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Newsrooms can’t use superheroes

June 8, 2014 by Guy

A few weeks ago, an article in The Atlantic by Daniel D. Snyder examined the clash between being a superhero with a secret identity and the ethics of journalism, namely being open and honest about who you are and how you got the details for your stories and photos.

It reminded me in a tangential way of a short story I wrote a few years ago after seeing “Superman Returns.” In that movie, despite being set in the modern world, the Daily Planet’s newsroom seemed culturally excavated from the 1950s — there were big, flat TVs and everyone had a computer, but it was as though the Internet didn’t exist. Reporters wrote. Photographers shot still photos. No one worried about minute-to-minute deadlines. And the more those thoughts stewed inside of me, I came to the conclusion that no superhero would find it possible nowadays to hold down a job as a journalist, which led to this story …

No Place for Heroes

As I left the news building for the last time, the breeze fluttered through cards in the Rolodex atop the box I carried. The old Rolodex had been with me since I started, filled with contacts made over more than two decades. It used to be every reporter had one, but over time you saw fewer of them around the room. Now it’s almost as much a relic as the lead spike sitting in the bottom of the box with my other things. No one has actually “spiked” a story since the day the last typewriter left the newsroom, but Ed, one of the old copy editors, couldn’t bear to take it off his desk, and when he retired a couple of years ago he handed it to me as a parting gift. Maybe I should have handed it off myself when they told me to clear out my desk, but as I packed the box, it was as though memories were piled deep on that spike, so I picked it up and placed it on the box to carry home.

News has been my life. Well, at least my work as a newsman made me feel a part of humanity in a way that nothing else did. There was electricity to working a story. It made me feel alive, charged. Not as charged as flying out and being in the action itself, actually catching the robbers or putting out the burning skyscraper, but being a reporter on the scene was always the next best thing, and there were plenty of times I could tell the trouble wasn’t so bad and the police or fire department could handle it while I took notes and shot bull with the other reporters.

Now, here I was, laid off, downsized, holding a box with a Rolodex, some personal files, cubicle knickknacks and mementos. A stuffed Cartman doll. A few photographs. A signed cartoon from the editorial cartoonist, who had been laid off a few years ago. A copy of the first A1 story I was part of, about a corrupt senator. A fragment of the rocket that narrowly missed hitting the city, last year’s biggest story. A Mason jar of river water, first captured and sealed up for an environmental story 17 years ago that became both mysteriously browner every year and also somehow now was a little more than half its original volume; a newsroom legend, and now it sat here, in my box, out in the sun for the first time in 17 years.

I just stood there by the car, looking down at the box. I hadn’t been unemployed since that first time I arrived in the city. Once, when unemployment rates were high, a man I interviewed told me how he remembered every detail about the moment he was fired – the ticking second hand of his boss’s clock, which snagged a half-beat near the 9 every time; the smell of cigarettes that clung to his boss’s shirt; the way his boss looked almost afraid of him. I understood him now in a way I didn’t before. Though truly what I think I will remember most is the powerlessness. I had never felt that before. I saw the end coming, as I had countless times before outside that building, but this time, sitting in that chair in human resources, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

About two dozen of us were let go today. Some simply left everything behind. Most, like me, gathered their things and walked out holding a box and trying to keep a brave face. A few I had seen leave were angry. Michael, for instance, strode out muttering loudly, punctuating everything with curses as his wiry, brown hair bounced around him. When he reached the sidewalk, he turned and drop-kicked his box at the building, then turned back and kept walking to the parking lot.

Walking toward my car, I passed Betty loading her box into her car. She looked at me and paused just a moment. “Early retirement,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess I’m lucky for once that I’m old.”

“Old” was the common denominator in the layoffs. Not old age. “Old” as in “old ways.”

Betty’s work habits had been the same for 37 years. She was careful, thorough and conscientious. That used to be enough to make her a model around the newsroom. But it wasn’t enough anymore. She refused repeated requests from the editors to participate in the newsroom’s expanding number of webcasts. She insisted on holding on to her stories until the absolute final deadline, polishing the words, and didn’t care about getting the story out early enough for the social media team to link to it before Facebook traffic peaked. She never got the hang or the habit of posting her stories to the website herself. She wouldn’t use a digital audio recorder. She never even included Web links – an editor looked them up instead – and she gently scolded colleagues who used “Google” as a verb.

Like all journalists, I had recognized the business was changing. More and more, reporters kept in constant contact with the newsroom and filed updates throughout the day, just a paragraph or two by email or cellphone or even text message. A reporter on a major breaking story in a city as big as this one often had to take a few minutes for at least a phone interview for use on the Web and TV.

All of this was exactly why I found my possessions in a box. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to change with the times or didn’t know how to do all those things. I just couldn’t. You can rescue a crashing airliner and later write about how it was saved, but you can’t interrupt the rescue to post a live update. Even once it’s on the ground, you can’t just whip out your phone and write a bulletin. The marauding alien bent on destruction won’t simply pause for a couple minutes just because you need to step aside to call the newsroom with the latest on which buildings have been seriously damaged and where traffic is blocked by debris.

Back when I started with the paper, you had a deadline. One. The job was easy. Whether I was in uniform part of the day or always playing the reporter, all I had to do at the end was write everything I knew was true and turn it in before Perry blew his top. I could type so fast I’d break the keyboard. But even if you’re fast enough to dodge a bullet, you can’t be in two places at once.

The company began offering multimedia training a year ago, and I signed up. But something always came up. Once I was headed for a session on recording and editing video for the Web, but a man in Chicago had set a bomb protected by lasers, so I had to skip it. Once I was in a session, but then a meteor was about to wipe out Fiji, so I pretended to be sick and excused myself early. Other times I showed up late.

Perry called me and several other reporters into his office a few months ago to preach to us about the “new media universe.” Afterward, he grabbed me by the elbow while everyone else walked out. “Jesus, Kent,” he said, “the whole world could be yours if you’d just reach out and take it. What are you thinking?”

That rolled around my head a few times as I stood outside my car, looking down into my box. I had heard it before, but not quite like that. I opened the back door of the car and slid the box onto the seat.

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw someone coming, then I turned and realized it was my reflection in the window of a van parked beside me. For a moment, the figure I thought I saw looked frail, slumped. I straightened my shoulders.

Looking up at the building again, I saw Perry come out on his way to lunch.

I hope a meteor lands on your house, buddy, I thought. See if I lift a finger to stop it.

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Date a reporter? You can do better

June 6, 2014 by Guy

Attention, single people: If you meet a reporter through online dating site eHarmony, run the other way.

Not because reporters make bad partners – not that I’m saying they make good ones, either – but because eHarmony put out a list this week of the “15 reasons to date a reporter.” Although Kristen Hare at Poynter.org found at least some of the 15 to be “spot on,” little on the list resembles the people in any newsroom I ever worked in, or passed through, so I question whether the reporters on eHarmony are telling the truth about their occupation.

For instance, it says, “Reporters are usually self-employed and have flexible schedules.” What?! A self-employed reporter is usually an unemployed reporter, and for a reporter, “flexible schedule” most often means he or she will have to cancel a date to go cover a story.

“You’ll be getting a great Scrabble partner” – or you would, if he could spell. Newsrooms are full of dictionaries for a reason.

“Reporters meet deadlines”? When I worked in Winston-Salem, reporters’ deadlines were observed mainly in the breach. I have never heard another editor say that isn’t the norm.

“Reporters make great dates to parties and family events, as they’re great at asking questions and engaging others in conversation.” Hmmm. I have known such extroverted reporters, many of them TV reporters, but most newspaper journalists are introverts. We got into the business because we’re writers, not talkers. We learn to ask questions of strangers because it’s required by the work, but it doesn’t come naturally, and on our own time we’d rather not.

I well remember a party that a co-worker’s non-journalist spouse gave years ago, where she invited a bunch of her non-journalist friends in addition to her husband’s journalist co-workers. All the journalists gathered together and talked shop in a corner while the party went on without them elsewhere in the house. Afterward, she berated the entire newsroom for their behavior. Date a reporter and expect that, then be happy if your experience is not quite that bad.

“Your date will remember your birthday, the way you like your coffee, and that promise you made her last week.” Sure, just don’t ask my wife how reliable my memory is when it comes to events she has even written down on the calendar on our refrigerator.

“Reporters get invitations to swanky events” so you can “hobknob with the mayor and other local celebrities.” A reporter’s “invitation” usually translates into an assignment to cover the event and write about it. Little hobknobbing there, and free passes for spouses or dates are not included.

But the worst reason the list gave to date a reporter was saved for last: “Clark Kent. Enough said.”

Enough? Not nearly. I have to wonder whether the list-maker ever paid attention to the comics. Clark was a schlub. No one ever wanted to date Clark Kent, intrepid reporter. They only had eyes for Superman.

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There is a digital chasm in journalism

May 14, 2014 by Guy

The goat must be fed
In the 16 months since I came to the News-Topic, I have had the basic idea rumbling around my head for a post on the disconnect I see between posts about digital storytelling tools and the reality of small-town journalism, which accounts for the great majority of news organizations in the U.S. But I never had the time to pull my thoughts together.

Now the Duke Reporters Lab has helped do a lot of the heavy lifting for me with a study showing that there is a “significant gap between the industry’s digital haves and have-nots – particularly between big national organizations, which have been most willing to try data reporting and digital tools, and smaller local ones, which haven’t.”

I object to the word “willing” in that sentence. It may be the case in many places that there is active resistance to using data and digital tools, but I have not seen that at many of the small newsrooms I visited in my previous job or in this one. The spirit is willing at places like this, but the flesh is exhausted.

The study finds newsroom leaders citing “budget, time and people as their biggest constraints” but “also revealed deeper issues – part infrastructure, part culture. This includes a lack of technical understanding and ability and an unwillingness to break reporting habits that could create time and space to experiment.”

In the case of my organization – print circulation approximately 5,000-6,000 – I can tell you the issue is approximately 95 percent one of time and people. My news staff, including me, totals six people, one of them dedicated full-time to local sports. There is no clerk to compile our extensive events listings or obituaries. I am expected to have an all-local front page in the print product, and I have my own set of standards for what I will accept out front (and while the bar is lower than it might be at a major metro, it largely is set higher than “incremental” news). Three of my four writers have less than two years’ experience. And no matter whether I find some events very newsworthy, there are longstanding community expectations for coverage of certain things, and skipping them carries stiff costs in community relations. With all of that, I find that getting my minimum number of local stories worthy of A1 takes about all the staff time that can be managed.

I can recognize that digital storytelling is worthy in its own right, not just “bells and whistles,” and still say there is precious little room here for “difficult trade-offs” in coverage.

That’s the 95 percent obstacle. The 5 percent is primarily infrastructure and, to at least some extent, technical understanding. Simply put, our CMS seems terrible – it’s locked down, limited, balky and not at all user-friendly. But it’s possible we are wrong, since no one here has ever been able to get formal training for it. Whatever we know how to do is based on our knowledge of other CMSes each of us has used (I at other companies, and my staff at their school papers) or the bare-bones “this is how you post a story” knowledge that the existing reporting staff provided me when I arrived here.

This is not to say we don’t talk about the website, our online audience or how to engage readers online. We are active in social media, almost everyone on the staff has shot and posted video, and we have interactions with readers online. We do more online now than this newsroom ever has. We WANT to keep doing more, and I WILL keep looking for ways to do it.

But as the Duke report says: The goat must be fed. Everything else has to come later.

Posted in Online media, Print media | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Online reader loyalty: We have it

May 10, 2014 by Guy

I’m suddenly feeling much better about how my small newspaper is doing online after a recent post by Poynter’s Sam Kirkland that said:

“The latest report by analytics firm Parse.ly indicates large news sites see a greater percentage of visitors return within 30 days than small news sites do. … Sites with more than 10 million monthly visitors saw a 16 percent return rate, while sites with fewer than 1 million monthly visitors saw a 9 percent return rate. … Across Parse.ly’s entire network, an average of 11 percent of visitors returned to a site within 30 days.”

The monthly return rate on newstopic.net currently is 59.9 percent, if our Google Analytics are to be believed.

But I don’t know why that should be surprising. Unless you have local ties, you would not have much reason to seek out the content available from the News-Topic. If the hypothesis is that reader loyalty ought to make our site more attractive to online advertisers, then our site is an undiscovered gem, though our audience size (about 36,000 visitors in the past month) makes it a tiny gem.

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Facebook’s too much in my face as it is

April 18, 2014 by Guy

News item: “Facebook is rolling out a new tool that allows its users to track their friends in real time.

“Flipping on the feature in the Facebook mobile app lets you share your general or specific location with friends.”

You’re at your favorite isolated getaway, finally alone. No squabbling family or demands from a boss or spouse. Stretched out on a chaise lounge in the sun, you close your eyes and doze off. You awake to the sound of nearby footsteps.

“HEY, there you are! Wake up, sleepy head!”

You blink and look up. Someone is silhouetted against the blue, perfect sky, but you’d know that head anywhere. “Oh, uh, Bill? Hey.”

“Hey! Having fun, right, relaxing in the sun.”

You’re still groggy. “Right,” you say, but you’re wondering what he’s doing here.

“Hey! I got an idea. Let’s head into town! I know just the spot! This area is practically my second home.”

Oh no, you think. Oh no oh no oh no. “I don’t know,” you say.

“Oh, come on! You’ll love it.” Bill pulls up a chair and sits, then reaches into your cooler and pops open a can.

“Help yourself,” you say. Bill misses your sarcasm. “Say, Bill, what brings you here?”

“My car. HA! Get it? My car brings me here!” Bill always laughs at his own jokes. “I slay me,” he says.

“Yeah, no I mean did you just happen to spot me as you were driving past on your way somewhere?” you ask. “The coincidence of it just struck me.”

“No coincidence, buddy, Facebook showed me you were here.” He holds up his phone, and you see a tiny version of your disembodied head at the center of the map on the screen.

“Oh, yeah,” you say, “Facebook.” You thought you had turned off the friend-finder feature. You reach into your pocket to check.

“Yeah. You know, I’m glad I checked it, because otherwise I probably would have just stayed home this weekend. Imagine that!”

You try not to look too startled.

“But then I looked, and I said to myself, ‘Now that’s a plan!’”

Your phone’s Facebook app shows you that the friend-finder app is indeed on. You toggle it to off. But then the icon slides back by itself. You slide it back. It won’t stay and slides back to on. “I think I need to reboot the phone,” you say.

“Tell you what!” Bill says. “I’ll go make a store run and be back lickety split! Then we can both start relaxing!”

You hold down the phone button to reboot it, nodding at Bill.

“You need anything?” Bill asks.

“No, I’m good.”

Bill walks to his car as your phone’s screen lights up again. You open Facebook. Friend-finder is still on. You toggle it to off – but it keeps sliding back. You sigh and start to contemplate the drive back home. Or – you get an idea – maybe a long-distance drive, to Palo Alto, Calif. You use your phone’s voice-recognition feature and ask it a question: “Where does Mark Zuckerberg live?”

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America’s most miserable news site is …

April 4, 2014 by Guy

Let’s be 100 percent clear about this: There is no survey that designated the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area, where I live, as one of the nation’s “most miserable cities,” no matter what you read on Facebook or in a newspaper or saw on the Charlotte TV news.

What did happen is that the Gallup polling organization and a company called Healthways – which sells its services to businesses looking for ways to decrease health costs while boosting performance – issued the 2014 version of an annual report that, among other things, ranked 189 metropolitan statistical areas based on a nationwide survey of more than 500,000 people, who were asked about their height and weight, how much they exercise, how many servings of fruits and vegetables they eat, whether they smoke, how much stress they think they are under and whether they have health insurance.

The pollsters plugged those answers into a formula and came up with a number expressing each area’s “overall well-being.”

Note that nowhere in the evaluation is any expression of miserableness.

If you look at the Gallup-Healthways site ranking the communities, you find stress on the positives, such as, “There are tangible policies that communities can adopt to actively cultivate and improve residents’ well-being.”

This is the most-negative thing that Gallup-Healthways said in its reporting:

“Huntington-Ashland also trailed all other metros in 2008, 2010, and 2011; its score of 58.1 in 2010 remains the lowest on record across five reporting periods spanning six years of data collection.”

This is the second-most-negative, and it involves our region and two others in the bottom 10:

“None of these metro areas are strangers to the bottom 10 list, with each community having appeared at least once on the list in a prior reporting period.”

That’s it. It’s not so bad, and it doesn’t come close to “miserable.” How could it when the 189th-ranked metro area’s overall score is barely 13 points lower than the top-ranked metro?

And if you study the individual scores in the separate categories of the survey, what killed the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton area’s score was that too many people smoke and not enough people exercise regularly. In every other category, our scores were solidly in the middle of the pack, but in those two, our scores are pretty bad — we had the fourth-highest smoking rate and 12th-lowest exercise rate.

So where, you may wonder, did the term “most miserable cities” come about?

This is a tale of the Internet and the term “clickbait.” Companies that make most of their money from Internet advertising need to be able to get lots and lots of people to come to their sites because the advertiser pays based on how many people see the page that the ad is on. To do this, some sites write headlines that are at least somewhat misleading. In other words, they bait people into clicking the headline.

The “America’s most miserable cities” headline is one of those.

Whoever did it hoped that the reaction would be, “Oh my God! We live in (or know someone who lives in) one of America’s most miserable cities! I have to post this to Facebook!” Which then would be followed by lots and lots and lots more people clicking on the link to go to the site to see the list. Better yet, the headline also appears on a photo gallery, requiring people to click through all 10, which gooses the website’s statistics even more.

That “miserable” designation apparently originated at a website called 24/7 Wall St., and it spread far and wide via Yahoo!, among others (the one I saw on Facebook was on Yahoo!).

Until online advertisers decide that sheer volume of clicks is not a good measure of the value they get for their advertising dollar, you’ll probably keep seeing things like that.

But I can say this for sure: Any reporter or editor at any newspaper or TV station who picked up the “miserable” terminology without checking to see whether the word really appeared in the survey is a miserable excuse for a journalist.

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Don’t give up on news innovation

April 2, 2014 by Guy


If innovation is all about learning how to fail, the news business is innovating its butt off.

This morning brought the news that Digital First Media, which has been making the industry’s biggest, hardest, loudest pitches for transformation away from print-centered operations, is going to close its biggest innovation, Project Thunderdome, and may begin selling newspapers.

A number of the names attached to DFM’s digital push I first became aware of because of their work elsewhere, especially Jim Brady, Steve Buttry and Mandy Jenkins. Many of the things they have advocated have felt, on a gut level, like the right things to do to get to the future of the news business. They have demonstrated ways to build engagement online and build news audience online even as the decades-long decline in newspaper circulation, which long predated the Internet, continues and TV audiences erode.

The problem, as ever, is that while most people seem to agree that the future of news is digital and mobile, the “business” part of it doesn’t seem able to innovate or migrate its way as quickly as the news part can.

Now if DFM has faltered, as the innovative hyperlocal site TBD did before it, will others pull back?

Publishers have always been wary of venturing quickly into the digital realm without proof they can generate revenue there equal to what they lose by dropping print, so doesn’t this provide just one more excuse to slow down?

And because the Orange County Register’s efforts to boost business by reinvesting in the print product also appear to be going nowhere, the new mantra in news might just become, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

But when you know the beach is eroding under your feet, just standing there isn’t much of an option. I think we all have to keep looking at the kinds of things TBD, DFM and others have been trying, and pick the ones that make sense in our own newsrooms with the staff we have. Pick up the flag and keep marching forward.

UPDATE: Steve Buttry makes the argument that you can’t call Thunderdome a failure (or TBD either) because it was never given enough time to succeed. I think he’s correct, but I don’t think the folks who can put money into these kinds of things will examine the merits of his argument closely. I’m afraid the narrative that will be constructed from the outside will say that what was tried at Thunderdome, and TBD, clearly failed or the plug wouldn’t have been pulled.

On another topic, I also just read the post from Digital First CEO John Paton explaining today’s moves. It says, in part:

“In the past two years we have learned a tremendous amount from Project Thunderdome much like others that have come before it like our Ben Franklin Project.

“We have explored, experimented but more importantly we have learned and have a much higher level of digital skills than we did before. And, best of all, a higher level of confidence in our digital abilities across our entire Company.

“Our skills in data journalism, video production, website and mobile developments are all the better for Project Thunderdome.

“But what once were fairly isolated skills located in one place are now skills shared by many in our Company. Where once initiatives, like Project Unbolt were led centrally, we now have divisions taking their own Digital First initiatives.”

In other words, Thunderdome was so successful that the company no longer needs it.

Project Unbolt, by the way, was announced Jan. 29. I guess that would make it the most successful digital initiative ever because it made itself obsolete in barely more than two months.

Maybe it’s not Orwellian of Paton to put it that way, but on a much smaller scale I have seen what happens when “successful” initiatives driven by corporate HQ suddenly end. Often, so does the success; what you thought was “buy in” was editors telling staff, “Just do it and get corporate off my butt, OK?” If that was the case at any DFM properties, it should be clear before long — probably in much less time than Thunderdome had to build these new skills and habits across DFM.

4/3/14 UPDATE: Good business perspective from Alan Mutter:

“In other words, the objectives of the Digital First investors were the antithesis of the patience – and multimillion-dollar commitment – required in the slog to identify successful interactive publishing models, whatever they eventually may turn out to be.

It would be a mistake to view the failure at Digital First as a failure of digital publishing or a reason to stop trying to get it right.”

4/4/14 UPDATE: Great contribution of context by Mandy Jenkins, which among other things further points out the corporate babble of Paton’s statement about Thunderdome having been so successful. Among other things:

“Thunderdome never even got the chance to carry out even the beginnings of our goals. Many of our long-planned channels just started launching. We had a number of new revenue-generating products on the horizon. We had just started building our in-house product team.”

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Standards matter, and I do care

March 22, 2014 by Guy

A rose is a rose is a rose.

But a rose is not a daisy or an iris or a pansy.

More is not less, and over is not under.

At least not yet.

The Associated Press hasn’t changed its mind on how journalists should use those words, but I wonder whether it’s only a matter of time.

This week the Associated Press changed a rule in the AP Stylebook. And the change was met with howls of disgust and outrage – mine. But I wasn’t the only one howling.

The rule in question governed the use of “more than” versus “over” when talking about quantity or volume. The rule has been essentially that you use “more than” for things you can count, and you use “over” for things that can be measured but not counted. For instance, “more than 12 items,” and “over a quart.”

But AP now says you don’t have to bother with the distinction anymore. Whatever works. It’s all good.

Why?

Because “it has become common usage.”

You know why it has become common usage? Because not enough people have bothered to learn what’s correct. That isn’t a good reason to lower your standards. It’s like the language equivalent of grade inflation — if no one can earn an A anymore, just lower the bar so what used to get a B grade is now worth an A.

One of the more amusing reactions to AP’s decision that “over” and “more than” were interchangeable came from Mike Shor on Twitter: “More than my dead body!”

Once upon a time, when you wanted to express the idea that something didn’t matter to you, you said, “I couldn’t care less.”

But it has been years since I heard anyone say that. What they say now is, “I could care less.”

Why would anyone say that? If you “could care less,” it means you care. If you care, it bothers you. It makes no sense to say that if you mean that it doesn’t bother you.

But because so many people now say it, it’s “common usage,” the same theory AP has used to say that “more than” and “over” are interchangeable.

And so it goes.

Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty in “Through the Looking Glass” said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” And that’s exactly how we get to this point.

There used to be a difference between the meanings of “composed” and “comprised.” But some people didn’t learn it, others couldn’t remember it, some of each didn’t bother to check before they used one of the words, and after a while the dictionary started listing both definitions as correct for each.

“Common usage” doesn’t make it right.

And no, I don’t propose that those who know the difference go around correcting everyone publicly when people use words incorrectly. But if the people who use words for a living give in to the incorrect uses, then what?

If enough people say blue and yellow are the same color, eventually the words for them will come to have the same meaning, but that will mean only that the words have lost their usefulness.

If we keep rounding the edges off of words because we let people who don’t bother to learn the correct definitions rewrite the definitions, all we will be left with eventually is, “Well, you knew what I meant.”

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New hope that news audiences have more value

March 18, 2014 by Guy

Reading about attracting news audiences and revenue for online news sites has often been depressing. Even for someone who believes in the need for meeting the audience where it is and adapting to the needs of online and mobile news consumers, at times it has felt like the future was heading toward a world dominated by Buzzfeedy listicles and clickbait and Upworthy-worthy headlines, where all advertising revenue is forever lagging and all audiences are zephyrlike transients.

You can simultaneously believe that not just journalism but locally oriented journalism is necessary for society but feel overwhelmed by skepticism about how many people out there have the same belief and will actively seek it in numbers that will support some kind of sustainable revenue model.

But recent weeks have brought some research to stoke your optimism.

The American Press Institute reported this week on a survey by the Media Insight Project, an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about news-consumption habits:

“When asked to volunteer how they came to the news, people tend think less about the device than the news gathering source and the means of discovery (social media or search). Taken in combination, the findings suggest that people make conscious choices about where they get their news and how they get it, using whatever technology is convenient at the moment.”

The survey also found that people do notice what strengths different news organizations have, for instance turning to local TV sources (TV itself or a TV station’s website) for weather, traffic, crime, and health news, and newspaper sources for news about their local town or city, for news about arts and culture, and for news about schools and education.

And hasn’t that been one of the underlying hopes of traditional journalists, that our existing “brand” is more than our traditional medium or platform, that the public associates our news organization with the news we produce?

That’s what this survey indicates is the case – they seek us out for news, not just, as often is said, wait for any news that really is important to find them:

“Overall, for instance, social media is becoming an important tool for people across all generations to discover news — but hardly the only one, even for the youngest adults.

“… People across all generations are most likely to discover news by going directly to a news organization, rather than letting the news come to them.”

Super.

We can check off that part of how to survive the future.

That still leaves revenue, the front that has been the bleakest, where analog dollars turn to digital dimes, if that.

But Tony Haile, the CEO of data-analytics company Chartbeat, wrote in a column last week for time.com on research by his company that finds that audiences drawn to actual news may hold more value for advertisers than those on other sites because they pay attention to the page and linger longer. Why that matters:

“Someone looking at the page for 20 seconds while an ad is there is 20-30% more likely to recall that ad afterwards.”

And best of all, it may be that news organizations have undervalued their advertising slots that are lower on the digital page, especially below the “fold” where ads and content aren’t seen unless the viewer scrolls:

“Here’s the skinny, 66% of attention on a normal media page is spent below the fold. That leaderboard at the top of the page? People scroll right past that and spend their time where the content, not the cruft, is. Yet most agency media planners will still demand that their ads run in the places where people aren’t and will ignore the places where they are.”

Pair this with the results of a study by the Pew Research Journalism Project that found that “People who visit a news organization’s website directly engage with its content more than those who enter ‘sideways’” through social media and other referrels, as Andrew Beaujon wrote last week at Poynter.org.

The Pew report, “Social, Search and Direct: Pathways to Digital News,” said:

“In this study of U.S. internet traffic to 26 of the most popular news websites, direct visitors — those who type in the news outlet’s specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked — spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral.

“… For news outlets operating under the traditional model of building a loyal, perhaps paying audience, obtaining referrals so that users think of the outlet as the first place to turn is critical.”

This doesn’t suggest to me that all the time newsrooms spend now trying to engage audiences on Facebook, Twitter or other social sites is wasted or even that it should be cut back. It puts your news in front of audiences, including some people who are not regular readers or viewers. That exposure may be critical in building your brand in the minds of that portion of the audience.

That makes it up to you to be sure that what you have lured them to is news they find worthwhile enough that they come back on their own.

And that has always been the name of the game for survival in news.

Posted in Broadcast media, Mobile media, Online media, Print media, Social media | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What it was wasn’t Indiana

March 1, 2014 by Guy

Now just a cotton-pickin’ minute here.

Do you mean to tell me that someone is trying to move Mayberry out of North Carolina to some spot way up North?

Uh-uh, naw sir, that won’t do. That won’t do ay-tall.

The Indianapolis Business Journal reports that the town of Danville, Indiana, is planning a two-day “Mayberry in the Midwest” festival in May. The idea apparently sprang from a Mayberry-themed restaurant in the town.

Now, you might not have been able to tell it from the accents of many of the people populating Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show” – the mayor, the lady druggist, Barney, Aunt Bee, Otis, the chorus director and any member of the state police who passed through town, to name a few – but Mayberry was set in North Carolina, not central Indiana barely more than a hop, a skip and a jump from the home of the Indy 500, where the cars may all keep turning left but look more like cigars than anything in a dealership’s stock.

Andy Griffith, of course, grew up in Mount Airy and based the fictional Mayberry in great part on his hometown. There has long been a Snappy Lunch there, just like in the show, and you might recall the frequent references in the TV show to the nearby town of Mount Pilot and notice on a map that Mount Airy is very near Pilot Mountain. Mount Airy, in turn, has been a top attraction for fans of the TV show and long ago adopted Mayberry as its alter ago. It hosts an annual Mayberry Days festival, and the actress who played Thelma Lou moved to Mount Airy a few years ago to escape California and settle in to a place where people make her feel like family.

Considering all this, you just have to ask yourself two questions. One: Do the good people of Danville, Indiana, think folks don’t remember that the show was set in North Carolina and won’t notice the decided lack of any Andy-like way of talking in those parts? That hardly seems likely.

Now, what would all those folks up in Indiana think if we down here tried to take up one of their better-known attractions and make like it was ours? Maybe the “World’s Largest Ball of Paint” in Alexandria, or the Giant Lady’s Leg Sundial in Lake Village.

They might not like it one bit, and who could blame them?

No, right is right, Mayberry belongs in North Carolina, and anyone who knows anything about Mayberry knows exactly what Danville, Indiana, has to do to make this here sitchyayshun right.

Nip it. Nip it in the bud.

Posted in Personal | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment »

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