Start making sense

Common to both Gina Chen and Megan Garber’s recent calls for incorporating the Wikipedia aesthetic into newsrooms is the timely idea of giving readers what they need to empower themselves and make sense of the world.

In her look at the hyperlocal upstart WikiCity, Chen sees a potential model (and perhaps partner) for news organizations wanting to tap into hyper-niches in their communities. In previous posts, Chen has advocated for a reinvention of news websites so that they place more emphasis on giving readers what they want — not just in terms of news, but a whole host of interests.

I think Chen is right in wanting news organizations to play a bigger, more comprehensive role in being a “one-stop-shop” for readers, via curation, in their geographic area. After looking the WikiCity sites for Tampa and St. Petersburg, (I live in the Tampa Bay area), I can see the potential for fulfilling Chen’s vision, though there’s some work to be done, as neither site is arranged in a way that I would dare call “intuitive” and the content is generally very thin.

Garber, who writes for Columbia Journalism Review, has a piece on health care coverage and Wikipedia that is in sync with my own appreciation for the “wikification” of the newsroom.

Garber contrasts the lurid drama of the “death panels” narrative that has “proven irresistible to reporters” with the well-organized, comprehensive Wikipedia entry for “Health Care Reform in the United States.”

Indeed, what Wikipedia provides, ultimately, is information, pure and simple. And, perhaps just as significantly, it provides the implicit assumption that ‘information, pure and simple’ is enough. An encyclopedia entry has no mandate for a ‘colorful lede.’ It has no instinct for conflict. It assumes its audience’s attention, rather than feeling compelled to earn it, painstakingly—word by dramatic word.

And, because Wikipedia is crowdsourced, it has no implicit mandate, ethical or economical, toward ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity.’ It thus has no vested interest in the kind of he said/she said approach that has, to this point, so sorely compromised the mainstream media’s health care narrative.

How Twitter is helping journalists

MediaShift looks at how journalists are using Twitter in Australia, by breaking news, crowdsourcing and linking to articles.

Elsewhere, Beatblogging explains why Twitter is a great way for journalists to take notes for stories.

Here's where newspapers need to invest their resources

Of the seven strategies Mark Potts lays out for the news industry to adopt, two in particular stood out for me as of particular importance. His criticism of news sites that spread themselves thin by trying to appeal to all readers is one that bears repeating. See if you agree.

I’m excerpting them here, but I recommend you read the entire post.

Vertical products: One of the most broken things about the newspaper business is the “all things to all people” model. By trying to do a little of everything, newspapers don’t really do anything well—for readers or for advertisers. New products that focus on specific, vertical audiences should be the wave of the future, but so far they’re barely even a trickle (let’s see—there’s Gannett’s MomsLikeMe franchise, and then…not much else).

New forms of advertising: Banner ads are so…1997. Interstitials, pop-ups and intrusive ads are so…obnoxious. Classifieds are so…dead. Meanwhile, Google is making money off of local search, other non-newspaper companies are pioneering things like click-per-call and pay-per-click, and various startups are perfecting cheap ways to create and sell local ads. Could it be that newspapers are having trouble making online advertising revenue grow because they’re selling the wrong kinds of online ads? Hmmm.

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. …

Gina Chen's open letter to newspapers

Gina Chen of Save the Media has an outstanding post today that tells newspapers what she as a consumer expects from them.

Here’s Chen on:

Wanting original, well-reported articles:

While we still have a newspapers, don’t fill it just with 6-inch stories and snippets of yesterday’s news. I’ve read those already online. What I haven’t read already online is enterprise, a well-written profile that really digs deeply into a person, investigative pieces that expose government waste, inequity and greed. The short, shallow story isn’t going to save newspapers.  And if that’s all I get in the print, honestly, I don’t need the print at all. …

… There’s really no excuse for running most feature wire stories these days with a few exceptions, such as movie openings or some science and technology pieces.  And if you must run it, please make sure it has some additional information to localize it. That can be as simple as: Can I buy the product here? Is the trend happening here? What’s the local impact.  And, please, please, don’t tell me you don’t have enough reporters because you’ve laid them all off or cut their hours or furloughed them. That may be true, but as a consumer, I don’t really care. …

… Every reporter should be doing enterprise reporting on his or her beat. Some stories may be simply noticing a trend in a community; that’s fine. Not every story has to be Watergate. But there should be many stories that tell me something I can’t get anywhere else.

On integrating print and Web:

Wiki-fy the news

The New York Times‘ article about Journalism Online L.L.C. says the prospects of  the venture’s success is “doubted by many media analysts.”

It never mentions a single one of those analysts. Doesn’t provide so much as a hyperlink.

Nor does it explain what is meant by the provocative “The company also plans to negotiate licensing and royalty fees with search engines and news aggregators for the use of the publications’ work.”

And you know what: That’s OK. Sort of.  But you have to let readers know that you’ll be following up on the story, that the report isn’t just a one-and-done deal.

Regardless of whether you as a reporter will provide more context, here’s my big idea:

"Death wheeze" looks to unseat "death spiral"

Because “death spiral” is so two days ago: Here’s the headline from Erick Schonfeld’s article that ran in TechCrunch today:

That whining sound you hear is the death wheeze of newspapers

I just smothered my copy of today’s paper with a pillow. Sound’s gone. Time to move on to the next overdramatic assessment of the industry.

The AP is mad as hell

It’s true. AP Chairman Dean Singleton said so in his remarks at the AP Annual Meeting, held yesterday in San Diego:

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.

We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.

In other words, Glenn Beck has now found a kindred spirit.

Peter Kafka, while sympathizing with the AP, doubts the nascent crusade’s effectiveness:

The thing is, even if the news guys somehow stopped people from using Google to find information they need, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the essential problems plaguing their business. Such as:

Break these blog rules, journalists

Once again, Save the Media‘s Gina Chen is lighting the way for reporters who want to thrive in the digital age.

This time, she covers “10 journalism rules you can break on your blog.” My favorite is number 2:

Tell part of the story: Journalists are trained to wait until they have the full story before telling any of it. I’m not asserting that blogs shouldn’t be accurate; they should. But they should be immediate even if that means telling only the story as you know it at that moment in time. The beauty of a blog is you can update immediately as more details become apparent or earlier reports are disputed. This isn’t publishing lies; this is giving readers evolving information in real time.