Up to this point, I've been talking about some of the concepts that shape my thinking about media and journalism: Quality; epistemology; the cultural flaws that warp these discussions; the ideas that I think will lead us around those obstacles to answers. But I haven't really offered any answers of my own.
One reason: What use are they? They're not scholarly. They're not researched and footnoted. By the standards that I respect, my answers are little more than jackleg bullshit.
So to put the proper value on these answers, understand that each comes with endless caveats and a deep sense of humility. The future isn't known, everything can (and will) change in unexpected ways, and the odds of me being right on more than half of these statements is absurdly low. I accept that.
But if you'll take these ideas in that spirit -- not as confident proclamations, but as working insights and imagination gained through hard experience, reading and conversation -- then perhaps you'll find their intrinsic value. If they turn out to be predictively true -- great. If they wind up having no value of their own, but spark your thinking toward something great, then I'm OK with that, too.
Human intelligence is based on prediction. We shouldn't be afraid to predict, just as we shouldn't perpetually tie our egos to being correct.
Here goes:
MONOCULTURE TO ECOSYSTEM
Modern media is in transition from the monoculture monopolies of the 20th century to the diverse explosion of expression that represents the 21st century future. Think of the past as a wood-pulp tree farm; think of the future as a rainforest. To outsiders, a tree farm appears orderly and logical while a rainforest appears impassible, chaotic and dangerous. To residents, however, a rainforest is a vibrant, living ecosystem, and a tree farm is artificial and sterile.
We are moving into a media ecosystem of multiple niches and processes. No single niche dominates, and despite constant competition within and between niches, the resulting chaos is externally stable because of its healthy inner dynamism. All the ideas expressed here are to be conceived as existing within the new media ecosystem. To those who fear the thought of a news media that is not controlled by trained elites, here's your lesson for the day: Control doesn't scale.
STUCTURED AND SEMI-STRUCTURED DATA
The No. 1 functional shift, from a future media historian's perspective, will be the change from the current "document" mindset to the future "database" mindset. Modern journalists see themselves as people who report facts and write stories and cannot grasp that the act of turning information into narrative instantly limits its usefulness and accuracy. News writers will continue to create narratives, because the human brain sorts and stores data by narrative mnemonics. In fact, the bulk of the information we consume will continue to be structured into narrative.
But the primary function of newsgathering organizations will be to create and curate semi-structured databases of interesting/significant information. This, by the way, is the reason that the expansion of The Semantic Web matters right now.
SCALABILITY
Narrative doesn't scale to a global information economy. Personal insight about a candidate doesn't scale to a national campaign. A fair and balanced examination of a two-sided story doesn't scale to a topic like global climate disruption. News media will shift from an artificial one-size-fits-all system (based on front pages, production schedules, newshole, broadcast formats, standard server/bandwidth configuration, etc.) to one that expands and contracts depending on situations. This will require new tools and conventions. Many of these solutions will be social.
OPEN SOURCE
Proprietary, compiled information tools and repositories will fail to keep pace with their open source competitors. Ultimately, all first-class news platforms will be based on open-source principles, and all commonly held information will be structurally compatible.
INFORMATICS
Informatics is the study of the structure of information. "Discovery Informatics" uses sophisticated software agents to detect and explore patterns in enormous streams and vast pools of data. Since all major news organizations will have comparable news databases, much 21st century newsmedia competition will consist of duels over user-tools. The news company with the "best" informatics tools stands a good chance of being the commercial winner.
THE BLUR: NEWS, INFORMATION AND ADVERTISING
Artificial distinctions between information types will be blurred and then forgotten. The new challenge will be getting the right information to the right user at the proper time, rather than maintaining firewalls or winnowing out things that "aren't news anymore." In the future, it's all about the end-user's needs and experience. This means that something other than artificial firewalls will have to stand as a credibility marker between types of content.
NEWSBOTS AND INTELLIGENT AGENTS
Human intelligence doesn't scale to the flow of global information. Informatics tools that represent the interests and intentions of individual human beings will serve as the adaptation that scales human intent to the scope and pace of the new information economy. The ultimate result of a system that incorporates multiple intelligent agents acting on behalf of each individual and organization will be something I've called The Construct, and understanding what is being expressed within The Construct in real time will replace polling, focus groups and market research.
MULTIPLE REVENUE STREAMS AND BUSINESS MODELS
Modern media profits are based on paid content and -- to a far greater extent -- advertising, with an emphasis on display advertising. Future media operations will collect revenue in multiple ways, often receiving a percentage of a transaction whenever its "free" user tools connect buyer and seller. Most advertising will be performance-based and connected to the expressed intent of the user (whether by search or some other function). Traditional display advertising will be a high-end niche for major brands and a low-end function of small-scaled media.
Other news operations will operate as non-profits, receiving no traditional advertising. Some may be run as foundations, or even as informational utilities, governed by boards and bylaws. Much media will be created by individuals and groups that depend on pledge drives to cover their costs, but some of it may be produced by "for-profit social ventures" that blend the power of supply and demand with the intentions of non-profit organizations.
INTELLIGENCE BRIEFING MODEL
One news organization model will rely solely on paid premium subscriptions: News agencies that base their credibility on predictive accuracy (outcome) rather than on "fair and balanced" coverage (process). These services, which treat users as executives to be briefed and prepared, will cost more and will appeal to users who work in highly competitive industries or individuals who make informational awareness a lifestyle choice.
MAINSTREAM RETRENCHMENT
"Mainstream media" today are in decline, with "the people formerly known as the audience" fragmented. Future media will separate into market-driven grades of information. The "mainstream" will become a smaller subset of the total media flow, generally associated with less-sophisticated technology and users who: 1. Produce little content; 2. Profit only marginally from higher grades of information; and 3. Choose a passive lifestyle. Mainstream media will not dominate, but will represent the most significant media plurality.
NICHESTREAMING
Higher-end information users will largely reject 20th century-style mass media, which will remind future users of Stalinesque architecture from the old USSR. These higher-end users will select and manage their personal mediascapes, and media companies will work to connect to these users by identifying and serving many individual niches.
E PLURIBUS UNUM
The current mediascape is built around a recognizable meda "voice" that was established during a period of information scarcity. It is animated by a sense of lingua franca continuity that stretches across newspapers, magazines, TV channels and the academy. The new mediascape will arise from the spirit of unlimited bandwidth and will be fundamentally infused with a limitless diversity of voice, tone and topic. While it will seem a cacophony to older users, new tools and conventions will allow us to experience it on a human scale. From the many will flow a single "media gestalt" -- that we'll experience in many ways.
WATCHMEN WATCHERS
Bias warriors have reduced media criticism to an endless ferreting-out of journalistic hostility toward victimized partisans. In the future, subjective, analog bias hunting will be replaced by a variety of data-driven credibility grades, "best-practices" quality assurances (think ISO 9000 for professional news media organizations), and outside observers. Who is watching The Watchmen? We are. With computers.
CREDIBILITY GRADING
Not all corrections are created equal. Not all lies are as damaging. Stupidity in one sphere doesn't prove stupidity in general. These are the common arguments against the notion that a database approach to credibility grading as a practical application. Yet our current analog system -- based entirely on "the human factor" -- has failed to make useful distinctions on these questions. The reason? Without a system of standards, a human-mediated system cannot respond quickly enough to counter its manipulation by outside parties (Swiftboating). Again: Control doesn't scale.
For credibility to scale to a global information glut, future news media must develop: 1. Systems of publicly grading the "confidence level" of developing information; 2. "Sticky" credibility grades on factual outcomes, both for news organizations AND for news sources; 3. A reputation economy for multiple levels of information users; 4. Transparent processes; 5. Standards-based archiving.
The human element is not endangered, and will account for applying these evolving systems. But future generations will find our fondness for seat-of-the-pants epistemology quaint... if more than a little disturbing.
DEATH OF MONOPOLY PRICING AND PROFITS
While metro newspaper publishers tend to frame the industry's current financial situation as a crisis brought on by declining circulation, the loss of old revenue streams (classifieds) and structural changes in the economy (Big Box retailers vs. locally owed businesses), these statements -- while true -- obscure the obvious. News markets that we once ruled are fracturing into numerous competitors, making it impossible for us to dictate monopoly pricing to advertisers. Newspapers remain profitable, but their profit margins are declining.
The current crisis is a crisis of expectations more than it is a crisis of fundamentals (which are, nonetheless, shakey). Shareholders have come to expect 20 to 30 percent profits from their media holdings, and that simply cannot continue in a diverse 21st century mediascape.
The future of our industry will be based on companies that return profits similar to those experienced in the retail sector. Smaller companies may return higher percentages, but big media will have to learn to get along on single-digit margins.
In a monopoly environment, falling profits mean quality cutbacks. In a competitive environment, companies that choose not to compete for quality choose to die. The winners in the 21st century will be those media companies that make this transition gracefully, fund quality journalism, and learn to be pleased with 8 percent returns.
GAME THEORY
Before video games, electronic entertainment was passive and learning was something that we delivered to young people in ways we determined to be good for them. Not anymore. Today's information users were weened on games that allowed them to explore their environments, and nobody under the age of 60 reads the entire user's manual before diving into a new game. Game concepts -- from user interfaces on news sites to reputation economies on comment threads -- will drive the development of 21st century media. All significant information will be interactive and two-way.
SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY -- VIRTUAL AND OTHERWISE
Social technology extends from the passive (LinkedIn) to the transitory (Twitter), from the
networked (Facebook) to the experiential (Second Life). Social technology can be the delivery platform for news (BREAKING NEWS ALERTS on Twitter), the organizing force behind original reporting (NewAssignment.Net) or the system that sorts and shapes the information stream (Digg). Social technology that incorporates each of these functions will play significant roles in news media within the coming decade for one reason: Social technologies are scalable.
THE WEB IS LOCAL
Earlier this decade I annoyed people by asking this question during high-level discussions of news strategy: Is the Internet local? No one ever said yes.
I meant this question as a challenge to the "local-local-local" insanity that has gripped the newspaper industry, but also as a challenge to think about community in non-geographic terms. And I think I've been proven right: the Internet (and more specifically, the Web) is local, at least in terms of the way people experience their lives.
I've lived in North Central Charleston, S.C., since 2001 and have never attended a neighborhood association meeting. On the other hand, last night I spent hours helping promote the Draft Lessig movement, then donated $50 to a potential candidate for the California 12th congressional district. Why? Because I am more fundamentally a member of the virtual community of values represented by Lessig than I am a member of the North Central neighborhood. I could move to another neighborhood tomorrow, but I would still be the same person once I unpacked.
And why should we disparage online identities relative to meatspace identities? There are more Americans who play World of Warcraft than there are American farmers. If you're trying to be relevant to people's lives, why aren't you covering the kid who made Level 70 in The Burning Crusade with the same degree of interest that you apply to reporting on the kid who won a 4H Award?
Is the Web local? Yes, if by local we mean "of highest personal priority."
Geographically local community coverage will continue to be -- as it is now -- an expensive, high-priority product with a market value capped by geography. Virtual community coverage is also expensive and high-priority -- but its value is limited only by the size and interest of each virtual community. Where would you rather put your money?
TRUE CONVERGENCE
The old idea of "media convergence" meant that newspapers and TV stations would -- in one way or another -- become similar entities on the Web, and news organizations spent plenty of money in the 1990s trying to figure out how to collect 30 percent profits off that idea. The new idea of converged media begins with open-source, structured/semi-structured data streams and flows out to every imaginable form of media, from newspaper to "news games" to virtual worlds to cell phones, via every established 20th century medium (text, still image, audio, video, tabular data, game).
The art of 21st century journalism editing will come in understanding how individual ideas or events are best communicated to target audiences. True convergence isn't about capturing the online video market: It's about learning to surf the wave of constantly churning social and technological change.
Example: YouTube revolutionized Web video in 2005 by offering free hosting for user-created content, plus an essential yet counter-intuitive feature: HTML embed codes. Three years later, most mainstream media have yet to catch up to that advancement because they can't figure out how to think about video within the context of their news operations. That's because they see video as a "thing," just as they see a news story as a "thing." Meanwhile, the video-sharing market is rapidly fracturing into dozens of competing platforms because video is many things. It can be raw, uneven and viral (YouTube), it can be immediate and highly personal (Qik), it can be deliberate and repeatable (BlipTV).
Hence, True Convergence isn't about adding video to your news website. It's about understanding that a breaking news clip of a robbery shot from a bystander's cell phone and a three-minute video story on crime statistics are fundamentally different things. They are only lumped together as "video" in the same way that a limerick and a technical manual may categorized as "text."
True Convergence begins with recognizing the similarities and differences between pieces of content REGARDLESS OF THE MEDIUM THAT TRANSMITS THEM.
CURATING INFORMATION
Wikipedia gets a bad rap in traditional media, typically on the grounds that it is uncontrolled and unfiltered by traditional top-down editorial methods (Reason? Control doesn't scale). While this fundamentally misunderstands the wiki concept, it also ignores entirely the beneficial ways in which people have come to use Wikipedia: As a curated form of search, and as a non-news based method of keeping up with developing information.
Consider: If I'm suddenly interested in what's happening in Kosovo, I can read the news reports on the independence movement. These reports place the emphasis on what's new, since news reporting values novelty. But for me -- since I haven't been paying attention to Kosovo -- that news is an isolated, context-free dataset, and there's only so much context I can get from a 15-inch wire story.
I can go to a traditional, top-down information source (CIA Factbook) to find out more about Kosovo, but I'll have to guess at how current the information is. Or I can go to Wikipedia and read an article about Kosovo that has been edited to included the latest information.
Typical news organizations shun this kind of thinking as "not news. They will soon retire that attitude. Since zapping in and out of topics is the way most informed people acquire information, creating and curating not only databases but high-quality topic articles will be one of the most significant journalism jobs of the future. Again, this will not be instead of news writing, but in addition to newswriting. The best news sources (BBC) already perform this function, often in real time.
NEW ELITES
The Old Elites were economic and institutional, with the occasional popular artist thrown into the mix. While such elites will continue to influence culture, they will be forced to compete with unmediated communities that produce their own elites. Example: Boing Boing's contributors represent an informational elite that is driving culture in ways that elude the control of traditional elites. These new elites will likely appear transitory by traditional standards, but their influence will be profound.
THE CREATIVE MIDDLE CLASS
In the current system, the two options for creative people are rock star or starving artist. In a networked era approaching The Singularity, the creation of content, knowledge and technology will be the primary work of the American economy. For this to function properly, we'll have to develop some kind of stable basis for a creative middle class. Journalists will be members of this class, and would benefit from structures that enable it (health care, new revenue relationships, etc.)
SURPLUS PEOPLE
As development of our knowledge and technology accelerates toward The Singularity, it is likely that the bulk of the human species will become -- in economic terms -- surplus labor. Affordable robots are moving off the assembly line and into our homes and offices, a trend that will accelerate as nanotechnology, green energy and environmentally friendly materials replace the fundamentals of our Peak Oil economy. Media will have an enormous role in dealing with the crisis of unemployable humans, a shift so enormous that we should not fail to include it in our thinking.
YES, NEWSPAPERS ARE GOING AWAY
Not immediately, and not because of TV and the Internet. Newspapers (as we know them) are going away because, as physical products, they are wasteful, create an enormous carbon footprint and pollute our cities. The transition from a Peak Oil economy of waste, consumerism and profitable inefficiency is rapidly moving toward an economy based on life-cycle costs. As regulations begin to require that publishers account for the disposal, cleanup and carbon-mitigation costs of their products, most newspapers will instantly lose real profitability. TMCs will shut down their print editions and switch to Web-only distribution overnight.
The future of newspapers is niche. In 20 years we'll see print newspapers as expensive, "boutique" products for the select few (and the terminally stubborn).
OK, that's what I've got. Think we'll find something to talk about?
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
"Blackboxing" news judgment
Orson Scott Card's "Ender" series wouldn't be much of a story without a device known as "the ansible," a sort of sub-space radio that allows people to communicate instantaneously from planet to planet across light years of empty space. The story doesn't work without it... but how does it work?
Card's answer? It doesn't matter. The ansible is a black box: In science fiction terms, that means that it has rules, that it abides by those rules, and that so long as those rules are followed, the reader doesn't need to know how it works.
If you get right down to it, that sounds an awful lot like news judgment.
You'll hear a lot of people explain a lot of mysteries as "news judgment" as you go through your career. At its most basic, news judgment determines the difference between a strip "false-lead" and a two-column "news lead" and a bottom of the page "reader." New judgment sorts the daily budget into pages and categories, but it also illuminates decisions about photo placement, cropping, and the tone of headlines.
That's plenty, but we're still not done. Because our profession uses the "news judment" black box to determine more than story placement and layout. News judgment informs our decisions about what stories to cover and what resources they merit. News judgment tells us which voices to trust and which voices to ignore. Information goes in, processed news comes out. What happens in between is... well, as we say: Trust us.
Pause to consider this for a moment. We work in a profession that demands disclosure of interests. We discipline ourselves as reporters and editors to think in rational, restrained ways about competing versions of "truth." We demand that all information have a source, and that we know the source. We set aside what we think and suspect for what we can prove, and if anything in that reporting winds up being even trivially inaccurate, we will fall on our collective swords "because our credibility is all we have."
And at the end of all that work, we turn over all that we do... to a black box.
Is it really a black box? Of course not.
News judgment is one of the arts in what we do. It's supposed to represent the wisdom of our tribal elders, passed down by the generations. It's the pause before taking the bait, the long view in the heat of the moment, the experienced eye that see through the surface spin. News judgment is achieved in part by observing, in part by remembering, in part by reasoning... but it is also largely a function of sitting around talking and worrying. Even when traditional news judgment is done well, it's a messy, fretful process, much more sausage than steak.
But when news judgment is done poorly -- and it often is -- it makes a mockery of those noble intentions. Work in the business long enough and you'll encounter it: Sunday night editors who downplay a big story because they don't want to remake a page on deadline; top editors with hidden agendas they will never voluntarily reveal. Egos and office politics and fear and vengeance."News judgment" is our vague rationalization for all sorts of failures.
One of the cultural shifts that lies ahead of us can be compared to the shift from analog to digital recording. Old LP records -- the kind we listened to when I was a kid -- warped and hissed and popped, but they had a warm sound that digital music doesn't, and there were (and are) still those people who prefer it. But switching to digital music -- each note and quality assigned a digital descriptor instead of an analog wave -- opened doors to new possibilities: CDs, MP3s, downloads, etc.
We stand at that crossroads. There are things I love about our current way of doing things, but then again, I know that the way we do things isn't really a system. Moving ahead into the 21st century is going to require information systems that allow people to make multiple uses of the same data. The past is analog and opaque, the future is digital and transparent, yet we can't budge from this intersection. Why?
Three reasons:
Newsroom culture loves its analog myths: the hard-nosed reporter, the tough city editor, the cynical poet who captures the beautiful ugliness of life in a 20-word news lede, then heads off to the nearest bar to drink himself out of that terrible clarity. We are, so many of us, romantics at heart. Don't turn journalism into a digital representation of data, we say. You'll kill off the human factor -- and that's what really matters.
Then there's another, less romantic reality: We know that, despite all our claims to contrary, we produce a low-grade product. Call it the first draft of history, call it whatever you want, but ask yourself this question: Would you put a guarantee on it? What's the shelf life of what we write? How informed are our decisions? Demanding a systematic accounting for the messy daily miracle that is a newspaper will only reveal how non-systematic we are.
Finally, there's power. Senior editors and the people who influence them have the unchecked power to "make the news" in their own image, and for all their talk, they simply don't want to give that power away.
Twenty-first century journalism will differ from journalism practiced in the 20th century in numerous ways, but I predict the most significant change will be in the way we structure information and account for our decisions. Narrative was our primary tool in the past, but narrative doesn't scale. News judgment worked pretty well when the economics of information were based on scarcity, but it falls apart in an information market based on glut.
Newspaper journalists tell me you can't present the news by formula, that you can't grade information on its confidence. My answer to them? Horseshit. Google News is run by algorithms. Digg is propelled by user input. Intelligence agencies -- one of the models for our 21st century journalistic descendants -- routinely grade the "confidence level" of the information they process.
We're going to need all sorts of digital news products and systems, but none of those developments will matter if they're presented based on some black box called "news judgment." In a world where there's too much information and not enough time, trust will demand transparency and repeatability.
Does that mean we'll no longer have courageous editors who buck the system and do what's right? Or that reporters who tell insightful, moving stories will lose their value? Absolutely not.
Here's what I believe: Once we do journalism in the open, with open-source principles and ethics, we'll have a shot at regaining the credibility we lost over the last 30 years. And once the people learn to trust us because they can test us, they'll be able to see the value of that courageous editor and that insightful reporter.
All they see right now is a black box.
Card's answer? It doesn't matter. The ansible is a black box: In science fiction terms, that means that it has rules, that it abides by those rules, and that so long as those rules are followed, the reader doesn't need to know how it works.
If you get right down to it, that sounds an awful lot like news judgment.
You'll hear a lot of people explain a lot of mysteries as "news judgment" as you go through your career. At its most basic, news judgment determines the difference between a strip "false-lead" and a two-column "news lead" and a bottom of the page "reader." New judgment sorts the daily budget into pages and categories, but it also illuminates decisions about photo placement, cropping, and the tone of headlines.
That's plenty, but we're still not done. Because our profession uses the "news judment" black box to determine more than story placement and layout. News judgment informs our decisions about what stories to cover and what resources they merit. News judgment tells us which voices to trust and which voices to ignore. Information goes in, processed news comes out. What happens in between is... well, as we say: Trust us.
Pause to consider this for a moment. We work in a profession that demands disclosure of interests. We discipline ourselves as reporters and editors to think in rational, restrained ways about competing versions of "truth." We demand that all information have a source, and that we know the source. We set aside what we think and suspect for what we can prove, and if anything in that reporting winds up being even trivially inaccurate, we will fall on our collective swords "because our credibility is all we have."
And at the end of all that work, we turn over all that we do... to a black box.
Is it really a black box? Of course not.
News judgment is one of the arts in what we do. It's supposed to represent the wisdom of our tribal elders, passed down by the generations. It's the pause before taking the bait, the long view in the heat of the moment, the experienced eye that see through the surface spin. News judgment is achieved in part by observing, in part by remembering, in part by reasoning... but it is also largely a function of sitting around talking and worrying. Even when traditional news judgment is done well, it's a messy, fretful process, much more sausage than steak.
But when news judgment is done poorly -- and it often is -- it makes a mockery of those noble intentions. Work in the business long enough and you'll encounter it: Sunday night editors who downplay a big story because they don't want to remake a page on deadline; top editors with hidden agendas they will never voluntarily reveal. Egos and office politics and fear and vengeance."News judgment" is our vague rationalization for all sorts of failures.
One of the cultural shifts that lies ahead of us can be compared to the shift from analog to digital recording. Old LP records -- the kind we listened to when I was a kid -- warped and hissed and popped, but they had a warm sound that digital music doesn't, and there were (and are) still those people who prefer it. But switching to digital music -- each note and quality assigned a digital descriptor instead of an analog wave -- opened doors to new possibilities: CDs, MP3s, downloads, etc.
We stand at that crossroads. There are things I love about our current way of doing things, but then again, I know that the way we do things isn't really a system. Moving ahead into the 21st century is going to require information systems that allow people to make multiple uses of the same data. The past is analog and opaque, the future is digital and transparent, yet we can't budge from this intersection. Why?
Three reasons:
Newsroom culture loves its analog myths: the hard-nosed reporter, the tough city editor, the cynical poet who captures the beautiful ugliness of life in a 20-word news lede, then heads off to the nearest bar to drink himself out of that terrible clarity. We are, so many of us, romantics at heart. Don't turn journalism into a digital representation of data, we say. You'll kill off the human factor -- and that's what really matters.
Then there's another, less romantic reality: We know that, despite all our claims to contrary, we produce a low-grade product. Call it the first draft of history, call it whatever you want, but ask yourself this question: Would you put a guarantee on it? What's the shelf life of what we write? How informed are our decisions? Demanding a systematic accounting for the messy daily miracle that is a newspaper will only reveal how non-systematic we are.
Finally, there's power. Senior editors and the people who influence them have the unchecked power to "make the news" in their own image, and for all their talk, they simply don't want to give that power away.
Twenty-first century journalism will differ from journalism practiced in the 20th century in numerous ways, but I predict the most significant change will be in the way we structure information and account for our decisions. Narrative was our primary tool in the past, but narrative doesn't scale. News judgment worked pretty well when the economics of information were based on scarcity, but it falls apart in an information market based on glut.
Newspaper journalists tell me you can't present the news by formula, that you can't grade information on its confidence. My answer to them? Horseshit. Google News is run by algorithms. Digg is propelled by user input. Intelligence agencies -- one of the models for our 21st century journalistic descendants -- routinely grade the "confidence level" of the information they process.
We're going to need all sorts of digital news products and systems, but none of those developments will matter if they're presented based on some black box called "news judgment." In a world where there's too much information and not enough time, trust will demand transparency and repeatability.
Does that mean we'll no longer have courageous editors who buck the system and do what's right? Or that reporters who tell insightful, moving stories will lose their value? Absolutely not.
Here's what I believe: Once we do journalism in the open, with open-source principles and ethics, we'll have a shot at regaining the credibility we lost over the last 30 years. And once the people learn to trust us because they can test us, they'll be able to see the value of that courageous editor and that insightful reporter.
All they see right now is a black box.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Gloom and Doom
I hear this quite a bit: Journalists (particularly print journalists) are tired of hearing all the "doom and gloom" about what lies ahead for the industry.
The statement is usually followed by a call for "solutions" and bolstered by high-ranking reassurances that "newspapers aren't going away."
Which probably explains why I'd rather talk about doom and gloom than sweetness and light.
Some points worth remembering:
New communications technologies don't typically exterminate their predecessors (this isn't exactly true: try sending a telegram). Newspapers survived radio, radio survived TV, TV has survived Teh Interwebs, and so on.
Even dinosaurs didn't exactly go extinct. They just stopped being big old dominant lizards and survived as birds -- light, maneuverable, adaptable birds.
Change only looks like gloom and doom when you're living through it.
Hence: The issue isn't newspapers. It's journalism.
If we insist on determining the success or failure of ideas based on the relative successes and failures of newspapers, then we're using the wrong metric. If we insist on valuing only those ideas that return 20 percent profits to investors, then short-sighted greed will blind us to the obvious.
We've got some heavy lifting to do. We need new business models (note that I made this plural) that can fund quality journalism. We need to switch from "document" thinking to "database" thinking. We must re-imagine a relationship with "the people formerly known as the audience" that fundamentally accounts for the fact that the transmission of information is no longer a one-way street.
Will there be newspapers in the future? Sure. Not that most of us will care.
Radio was still around in the 1950s, but Edward R. Murrow -- whose "This is London" Blitz radio reports were the stuff of radio-journalism legend -- had moved on to TV.
So let's stop worrying about preserving the status of the current newsroom management class and the wealth of our media ownership elites.
Let's start scheming up new ways to make great journalism.
Nothing gloomy there.
The statement is usually followed by a call for "solutions" and bolstered by high-ranking reassurances that "newspapers aren't going away."
Which probably explains why I'd rather talk about doom and gloom than sweetness and light.
Some points worth remembering:
New communications technologies don't typically exterminate their predecessors (this isn't exactly true: try sending a telegram). Newspapers survived radio, radio survived TV, TV has survived Teh Interwebs, and so on.
Even dinosaurs didn't exactly go extinct. They just stopped being big old dominant lizards and survived as birds -- light, maneuverable, adaptable birds.
Change only looks like gloom and doom when you're living through it.
Hence: The issue isn't newspapers. It's journalism.
If we insist on determining the success or failure of ideas based on the relative successes and failures of newspapers, then we're using the wrong metric. If we insist on valuing only those ideas that return 20 percent profits to investors, then short-sighted greed will blind us to the obvious.
We've got some heavy lifting to do. We need new business models (note that I made this plural) that can fund quality journalism. We need to switch from "document" thinking to "database" thinking. We must re-imagine a relationship with "the people formerly known as the audience" that fundamentally accounts for the fact that the transmission of information is no longer a one-way street.
Will there be newspapers in the future? Sure. Not that most of us will care.
Radio was still around in the 1950s, but Edward R. Murrow -- whose "This is London" Blitz radio reports were the stuff of radio-journalism legend -- had moved on to TV.
So let's stop worrying about preserving the status of the current newsroom management class and the wealth of our media ownership elites.
Let's start scheming up new ways to make great journalism.
Nothing gloomy there.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Why quality is a moving target
I got my first regular job at a professional newspaper in my final semester of college. It was a job that no longer exists: Paste-up guy for The Chapel Hill Newspaper.
In those days, editors used pencils to draw page layouts on pieces of paper and stories came out of typesetting machines in long single columns. My job was to take those typeset columns, run them through a machine that coated the back of the sheet with hot wax, and then use an Exacto knife to assemble the stories according to the layout diagrams.
Photos came in pretty much the same way: Editors sized them, the imaging department sent them to a printing machine, and then our crew would cut them out, wax them, crop them, put them on the page and outline them with line tape.
Every once in a while an editor would call for a cut-out photo, and since I had a background as a commercial artist and did a decent job of cutting subjects out of photographs, my skills encouraged more editors to design more pages using more cutouts.
In those days, the definition of a "quality" cutout was a photo that had been cut by someone with a knack for it.
Then Photoshop came along, and suddenly it was possible to do digital cutouts.
FAST FORWARD: PHOTOSHOP
And here's the message: On the day that newspapers gained that ability, the BEST Exacto-knife cutout artist became obsolete. It's simply not possible to do with a knife and a waxing machine what Photoshop users can do with the Magic Wand and various lassos.
New tools -- new technologies -- changed the definition of quality for that specific journalistic convention. The reason was obvious: What used to look good to our pre-Photoshop eyes looked ham-handed once we saw what the new software could do. We understood, without needing to argue over it, that we had to change our standards.
So why is it that when we talk about informational tools, Old School Print Journalists categorically reject the idea that new technologies make our old standards obsolete?
EXAMPLE: ELECTION NIGHT
I spent more than decade running election coverage at two daily newspapers. Having a successful election night is really about logistical planning, which meant that I would typically spend a lot of time thinking about how to process poll results into reliable numbers on deadline. The hard numbers went to "Winner's Boxes," the percentages went to reporters and editors, and if everything ran smoothly, they'd all match-up by final edition.
That was the state of the art in the late 1990s: Dead data in stories and image files, collected over the phone and handwritten by a staff of clerks onto Xeroxed forms that we copied and distributed to be keyed into the system by more clerks. Valuable today, useless tomorrow.
Did we know about spreadsheets and databases back then? Sure. But we had no practical way of integrating those programs into our proprietary content management systems. We couldn't even type the numbers into that system and have them flow into the program that we used to create the winners' boxes.
Then XML came along, and suddenly everyone had the opportunity to build systems that could talk to each other across platforms.
XML allows us to mark up structured or semi-structured data for multiple uses and re-uses. Type it in once, edit it as you would an important story, and then archive when you're done. Write a simple script and the numbers in your winners boxes will update automatically every time you enter new results. Collect enough of it and you can do information magic: Comparisons, charts, searchable products. Combine that data with other tools (the Google Maps API, Flash, Action Script, etc.) and you can create products that were unimaginable when you collected the data in the first place.
That should have made the old "dead-data" system obsolete overnight, just like Photoshop killed all the Exacto cutout artists. But XML has been around since 1998, and most newspapers still aren't using it to manage the data that they process.
Take a look at the cable news network websites: They get it. Cable news spends more on technology because they're working in public in real time. Newspapers don't care, because we work in private and we only show you our final revision. To cable news, technology is a mandatory investment; to newspapers, it's an expensive luxury.
So most cable news sites put up election numbers that are actually being served from databases, rather than typing results from one document into another document. The difference? Change the database and you change all the instances. Without a databased system, you must manually edit each instance that appears on your site.
Because newspapers don't tend to think in terms of databases, they create documents. Even the cool "Interactive Map" that Charleston.net posted after the South Carolina primaries isn't really a true database product. Yes, it nicely mashes up election data to a Flash map, and it looks great. But the data is an isolated capture.
That is to say: because we didn't design the guts of the map around a central database, the data in the map wasn't automatically updated when the state parties provided their final tallies. That's why it's Feb. 6th and our Jan. 26th map still says that 1 percent of Richland County's precincts have yet to report.
To a newspaper editor, that's a quibble. We published. We had a map. It was cool. But I look at that 1 percent and see an Exacto knife cutout. It's a good Exacto knife cutout, but I know that technology has changed the audience's expectations. I know that this change is continuous and accelerating. I know that the data matters.
Why should a newspaper editor care? Because if he'd bitten the bullet on creating an integrated election-results database in 2007, he'd have all sorts of cool things that he could do with with that data in 2012. Or November. Maybe his reporters would play with it and find fascinating stories. Maybe he could open it up to users from the website and they would find fascinating stories. We'll never know.
If you cannot immediately grasp why this is concept is fundamental to understanding the immediate future of 21st century journalism and culture, well... I'll be posting on that later.
In those days, editors used pencils to draw page layouts on pieces of paper and stories came out of typesetting machines in long single columns. My job was to take those typeset columns, run them through a machine that coated the back of the sheet with hot wax, and then use an Exacto knife to assemble the stories according to the layout diagrams.
Photos came in pretty much the same way: Editors sized them, the imaging department sent them to a printing machine, and then our crew would cut them out, wax them, crop them, put them on the page and outline them with line tape.
Every once in a while an editor would call for a cut-out photo, and since I had a background as a commercial artist and did a decent job of cutting subjects out of photographs, my skills encouraged more editors to design more pages using more cutouts.
In those days, the definition of a "quality" cutout was a photo that had been cut by someone with a knack for it.
Then Photoshop came along, and suddenly it was possible to do digital cutouts.
FAST FORWARD: PHOTOSHOP
And here's the message: On the day that newspapers gained that ability, the BEST Exacto-knife cutout artist became obsolete. It's simply not possible to do with a knife and a waxing machine what Photoshop users can do with the Magic Wand and various lassos.
New tools -- new technologies -- changed the definition of quality for that specific journalistic convention. The reason was obvious: What used to look good to our pre-Photoshop eyes looked ham-handed once we saw what the new software could do. We understood, without needing to argue over it, that we had to change our standards.
So why is it that when we talk about informational tools, Old School Print Journalists categorically reject the idea that new technologies make our old standards obsolete?
EXAMPLE: ELECTION NIGHT
I spent more than decade running election coverage at two daily newspapers. Having a successful election night is really about logistical planning, which meant that I would typically spend a lot of time thinking about how to process poll results into reliable numbers on deadline. The hard numbers went to "Winner's Boxes," the percentages went to reporters and editors, and if everything ran smoothly, they'd all match-up by final edition.
That was the state of the art in the late 1990s: Dead data in stories and image files, collected over the phone and handwritten by a staff of clerks onto Xeroxed forms that we copied and distributed to be keyed into the system by more clerks. Valuable today, useless tomorrow.
Did we know about spreadsheets and databases back then? Sure. But we had no practical way of integrating those programs into our proprietary content management systems. We couldn't even type the numbers into that system and have them flow into the program that we used to create the winners' boxes.
Then XML came along, and suddenly everyone had the opportunity to build systems that could talk to each other across platforms.
XML allows us to mark up structured or semi-structured data for multiple uses and re-uses. Type it in once, edit it as you would an important story, and then archive when you're done. Write a simple script and the numbers in your winners boxes will update automatically every time you enter new results. Collect enough of it and you can do information magic: Comparisons, charts, searchable products. Combine that data with other tools (the Google Maps API, Flash, Action Script, etc.) and you can create products that were unimaginable when you collected the data in the first place.
That should have made the old "dead-data" system obsolete overnight, just like Photoshop killed all the Exacto cutout artists. But XML has been around since 1998, and most newspapers still aren't using it to manage the data that they process.
Take a look at the cable news network websites: They get it. Cable news spends more on technology because they're working in public in real time. Newspapers don't care, because we work in private and we only show you our final revision. To cable news, technology is a mandatory investment; to newspapers, it's an expensive luxury.
So most cable news sites put up election numbers that are actually being served from databases, rather than typing results from one document into another document. The difference? Change the database and you change all the instances. Without a databased system, you must manually edit each instance that appears on your site.
Because newspapers don't tend to think in terms of databases, they create documents. Even the cool "Interactive Map" that Charleston.net posted after the South Carolina primaries isn't really a true database product. Yes, it nicely mashes up election data to a Flash map, and it looks great. But the data is an isolated capture.
That is to say: because we didn't design the guts of the map around a central database, the data in the map wasn't automatically updated when the state parties provided their final tallies. That's why it's Feb. 6th and our Jan. 26th map still says that 1 percent of Richland County's precincts have yet to report.
To a newspaper editor, that's a quibble. We published. We had a map. It was cool. But I look at that 1 percent and see an Exacto knife cutout. It's a good Exacto knife cutout, but I know that technology has changed the audience's expectations. I know that this change is continuous and accelerating. I know that the data matters.
Why should a newspaper editor care? Because if he'd bitten the bullet on creating an integrated election-results database in 2007, he'd have all sorts of cool things that he could do with with that data in 2012. Or November. Maybe his reporters would play with it and find fascinating stories. Maybe he could open it up to users from the website and they would find fascinating stories. We'll never know.
If you cannot immediately grasp why this is concept is fundamental to understanding the immediate future of 21st century journalism and culture, well... I'll be posting on that later.
Are you thinking, or "quorum sensing?"
In the fall of 2005 I wrote one of my final science-beat articles on research into a biological phenomena called "quorum sensing." Specifically, quorum sensing represents a form of chemical communication between bacteria. That's vaguely interesting, but the exact moment at which quorum sensing transformed my understanding of the world took place when a microbiologist described bacterial behavior as being "kinda like a really bad corporate environment."
Because I realized it wasn't "kinda" like a bad corporate environment -- it was EXACTLY like a bad corporate environment.
QUORUM SENSING IN BIOLOGY
To summarize: Bacteria send out chemical signals into their environment. As they wander about they encounter chemical signals sent out by other bacteria. At low levels of population density, this chemical signaling has zero effect on bacterial behavior, but as a population begins to expand, the background noise of chemical signaling passes a threshold. The result is like flipping a switch: Bacteria that acted one way below the threshold suddenly behave in radically different ways. And they do so like a light turned on by a switch rather than like a light turned on by a rheostat.
Hence: When an individual bacteria receives only a few chemical signals, it acts as an individual. But once it perceives that there are sufficient members of its species in the area, it cooperates in complex ways to create a colony. Once that colony is established, quorum-sensing bacteria will serve the colony even if that means committing suicide.
This is why having one or two e. coli on your hamburger won't make you sick. Individual e. coli are waiting for a signal to start acting aggressively. A few e. coli acting up would immediately be overwhelmed by your immune system; an army of e. coli, conducting a coordinated surprise attack, will put you right on your ass.
(Interestingly, this also takes place in the animal kingdom. Ever notice how fire ants tend to bite all at once? That's because they're using chemical signals. If the first fire ant to reach your ankle bit you right away, you'd kill it and brush off the rest. Instead, the ants wait for the signal that says a bunch of them are in position, and then they bite simultaneously. It's an evolved a form of communication that enables ants to inflict maximum damage on their enemies.)
And how do bacteria colonies compete for resources? Our classical, Western, market-based idea of competition holds that whichever competitor is the most productive wins. But quorum-sensing bacteria often win by cheating, secreting chemicals that poison or confuse their competitors.
Does the best bacteria colony win? Not usually. The most organized and established bacteria win.
And since our subject is media change, this point is significant, too: In a mature bacterial ecosystem, there is little actual competition. All the organisms in the ecosystem have evolved to exploit their own niches. What sets off bacterial war is anything that upsets that equilibrium. Competition -- often violent -- occurs whenever nature encounters a vacuum.
QUORUM SENSING IN THE MEDIA
I believe it helps to think of mass-media as an ecosystem. Newspapers and TV stations competed for scoops, eyeballs and ad revenue, but TV didn't threaten to put newspapers out of business, and vice versa. That particular media ecosystem remained more or less stable from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. The World Wide Web began threatening it in 1994-95, but it took the mass distribution of broadband access and a series of subtle technological advancements to actually disrupt the equilibrium that pays journalists' salaries.
We practice journalism today in the transitional period between an old equilibrium that has ended and a new equilibrium that has yet to take shape. The outcome cannot yet be reliably predicted, and the notion that the best, most productive ideas will naturally rise to the top is far from proven.
As I look around, I see a lot of companies acting like bacteria colonies. They send out signals and try small initiatives, but few are moving in any bold, wise directions. Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
In other words, their actions will not be determined by an independent, forward-thinking assessment of individual ideas, but by their perceptions of where everyone else is going.
On the one hand, this isn't a bad approach. It's certainly traditional, and it certainly offers at least the illusion of safety. But this corporate quorum sensing has also been the cause of some amazingly foolish industry fads -- like the "pay-to-read-our-website" push and the "heavy registration" mandate. It's not like the experts didn't tell the executives these were bad ideas at the time -- it's just that everyone understood from the signals in their boardroom environments that the CEOs and shareholders were tired of websites that didn't make profits.
QUORUM SENSING WITHIN THE PROFESSION
Journalists like to believe that we are -- as a profession -- a tribe of free-thinking individualists. It turns out we're not that different from other professions, with the same incentives toward group-think, quorum-sensing and anti-intellectualism.
It's also time to call bullshit on the newsroom tendency to imagine that all these conformist, bottom-line tendencies arise with the beancounters and are then forced upon our noble First Amendment enterprise. Newsrooms are, by their very nature, conservative institutions that abhor anything that disrupts the production cycle. We're actually hostile to innovation.
You'd think that an entity that produces something new every day would be adapted to rapid change. The opposite is true. A newspaper is a physical object that is printed and delivered at the same time, every day. Only what goes into it changes. and so long as what goes in doesn't upset the production process or change the physical object, content barely matters.
But try to change any of those variables -- deadlines, workflows, meeting schedules, the relationships between our print products and our electronic products -- and watch all hell break loose. A newspaper is a machine honed to perfection by time. It can't adapt easily to new things because it's become so efficient at doing the same thing, over and over.
Why bother to talk about this? Because as we discuss creating or improving quality in the digital environment, what we're really talking about is re-engineering the entire environment. Print journalists want to talk about saving newspapers, and that's the wrong topic. The real issue is how we'll change journalism to function with 21st century tools.
Why talk about this in the context of bacteria? Because print journalists by and large still discuss new-media journalism based not on experience or study, but on their quorum-sensing perception of their peers' attitudes. New media tools like database/map mashups represent wonderful new opportunities for advancing the original goals of journalism, yet print journalists still tend to frame their internal discussions of new media as a narrative about civilized people besieged by barbarians. These men and women are not thinking about the future, they are conforming to their perception of the present.
And if you are outside of that perceived consensus, you're likely to be very lonely.
PUTTING QUORUM SENSING TO WORK FOR YOU
A shorter version of this post might be: "Being right is less important than being normal." Because something about human psychology tells us that the more often we hear or see something in a non-threatening way, the more normal it becomes.
Two things will have to happen before we'll succeed in creating quality journalism for the new media ecosystem. Thing No. 1 is we'll need a functional business model; Thing No. 2 is we'll need to convince everyone in the business that our ideas fit within the mainstream.
For instance, I predicted two years ago that the future of news reporting will include geo-tags for every location we mention in stories. And the technology exists today to integrate this into the newswriting workflow. The costs of including this in our reporting are minimal, the benefits are significant, and you could make money by doing it.
So why aren't newspapers doing this?
Because it seems weird. Because it's new. Because the people who make these decisions can't quite imagine the new products that would make use of this data or the process that would create a geo-tagging interface for newswriters and editors.
But here's what will happen: As executives are exposed to more geo-data mashups, they'll begin to perceive that geo-tagging is OK. Geo-tagging will start to seem like a normal thing to do with bits of information. They'll start to see the profit potential in it, because companies like Google will be making money off of it.
And on that day, some newspaper executive will ask his assembled subordinates,"Why aren't we geo-tagging all our stories? Why are we behind the curve again!?"
In other words, seeing the future isn't enough. We have to communicate that future over and over, spreading our good ideas and winnowing out our bad ideas. We have to understand that our decision-makers will have to see our ideas crop up in many places before they'll see them as valid.
News veterans -- and I'm one of them -- are not generally enamored of the newest generation of entry-level reporters. We question your work ethic, your willingness to learn, your willingness to pay your dues. I think there are lots of things young journalists should learn from veterans -- but let's be frank: You're also in a position to help us advance new ideas about journalism and media.
You can help by leading, but you can also help by treating new ideas as normal evolutions of old values. You can become quorum-sensing transmitters of normalcy to anxious news executives. You can think about novel technologies without feeling threatened by them. You can see change as an opportunity rather than a threat, and you can communicate that with your attitudes.
Whatever the fate of your generation, you can play an important role in the current transformation from the old equilibrium to the new. It might even make some of you stars.
"Charlie, here comes the deuce. And when you speak of me, speak well." -- Crash Davis, Bull Durham (1988)
Because I realized it wasn't "kinda" like a bad corporate environment -- it was EXACTLY like a bad corporate environment.
QUORUM SENSING IN BIOLOGY
To summarize: Bacteria send out chemical signals into their environment. As they wander about they encounter chemical signals sent out by other bacteria. At low levels of population density, this chemical signaling has zero effect on bacterial behavior, but as a population begins to expand, the background noise of chemical signaling passes a threshold. The result is like flipping a switch: Bacteria that acted one way below the threshold suddenly behave in radically different ways. And they do so like a light turned on by a switch rather than like a light turned on by a rheostat.
Hence: When an individual bacteria receives only a few chemical signals, it acts as an individual. But once it perceives that there are sufficient members of its species in the area, it cooperates in complex ways to create a colony. Once that colony is established, quorum-sensing bacteria will serve the colony even if that means committing suicide.
This is why having one or two e. coli on your hamburger won't make you sick. Individual e. coli are waiting for a signal to start acting aggressively. A few e. coli acting up would immediately be overwhelmed by your immune system; an army of e. coli, conducting a coordinated surprise attack, will put you right on your ass.
(Interestingly, this also takes place in the animal kingdom. Ever notice how fire ants tend to bite all at once? That's because they're using chemical signals. If the first fire ant to reach your ankle bit you right away, you'd kill it and brush off the rest. Instead, the ants wait for the signal that says a bunch of them are in position, and then they bite simultaneously. It's an evolved a form of communication that enables ants to inflict maximum damage on their enemies.)
And how do bacteria colonies compete for resources? Our classical, Western, market-based idea of competition holds that whichever competitor is the most productive wins. But quorum-sensing bacteria often win by cheating, secreting chemicals that poison or confuse their competitors.
Does the best bacteria colony win? Not usually. The most organized and established bacteria win.
And since our subject is media change, this point is significant, too: In a mature bacterial ecosystem, there is little actual competition. All the organisms in the ecosystem have evolved to exploit their own niches. What sets off bacterial war is anything that upsets that equilibrium. Competition -- often violent -- occurs whenever nature encounters a vacuum.
QUORUM SENSING IN THE MEDIA
I believe it helps to think of mass-media as an ecosystem. Newspapers and TV stations competed for scoops, eyeballs and ad revenue, but TV didn't threaten to put newspapers out of business, and vice versa. That particular media ecosystem remained more or less stable from the early 1960s to the early 2000s. The World Wide Web began threatening it in 1994-95, but it took the mass distribution of broadband access and a series of subtle technological advancements to actually disrupt the equilibrium that pays journalists' salaries.
We practice journalism today in the transitional period between an old equilibrium that has ended and a new equilibrium that has yet to take shape. The outcome cannot yet be reliably predicted, and the notion that the best, most productive ideas will naturally rise to the top is far from proven.
As I look around, I see a lot of companies acting like bacteria colonies. They send out signals and try small initiatives, but few are moving in any bold, wise directions. Many executives are just sitting around, receiving signals from their environment, waiting for the signal that a "quorum" has coalesced around a new direction.
In other words, their actions will not be determined by an independent, forward-thinking assessment of individual ideas, but by their perceptions of where everyone else is going.
On the one hand, this isn't a bad approach. It's certainly traditional, and it certainly offers at least the illusion of safety. But this corporate quorum sensing has also been the cause of some amazingly foolish industry fads -- like the "pay-to-read-our-website" push and the "heavy registration" mandate. It's not like the experts didn't tell the executives these were bad ideas at the time -- it's just that everyone understood from the signals in their boardroom environments that the CEOs and shareholders were tired of websites that didn't make profits.
QUORUM SENSING WITHIN THE PROFESSION
Journalists like to believe that we are -- as a profession -- a tribe of free-thinking individualists. It turns out we're not that different from other professions, with the same incentives toward group-think, quorum-sensing and anti-intellectualism.
It's also time to call bullshit on the newsroom tendency to imagine that all these conformist, bottom-line tendencies arise with the beancounters and are then forced upon our noble First Amendment enterprise. Newsrooms are, by their very nature, conservative institutions that abhor anything that disrupts the production cycle. We're actually hostile to innovation.
You'd think that an entity that produces something new every day would be adapted to rapid change. The opposite is true. A newspaper is a physical object that is printed and delivered at the same time, every day. Only what goes into it changes. and so long as what goes in doesn't upset the production process or change the physical object, content barely matters.
But try to change any of those variables -- deadlines, workflows, meeting schedules, the relationships between our print products and our electronic products -- and watch all hell break loose. A newspaper is a machine honed to perfection by time. It can't adapt easily to new things because it's become so efficient at doing the same thing, over and over.
Why bother to talk about this? Because as we discuss creating or improving quality in the digital environment, what we're really talking about is re-engineering the entire environment. Print journalists want to talk about saving newspapers, and that's the wrong topic. The real issue is how we'll change journalism to function with 21st century tools.
Why talk about this in the context of bacteria? Because print journalists by and large still discuss new-media journalism based not on experience or study, but on their quorum-sensing perception of their peers' attitudes. New media tools like database/map mashups represent wonderful new opportunities for advancing the original goals of journalism, yet print journalists still tend to frame their internal discussions of new media as a narrative about civilized people besieged by barbarians. These men and women are not thinking about the future, they are conforming to their perception of the present.
And if you are outside of that perceived consensus, you're likely to be very lonely.
PUTTING QUORUM SENSING TO WORK FOR YOU
A shorter version of this post might be: "Being right is less important than being normal." Because something about human psychology tells us that the more often we hear or see something in a non-threatening way, the more normal it becomes.
Two things will have to happen before we'll succeed in creating quality journalism for the new media ecosystem. Thing No. 1 is we'll need a functional business model; Thing No. 2 is we'll need to convince everyone in the business that our ideas fit within the mainstream.
For instance, I predicted two years ago that the future of news reporting will include geo-tags for every location we mention in stories. And the technology exists today to integrate this into the newswriting workflow. The costs of including this in our reporting are minimal, the benefits are significant, and you could make money by doing it.
So why aren't newspapers doing this?
Because it seems weird. Because it's new. Because the people who make these decisions can't quite imagine the new products that would make use of this data or the process that would create a geo-tagging interface for newswriters and editors.
But here's what will happen: As executives are exposed to more geo-data mashups, they'll begin to perceive that geo-tagging is OK. Geo-tagging will start to seem like a normal thing to do with bits of information. They'll start to see the profit potential in it, because companies like Google will be making money off of it.
And on that day, some newspaper executive will ask his assembled subordinates,"Why aren't we geo-tagging all our stories? Why are we behind the curve again!?"
In other words, seeing the future isn't enough. We have to communicate that future over and over, spreading our good ideas and winnowing out our bad ideas. We have to understand that our decision-makers will have to see our ideas crop up in many places before they'll see them as valid.
News veterans -- and I'm one of them -- are not generally enamored of the newest generation of entry-level reporters. We question your work ethic, your willingness to learn, your willingness to pay your dues. I think there are lots of things young journalists should learn from veterans -- but let's be frank: You're also in a position to help us advance new ideas about journalism and media.
You can help by leading, but you can also help by treating new ideas as normal evolutions of old values. You can become quorum-sensing transmitters of normalcy to anxious news executives. You can think about novel technologies without feeling threatened by them. You can see change as an opportunity rather than a threat, and you can communicate that with your attitudes.
Whatever the fate of your generation, you can play an important role in the current transformation from the old equilibrium to the new. It might even make some of you stars.
"Charlie, here comes the deuce. And when you speak of me, speak well." -- Crash Davis, Bull Durham (1988)
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Quality and other essential bullshit
"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then to work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value." -- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974Our topic for Feb. 25th (absent a spiffy name-change) is "Quality in the digital environment." And obviously, with professional journalists coming in to talk to journalism students and faculty, the form of quality we're going to be discussing is ...
Musical quality.
Or we might as well be. Because "quality" turns out to be one of those philosophical topics that professional journalists simply hate. So to get things started, let me encourage you to begin your thinking about journalistic quality in the digital environment by forgetting about the journalism and the vaguely defined digital environment and focusing on that elusive word: quality.So: Back to music.
You know good music when you hear it, right? And your tastes in music have improved with age, as you've listened to more music? Most likely.
But if I asked you to define -- in terms that apply to all music and to all listeners, in all meaningful situations -- what makes one piece of music quality and another pure crap, would you consider that a valid request? Where would you begin?
And if it's not possible to define a universal standard of quality for something as universal as music... well, how are we going to do that trick for journalism?
We all think we know quality when we see it (or hear it), but when we attempt to define what quality is, we can't get there. We can't pin quality down, measure its absolute terms, cite its sources. In touching upon this word, we are entering into hostile territory: the realm of the philosopher.
Quality is, at its heart, a matter of metaphysics, and journalism -- as a set of tools -- is poorly equipped to deal with metaphysics. Our profession is a mental discipline in which we are asked to weigh multiple bits of information and perspective and then responsibly reason our way through conflicting possibilities by asking: How do you know? Where is your proof? In our business, the material always trumps the intangible: You've got an anonymous quote? My on-the-record quote trumps it (regardless of the quality of the two quotes, by the way). You've got three people who'll say something on the record? My official, FOIA-obtained document kicks their collective asses. And so on.
So when you try to talk philosophy with journalists, be prepared. Our brains short-circuit. What journalists really believe is that things that cannot be sourced in a materialistic way are -- in essence -- irrelevant. Which means that quality is just a word, and people who say things like "quality cannot be defined" are simply eggheaded bullshit artists.
OK. Got it.
But understand this: To be great, you must be willing to tackle the intangible. To build better journalism, you simply must struggle with the abstract dilemmas of quality, because the answers you find will point you to new possibilities.
Are all opinions of quality equal? Should decisions about quality be trusted to the people or to informed elites? What expertise improves our understanding of quality? Can quality be measured by popularity? Or profitability? Should we measure journalistic quality by how closely we hew to abstract notions like "truth," or by tangible metrics, like correction counts? Is quality found in a process or discipline, or does it reside solely in the end product, however created?
Why should anyone care about this? Because brand new tools are changing the context in which we commit journalism. My charge to you: Do not judge new tools by old assumptions -- particularly those that reject the validity of abstract criticism.
Because we do not look to improve the quality of journalism for journalists. Or to make more money for stockholders. And we certainly don't do it to validate the grumpy opinions of our high priests.
The only reason to improve the quality of journalism is to serve people. And we should get about it.
"Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster." -- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Wake up!
I mothballed this blog in 2007 for many reasons. Some of them were conceptual (I felt that discussing media absent the larger context of culture was pointless); others were personal (I'd stepped down from a "management" level job and returned to reporting).
But it occurred to me last week that it was time to bring it back in a new, and very specific, incarnation: From now until Feb. 24, I'll be using this site to prepare students at the University of Mississippi for my visit on Feb. 25th. Janet and I will be appearing on a panel with the tentative title "Quality in the Digital Environment," then sticking around to talk with the staff of the student newspaper there.
There's a great story about a radio talk show host and fan of Noam Chomsky who once ambushed Jeff Greenfield about why Nightline wouldn't invite Chomsky on as a guest. Greenfield's answer -- oft-derided but certainly candid -- was to ask a question: Could Chomsky condense his ideas down to 30-second answers?
And obviously, the answer is no. You can't introduce an idea in 30 seconds. All you can really do in 30 seconds is reinforce existing ideas, scoring shallow debating points against "the opposition."
I have no interest in boring people who don't care about my topic with lengthy explanations. In fact, I really have no interest in people who don't care about my topic -- which, based on experience, will likely be most of the people in the audience. But I'm intensely interested in the self-selecting few who will find something of value in the ideas I represent.
To those people, I dedicate this new incarnation of this old blog. I'll try to post a steady stream of ideas and concepts here, then leave it around for reference for anyone who comes along later.
But it occurred to me last week that it was time to bring it back in a new, and very specific, incarnation: From now until Feb. 24, I'll be using this site to prepare students at the University of Mississippi for my visit on Feb. 25th. Janet and I will be appearing on a panel with the tentative title "Quality in the Digital Environment," then sticking around to talk with the staff of the student newspaper there.
There's a great story about a radio talk show host and fan of Noam Chomsky who once ambushed Jeff Greenfield about why Nightline wouldn't invite Chomsky on as a guest. Greenfield's answer -- oft-derided but certainly candid -- was to ask a question: Could Chomsky condense his ideas down to 30-second answers?
And obviously, the answer is no. You can't introduce an idea in 30 seconds. All you can really do in 30 seconds is reinforce existing ideas, scoring shallow debating points against "the opposition."
I have no interest in boring people who don't care about my topic with lengthy explanations. In fact, I really have no interest in people who don't care about my topic -- which, based on experience, will likely be most of the people in the audience. But I'm intensely interested in the self-selecting few who will find something of value in the ideas I represent.
To those people, I dedicate this new incarnation of this old blog. I'll try to post a steady stream of ideas and concepts here, then leave it around for reference for anyone who comes along later.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Times-Select RIP
File it under We-Told-You-So: Management at the NYT is preparing to shut down Times-Select, the company's $50-a-year paywall experiment. I don't feel like dancing on its grave, because the idea of paying for certain types of content shouldn't be lost, and Times-Select (in concept, anyway) came close to being that kind of product. But there's a message in this headline that's going to cause a lot of consternation around newspaper boardrooms.
The short history of most newspaper websites looks a lot like this: Excitement (1995-99); Disillusionment (1999); The Empire Strikes Back (2000-03); Blogs, Video, Mass Confusion and Slow Progress (2004-07). Next up: Panic and Fundamental Reconfiguration (2008-11). But I'm getting ahead of myself.
One of the primary media-company theories in the post-Disillusionment period was that early Web business plans were distorted by a sort of hippie-ish Web-culture altruism in which people came to expect that all content should be free. Many executives came to believe that their future on the Web would take place behind some kind of paywall, and that consumers would be conditioned to this hard reality by industry control. This was a dearly held belief founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of online media that nevertheless jibed smoothly with widespread attitudes within the media management class.
In many cases, the first step toward that goal was "heavy" registration, and newspaper sites across the country drank the Kool Aid in the first years of this decade. Combine that "register or go away" attitude with the average circulation director's outright hostility toward the Web edition and you'll understand the zeitgeist of The Empire Strikes Back period. Companies stopped treating their sites as charity cases and started demanding profits -- or at least the reasonable expectation of profits in the very near future.
To executives who dreamed of online subscription fees and the comfortable familiarity of a one-to-many distribution model, Times-Select was not only a shining city on a hill but a well-timed counter-argument to the read-write-Web voices of 2004-2005. The NYT's new plan to wall-off its most popular columnists came at the same moment that heretics within the industry were arguing (with much inconvenient evidence in their favor) for a very different (Web 2.0) type of future for newspaper sites.
Times-Select had a few things going for it, just as The WSJ's paywall had a logic that surpassed the market limits on generic paid-content news. But those attributes weren't applicable to metro newspapers. Charge for your online coverage of Anytown, USA, and three things will happen: 1. Traffic at the local TV station sites will spike; 2. Your smaller print-pub competition will get a boost for their Web sites; and 3. You'll encourage a whole new class of Web-only news operations to move into the vacuum you've created. It's simple economic logic, and yet the industry's desire for a paid-content future remained so overwhelmingly strong that Times-Select stood for two years as a symbol for the Big Media Alternative to a small media future.
Let's hope that the demise of the Times-Select experiment puts to rest a lot of institutional biases operating as poorly conceived theories about the nature of online media. This is a moment when legacy-media companies need to move rapidly, boldly and flexibly toward relevant futures, and every iota of time and energy spent debating the relevancy of a paid-content business model for general news coverage is a movement in the wrong direction.
The short history of most newspaper websites looks a lot like this: Excitement (1995-99); Disillusionment (1999); The Empire Strikes Back (2000-03); Blogs, Video, Mass Confusion and Slow Progress (2004-07). Next up: Panic and Fundamental Reconfiguration (2008-11). But I'm getting ahead of myself.
One of the primary media-company theories in the post-Disillusionment period was that early Web business plans were distorted by a sort of hippie-ish Web-culture altruism in which people came to expect that all content should be free. Many executives came to believe that their future on the Web would take place behind some kind of paywall, and that consumers would be conditioned to this hard reality by industry control. This was a dearly held belief founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of online media that nevertheless jibed smoothly with widespread attitudes within the media management class.
In many cases, the first step toward that goal was "heavy" registration, and newspaper sites across the country drank the Kool Aid in the first years of this decade. Combine that "register or go away" attitude with the average circulation director's outright hostility toward the Web edition and you'll understand the zeitgeist of The Empire Strikes Back period. Companies stopped treating their sites as charity cases and started demanding profits -- or at least the reasonable expectation of profits in the very near future.
To executives who dreamed of online subscription fees and the comfortable familiarity of a one-to-many distribution model, Times-Select was not only a shining city on a hill but a well-timed counter-argument to the read-write-Web voices of 2004-2005. The NYT's new plan to wall-off its most popular columnists came at the same moment that heretics within the industry were arguing (with much inconvenient evidence in their favor) for a very different (Web 2.0) type of future for newspaper sites.
Times-Select had a few things going for it, just as The WSJ's paywall had a logic that surpassed the market limits on generic paid-content news. But those attributes weren't applicable to metro newspapers. Charge for your online coverage of Anytown, USA, and three things will happen: 1. Traffic at the local TV station sites will spike; 2. Your smaller print-pub competition will get a boost for their Web sites; and 3. You'll encourage a whole new class of Web-only news operations to move into the vacuum you've created. It's simple economic logic, and yet the industry's desire for a paid-content future remained so overwhelmingly strong that Times-Select stood for two years as a symbol for the Big Media Alternative to a small media future.
Let's hope that the demise of the Times-Select experiment puts to rest a lot of institutional biases operating as poorly conceived theories about the nature of online media. This is a moment when legacy-media companies need to move rapidly, boldly and flexibly toward relevant futures, and every iota of time and energy spent debating the relevancy of a paid-content business model for general news coverage is a movement in the wrong direction.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
NEW CULTURE, NEW MEDIA
I spent the weekend at a gathering of what might best be described as the post-mass-media tribe in Black Mountain, N.C.
This isn't youthful rebellion. It isn't a bunch of people sitting around smoking pot on Daddy's dime. These are competent, intelligent, community-oriented people with a variety of interests and skills. They care about the environment, justice, free-expression, equal opportunity and liberty. They put their money -- and their muscles --on their values.
And I have this powerful sense that these are the people who are about to power the next wave of cultural creativity in America. Old values, new threats and emerging technologies are morphing into a Green Revolution that is both global and intensely local, with a strong emphasis on sustainability and responsibility.
Thow-away media mean nothing to these people. They don't "do" shoddy.
Got anything for them?
- They don't read newspapers, and why should they? Newspapers scorn them to begin with.
- They don't watch much TV, either.
- Big music labels piss them off. Small labels that care about music turn them on.
- They don't like one kind of music: they love all sorts of music.
- They would rather entertain themselves than be entertained.
- Some of these people just recently opted out of mainstream culture. Others stopped caring what you think about them 40 years ago. And some of them are second- and third-generation products of the counter culture.
This isn't youthful rebellion. It isn't a bunch of people sitting around smoking pot on Daddy's dime. These are competent, intelligent, community-oriented people with a variety of interests and skills. They care about the environment, justice, free-expression, equal opportunity and liberty. They put their money -- and their muscles --on their values.
And I have this powerful sense that these are the people who are about to power the next wave of cultural creativity in America. Old values, new threats and emerging technologies are morphing into a Green Revolution that is both global and intensely local, with a strong emphasis on sustainability and responsibility.
Thow-away media mean nothing to these people. They don't "do" shoddy.
Got anything for them?
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
WHAT IF YOUR BUSINESS PLAN WAS LOVE?
I've developed a new schtick for explaining the concept of news judgment to civilians: A newspaper is a big averaging machine, I tell them.
Here's how it works: When reporters and editors get new information, they estimate its newspaper value based on their subjective mental picture of the average audience they're trying to satisfy. If they're thinking very clearly, they'll also abstract the situation out to ask "If something similar took place with a different group or in a different place, how would I respond?" Then they'll execute the coverage in a way that is averaged out to deny material to as many predictable critics as possible.
The purpose of all this averaging is to generate a product that alienates the fewest people while generally presenting information of value to the broadest possible audience. If that's your business plan -- and for metro dailies, it is -- then strong emotions (unless predictably held by a near consensus of the population) are a bad outcome. Because for all the talk about the liberal media, a metro newspaper is much more like the Israeli parliament (a loosely cobbled-together group of competing constituencies, many of which are in direct disagreement on certain points) than an ideological monoculture.
The goal of such a product is maintaining that coalition, not doing any one thing particularly well. In fact, should your newspaper suddenly start doing a great job of covering sports, it's very likely that someone, somewhere, will question why so many resources are being put toward college football while so little is being devoted to the 2008 presidential election. And so on.
Which brings us to a key question about the future of metro dailies: If the spirit of the new media is niche and the concept of your existing product is general, how do you get there from here?
Well, here's one answer: Stop making papers with the goal of people not hating them and start making papers for people to love.
And there's only one way to do that: Make more than one newspaper. Let people choose which one they want to read. And then give them reasons to love that choice.
How many should you make? On what should each paper be based? What resources should be shared? How would you administer such an operation? Good questions, all.
But not show-stoppers.
Any news organization that would attempt such a transition would (or, more accurately, should) know its individual markets better than I would be able to imagine in the generic sense, so let's keep this at the macro level. The "take-away," then, is this easy-to-remember aphorism: In a niche world, the place to be is where people are grooving.
Not where you want the people to go, not where it's easiest for you to put them. You go where they want to be and make products that improve their lives, make them happy, fulfill their needs. So if that means you have one paper that serves the interests of conservatives and another that serves the interests of everybody else, OK.
I used to hate this idea, but now I simply accept it. Resisting it doesn't serve anyone, including "the public," and it certainly isn't a great way to build an enduring business. My worry in 2005 was that without a lingua franca (i.e., a mainstream media identity that persisted in this great averaging I mentioned above), American society would simply Balkanize. My epiphany in 2007 is that this has, in fact, already happened -- and might actually turn out to be a good thing.
In 2005 I thought it was a good thing that the media created norms that went beyond partisan control. In 2007, I don't care so much about that. In fact, I'm not sure that I like anybody having that kind of power. Period.
So why not let go of these outdated notions and focus instead on communicating our altruistic community-service values by putting love at the center of our business model? It's certainly a better starting point than our current position, which is everywhere... and nowhere.
Here's how it works: When reporters and editors get new information, they estimate its newspaper value based on their subjective mental picture of the average audience they're trying to satisfy. If they're thinking very clearly, they'll also abstract the situation out to ask "If something similar took place with a different group or in a different place, how would I respond?" Then they'll execute the coverage in a way that is averaged out to deny material to as many predictable critics as possible.
The purpose of all this averaging is to generate a product that alienates the fewest people while generally presenting information of value to the broadest possible audience. If that's your business plan -- and for metro dailies, it is -- then strong emotions (unless predictably held by a near consensus of the population) are a bad outcome. Because for all the talk about the liberal media, a metro newspaper is much more like the Israeli parliament (a loosely cobbled-together group of competing constituencies, many of which are in direct disagreement on certain points) than an ideological monoculture.
The goal of such a product is maintaining that coalition, not doing any one thing particularly well. In fact, should your newspaper suddenly start doing a great job of covering sports, it's very likely that someone, somewhere, will question why so many resources are being put toward college football while so little is being devoted to the 2008 presidential election. And so on.
Which brings us to a key question about the future of metro dailies: If the spirit of the new media is niche and the concept of your existing product is general, how do you get there from here?
Well, here's one answer: Stop making papers with the goal of people not hating them and start making papers for people to love.
And there's only one way to do that: Make more than one newspaper. Let people choose which one they want to read. And then give them reasons to love that choice.
How many should you make? On what should each paper be based? What resources should be shared? How would you administer such an operation? Good questions, all.
But not show-stoppers.
Any news organization that would attempt such a transition would (or, more accurately, should) know its individual markets better than I would be able to imagine in the generic sense, so let's keep this at the macro level. The "take-away," then, is this easy-to-remember aphorism: In a niche world, the place to be is where people are grooving.
Not where you want the people to go, not where it's easiest for you to put them. You go where they want to be and make products that improve their lives, make them happy, fulfill their needs. So if that means you have one paper that serves the interests of conservatives and another that serves the interests of everybody else, OK.
I used to hate this idea, but now I simply accept it. Resisting it doesn't serve anyone, including "the public," and it certainly isn't a great way to build an enduring business. My worry in 2005 was that without a lingua franca (i.e., a mainstream media identity that persisted in this great averaging I mentioned above), American society would simply Balkanize. My epiphany in 2007 is that this has, in fact, already happened -- and might actually turn out to be a good thing.
In 2005 I thought it was a good thing that the media created norms that went beyond partisan control. In 2007, I don't care so much about that. In fact, I'm not sure that I like anybody having that kind of power. Period.
So why not let go of these outdated notions and focus instead on communicating our altruistic community-service values by putting love at the center of our business model? It's certainly a better starting point than our current position, which is everywhere... and nowhere.
Monday, February 05, 2007
SHOOT BETTER VIDEO: 33 tips from Ellen Seidler
One of the perks of finishing up one assignment (helping modernize our paper's website) and heading on to the next one (back to the newsroom as a combo print/online features reporter) is that I'm finding cool stuff as I pack up my office. Today's gem: Notes from a fantastic class given last March at the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism during my week as a 2006 Western Knight Center fellow.
A lot of us in print journalism are moving toward online video storytelling these days, but you don't have to be a pro-jo to get value out of these practical rules. The ideas here belong to Ellen Seidler, but the paraphrasing -- poor as it may be -- is mine.
A lot of us in print journalism are moving toward online video storytelling these days, but you don't have to be a pro-jo to get value out of these practical rules. The ideas here belong to Ellen Seidler, but the paraphrasing -- poor as it may be -- is mine.
- Discuss your expectations with the team first. Plan your shoot.
- When you're shooting on new DV tape, roll 30 seconds of nothing to get past the typically imperfect tape head.
- Check your audio before you need it. Are your levels set accurately?
- Shoot selectively. Be disciplined with start/stop/record. It will make you a better shooter.
- Shut up when you shoot. Audio makes video three-dimensional and you'll need that ambient sound... so don't yack over it.
- Hold all your shots at least 10-15 seconds. You can always make a 10-second shot into a two-second shot.
- Give yourself extra room in editing action shots.
- Avoid excess zooms or pans. Use them sparingly, if at all, and only to reveal or emphasize.
- Always begin or end a zoom or pan on a static shot. A zoom should begin with 15 seconds of wide shot, end with 15 seconds of tight shot. This gives you flexibility in editing.
- Shoot in sequences: Wide shot; details; angles.
- Always use a tripod when shooting a static subject.
- Always use a tripod on a sit-down interview.
- The wider the angle, the less shake in the shot.
- Don't be shy. Get up-close and personal with your subject.
- Mix your shots by this ratio: one quarter wide, one quarter medium; half close-up.
- Close-up translates a lot better on the Web.
- In composing shots, set up a frame and let things happen within it.
- For sit-down interviews: Shoot head and shoulders.
- Remember the Rule of Thirds. If you divide your screen into vertical thirds, know that the viewer's eye wants to rest on the upper third of the screen.
- If your subject in a sit-down is looking into the camera, center the shot.
- If the subject is looking at the reporter, then eye-level composition is good. Frame the shot with "nose room" in the direction the subject is looking. Don't center the subject in this composition.
- Tell the subject: "Don't look at the camera. Look at the reporter."
- Don't make eye contact with the subject.
- If you're doing multiple interviews, keep the shots similar.
- Get your set-up and "two-shots" after the interview. Move the camera back, but stay on an imaginary line (and remember: once you choose a side, stick to it). Now put the reporter in the shot and have the reporter talk while you run tape of the two of them together. Then get a reverse shot over the subject's shoulder of the reporter listening. Then get a close-up of the reporter listening. You'll use these options during editing.
- To really be professional, record 30 seconds of silence to get "room tone."
- To get tight depth of field, stretch out your zoom.
- Change your angle and perspective. Don't treat the camera like your eyes.
- If you're shooting something boring like a building, get people in the shot.
- Use a tripod for steady shots. If a tripod isn't available, get close and go wide.
- Anticipate action.
- Be actively involved in the context of what's going on.
- Take care in "dressing the mic" when using a lavaliere set-up. Hide the wire in the subject's lapels, under jackets, etc. "Flip the clip" as needed. Set the mic up in line with the subject's mouth, but not too close to the throat.
- Have a labeling system and be sure to label all your tapes. It's easy to skip this (something I know from experience), but don't. Pretty soon you'll have a lot of identical tapes, and you be glad you took a few seconds in the field to get organized.
- Want to override your auto-focus? This is particularly useful if you're planning a zoom-out. Focus in advance on the subject farthest away and then pull back to the shot you want.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
HYPING HYPER-LOCAL
The big issue in newspapering these days isn't quality or ethics but preservation: preservation of jobs, status, and the printed product, but also to some extent the preservation of our own cultural myths. The aloof-but-wise senior editor. The tough-but-fair city editor. All manner of reporter stereotypes. We desire not only to preserve newspaper journalism in the digital age, but to do so with our fondest professional myths intact.
Which might be why today's Romanesko e-mail gave top billing to this column by Danny Westneat of The Seattle Times: "Local news can matter once more." Westneat states this idea as if he just discovered it, but if you've been in the business at any time within the past decade you've heard his sentiments repeatedly: Back to basics. Back to the street. Shoe leather. Good old-fashioned reporting. Non-institutional. Chicken dinners. Local. Local local local...
What's annoying about this prescription -- preached by every newspaper consultant I've encountered during my 16 years in the business -- is that it's bird-bath shallow. I suspect that professional newspaper journalists so readily accept it as true because it matches our template for what we want the truth to be, and we embrace it with an "old verities" passion that substitutes ingrained belief for insightful analysis. We believe it because it comforts us.
But back to Westneat, reflecting on his salad days as a rookie reporter for a now-dead small paper and the lessons we could learn from days gone by:
1. Unhip? That's a straw man. Most executives in the metro newspaper business has been clamoring for a community-newspaper-style solution to their circulation woes since I entered the trade back in the late 1980s. It's probably why I got hired as a metro editor in the first place -- my lack of metro orthodoxy was actually considered a selling point by my new bosses. And walk into any mid-metro newsroom in America today and you'll find at least one editor armed with studies and reports who thinks that the way we'll survive in the 21st century is to "do what we do best: local news." Westneat and others like him are fighting a non-existent opponent. They're not the rebel alliance anymore: They're the Empire.
2. "Intensely local, professionally gathered news is ... the one thing you can't get anywhere else." Emphasis, please on the word "professional," because what Westneat and the hyperlocal newsroom evangelists really want to do is draw a public distinction between the professionals and the amateurs. In Newspaper World, news gathered by professionals -- and, more importantly, edited by professionals -- is just inherently better, with no supporting arguments necessary. Only when one adds the word "professional" can one make the statement that intensely local news cannot be gotten anywhere else. Because these days you can get intensely local and intensely personal news all over the place. For free.
So let's clarify these contrarian points, and let's keep repeating them until the decision-makers start to grasp them:
1. Reporting local news isn't what newspapers do best. In fact, the best medium for reporting local news is the Web (more on this later). What newspapers do best (when they choose to do it) is to condense large amounts of information into a small amount of newsprint space and reader time. From a user's perspective, a newspaper is the most efficient medium for communicating lots of information in one burst. That's a fantastic selling point for the newspaper industry, but I've never heard this concept discussed by newspaper consultants. Ever.
2. Metro newspapers aren't built to provide hyperlocal news coverage. The idea of the American metro newspaper is a 20th century phenomenon that capitalized on the need for one product that combined local, state, national and international news into one package. The central principle of the metro paper is that its news judgment emphasizes stories that have the widest appeal across multiple communities within a defined readership area, thereby capturing a fantastic economy of scale that delivered maximum eyeballs at minimal cost. So when a metro paper starts emphasizing community-level news, it's actually reversing that economy of scale: less interest at a higher cost per reader. Various metros have attempted to address this equation via various zoned-edition plans, but none of them reverse the basic math. They're spending more to get less.
3. Local news is expensive. Whether you do it at the metro level or the weekly level, community news is more expensive to produce than state or national news. To wit: If I have a one-person bureau covering my state legislature, that one reporter will provide stories with interest that crosses all my local coverage areas. Hence, one Statehouse reporter = news that's potentially relevant to all of my 250,000 readers. But a story about a Rotary Club breakfast in Mount Pleasant is of zero interest to my readers at Folly Beach, and to be blunt about it, of limited interest to Mount Pleasant residents who aren't members of the Rotary Club. So one reporter there = news of relevance to maybe a few hundred people in a community of 62,000, within a metro readership of 250,000 That's a lousy economy of scale.
If you don't "zone" the pages, then at least 99 percent of the people who get your Rotary breakfast story are going to skip over it; if you do zone it, then you're getting a lower advertising rate on the same investment of staff time. Either way, this is hardly a recipe for saving your newspaper.
5. Local-local news is a Web strength, not a print strength. In the online world, where bandwidth might as well be infinite, what I publish about Folly Beach doesn't come at the expense of Mount Pleasant coverage. In the print world, where newshole (newshole = the amount of space available for news after the ads are sold and arranged) is an extremely limited commodity, news judgment becomes a zero-sum game.
So when consultants say that "local news is what newspapers do best," what they're really saying is that we're the only traditional media with relatively large reporting and editing staffs already in place. Radio and TV stations typically field tiny news staffs, and online competitors are usually bootstrap operations. This is why smart news people are pushing their hyper-local efforts out onto the Web, where I can publish both my Rotary Club story from Mount Pleasant and my surf tournament story from Folly Beach at no additional cost, or without one choice precluding the other.
There's an additional issue here, which any metro city editor will tell you: If you emphasize local news on your front pages, readers will create impressions about which communities are most important in the eyes of the editors. Perceived slights in the presentation of local news become lingering resentments, and will actually alienate readers in areas that feel underserved or negatively portrayed. Count on it.
4. The traditional "professional" model may not be the best way to approach hyper-local news. Traditional newspaper journalism features a layered editing process and an inferred sense of news judgment that reflects the newspapers' cultural sense of what's important and appropriate. In Newspaper World, this professional care and filtering is your assurance of quality information and good taste, a virtual paper band around the news that proclaims it "Sanitized for Your Protection."
But newspaper-speak and the normative-values of a for-profit enterprise don't necessarily meet the needs, tastes or interests or modern readers. Yes, accuracy matters, but to suggest that accuracy as we define it is the only value that readers care about is to miss the point entirely. This is one of the lessons the industry should have learned from its minority readership studies, but didn't: Who gets to speak and what they get to say is an extremely important issue to some readers. By playing to the averaged-out middle, we are leaving out all kinds of voices. Our message to them, intentional or otherwise? "You don't count."
Newspaper editors discuss these issues in the abstract as policies and precedents, typically with lots of expensive input from attorneys, producing ventures that are cautious and tepid. Meanwhile, a new class of "amateurs" is filling the vacuum, creating a form of "news" so philosophically distinct from traditional news judgment that it requires a new label: Placeblogging. One of the heroes of this movement is H2Otown creator and Placeblogger.com founder Lisa Williams. Here's how she describes the difference:
5. The amateurs aren't always amateur. Lisa Williams surely can't be considered an amateur now, and Debbie Gallant of BaristaNet is a good example of what happens when a traditional journalist branches out into the placeblogging genre. So if the pro-am divide isn't the issue, what is? Perhaps it's more about culture. Perhaps its more about money. Perhaps it's more about your ideas about control, or responsibility, or propriety.
Nor should we assume that "amateur reporting" is necessarily "inferior reporting." A generic 22-year-old reporter with a J-school diploma might know how to spell "accommodate" and apply AP Style, but does that make him a better news source than a longtime resident "amateur" who knows the community inside and out? I used to be that generic J-school grad, and my new community was a minefield of hidden connections and unseen relationships. So while what I wrote was typically "accurate" (in the sense that it wasn't demonstrably wrong), it was generally devoid of understanding, context or insight.
Newspapers aren't dying, but our assumptions are. Whether we approve of it or not, news is migrating to the Web, and the newspapers that survive the coming shakeout will do so by adjusting to their roles as highly intelligent, carefully edited and moderately profitable niche publications. You can preach local-local-local all you wish, but you're chasing a lonely dollar swirling clockwise down the drain.
Which might be why today's Romanesko e-mail gave top billing to this column by Danny Westneat of The Seattle Times: "Local news can matter once more." Westneat states this idea as if he just discovered it, but if you've been in the business at any time within the past decade you've heard his sentiments repeatedly: Back to basics. Back to the street. Shoe leather. Good old-fashioned reporting. Non-institutional. Chicken dinners. Local. Local local local...
What's annoying about this prescription -- preached by every newspaper consultant I've encountered during my 16 years in the business -- is that it's bird-bath shallow. I suspect that professional newspaper journalists so readily accept it as true because it matches our template for what we want the truth to be, and we embrace it with an "old verities" passion that substitutes ingrained belief for insightful analysis. We believe it because it comforts us.
But back to Westneat, reflecting on his salad days as a rookie reporter for a now-dead small paper and the lessons we could learn from days gone by:
It covered community fairs. Printed death notices and high-school box scores and the police blotter. Watchdogged local government. Wrote up everything hometown, from heroes to rezones.There are a couple of things to fisk in these three paragraphs:That kind of small-town newspapering is considered boring today. Unhip. Supposedly we're all too globalized or tuned into Web video clips to want such provincial news.
My own view is the opposite. I think intensely local, professionally gathered news is due for a comeback. It's the one thing you can't get anywhere else.
1. Unhip? That's a straw man. Most executives in the metro newspaper business has been clamoring for a community-newspaper-style solution to their circulation woes since I entered the trade back in the late 1980s. It's probably why I got hired as a metro editor in the first place -- my lack of metro orthodoxy was actually considered a selling point by my new bosses. And walk into any mid-metro newsroom in America today and you'll find at least one editor armed with studies and reports who thinks that the way we'll survive in the 21st century is to "do what we do best: local news." Westneat and others like him are fighting a non-existent opponent. They're not the rebel alliance anymore: They're the Empire.
2. "Intensely local, professionally gathered news is ... the one thing you can't get anywhere else." Emphasis, please on the word "professional," because what Westneat and the hyperlocal newsroom evangelists really want to do is draw a public distinction between the professionals and the amateurs. In Newspaper World, news gathered by professionals -- and, more importantly, edited by professionals -- is just inherently better, with no supporting arguments necessary. Only when one adds the word "professional" can one make the statement that intensely local news cannot be gotten anywhere else. Because these days you can get intensely local and intensely personal news all over the place. For free.
So let's clarify these contrarian points, and let's keep repeating them until the decision-makers start to grasp them:
1. Reporting local news isn't what newspapers do best. In fact, the best medium for reporting local news is the Web (more on this later). What newspapers do best (when they choose to do it) is to condense large amounts of information into a small amount of newsprint space and reader time. From a user's perspective, a newspaper is the most efficient medium for communicating lots of information in one burst. That's a fantastic selling point for the newspaper industry, but I've never heard this concept discussed by newspaper consultants. Ever.
2. Metro newspapers aren't built to provide hyperlocal news coverage. The idea of the American metro newspaper is a 20th century phenomenon that capitalized on the need for one product that combined local, state, national and international news into one package. The central principle of the metro paper is that its news judgment emphasizes stories that have the widest appeal across multiple communities within a defined readership area, thereby capturing a fantastic economy of scale that delivered maximum eyeballs at minimal cost. So when a metro paper starts emphasizing community-level news, it's actually reversing that economy of scale: less interest at a higher cost per reader. Various metros have attempted to address this equation via various zoned-edition plans, but none of them reverse the basic math. They're spending more to get less.
3. Local news is expensive. Whether you do it at the metro level or the weekly level, community news is more expensive to produce than state or national news. To wit: If I have a one-person bureau covering my state legislature, that one reporter will provide stories with interest that crosses all my local coverage areas. Hence, one Statehouse reporter = news that's potentially relevant to all of my 250,000 readers. But a story about a Rotary Club breakfast in Mount Pleasant is of zero interest to my readers at Folly Beach, and to be blunt about it, of limited interest to Mount Pleasant residents who aren't members of the Rotary Club. So one reporter there = news of relevance to maybe a few hundred people in a community of 62,000, within a metro readership of 250,000 That's a lousy economy of scale.
If you don't "zone" the pages, then at least 99 percent of the people who get your Rotary breakfast story are going to skip over it; if you do zone it, then you're getting a lower advertising rate on the same investment of staff time. Either way, this is hardly a recipe for saving your newspaper.
5. Local-local news is a Web strength, not a print strength. In the online world, where bandwidth might as well be infinite, what I publish about Folly Beach doesn't come at the expense of Mount Pleasant coverage. In the print world, where newshole (newshole = the amount of space available for news after the ads are sold and arranged) is an extremely limited commodity, news judgment becomes a zero-sum game.
So when consultants say that "local news is what newspapers do best," what they're really saying is that we're the only traditional media with relatively large reporting and editing staffs already in place. Radio and TV stations typically field tiny news staffs, and online competitors are usually bootstrap operations. This is why smart news people are pushing their hyper-local efforts out onto the Web, where I can publish both my Rotary Club story from Mount Pleasant and my surf tournament story from Folly Beach at no additional cost, or without one choice precluding the other.
There's an additional issue here, which any metro city editor will tell you: If you emphasize local news on your front pages, readers will create impressions about which communities are most important in the eyes of the editors. Perceived slights in the presentation of local news become lingering resentments, and will actually alienate readers in areas that feel underserved or negatively portrayed. Count on it.
4. The traditional "professional" model may not be the best way to approach hyper-local news. Traditional newspaper journalism features a layered editing process and an inferred sense of news judgment that reflects the newspapers' cultural sense of what's important and appropriate. In Newspaper World, this professional care and filtering is your assurance of quality information and good taste, a virtual paper band around the news that proclaims it "Sanitized for Your Protection."
But newspaper-speak and the normative-values of a for-profit enterprise don't necessarily meet the needs, tastes or interests or modern readers. Yes, accuracy matters, but to suggest that accuracy as we define it is the only value that readers care about is to miss the point entirely. This is one of the lessons the industry should have learned from its minority readership studies, but didn't: Who gets to speak and what they get to say is an extremely important issue to some readers. By playing to the averaged-out middle, we are leaving out all kinds of voices. Our message to them, intentional or otherwise? "You don't count."
Newspaper editors discuss these issues in the abstract as policies and precedents, typically with lots of expensive input from attorneys, producing ventures that are cautious and tepid. Meanwhile, a new class of "amateurs" is filling the vacuum, creating a form of "news" so philosophically distinct from traditional news judgment that it requires a new label: Placeblogging. One of the heroes of this movement is H2Otown creator and Placeblogger.com founder Lisa Williams. Here's how she describes the difference:
Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term “citizen journalism,” or journalism done by non-journalists.Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways…
That's a kind of intimate informality that newspapers will never be able to match, and we would be silly to try. But when we look at hyper-local as a Web function, not a print one, then all sorts of things become possible -- including profit. A multi-layered editing process, with reporter separated from executive editor by no fewer than three or four intervening layers of editors (not to mention the enormous overhead of a legacy newsroom) will never generate enough content or traffic to make neighborhood-level coverage profitable. But successful placebloggers scale their staffing to the size of their coverage and earn enough to pay salaries. Chew on that.
5. The amateurs aren't always amateur. Lisa Williams surely can't be considered an amateur now, and Debbie Gallant of BaristaNet is a good example of what happens when a traditional journalist branches out into the placeblogging genre. So if the pro-am divide isn't the issue, what is? Perhaps it's more about culture. Perhaps its more about money. Perhaps it's more about your ideas about control, or responsibility, or propriety.
Nor should we assume that "amateur reporting" is necessarily "inferior reporting." A generic 22-year-old reporter with a J-school diploma might know how to spell "accommodate" and apply AP Style, but does that make him a better news source than a longtime resident "amateur" who knows the community inside and out? I used to be that generic J-school grad, and my new community was a minefield of hidden connections and unseen relationships. So while what I wrote was typically "accurate" (in the sense that it wasn't demonstrably wrong), it was generally devoid of understanding, context or insight.
Newspapers aren't dying, but our assumptions are. Whether we approve of it or not, news is migrating to the Web, and the newspapers that survive the coming shakeout will do so by adjusting to their roles as highly intelligent, carefully edited and moderately profitable niche publications. You can preach local-local-local all you wish, but you're chasing a lonely dollar swirling clockwise down the drain.
Friday, December 15, 2006
INVEST OR FAIL
We don't know all sorts of things about the business future of online media, but there's one thing that's already quite predictable: the eventual profit-margins in 21st century media are likely to be far less generous than the fat and complacent margins to which we grew addicted in the 20th century.
I'm confident about this because we already know that the Web is inherently competitive, and in any type of competition, small margins of quality and success produce outcomes that are wildly disproportionate. This is why baseball franchises will spend millions of dollars on a free-agent pitcher who offers only the prospect of a slight improvement in the rotation's overall ERA. On such tiny margins are championships won and windfall profits earned. One might think that this is a rather obvious observation, but one would be wrong.
Here's why our industry doesn't get it: Modern media executives -- not to mention investors in traditional media companies -- earned their fortunes by wringing every possible dollar out of their properties. The rise of corporate ownership in the 1980s and 1990s certainly cut a lot of non-productive fat from newsroom budgets, but the last of the fat disappeared a decade ago. Every cut since has been to quality, and the cumulative effects are now apparent. Mention this in certain carpeted hallways and you'll get funny looks, because "quality" is a subjective concept to these people -- not nearly as tangible or meaningful as the highly objective concept of profit.
So while media executives will always talk about public service and editorial quality and civic duty, their aversion to invest in their products is a much more meaningful impulse. And why shouldn't it be? Newspapers have returned double-digit profits for decades with almost no visible correlation to editorial quality. To put it bluntly, the return-on-investment on "quality" has been so minimal for so long that it's now barely worth consideration. So long as newspapers remain local monopolies, this isn't likely to change.
Consequently, media companies of late have been far more interested in adding new publications and products (without adding staff) than they've been in improving the quality of their core enterprises. If newspapers make 10 to 15 percent profit no matter what you put on their front pages, why worry about the various erosions now besetting the industry? Squeeze your staff and production capabilities harder and get your growth out of new products.
This works up to a point -- specifically, to the point at which these local monopolies break apart into multiple competitions for suddenly elusive market share. I'm convinced that the truly significant shakeout change in our industry over the next few years will be this shift to a truly competitive media economy.
The current economy rewards shallow-minded journalistic shoddiness. The coming economy will punish it mercilessly.
Consider: If the choice between city hall coverage is a choice between two clickable links, one that belongs to your paper and another that belongs to a start-up competitor that treats city hall coverage seriously, how long will readers continue to click the link that finishes second in terms of quality? What will it take to get that click back once you've lost it?
In that kind of competition, suddenly quality isn't an afterthought -- it's the entire game.
When you see things this way, you wonder: Why aren't media companies investing more money to secure those clicks today and into the next decade? If media Goliaths enjoying 15 percent profits in 2006 routinely invested half that money in quality improvements, they'd be well positioned to head off the inevitable future challenge from an army of Davids. Wouldn't they?
But investing in quality content just isn't an option in the current financial climate, and even when corporations think ahead to emerging technologies and media, they almost invariably wind-up fixating on the cost-cutting potentials of new media tools.
Consider this Frank Ahrens piece from earlier this month in the WaPo ("A newspaper chain sees its future, and it's online and hyper-local") about Gannett's decision to push the Web-first concept out to its subsidiaries.
Because that's what the corporate idea of a "mojo" is: a combination print writer, still photographer, radio host and TV production crew, all wrapped into one isolated, overwhelmed package, rolling endlessly from one meaningless chicken-dinner story to another. Not an evolution in journalistic capability, but a way to have one person do the work of three while pocketing the difference. Quality be damned.
The "mojo" concept isn't something that Gannett just invented, either. In March while attending the Western Knight Center multimedia reporting seminar at UC Berkeley, we were introduced to a television reporter whose station changed hands and was placed under new management that delivered the following ultimatum: Only those employees who could operate both in front of the camera and behind the viewfinder would continue to receive paychecks.
Gone were the days of broadcast teams of two (reporter/videographer) and sometimes three (reporter/videographer/producer) professionals. Now this reporter (who also had to take a pay cut) is her own producer, her own camera operator. When she needs a "two-shot" at an interview, she has to set up the tripod and film herself pretending to listen to the subject. She even transmits from remote locations and must solve any technical problems that arise. So she's her own engineer, too.
The great irony is that these low-cost tools now enable freelance journalists to compete in media arenas that were once the sole province of well-funded professionals. Instead of three local news channels, the Web offers the opportunity for dozens. One would think that media companies would understand that skimping on quality actually encourages competition from motivated amateurs, but again, one would be wrong.
In the week after the Ahrens piece ran, links to it were sent to me by no fewer than three other journalists. You could practically hear the gears in their head cranking through the possibilities, wondering, "Is this good? Is this bad?" The answer is neither: tools are tools. How we choose to use them determines whether they are good or bad.
The good news for those of us in the business is this: media isn't going away, and people with talent, ethics and commitment will be more valuable -- not less -- after the transition. On the other hand, the survival of publicly traded media mega-chains is another matter entirely.
If you're wondering how your company will stack up, here's a good test: Is your management investing in quality content or looking for vapid new ways to cut corners? Are they innovating or copying? Are they acting like scrappy competitors or vaguely annoyed sleepwalkers?
Answers, please, on a postcard...
I'm confident about this because we already know that the Web is inherently competitive, and in any type of competition, small margins of quality and success produce outcomes that are wildly disproportionate. This is why baseball franchises will spend millions of dollars on a free-agent pitcher who offers only the prospect of a slight improvement in the rotation's overall ERA. On such tiny margins are championships won and windfall profits earned. One might think that this is a rather obvious observation, but one would be wrong.
Here's why our industry doesn't get it: Modern media executives -- not to mention investors in traditional media companies -- earned their fortunes by wringing every possible dollar out of their properties. The rise of corporate ownership in the 1980s and 1990s certainly cut a lot of non-productive fat from newsroom budgets, but the last of the fat disappeared a decade ago. Every cut since has been to quality, and the cumulative effects are now apparent. Mention this in certain carpeted hallways and you'll get funny looks, because "quality" is a subjective concept to these people -- not nearly as tangible or meaningful as the highly objective concept of profit.
So while media executives will always talk about public service and editorial quality and civic duty, their aversion to invest in their products is a much more meaningful impulse. And why shouldn't it be? Newspapers have returned double-digit profits for decades with almost no visible correlation to editorial quality. To put it bluntly, the return-on-investment on "quality" has been so minimal for so long that it's now barely worth consideration. So long as newspapers remain local monopolies, this isn't likely to change.
Consequently, media companies of late have been far more interested in adding new publications and products (without adding staff) than they've been in improving the quality of their core enterprises. If newspapers make 10 to 15 percent profit no matter what you put on their front pages, why worry about the various erosions now besetting the industry? Squeeze your staff and production capabilities harder and get your growth out of new products.
This works up to a point -- specifically, to the point at which these local monopolies break apart into multiple competitions for suddenly elusive market share. I'm convinced that the truly significant shakeout change in our industry over the next few years will be this shift to a truly competitive media economy.
The current economy rewards shallow-minded journalistic shoddiness. The coming economy will punish it mercilessly.
Consider: If the choice between city hall coverage is a choice between two clickable links, one that belongs to your paper and another that belongs to a start-up competitor that treats city hall coverage seriously, how long will readers continue to click the link that finishes second in terms of quality? What will it take to get that click back once you've lost it?
In that kind of competition, suddenly quality isn't an afterthought -- it's the entire game.
When you see things this way, you wonder: Why aren't media companies investing more money to secure those clicks today and into the next decade? If media Goliaths enjoying 15 percent profits in 2006 routinely invested half that money in quality improvements, they'd be well positioned to head off the inevitable future challenge from an army of Davids. Wouldn't they?
But investing in quality content just isn't an option in the current financial climate, and even when corporations think ahead to emerging technologies and media, they almost invariably wind-up fixating on the cost-cutting potentials of new media tools.
Consider this Frank Ahrens piece from earlier this month in the WaPo ("A newspaper chain sees its future, and it's online and hyper-local") about Gannett's decision to push the Web-first concept out to its subsidiaries.
The chain's papers are redirecting their newsrooms to focus on the Web first, paper second. Papers are slashing national and foreign coverage and beefing up "hyper-local," street-by-street news. They are creating reader-searchable databases on traffic flows and school class sizes. Web sites are fed with reader-generated content, such as pictures of their kids with Santa. In short, Gannett -- at its 90 papers, including USA Today -- is trying everything it can think of to create Web sites that will attract more readers.Some of those ideas are excellent, and the shift to a Web-first publishing model is inevitable. But the star of the Ahrens article isn't a good idea but a truly bad one:
Darkness falls on a chilly Winn-Dixie parking lot in a dodgy part of North Fort Myers just before Thanksgiving. Chuck Myron sits in his little gray Nissan and types on an IBM ThinkPad laptop plugged into the car's cigarette lighter. The glow of the screen illuminates his face.Let me clarify: Training talented journalists to use laptops, recorders, cameras, camcorders and all manner of associated hardware and software isn't a bad idea. Pushing reporters out the door with these tools in order to produce more crap more cheaply is a bad idea.
Chuck Myron is one of more than a dozen "mobile journalists" -- mojos -- for the Fort Myers News-Press. He doesn't have an office or even a cubicle, so his car is his newsroom. The paper's parent company, Gannett, hopes the mojos' local focus will drive readers to its community-specific Web sites.
Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or "mojos." The mojos have high-tech tools -- ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras -- but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper's Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content -- regardless of its traditional news value -- is key to building online and newspaper readership.
Because that's what the corporate idea of a "mojo" is: a combination print writer, still photographer, radio host and TV production crew, all wrapped into one isolated, overwhelmed package, rolling endlessly from one meaningless chicken-dinner story to another. Not an evolution in journalistic capability, but a way to have one person do the work of three while pocketing the difference. Quality be damned.
The "mojo" concept isn't something that Gannett just invented, either. In March while attending the Western Knight Center multimedia reporting seminar at UC Berkeley, we were introduced to a television reporter whose station changed hands and was placed under new management that delivered the following ultimatum: Only those employees who could operate both in front of the camera and behind the viewfinder would continue to receive paychecks.
Gone were the days of broadcast teams of two (reporter/videographer) and sometimes three (reporter/videographer/producer) professionals. Now this reporter (who also had to take a pay cut) is her own producer, her own camera operator. When she needs a "two-shot" at an interview, she has to set up the tripod and film herself pretending to listen to the subject. She even transmits from remote locations and must solve any technical problems that arise. So she's her own engineer, too.
The great irony is that these low-cost tools now enable freelance journalists to compete in media arenas that were once the sole province of well-funded professionals. Instead of three local news channels, the Web offers the opportunity for dozens. One would think that media companies would understand that skimping on quality actually encourages competition from motivated amateurs, but again, one would be wrong.
In the week after the Ahrens piece ran, links to it were sent to me by no fewer than three other journalists. You could practically hear the gears in their head cranking through the possibilities, wondering, "Is this good? Is this bad?" The answer is neither: tools are tools. How we choose to use them determines whether they are good or bad.
The good news for those of us in the business is this: media isn't going away, and people with talent, ethics and commitment will be more valuable -- not less -- after the transition. On the other hand, the survival of publicly traded media mega-chains is another matter entirely.
If you're wondering how your company will stack up, here's a good test: Is your management investing in quality content or looking for vapid new ways to cut corners? Are they innovating or copying? Are they acting like scrappy competitors or vaguely annoyed sleepwalkers?
Answers, please, on a postcard...
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