Tag Archives: newspapers

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

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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.

Hey newspapers, quit worrying about what Google’s buying and serve your customers

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News that Google is considering gobbling up Yelp has everyone twittering about how nothing’s safe from the search-blog-mail-chat-office-data giant. I generally avoid leaping into this kind of fray since I don’t really have a dog in the fight and don’t care to add to the hype.

But when I saw this tweet Friday afternoon, I had to come out swinging:

I think not.

http://twitter.com/pachecod/statuses/6807927866

Newspaper business directories are losers. First off, I speak from experience that newspaper community-based business directories are impossibly unwieldy to manage (you never get everyone included, so you’re not really the authority) and are about 10 laps behind the big-dog search industry that is always innovating ahead of your game.

And tying a directory to a walled community is a non-starter. Think you can compete with the draw and activity of a 350-million-and-growing active community? Come down off your high horse. Now try again.

Actually, newspapers should be concerned if their advertisers aren’t calling them to ask what the news means for their business locally and how they should respond.

For years, newspapers ad reps were the captains of a local business’ strategy to reach customers, for obvious reasons. While the Web disrupted, expanded and democratized the channels, we panicked and threw stuff at both readers and advertisers with the hope that we’d get the water back behind the dam.

Meanwhile, local advertisers were bombarded with SEO snake oil and social media hype and left out in the cold by their long-time allies if they weren’t convinced by confusing print ad pricing or iffy online banner campaigns.

Seth Godin wrote this morning about how effective it is to fight the natural flow of market forces, especially in a disrupted market like newspapers:

Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.

Google owns search; it’s a habit. Hell, it’s a verb. No local directory is going to touch that kind of reach. Instead, a complete strategy for a local business should include a Google business listing, a Facebook fan page and a branding campaign in the paper and online.

Like the proverbial reed that bends in the breeze but survives the typhoon, the local news organization’s best bet is to be the conduit for that work — the first call an advertiser makes when they hear of a new method to reach customers.

And, because technologies change, merge and shift, our advice and platforms must be flexible enough to adapt. Local business doesn’t need another business directory, they need a partner and a media hub. (I’ve been working on one version. More to come on that soon.)

So if Google buys Yelp, fine. Go out to your restaurant clients and teach them how social media works. Get them into the data stream, help them understand why it’s a good thing that people are talking about them and be available when the landscape changes. Because it will.

But you’ll be there. If you build relationships, that is.

The elephant in the college town: university news and communications

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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.

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

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

Adding value to print by letting online be its own animal

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Here in the mid-Willamette Valley, we’re in the process of switching from a really archaic copy-and-paste content management system to a vastly more powerful system in our newsrooms. I’m not doing as much reporting as I used to, instead I’m picking up more work moving this process forward and planning where we’re going. Good times.

While we lose some options in design and navigation as the company moves toward standardized design across properties, we’re expecting to gain tenfold in our ability to serve content better through tags and categories and a vastly improved (we’re told) search function.

I’ve been burned before so I don’t want to put my eggs in one basket, but I’m pretty excited about the options we’ll have once we understand the system more completely.

More importantly, though, is that we could (hopefully) be on the verge of a sea-change in how and what we post to the Web. First off, everyone in the newsroom is to be trained and will be expected to post their own stuff to the Web.

This led me to wonder if our Web content system could become our primary tool for managing and creating content. Maybe, but the system is primarily a publishing tool and doesn’t handle drafts and note-taking, so could lead to more problems than it’s worth right now.

This hasn’t stopped me from pushing for change in our newsroom processes.

My question for the past couple of weeks as we work through the specifics has been “Does it add value?” I read an interesting post this week by Tom Foremski about how the Web devalues anything it touches, or at least anything that can be digitized: music, TV, newspapers and magazines and software.

Foremski emphasises that this devaluation isn’t in the social value of these items, but rather in the cost necessary to produce and, especially, distribute them, a take on an idea developed by Clay Shirky.

It’s a point that’s clear to folks working to keep news organizations afloat these days and it calls for a new way of thinking about content and its relationship with readers. It’s also why the pay-for-online-journalism idea won’t, I believe, ever gain any real traction, especially the general interest publication I work for.

Information is everywhere and it’s free. Yeah, yeah, we know it’s not free to produce, but nobody cares about your bottom line. Find a way to get it done.

So why not make the Web operation into one big beatblog about the mid-Willamette Valley and break away from duplicating print and online?
Here’s the vision:

  • Take advantage of what the Web does well, including breaking news and deep connections through hyperlinks. Moving forward, we’ll be able to easily add hyperlinks and suggest related stories. That deepens the experience for Web readers in a way they expect and can benefit from.
  • Feature local multimedia more prominently and more effectively present related and source material.
  • Use tools like Publish2 to allow journalists to share what they’re reading and source material for stories they’re working on.
  • Move beyond simple (often nasty) commenting on stories toward a chat model, hosted by the reporter.

What I’m still working on are details about how to add value into the print edition.

To start, it’s important that we let online be online and stop posting the print version of stories to the Web site.

Those pieces are snapshots written for the newspaper and should maximize a readers’ experience with that medium with longer, more reflective stories and clip-and-save utility.

Let online carry the feedback, the early versions and the long tail.

Both have value at different times and for different people. Our goal should be to make a print subscription attractive to those who get immediate news online and teach print subscribers how to join the online experience.

This could develop into completely distinct print and digital products (I hope) and a new set of skills and workflow in the newsroom. I’m excited about the possibilities.

Ditching the baggage

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Interesting post today at masteringmultimedia, who pulls this piece from Rosenblumtv’s post he calls microeconomics:

The web offers not just another platform for distribution of product, but rather an entirely new calculus for how an online media company can be run. By its very nature, it changes the construct of most media businesses. Migrate your newspaper to the web completely and you suddenly lose the cost of ink, paper, presses, pressmen, delivery trucks, distribution and paperboys. Tell your writers to work from home and you can lose the building, the desks, the lights, the cleaning services and most of the management as well. Cut all those costs, and suddenly your ad based web revenue can look pretty good in comparison. Its the overhead that is killing you. Lose it. You don’t need it.

This reminds me of a post on wemediaguru in which Jason talked about newspapers opening a coffeeshop in the newsroom (or at least the building) and inviting the public in to work and hang out.

At the time, I thought it was a little goofy, but now it seems to me that if news organizations ditch all the old baggage, they could move to downtown spaces, upgrade the facilities and have all those reporter-bloggers punching away next to freelance programmers, designers and whoever dropped in for a mega-latte.

I think the key is to retain the paper’s brand more than anything. I was up in Vancouver, Wash. a couple of weeks ago in the Columbian’s brand new building. It’s beautiful, and the paper’s staff uses the first four floors, with office space available on the top two. But what really grabbed me was the use of the paper’s brand in the architecture.

The pictures here don’t do it justice, but the cool lobby area features huge portions of the paper’s nameplate etched in the glass and inside on the walls. Clips help set the paper in the city’s history.*

My point is that what matters is the brand and the product, not how it’s delivered.

*Note: The fancy building didn’t help the Columbian. In Dec, 2008, they were forced to move back into their old location. In May, they filed for Chapter 11 protection.

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