Does your newsroom know its community?

Take about a minute and look at Mark Glaser’s 10 steps to saving newspapers in the digital age (via CyberJournalist). And then take note that the thread running through each of these steps isn’t about cutting costs as much as it is about being innovative in the effort to engage the local community.

Because I’m a good netizen, I won’t reprint the short post here and deprive CyberJournalist of the traffic, but I will say that Glaser is right on target in telling news sites to focus on what businesses want, rather than viewing them as an endless source of advertising dollars. And his recommendation to engage the community in face-to-face meetings recalls Gina Chen’s fine Save the Media post on how journalists can create communities of readers.

How Google Wave, wikis and the Web could reshape the news

Jeff Jarvis often encourages his readers to think about news in the Web ecosystem as a “process,” rather than as a product. Commenting on the preview of Google Wave, Jarvis expands on that idea:

In Wave, I see more than a new generation of email cum wikis cum Twitter cum groupware. Because it can feed blog and web pages and Twitter, I see a new way to create content, collaborative and live. I see a new way to make news.

Imagine a team of reporters – together with witnesses on the scene – able to contribute photos and news to the same Wave (formerly known as a story or a page). One can write up what is known; a witness can add facts from the scene and photos; an editor or reader can ask questions. And it is all contained under a single address – a permalink for the story – that is constantly updated from a collaborative team.

Jarvis’ point about the collaborative nature of future news is echoed by Paul Gillin, writing for Newspaper Death Watch:

Thoughts on journalism's future

Martin Langeveld took notes during a think tank in Washington, D.C. called “The Future of Context.” For the occasional wonky speak about “future-pointed contextual journalism” and “ecosystems,” here are a few observations/commentaries that struck me as fruitful for the future viability of the news industry:

• Advertisers can add context: blogs, newsletter to engage customers in conversation.

• Commenting needs to evolve into conversation.  This can be done by having reporters and editors step in, add context, ask questions, and moderate the discussion flow.

• It’s not the race to be first that counts — its who can become the convenor of the conversation around the story, and can make that conversation solution-oriented.  A collaborative beat blog is in fact a continuous conversation.  Again, we need to turn commenters into contributors and commenting into conversation.

• Radio has always been good at having conversations with its audience.  We are hardwired to learn best through conversations.  Newspapers in the past couldn’t tap into conversations very well, but now we can.  By focusing energy on making people part of the conversation and building community, we raise demand for our product.  (Steve Yelvington, Cox)

Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks

Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer lambastes newspapers for living in an “echo chamber,” failing to “adapt their business models,” and makes note of that “perfect storm” that has so many journalists bemoaning the fate of their industry. Criticisms that should sound more than a little echo chamber-ish to anyone who’s been following the pontifications about the newspaper industry.

Megan Garber (who’s awesome, btw), respectfully summarizes Lerer’s talk at Columbia University, where he prescribed the same vague calls to innovation that Clay Shirky wrote about a month ago (nothing will work, everything will work). But after initially bristling at Lerer’s generalized recommendations, upon reflection I realize he’s probably right. Now is the time for experimentation:

Lerer (after noting the usual caveats: that there’s no silver bullet to rectify journalism’s woes, and that “no one knows what the future will look like”) pointed to innovation—and hasty innovation, at that—as a necessity for newspapers and other news outlets. We need to “embrace disruptive innovation,” he said. …

Hyperlocal sites to keep an eye on

The following hyperlocal media projects were selected as the New Voices grant winners for 2009:

GrossePointeToday.com — A collaborative effort between Wayne State University and University of Michigan-Dearborn to cover Detroit’s five Grosse Pointes.

Oakland Local — Covering multiple communities in Oakland, Calif., “with a focus on environment, climate, transportation, housing, local government and community activism.”

Backyard News — Four to six independently owned websites that will cover communities in Harrisburg, Pa.

Maryland School Information Mapping — A geomapping tool to complement public policy information from MarylandCommons.com.

Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project — Community news website.

The Austin Bulldog — for “public interest and investigative reporting” in Austin, Texas.

New Era Media — Colorado news site aimed at young people.

The Villager: News and Notes from Coconut Grove West — News site for the Miami community.

Track progress of each initiative at www.j-newvoices.org. According to the site:

New Voices is a pioneering program to seed innovative community news ventures in the United States. Through 2010, New Voices is helping to fund the start-up of 56 micro-local news projects. 2009 and 2010 grantees will receive $17,000 grants and have the opportunity for $8,000 in follow-up funding after one year. New Voices is administered by

J-Lab at American University and supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Connecting news with communities

A quick rundown of what The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times and a group of hyperlocal sites are doing to build audiences.

The New York Times takes a look at hyperlocal sites EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch,

Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, offers his philosophy of what reporters need to do to grab eyeballs:

The art of a good blog is figuring out the right mix between the piece that you know is going to get maximum search-engine hits to the piece that really defines what you’re doing that’s uniquely valuable. That second piece might not bring in as much traffic, but it’s the piece that’s gonna keep the traffic once you get it in the door. So all of that, which is part of the job of building a community, building an audience — those are totally new skills.

Meanwhile, The Washington Times is embracing citizen journalism — in print:

Search Obama administration's financial docs

For your reading (and sleuthing) pleasure: ProPublica has placed all of the financial disclosure documents of Obama’s team online in one place. If you dig up any dirt, they want to know.

An easy way to map your community

Dan Gillmor and Arizona State University journalism students used the power of GPS, smart phones and Flickr to assemble a map (in real time) of Phoenix’s “First Friday Art Walk.”

Gillmor explains how easy it was to put together what looks like a valuable community resource, using technology that offers opportunities for civic journalism and crowdsourcing:

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

Journalism will cease to be a profession

Gotcha! I’m not saying that — no way! Nope, I’m just paraphrasing the words of Dave Winer, Web pioneer and provocateur par excellence. He reads Doc Searls. And Jay Rosen (me too, actually). And while at a panel discussion about the San Francisco Chronicle hosted by the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Winer poured an ice-cold glass of “THE FUTURE” over those stuffy gatekeepers in attendance:

I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent (sic). It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

I just going to assume that the messy truth Winer left out will clear up a statement I can’t begin to comprehend.

Training the next generation of journalists

Advertising Age‘s Simon Dumenco has a valuable response to a Minnesota retraining program for journalists:

What if, instead of spending money on “retraining” journalists to function in the 21st century, we focused on creating systems and programs and media enterprises that helped quasi-journalists not only monetize their content-making, but helped them do something more solidly journalistic?