the time it comes around.

To be honest, I don’t have a single feed from a traditional news organization’s main online product. Blogs and others fill the gap. Full disclosure: I work in a newsroom, so there’s plenty of talk about big headlines, too, plus it’s my job to know what’s news locally, but I know I’m not alone in this.

I’m not the first to ask the big question of how news organizations can remain relevant when even their online news isn’t fresh enough. I guess it just hit home today.

Creating distinct roles for print and online

Posted by Matt on September 18, 2009  | 

I was asked by my boss this week to respond to some strategic planning coming from the company, specifically related to crafting distinct roles for print and online in newsrooms.

I think it’s a great idea and I’m really hopeful that the concept moves forward. The big issue is deciding how to divide the two products and what they’re naturally good at doing.

Here’s an excerpt of my reply:

First, we’ve got to know the things we do in print that really work:
1) condense a lot of information;
2) create a product that combines good writing with a familiar structure. And it’s portable!
3) take the time to slow down, put things into context, tell stories and draw some conclusions;
4) invite readers to slow down, draw connections, take a journey through information and craft thoughtful responses;
4) deliver a lot of our product to a lot of places in a big damn hurry. Daily.

Next, look at the Web’s unique strengths:
1) immediate delivery using reader-supplied hardware (low overhead);
2) interactivity invites people to help report the story with tips, corrections and original reporting (contributed photos, etc);
3) can offer text, audio, video to provide other angles, tell stories in different ways;
4) searchable;
5) transparent (more on this later).

Print stops and takes the long view. The Web is a stream of networked information. That’s how they are distinct and how we craft different roles for them.

I think we stop posting full print stories to the Web and instead post incremental updates, heavily linked, with reporters standing in the stream splashing information out, if you will. We become curators of the information stream, highlighting interesting bits and directing people to the right places and conversations.

This also means that we’ve got to be taking part in the conversations to make the most of tips and feedback that come over the transom. (Here’s where we break the notion that a blog is not dirty word nor a reader comment stream nor a dumping ground for reporters’ musings. They are a powerful CMS tool that reach a large audience and invite a particular kind of give-and-take.)

This is where the transparency comes in: people can see where our tips are coming from, how we’re reporting a story, and how the organization has reported it in the past. They can easily read more by following links, etc. Active consumption of news. (Read David Weinberger for more on this.)

In print, we do what we’ve been doing well and what people depend on, while ramping up our game on all fronts. We tell important stories and guide people through complex subjects. We focus on crafting dynamic designs that grab people’s attention and energize them. We present vetted feedback and general interest information. We understand the gravitas of print and make use of it by offering some exclusives and reprints suitable for framing.

This isn’t mutually exclusive. Short posts online as a news item develops can lead to an in-depth story in a few days. A series of quick hits on government decisions can culminate in an analysis of the kinds of issues a council takes up and how it discusses them. Multimedia of an event can drive interest in a printed feature story.

Even if all of this became top priority, it’d take a lot of work to get newsrooms to embrace them. But that’s part of the fun.

Other ideas? Send them my way and we’ll discuss.

What do Lake Wobegon and journalism’s ‘golden days’ have in common?

Posted by Matt on September 1, 2009  | 

A colleague forwarded a quote this morning from Garrison Keillor, of “Prairie Home Companion” fame:

“This is the beauty of the new media: it isn’t so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people email it to friends and it slowly floods the country. What the new media age also means is that there won’t be newspapers to send reporters to cover the next war, but there will be 6 million teenage girls blogging about their plans for the weekend.”

He’s right about information sharing and the long tail, but he’s wrongheaded about the “good old days” of newspapers.

I guess Keillor is selectively forgetting that newspapers haven’t exactly been doing much sending reporters to cover anything overseas lately.

In fact, Lake Wobegon and ideas of newspaper journalism golden days have a lot in common: fantasy.

Life (and the news) “back in the day” was just as tough and fraught with issues as today. We just choose to forget the yellow journalism that spawned the Spanish-American War,  the drive for celebrity and institutional malaise that gave Jayson Blair room to run and the controversial style (at the time) in coverage and design of the USA Today.

It’s all too easy to take the low road and declare all bloggers as miscreants in pajamas (except for those pesky journalists with access to an open source CMS), twitter simply a tool for narcissists (sometimes, but what about the other 60 percent?) and that newspapers have already tried online and failed (think again).

Actually, thanks to new media, I think journalism’s best days are yet to come.

“One size” solutions don’t really fit anyone

Posted by Matt on August 28, 2009  | 

Ryan Sholin posts this morning on a topic that has kind of rankled me for some time now: blanket pronouncements about about what “newspapers” should or shouldn’t do.

…if you’re in the business of publishing pronouncements, predictions, prayers, analysis, criticism, or full on takedowns related to the current state of the newspaper industry, please understand that despite the convenience it would provide for said ruminations, there is no such thing as a monolithic, uniform entity called “newspapers.”

I’ll say.

While we’re at it, let’s stop making the “save journalism” discussion all about saving newspapers. Good journalism isn’t only done on newsprint. To think otherwise is elitist and myopic.

Acts of Journalism will continue and practitioners will thrive. It’s professional journalism that is soul-searching.

One size doesn’t fit all. The sooner we accept it, the sooner we can move forward with solutions.

Associated Press DRM gets there the hard way. Wherever ‘there’ is.

Posted by Matt on July 30, 2009  | 

Have you seen AP’s new “protective format” for tracking and charging for links?

I most certainly don’t understand how this is supposed to work. For that, have a look at Steve Yelvington’s excellent post.

But the convoluted diagram does remind me of other ‘inventions’: