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Archive for May, 2011

How Web-first publication looks at a small newsroom

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 21, 2010)

After all the cuts every newsroom in the country has made in recent years, “We don’t have enough people to do that” may be the most-used sentence (or thought) in response to any suggested change, especially asking newsrooms to start posting to Facebook and/or Twitter posts and the Web throughout the day. The editor of the 6,000-circulation paper in Middletown, Conn., says she heard it, but she found a way to get her staff started. Her staff, besides her, consists of three copy editors, two people in sports, and an unspecified but obviously small number of reporters, so it’s larger than I would expect most 6,000-circulation papers have, but not by much. Consider her general approach and see if any of it could work for you. Consider especially that when her copy editors said they didn’t have time to do their regular work plus the Web work, she changed everyone’s jobs, including her own — and let the editors themselves work together to figure out how to accomplish the new work.

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Action

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 17, 2010)

If you have ever been in a newsroom that has been through a reorganization, there’s a good chance you noticed at some point that while titles had changed and people may have changed places, the actual tasks being performed weren’t different and the stories being produced weren’t different. <a href=”http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/to-change-an-organization-focus-on-action-not-the-org-chart/” title=”It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common”>It’s not true of all reorgs, but it’s common</a>, Steve Buttry writes. Focus on actions and the desired result, not the newsroom structure:

“Every organization has strong default settings – that gravitational pull – that will override most changes in the org chart. … You achieve innovation by changing what people are doing. Structural changes need to be something that is incidental along the way. In that way, the tweak in the org chart is seen as logical because people can see that it supports the new things you are doing.”

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The younger part of your audience

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 9, 2010)

AJR boils down a Pew report on Millenials, those people born after 1980, and looks at the implications for news organizations. Relevant highlights:

“Millennials are the best-educated generation in history. Fifty-four percent of today’s 18- to 28-year-olds have had at least some college education, compared with 49 percent of Gen Xers, 36 percent of Boomers and 24 percent of the Silent Generation (age 65-plus) when they were the same age. While younger people are historically less likely to vote in political elections, in 2008 the gap between voters over and under 30 was the narrowest it’s been since 1972, when 18-year-olds were granted the right to vote.”

“Slightly more of them cite television as their main source of news, at 65 percent, with the Internet in second place at 59 percent. … Of those who cited television, 43 percent said they get most of their news from cable news, only 18 percent from the major networks and 16 percent from local TV. Only 24 percent said they got most of their news from newspapers. In a separate Pew study released in March, 35 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they follow the news most or all of the time. That’s a smaller percentage than older generations, but still seems kind of impressive.”

The main point of the article appears to be to try to jostle some of the traditionalists out of the idea that these young people will ever become more like our traditional readers (subscribers) and viewers, citing that 83 percent say they SLEEP WITH THEIR CELL PHONES and that “This is a generation that identifies technology use as the main difference between itself and other generations.” Unfortunately, the article comes no closer than any others to coming up with the answer to, “Now what?”

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So what does this mean for the media?

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 3, 2010)

Using the Internet rewires the human brain, and the result often is worse comprehension of information: “Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

A South Carolina journalism professor read the above-linked article and wonders in a blog post whether multimedia journalism is a positive thing, even though he and others in his school enthusiastically back it. Maybe he’s asking the wrong question.

Is it the inherent nature of the Web that promotes “cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning,” or is it the way that information on many — if not almost all — websites is presented that causes that? How “busy” is a typical Web page? If you have a page full of distractions and no visual center of gravity, with text that does not clearly and quickly tell you what you need to know, you create the same problem as on a similar-looking printed page.

6/7/10 UPDATE: The Nieman Journalism Lab provides some thoughtful analysis of the hubbub on the above issue.

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General workplace lessons

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on June 3, 2010)

A must-read blog post by Steve Buttry, with lessons that apply to any job anywhere, not just or even particularly in media. The summary:

-Don’t let complaints about the things you can’t control distract you from focusing on what you can control and finishing your job.
-Take responsibility for your work and admit your mistakes.
-Tradition is no excuse for failure to innovate.

A warning to people who aren’t sports fans: The explanation of these three lessons is entirely in the context of sports. However, you don’t have to be a sports fan or even understand the nuances of any one sport to appreciate the points he makes.

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Using social media for reporting

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, Social media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted May 26, 2010)

A great example from The Palm Beach Post showing ways to use social networking sites as reporting tools. The summary:

The Post’s social-media editor saw something on Twitter about a popular restaurant closing. She instant-messaged a business reporter, then 1) searched Twitter, 2) searched openbook, a site that lets you find public Facebook status updates even if you’re not logged on or have never used Facebook, and found two posts seemingly related to the business’s trouble, which she sent to the business reporter, 3) did a Google search of social media postings, and 4) tried two search engines for photo-sharing services. As the post says:

“The point of all this is not that Ouzo Blue’s closing is the news of the century (although they did have great melitzanosalata…) but that there are several social-media avenues available to search for information on a news story, to find people to interview and more.”

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Digital first – early lessons

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted May 20, 2010)

I can’t MAKE you read it, but a Poynter.org post about the early lessons of the reformed Journal Register’s “digital first, print last” approach ought to be required reading. Why:

“When we started out, we said, ‘We’re going to do what? How are we going to do this?'” said Laura Kessel, managing editor of the Willoughby News-Herald. “Now we’re showing ourselves that we can operate in a world that, even six months ago, used to be foreign to us.” 

The lessons are useful for both newspapers and television stations because many of them deal with audience-interaction and moving news online first. From Perkasie News-Herald Managing Editor Emily Morris:

“It’s been such an interesting experience to find out what residents are concerned about and then incorporate that into our coverage. We still have to get out there and cover stories, but I think all the reporters are thinking a lot differently now about what tools we can use to do that.”

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Tending to your ‘naked little creatures’

Posted in Online media, Print media, tagged on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted May 17, 2010)

For those of you who have any responsibility for writing headlines for the Web, the New York Times has a must-read column by David Carr on that subject. The basic problem being addressed: You can’t just take a headline that would work perfectly well in a newspaper and push it out to the Web and, by extension, your site’s RSS feed:

“Keep in mind that all of the things that make headlines meaningful in print — photographs, placement and context — are nowhere in sight on the Web. Headlines have become, as Gabriel Snyder, the recently appointed executive editor of Newsweek.com, ‘naked little creatures that have to go out into the world to stand and fight on their own.'”

Headlines for the Web have to be written with search engines in mind. That means short (the programs that search through headlines don’t even read as long as a Twitter post) and to the point, but ideally without taking too much life out of the headline.

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The thinking behind continuous-news strategy

Posted in Online media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted May 13, 2010)

I’ve heard more than once news people questioning why news sites (many, not all) put their newest stories at the top of the list of headlines as new things are posted through the day. A post at Lost Remote sums it up:

“This is hard for traditional news sites to grasp – we’re used to the finished news product and deciding which story to tell the audience is the lead – but continuous news is how people consume information online. It also doesn’t hurt that the format plays very nicely with Google. I’ve seen what happens at stations that switch to this web-native format, and the results are astounding: instant jumps in pageviews and time spent on site, and by several multiples as well.”

That post also cites a longer explanation posted on the pomoblog. A key point:

“The paradigm of ranked presentation is what the newspaper industry dragged with it to the Web in the mid ’90s, which was then copied by the television industry, because, well, that’s the way media companies did it. … Meanwhile, the people who built the Web moved in an entirely different direction, in part, because they knew something media companies didn’t — that the Web is a real time database, not a transport system for content.”

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A slog

Posted in Broadcast media, Online media, Print media, tagged , on May 15, 2011| Leave a Comment »

(Originally posted on May 7, 2010)

One of my least favorite parts of any local-election season was always compiling profile information, especially when there were a lot of candidates. You knew it was going to take forever to pull together, it would be largely boring stuff, it would disappear almost forgotten, and most people who needed it might never see it. The Web, of course, lets this stuff have a longer, more useful life. This year the Winston-Salem Journal made it easier for people to sift through it by compiling it into a searchable database. It might still be tedious to compile, but it’s more useful for voters.

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