I often shudder at the poor quality of online forums run by newspapers and other local media outlets. Come on, people! This reader interaction thing may be new to you, but some of us have been doing it for 10 or 15 years, and have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

This article outlines five basic rules for building sustainable online communities that are based on my 15+ years of experience with various online services, discussion groups, usenet forums, and — for the last seven years — as part of the management team behind the famous Slashdot discussion site. I’m not saying that you should follow slavishly in my footsteps, but I assure you that a forum you build (or rebuild) in accordance with my rules will be more popular, easier to manage, and more profitable than one that doesn’t follow them. These rules — and the software that helps enforce them — are the driving force behind hundreds of popular and profitable discussion-based Web sites.

Rule One:

Your discussions must be threaded or nested, not just “flat.”

A flat discussion tags the newest comments onto either the top or the bottom of ones already listed. A threaded discussion shows “discussion threads” but doesn’t display the entire content of posts replying to “parent posts,” just their subject headers.

The Sarasota (Florida) Herald-Tribune has “flat” message boards. In this example, a poster has replied to three other posts, but the new posts are not associated directly with the ones to which they are replying. This discussion had 62 posts at the time this screenshot was taken, and it was almost impossible to follow any of the sub-conversations within it because of the way it was displayed.

Kuro5hin is a “geek interest” news and discussion site that uses software based on Slashdot’s. This screenshot shows part of a 62-message discussion displayed in “threaded” mode.

Groklaw discusses legal issues related to free software. This example of “nested” discussion display is part of a string of over 300 reader comments attached to one article. Slashdot and Groklaw routinely run articles that draw 1000+ reader responses. Threading, nesting or some other sorting mechanism is necessary to keep discussions this large from becoming unintelligible.

Even in small discussions (20 or fewer posts), conversations are easier to follow if new comments are linked directly to comments they are responding to than if they are displayed in the order in which they were submitted.

Without reader-to-reader conversations, an online forum is nothing but a giant “letters to the editor” page. While posting responses to your published stories gives your readers more voice than they’d have without this ability, your forums or bulletin boards (or whatever you want to call them) will only achieve their full potential when readers start using them to talk directly to each other instead of merely reacting to content you have posted.

Rule Two:

You have readers who know more than you do about any given topic — and plenty of readers who don’t know nearly as much as they think they do.

I’ve been writing online long enough to realize that I should be be thankful for readers’ corrections and accept them graciously instead of letting them upset me. It takes a while to accept the constant barrage of criticism and nitpicking you get if you have reader comments attached directly to all articles on your site, but in the end you and your fellow writers will become more careful reporters.

One thing many online writers have noticed over the years is that compliments are more likely to be sent to you by private email, while critical comments are more likely to be posted on public boards. I’ve also noticed — speaking strictly from my own experience — that unfair public attacks from uninformed or mindlessly vituperative readers almost always draw rebuttals from other, more knowledgeable readers. I have learned not to get into arguments with readers who attack my online work in public, but to trust other readers to come to my defense if I have been wronged.

Of course, if I make a factual error or grammatical mistake and a reader posts a comment about it, the right thing to do is post something along the lines of, “Corrected. Thanks for noticing.”

This makes it clear to the readers that I pay attention to posts attached to articles published under my byline, and makes it even more clear that I respect my readers and happily give them credit if they give me informed criticism that helps improve my work.

The only problem with this philosophy is that it can be hard to separate experts from yow-yowers, especially if you’ve written about a topic area in which you are not an expert. But that’s why we have…

Rule Three:

Let your readers judge each other so you don’t have to judge them yourself.

Slashdot, Groklaw, Kuro5hin and many other geek-oriented discussion sites have moderation features built into the software that drives them. Slashdot’s moderation scheme, from which the others were derived, works like this:

• You cannot post in and moderate the same discussion; you cannot, therefore, moderate your own posts.
• Moderation powers are distributed semi-randomly, and only to readers who have had login identities for at least a few weeks. And no individual reader gets more than a few moderation points at a time, so it’s hard for one knucklehead to mess up the whole scheme.
• Obscenities, personal attacks, and other unwelcome speech will almost inevitably be moderated down into oblivion. “Community standards” have been used as a legal test of what constitutes obscenity. Give your readers the power to moderate other readers’ posts, and you will soon find what they consider obscene.

Slashdot has tried all sorts of additions and tweaks to its moderation system over the years, so many that a pretty good percentage of the Slashdot FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page is dedicated to comments and moderation.

The point of moderation is to separate dreck from diamonds. Readers who aren’t logged in view Slashdot comments that are rated +1 or above (on a -1 to +5 scale) but do not see comments rated 0 or -1 without special effort. Logged-in users’ comments post automatically at the +1 level, while comments from readers who are not logged in start at 0. A post from someone who is not a logged-in user, therefore, needs at least one logged-in reader to consider it worthy of a positive moderation point before most readers can see it at all, while a post from logged-in user that a few users who have moderation powers that day find offensive can easily drop from public view.

On the positive side, comments that add something useful to the discussion will be moderated upwards, so readers who only want to see the most cogent comments can set their preferences so that they see only comments moderated to +2, +3 or even +5.

On the negative side, you may want to give readers a little help. Most Slashdot-type posting systems allow employees or other selected forum monitors extra moderation privileges so that they can save readers from the task of removing strings of especially vituperative comments.

You may also want to only allow comments from registered, logged-in users. Slashdot allows anonymous comments because of the “whistle blower” factor; some of the site’s best posts have always come from people who might lose their jobs if they posted inside information about their employers’ actions under a traceable name. In return for occasional anonymous gems, Slashdot suffers from plenty of anonymous garbage down at the 0 and -1 moderation levels. You may decide this tradeoff isn’t worthwhile, and I won’t blame you if you take the easier course. I often wish we’d taken it ourselves.

In any case, you need to realize that your forums will need some watching and nurturing if they are ever going to become a valuable part of your online offerings.

Rule Four:

All good things must come to an end.

You can’t leave online conversations “open” forever. Sooner or later you need to close them off, if only to keep comment spam from taking over posting threads on older stories. You may chose to allow comments on stories for as long as 30 days, although you’re probably better off closing comments on most stories after a week or two if you publish weekly, daily or constantly.

Archiving older discussions as static pages instead of serving every completed conversation on your site as a dynamic page can also save dramatically on server usage, which will help keep costs down.

Rule Five:

Why buy a cow when the software is free?

By now you’re probably saying, “Whoa, man… where can I buy the cool software that runs Slashdot?”

I’m sorry. We don’t sell Slash. We give it away. For free. Right here. The only caveat is that if you figure out a way to make Slash run better or more efficiently, we ask you to share your improvements with us and other people who use Slash under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Scoop, the code that runs Kuro5hin, is also freely available, as is the Geeklog software behind Groklaw. And these are just a few of the best-known free content management systems out there that have Slashdot-like comment and moderation systems. There are many others. Slash is far from the easiest one to install, customize, and maintain, but it is also the most proven one for sites that may deal with millions of pageviews and tens of thousands of comments every day. Your IT people or hosting people may already have a favorite piece of free forum software; if so, that might be your best choice as long as that software is already being used successfully to power sites at least as large as yours is likely to become in the foreseeable future.

But the main thing isn’t the software. It’s your (and your management’s) attitude. It is not easy to give readers near-total control over some of your vital Web real estate. There is an endless temptation to do things like create topics you think will interest readers instead of letting your readers choose what to discuss on their own.

Communities aren’t created by management fiat. They grow on their own. You can provide a fertile environment for yours, and nurture it with light-handed moderation and by having staff members participate in its early conversations.

Note that I haven’t mentioned blogs as a factor in any of this. A reader-driven forum that allows users to start new topic threads gives readers the option of posting entries that are similar enough to blogs that calling some threads “blogs” becomes redundant.

And when it comes to staff members blogging… perhaps I’m showing my age here, but I remember when the people we now call “bloggers” were called “columnists.” But that’s another discussion for another time.

The growth of Weblogging has forced newspapers to address this relationship (for a recent development see Syndicate this! Linking old media to new, Stephen Bryant, OJR, 2006-03-27), and not just because of the rise of online discussion. The development of easy to use publishing tools has allowed newspaper columnists and opinion writers to develop their own spaces onlineⁱⁱ. And the syndication concept that underlies the Weblogging model allows commentary to be found and aggregated away from the hosting news site.

The Guardian situation

In the UK the Guardian newspaper, particularly notable for its columnists and the quality of its letters page, had long employed Web-based discussion forums such as Guardian Talk as part of its Guardian Unlimited network.

Having visited the US to research new developments, editor Alan Rusbridger observed the disagreggation of advertising and editorial, and the changing nature of editorial. He also observed the growth of non-traditional opinion aggregators such as the Huffington Post, which was competing with everything from The Nation and MotherJones to the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. On the home front he noted that the Guardian‘s readers had “started talking to one another, and going behind our backs to our sources and reports.”

Characterizing the papers of record as being stuck in ‘journalism as revelation’ mold, he questioned whether saying “We have got all these distinguished newspaper columnists” was an adequate response. “They’re not laughing at Ariana Huffington now,” he observed. “They are saying, ‘That is really interesting.’”

In response to these developments, in March this year, the Guardian launched Comment is Free, a “collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests”ⁱⁱⁱ. Comment is Free is edited by Guardian veteran Georgina Henry and politics page editor Tom Happold, and inspired by celebrated Guardian editor C. P. Scott’s famous aphorism ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’^iv. Contributors, of who there are now more than 200, are asked to write without remuneration (other than those who are published in the paper), with a £75 fee offered if their contribution is promoted as a pick of the day – a model not disimilar to the BlogBurst model discussed in Stephen Bryant’s piece. The payback for authors would appear to be access to customised publishing tools, and a larger audience than they might have for their own Weblog.

Comment is Free overview

The Comment is Free home page includes a Blog section (listing recent posts), Editors’ Picks, and an overview of all the comment from the Guardian and the Observer. The most active posts are listed, next to a ‘Best of the web’ selection. Each author has an associated RSS Webfeed, and each post includes links to ‘Digg this’, ‘Add it to Del.icio.us’, and ‘See who is linking here’ (using Technorati).

In order to post responses to pieces, commenters have to have registered and signed in for Guardian Unlimited blogs. Comments are limited to 5,000 characters, and flagged with a country (inferred from the user’s IP address). No HTML formatting is allowed, and there is no comment preview function. Each comment has a unique URL, allowing it to be directly ‘pointed to’. Post-moderation is employed, and each comment has a link allowing it to be flagged as offensive or unsuitable^v.

The overall interface design of Comment is Free was developed in house by the Guardian Unlimited design team with direction from Guardian creative director Mark Porter. It is a good and appropriate improvement on the 1998 Guardian Unlimited design, though it presents a similarly confused information architecture, eliding links to comments from ‘This week’, ‘Subjects A-Z’, the ‘Editors’ blog’, and the ‘Steve Bell’ cartoon.

As with most online publications, the Comment is Free interface is text-driven and linear^vi, and fails to exploit people’s visual powers, even to the extent, perhaps, of making more commented on posts more attention grabbing – a model pioneered as early as 1997 in the discussion areas at the BBC’s commercial site Beeb.com^vii.

In May, two months after its launch, Henry announced the Big Blogger contest, to elicit nominations for a commenter to become a regular Comment is Free blogger. This initiative was in response to the feedback that “not only is the debate on most of the threads not as bad as I sometimes make out, but… in many cases is of higher quality than the posts by some ‘professionals’” (Big Blogger: let battle commence, May 23, 2006)^viii.

Successes

The Guardian appears to consider Comment is Free to be a success, though Henry is frank about the challenges with which they are dealing. To its credit Comment is Free was nominated for the Innovation category of New Statesman New Media Awards 2006, though it didn’t win.

In his RSA lecture Rusbridger was honest in identifying the Huffington Post as the inspiration for Comment is Free, and Henry notes that the Post “has outstripped its liberal old media competitors in the 10 months since it launched” (Welcome to Comment is free, March 14, 2006). Despite being a ‘me too’ product the Guardian deserves credit for the ambition and scale of its engagement with the developments in online debate.

Flaws in the model

However, Comment is Free has a number of flaws. Some possible flaws (around the defensive selection of authors and tiny fraction of readers who comment) were addressed by Bob Cauthorn in Can newspapers do blogs right? (Robert Niles, OJR, 2006-04-23), and were responded to by Guardian Unlimited assistant editor Neil McIntosh in his comments posted on the piece.

Although Comment is Free is presented as a Weblog-based service, the posts often don’t follow a basic tenet of Weblogging: linking. This doesn’t significantly undermine the system, though it reinforces the feeling that this is an established newspaper space. This limitation is partly a product of the existing Guardian Unlimited infrastructure. One must assume that any columnist researches their piece online, and saves links and references with their manuscript (not least for fact checking). I suspect there is no way for these references to make it through the Guardian‘s print and online publishing system and onto Comment is Free – and the product suffers somewhat for it.

Comment is Free also appears to have ignored another tenet of Weblogging: instant publication. According to one author “you do not actually have access to ‘your’ page. You send copy to the editors, who then vet it, edit it and put it online at their own pace. There is no immediacy, and no direct control of your copy. The entire feeling of speaking directly to readers is lost, as it is so heavily mediated, not just by the editing process but the technology itself”.

The dynamics of posting a comment in Web-based fora have rarely been well addressed in publishing or any other sector. This may be because forum creators don’t properly think through any scenarios of use. For instance: someone reads a piece online (or in print), and thinks they might want to comment on it. Assuming they are registered (and, if they are starting in print, can find the piece online) they judge the quality of the discussion and decide to post their comments. But if comments are pre-moderated, how do they know when their comment has been posted? And when they have been posted, how might they know when further comments have been posted, particularly comments referring to their contribution? If we consider Web-based discussions to be akin to conversations or public debates we can see the dynamics are all wrong, with people speaking (often only with someone’s permission) only to find their conversants responding minutes later, or when they are out of earshot.

Not least for this reason, quality of discussion has been a significant issue for Comment is Free – though it is as much of an issue for other online publications. Discussions may start well, but they tend to lose focus and collapse, with commentators engaging in personal attacks on each other or the author. In one thread to which I contributed it only took one mild post for someone to refer to me in their response as having “attention span of a Christmas tree”, while the thread degenerated into McCarthyite exposés of the author’s background – rather than rational engagement with his arguments.

Lee Bryant of the London based social-software-oriented consultancy Headshift has been following Comment is Free. He says “the main issue which is that their ’1%ers’ are so quick, opinionated and polarised in their many views that the other 99% are largely discouraged from joining in.” Henry acknowledges that “Too many comments have nothing to do with the original post, or degenerate into back-and-forth slanging matches with others which just get in the way of reasoned argument and put off people who want to engage with the original piece” (Less is more, July 18, 2006). In response to this, a comment frequency cap was introduced, preventing individuals commenting more than once every half an hour.

It would help people reading more active posts if the authors reviewed the comments on their pieces, and linked to and responded to the key points made therein. This activity was partly hampered as result of Comment is Free breaking another Weblogging tenet: ease of use. According to the aforementioned author “to respond to comments, you have to check in all over again quite separately, as a ‘punter’ – again, you go through several technological hurdles just to respond to the comments on your own piece. So the sense of immediacy and ‘out there’-ness is non-existent “.

Clear discussion would be aided if commenters could more easily link to other comments, and if threads were closed at a preset time, with the interesting points of the discussion summarised to create a sense of closure. Henry has considered the issue of authors revisiting discussions, and notes that “more contributors are finding their way back onto their posts to answer points”, though she adds that “looking at some of comments [sic] certain individuals attract, I’m not that surprised they feel discouraged from joining in” (Open threads – what do you think?, June 30, 2006). Somewhat against the spirit of Henry’s comment, in his RSA lecture Rusbridger mused that if leading Guardian writer Polly Toynbee asking him if she should reply to the many emails she had received in response to a previous piece or write her next piece he would want her to do the latter.

Finding a way into a discussion is also hampered by the lack of visibility and profile of commenters. When people register, they are not required to use their real names, and their ‘handles’ vary from the moderately personable ‘PaulMac’ and ‘AndyV’ to ‘Rashers101′ and ‘GrunTuMolani’^ix. There are no mugshots associated with commenters, and no links to profiles, personal sites or Weblogs. As a result, it is difficult to get any sense of who one is debating. Toynbee reflected on this in one post which asked “Who are you all? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?” (Civil discourse? A vain hope, May 19, 2006).

Neither do these handles link to other comments their owners have made – comments that might at least help one understand more about that particular commenter. And in the event that someone you know and trust has made a comment in a thread you are reading, there is no way you could work out if the comment from AndyV was from the AndyV you know. As well as linking commenters to their other comments, it might help potential posters judge the quality of the discussion if commenters were listed prominently on each piece.

Part of the problem is that the ‘person’ is not considered to be an ‘object’ in the Comment is Free system in the same way a story is. If people were top-level objects, and tied into a social networking tool such as LinkedIn or MySpace, many of these problems could be properly addressed^x. But like many established online operations, the Guardian is tied into an existing login system that is used for its Media and other online services, and was built with other scenarios in mind.

The Comment is Free team is aware of the importance of profiles in the context of politeness. Writing on his Weblog, lead site developer Ben Hammersley noted that “[o]ne of the techniques we’re using is to display the town and country the commenting user’s ISP is considering them to be from. This, we think, calms things down a little, which is good” (Social bugs and localities, viewed 08/03/2006), though based on third party research he adds that this thesis “might well be wrong”. Again, Henry acknowledged that identity is important when she wrote “your identities are safe for now. I accept that for some there are sound reasons for not using your own names, but I doubt it’s true for most people” (Open threads – what do you think?, June 30, 2006).

The most considered (and accessible) discussion in the Guardian remains the letters pages, but oddly, if not unsurprisingly, there is no link made between the letters page and the stories to which they respond – or the comments on those stories on Comment is Free.

Learning from experience

There has been much study of the dynamics of online community, and there is considerable empirical evidence about how to foster good dynamics in this area. One of the earliest examples was the Sausalito, California-based bulletin board The Well. It flourished partly because of its limited, and professionally and geographically proximate, membership and by promoting maxims such as ‘You own your own words’^xi.

Reflecting on the problem of ‘scale’ and ‘common purpose’ in online communities, Bryant says “there is simply no way of creating a single community at this scale with only semi-authenticated users”.

The equivalent of The Well today is the Weblog model, in which individual- or group-owned Weblogs link to other Weblogs and posts and use trackback to create discussion threads from distributed contributions. This encourages a higher quality of debate, as people tend not to post offensive or ill-thought-out comments on their own Weblog, where they would be prominent for days or weeks, potentially damaging their online profile and reputation.

A number of Comment is Free contributors have suggested the use of trackback to facilitate this model (see Welcome to Comment is free, March 14, 2006). However, Hammersley noted that when the Guardian‘s Newsblog still supported trackbacks “we were getting 1000+ trackback spams an hour. It kills the server, and fills the blog with porn” (comment in Pick of the week, March 24, 2006). One solution to this danger might be to only allow trackback ‘pings’ from sites registered in the profiles of Comment is Free members.

If any model of distributed contribution is to work the Guardian will have to address another issue, which is that its stories often appear at more than one URL. For instance leading Guardian writer Simon Jenkins’s article on the BBC charter renewal ‘The BBC will never cut its cloth to suit any cloak but big’ is published on the main site at http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1731048,00.html and on Comment is Free at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1731054,00.html. This makes it difficult for Technorati, or any other tool, to aggregate references to the piece.

While these criticisms are made in the context of Comment is Free, the Guardian is in good company – which includes the Huffington Post – in the struggle to create a complementary public sphere online. What they also have in common is an apparent reluctance to build on existing research about these spaces, or to properly use design thinking to best address the scenarios of use around them.

The bigger issues

With Comment is Free the Guardian has moved smartly to address a significant development in its domain and its initial stumblings are at least understandable. At the RSA lecture Guardian Unlimited editor-in-chief Emily Bell joined the debate to argue that they had “just invented the Spinning Jenny” and were “up against people making piles of Levi’s in their bedrooms”.

However, to the extent that it sells itself on its commentariat it is not clear how Comment is Free can sidestep the continuing disaggregation of the newspaper industry that Rusbridger described. What is to stop an enterprising startup or a Yahoo! creating an opinion portal aggregating RSS feeds from the Guardian and its free-to-access competitors – as well as the key English language current affairs publications – and creating a better editorial, discussion and business model around them? Yes, readers would have to go to the free-to-access hosting site to read the original piece. But other than brand loyalty to the Guardian, and investment in one’s reputation as a Comment is Free contributor, it is hard to see what would stop commenters from moving. If the smart commenters were to move, the authors would be likely to engage with them on their new ground – and if a more author-friendly business model were devised they may move wholesale.

It is not clear that Comment is Free has yet got the commenters it wants. The reality is that the people the Guardian would really want leading the commentary on its pieces aren’t doing it at all yet. They are still writing letters, or posting on their own Weblogs – which are rendered almost invisible in the Comment is Free space.

There is also a wider issue to address. In his RSA lecture Rusbridger noted, “There is a huge explosion… of people who want to have a form of self-expression”. As other outlets for political discussion and self-expression have waned (partly a product of a more cynical attitude in the mainstream media), people have been turning to the online media as a source of identity and association. Unfortunately the quality of the relationship is low level and rather forced – hence the disappointing nature of much debate on Comment is Free and in other publications. With Comment is Free the Guardian’s ambitions appear to have been embraced by the wrong audience.

i Newspapers in the age of blogs, March 16, 2006

ii See for instance the regular Guardian contributor George Monbiot, who also includes footnotes and links to his stories

iii Guardian Unlimited editor-in-chief Emily Bell anticipated the launch in an Editor’s week piece, Confessions of a launch addict, March 11, 2006. For more on the site rationale see the About page.

iv From the CP Scott 1921 article ‘A Hundred Years‘

v However, my flagging of an unsuitable contribution by ‘TheMaster’ on a comment piece on the main site, Resilience, James Harkin, July 8, 2006, has not lead to it being removed.

viMy comments on broader design failure can be reviewed in ‘Publishing by Design: Time to Make Human Factors a Concern‘ Nico Macdonald, Online Journalism Review, 20 May 2004

vii There has been some experimentation in this area, and Ben Hammersley has presented a ‘tag cloud’ model on his Weblog (Weighted Tags Clouds Are So 2005) but this concept hasn’t been implemented.

viii The winner was announced in Big Blogger: We have a winner, June 23, 2006

ix See for instance comments on The flight test, Brendan O’Neill, August 3, 2006

x LinkedIn’s concept of degrees of separation could be useful in flagging comments from ‘people who are trusted by people you trust’

xiFor a considered history of The Well see ‘The Epic Saga of The Well‘ Katie Hafner, Wired magazine, Issue 5.05, May 1997

Blogging platforms: Which do you use?

Warner took a quick poll, and we found that we did indeed represent a pretty good sampling of what’s available in the blogosphere: the majority of the group uses Blogger, followed by Moveable Type and TypePad. Other choices included ExpressionEngine, WordPress, PostNuke and Drupal. Robert Niles, OJR editor and conference host, was the only self-publisher who coded his content management systems from scratch. He said he uses ColdFusion, a tag-based language which he said is easy to learn but difficult to host because of “system resource drains.”

Predictably, many held differing opinions about the various platforms. Staci Kramer, contributing editor for OJR and executive editor for paidContent.org, said that Drupal “isn’t really ready for prime time yet” but that the community is good. Dan Gillmor, author and founder of the Center for Citizen Media, warned that WordPress would be too much for beginners, but I responded that I had chosen it, even though I’m a beginner, because it has such a lively and well-established support community.

Mark Heckendorn, former intelligence specialist and new blogger, liked WordPress because of some easy-to-use features like one-click installation on his server account. He also recommended Rapid Weaver for Mac people.

Participants acknowledged that different personal needs colored their view of various blogging platforms. Some demanded a free system, others were willing to pay. Some had recently created new sites, while others needed systems that would support months of already-published archives. Some promoted open source solutions, others retorted that clients demanded proprietary software.

Gillmor urged the group, no matter what they chose, to look ahead and select only systems that support easy export of content and data into a transferable format like a MySQL database. Kramer echoed the thought, and reassured frustrated publishers, “There’s a solution to almost everything. Someone has had the problem before.”

Travis Smith, owner of Hop Studios, suggested to consider the blogging tool’s interface when making your selection. Smith offered a couple of other interesting pointers:

1. Consider the size of your comment field because it is related to the type of comments you will get. A small field will encourage short, choppy comments, while a long field might encourage comments that go on and on; and
2. On wikis: “a wiki depends on the power of the community to stay vibrant, to stay current.” Smith said that 10 or 15 dedicated users make a viable wiki community.

Mack Reed, creator, editor and publisher of LAVoice.org, said he is now “saddled” with PostNuke. Reed shared a story that perked up the ears of this newbie for sure: he woke one day to find instead of his homepage a white page with the words “you are owned” on it. After some investigation, he found that script kiddies in Brazil had exploited a flaw in an old version of his un-updated publishing system to rewrite the index document in each of his directories. Reed said the incident taught him the importance of keeping your platform up-to-date with the latest version — and to backup your data regularly. This suggestion prompted vigorous nods from the audience as Warner reminded people to backup data in different places, not just elsewhere on the same server.

Finally, Kramer advised to get to know people at your server’s hosting company so that you have a contact in the event of an emergency. She explained how helpful it was to have someone to go to when, with an older version of Moveable Type, someone she worked with accidentally wiped out all the subject lines in the entire blog!

Next on the scene: Vlogging

Online video producer David LaFontaine switched gears with a brief presentation about up-and-coming technologies and websites. He said that excitement about podcasting has given way to excitement about vlogging (video blogging). LaFontaine suggested looking at video hosting options like VideoEgg and YouTube and Gillmor added archive.org.

The group then discussed whether it is desirable to have the “YouTube” logo that appears in the viewing window when embedding video on your own site via YouTube. LaFontaine quipped: “Storage and bandwidth don’t come cheap.”

Looking for inspiration? Sites to watch

LaFontaine showed the group a section of Spain’s prominent newspaper, El Pais, called EP3. The service, conceived to attract younger readers, invites users to submit creative content through its community section. At first, LaFontaine said he didn’t like the interface because it’s complicated and all created in Flash. But when doing a case study of how the feature was used, he discovered that young people preferred the complexity, viewing the user interface as a challenge, like a video game. He said when the users would find things they liked, they would text message each other. Surfing the Net is “a group activity now,” LaFontaine said.

In another case study from Santiago, Chile, a newspaper called Las Últimas Noticias reinvigorated itself by having the online version of the paper dictate the print version; the newspaper is now number one in a nine-newspaper market, LaFontaine said.

“The tail is now wagging the dog.”

Warner wrapped up the session with a call for URLs to website where journalists could find ongoing support and guidance on tech issues. Among those suggested were:

• WebmasterWorld
• Slashdot
• A List Apart
• eHub

* * *

Related stories from OJR’s archives:

• Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool?

Industry consultant Vin Crosbie posted this essay Tuesday to the Online News Association's e-mail discussion list. We republish an edited version here as an instructive lesson to online news publishers struggling with how to solicit and manage informative and responsible reader content.]

“Silence Dogood” has been pointed to as the mother of a rich history of anonymity in American journalism. What is true is that between April and October of 1722 New England Courant Publisher James Franklin printed 14 articles that had been slipped under his door.

The author “Silence Dogood” claimed to be the widow of a country minister, but Franklin suspected the name was a pseudonym for someone else. It was common for eighteenth century journalists, including Franklin’s, to use pseudonyms when writing articles that the authorities might have been considered to be libelous or illegal.

Historical records infer that James Franklin knew the identities of his other pseudonymous contributors, but not that of “Silence Dogood.” That failing was perhaps one of many reckless publishing decisions by Franklin, who soon served jail time for his own writings in the Courant and who the Boston authorities later banned from publishing newspapers. He was meanwhile not amused to learn that “Silence Dogood” was actually his 16-year-old brother and apprentice Benjamin Franklin.

Unlike James Franklin, American Weekly Mercury Publisher Andrew Bradford of Philadelphia knew before publication that “Caelia Shortface” and “Martha Careful” were pseudonyms for Ben Franklin, who had fled Boston and joined Bradford’s employ.

When Franklin himself later became a newspaper publisher, he occasionally published his own articles under the pseudonyms “Anthony Afterwit” and “Alice Addertongue.” Yet the “Richard Saunders” of the eponymous book “Poor Richard’s Almanac” was probably publisher Ben Franklin’s best-known, self-permitted pseudonym.

There is a rich history of pseudonymity in American opinion journalism. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote “The Federalist Papers” using the pseudonym “Publius,” but not without their publisher’s prior permission and knowledge of their true identities. A more recent example occurred in 1947 when the publisher of Foreign Affairs granted the Moscow-based American diplomat George Kennan the pseudonym “X” to write the renowned political essay proposing the geographic containment of Communism.

Though I can’t think of a current American periodical that regularly grants pseudonyms to its writers, the British publishers of the Financial Times and The Economist regularly grant them for some of their columnists.

In all the examples I’ve mentioned, the publishers not only knew the pseudonymous writers’ true identities but also vetted the writers’ submissions before publication. That’s a far cry from publishing anonymous blog postings.

Though there is a rich history of pseudonymity in American journalism, there is none of anonymity. It has long been understood that if the publisher of a reputable periodical grants a writer use of a pseudonym, then that publisher knows the writer’s true identity and takes responsibility — legal and otherwise — for that writer’s words.

Printed periodicals grant pseudonymity but never anonymity. Imagine the cacophony that would result if printed periodicals published unvetted, unreviewed, anonymous Letters to the Editor or Op-Ed essays.

Yet we’re now discussing how some of those periodicals are doing the equivalent of that online. Should there really be any surprise that many of those comments are scatological, obscene, or libelous?

Publishing anonymous, unvetted, and unreviewed commentary online is hugely divergent from the policies of those publications’ print editions. It’s a different kettle of fish, one that can stink for the publishers. Indeed, those publishers and their new-media managers are being reckless. And if you think I’ve used too strong a word, poll newspaper libel lawyers and libel insurers.

Yes, the topic of anonymity is certainly worth discussing again and again. But we do realize that, for human reasons, the topic has not evolved during the past 10 years despite the evolution of technology. This topic is substantially the same as it was when the first open bulletin boards were posted on the Web in 1996 or when the first proprietary online service user forums went online years earlier. Online news managers who don’t know its history are doomed to relive it.

Although the technologies of this medium evolve with the speed of “Moore’s Law,” the actual laws and liabilities governing the technologies evolve about as fast as the eponymous Gordon Moore can walk (he celebrated his 77th birthday this month). That is because the mechanical topic of technology and the human topic of ethics seemingly aren’t related to each other. Although we may strive to offer bulletin boards and commentary fields where people might provide thoughtful and ethical comments without scatology, obscenity, or libel, we cannot and will not achieve that through technology alone.

What I’m about to state might seem farfetched, but a decade of studying online news media leads me to fear that it is true. I fear that our industry has fallen under the spell of a techno-utopian fallacy that says we can foster a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement and comity simply by implementing new-media technologies.

We implement technology that permits absolutely anonymous and spontaneous publication of people’s comments and we expect the majority of those comments will be decent, civil, and legal. We implement technology that allows readers to correspond with reporters and we expect those reporters will answer those readers’ e-mails. We implement technology that allows readers themselves to report the news and we expect that they will report a significant percentage of all stories in the future. We implement such technologies and our publishers expect that it all should be completely automated and not need extra supervisory or moderation staffing. And if a problem develops, we expect newer technology alone to solve it.

Yet we live in the real world, not a techno-utopian virtual world. Our real online environment is infested with spams, scams, phishers, filthy ranters, and libelous demagogues. The wonderful technologies we’ve implemented actually attract and facilitate them. (If technologies existed that permitted anonymous, unvetted, and unmoderated letters to be published in printed publications, then scatological, obscene, and libelous letters to the editor would appear there, too.)

Technology alone cannot foster a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement and comity. What we need are policies and practices to govern how our readers utilize these online technologies.

I realize that fans of “We Media” and “We the Media” (particularly those who think that mainstream media “talks down” to readers) might flinch at my using the phrase “govern how our readers utilize.” But media cannot offer transparency to the readers unless the readers are also willing to be transparent. If “News is a Conversation,” then transparency is required among all participants in that conversation, including the readers.

Radicals might claim that the news media must be absolutely subordinate to the readers. Yet just as the government must be subordinate to its citizens, no citizen can claim rights beyond the compact of government. If the readers are to govern how media operates, them no reader who wants to interact with the media should claim rights beyond that which the readers themselves demand from the media.

Why do so many otherwise pragmatic people in our industry think that their only choice is between accepting unmoderated and anonymous comments or else accepting none at all? I think this is because absolutism is part of the dogma of the techno-utopian fallacy. The choice about publishing comments needn’t be an all-or-nothing decision. The true path is in the middle of those extremes.

If you’re going to let someone publish something in your publication, whether in print or online, know their identity and read their submission before its publication. If they truly are willing to stand behind their words, then they must be willing to withstand identification by the publisher who has legal responsibility for the publication of their words.

If they request that the publisher disguise or omit their identity in publication, let them first provide the publisher with a cogent reason. (The publisher should state somewhere on the page’s boilerplate that a writer’s name may be withheld for reasons but only after prior identification.)

Yes, I know that this will create work for the online publishing staff. Tough. If you want to offer your readers the facility to comment, then you must adequately staff that facility or else cacophony can result, as it has in many cases. Publishers are deluded by the techno-utopian fallacy if they think that just because this facility involves computers it should operate autonomously and without staff moderation and supervision. There is no free lunch online.

You may have to identify by phone or e-mail the readers who submit comments, or perhaps you can build a registration system that adequately does this. You may also be able to build a system that filters out scatological or obscene terminology, but you should still review the submissions that survive those filters. Trust your readers, but don’t do so blindly. Blindness doesn’t foster transparency.

If a renaissance in journalism, civic involvement and comity is ever to be fostered, it must happen responsibly and without absolutism. Rights are also responsibilities. We have responsible free speech, not absolute free speech (don’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater unless there actually is a fire). You are irresponsible to your publisher, readers, transparency, and journalism if you offer absolute anonymity and spontaneous publication in your comments sections. You might get away with it for a while, but not forever.

Most Internet users have yet to start using blogs — about 73 percent of them, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project — and it is reasonable to predict that some will try to learn about blogs through major news sources’ blog roundups. In the absence of a clear consensus on the purpose and merit of blogs, readers who are new to blogs may misjudge the roundups as measures of public opinion. To help readers access new and informed ideas in political debates, MSM sources may have to betray the democratizing potential of blogs and take the risk of judging individual bloggers on their expertise and originality.

The traditional media kept a watchful eye on political blogs during Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings this month. Washingtonpost.com‘s “Who’s Blogging?” feature tracked bloggers who linked to Post stories, as the site has done since fall 2005. NYtimes.com ran one of its sporadic blog roundups for the occasion. And Slate shifted the focus of its regular “Today’s Blogs” column to the confirmation hearings.

The roundups delivered a heavy helping of stridently partisan blogs and threw in some nonpartisan legal blogs like SCOTUSBlog, but only a few moderate voices like Donklephant were included. The roundups make American political debate look more stagnant, confusing and hopelessly narrow than it really is. How can a first-time blog reader tell the difference between bloggers trying to evolve new ideas and those trying to vindicate their preconceptions? Should he or she rely on the in-house bloggers of publications and political groups or the freestanding, unaffiliated citizens who supposedly define the medium? If roundups answer these questions more often, they will offer a powerful vehicle for introducing readers to blogs that offer more than simplistic partisanship.

A disconnected debate

It’s true that the decisive lure of most popular political blogs is that they tell their readers what they want to hear and tend to acknowledge opposing ideas only to deride them. Pete Welsch found empirical evidence of this tendency last year during his research as a graduate student at Indiana University. Welsch first analyzed two conservative blogs, Instapundit and Outspoken, and two progressive blogs, Eschaton and Mouse Musings. He found that they rarely linked to the same sites — or to sites that advocated the opposite political ideology. As he researched a wider sample, he did find liberal blogs linking to conservative ones and vice versa, but, Welsch says, “A lot of that is going to be one side liking to the other and saying, ‘Look at this garbage.’”

Political bloggers represent themselves and their like-minded readers. Editors of online blog roundups say they don’t want to make their readers think otherwise. They just want to keep bloggers from stealing traffic and give readers access to a broader debate. But the latter can only work if MSM roundups lead readers to bloggers who think independently and draw on relevant experience and knowledge.

It is difficult to guide readers to a balanced list of blogs efficiently and maintain quality control at the same time, admits Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. “The Post generates between 100-200 articles a day, and to have someone continually cruising the blogosphere to keep on top of things just isn’t a good use of staff time,” he said in an e-mail interview. The Post’s “Who’s Blogging?” uses Technorati, a blog search engine, to gather links to blog posts that link back to Post stories. All a blogger has to do to get linked is register with Technorati and include a link to a given Post story. This usually yields a list that mixes insightful blogs in with boring ones. Many of the latter simply quote several paragraphs from stories and add a paragraph of their own comments, which are often predictably party-line.

“Sure, sometimes the blog posts don’t add much to the story, but we’re willing to accept that reality in exchange for being open to debate,” Brady says. “We can’t be accused of picking and choosing.”

Technorati also allows browsers to sort results by “authority” — the most-linked-to blogs being the most authoritative. This at least rewards the blogs that readers (or other bloggers) consider most reliable, but it doesn’t take into account other factors that constitute authority, like education, professional experience and demonstrated expertise.

Those qualities would help, for example, when scanning comments on blogs linked to “Pushing the Limits of Wartime Powers,” a news analysis that ran in the Post on Sunday, Dec. 18. Roughly paraphrased, the liberal blog comments one stumbles across range from “President Bush thinks he is on a mission from God” to “President Bush is kind of like Big Brother” to “I hope President Bush gets impeached.” Of course, the Post linked to conservative blogs as well, but the liberal links just demonstrate the lack of originality and variety among blogs within either category. At this point, more than a month later, there are many more posts linked to the story, and much more variety, but who’s checking this late (except perhaps extremely dedicated blog readers)?

Nitpicking the blogosphere

While it is not impossible for a strictly partisan blog to provide insight, specialized blogs like SCOTUSblog consistently offer something more useful than the party line — running expert commentary that would not fit into the typical consumer newspaper story. Such blogs certainly exist to help legal experts talk with each other, but there’s no reason that the average reader can’t use them to supplement traditional media stories with technical and historical detail.

Slate‘s daily blog roundup, “Today’s Blogs,” seems most effective at guiding readers to those supplements — and it provides a model for other roundups. Writers hand-pick links on a few selected issues each day, and also provide background information, if available, about those bloggers. This guides new blog readers through a muddle of pseudonyms, anonymity and conjecture to bloggers who just might know what they’re talking about. It’s also crucial to serving a Web-only magazine’s audience, which tends to know more about blogs. “You have to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff,” says “Today’s Blogs” editor Rachael Larimore. “We want people to know that they can come to us and find out what an authoritative blogger is saying.”

Larimore says this makes Slate more friendly to readers who aren’t used to blogs. “We don’t like to assume that our readers are familiar with everyone,” she said.

The New York Times can be picky as well, having offered blog roundups only sporadically. Two recent roundups accompanied stories that involved criticism of The Times itself — the jailing and testimony of Times reporter Judith Miller in October and The Times’ revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to perform wiretaps without obtaining warrants. Whoever organized the Miller-related roundup seems to have paid attention to bloggers’ qualifications, judging by the first three blogs linked to: Talking Points Memo by Washington Monthly writer Joshua Micah Marshall; First Draft by Tim Porter, whose resume includes 16 years as an editor at the San Francisco Examiner; and DavidCorn.com by David Corn, author of “The Lies of George W. Bush.” Corn and Marshall have their politics tattooed on their virtual faces, but they accompany their ideological assertions with observation and informed analysis.

The Times’ most recent roundup, as of this writing, accompanied its coverage of the Alito hearings. The linked blogs again appear to be hand-picked; many do not even link to Times coverage. This approach seemed to reveal the most variety, especially on the third night of the hearings. The Times roundup included posts on a variety of issues ranging from abortion to the small legal and procedural technicalities of the hearings. But to get the same variety on Washingtonpost.com, readers had to skim through each separate Post story on the hearings. A Post story that focused on questions about Alito’s views on abortion, for example, linked only to posts that discussed that specific story and emphasized abortion.

Sure, Slate and The Times can be accused of picking and choosing, but that doesn’t preclude variety or openness. On the contrary, a well-maintained blog roundup seems to give readers access to a wider political spectrum. And, because blogs are so easily accessible, a well-focused roundup might help publications encourage their readers’ curiosity. Few readers will put down the newspaper to look for the latest number of Harvard Law Review, but they might be willing to click away to a blog like SCOTUSblog for a few minutes of helpful elaboration.

Larimore says she and other Slate writers keep their own lists of blogs to check regularly, supplemented by Technorati searches and Google blog searches. The disadvantage of manual roundups is that they require more time and resources — and so can only be included with a few stories. In that sense, the hand-picked roundups won’t be as valuable to readers who want to explore the broadest possible range of opinions on the broadest possible range of news. Automated roundups may still be useful to readers when MSM sources are unable to offer hand-picked roundups.

Rallying the troops, ignoring the moderates

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and Kathryn Jean Lopez of The National Review’s The Corner blog agree on at least one thing: They represent only themselves and perhaps some of their readers.

“‘General public’ people probably aren’t watching the [Alito] hearings at all, because even some of our political-minded types have been dozing off,” Lopez said in an e-mail as she blogged on the hearings. She added: “People often tell me they come to us on National Review Online to find out ‘what conservatives are thinking.’ Sometimes, that proves more difficult — and interesting — than they thought, because even us conservatives — even those sitting around the same editorial table (real or cyber) — are not monolith on a whole host of issues.”

But Moulitsas says: “Every blog focuses on particular subject matter and hence attracts a like-minded audience. That’s all you’d ever be able to measure.”

By linking to these partisan voices (even if they are more complicated than expected, as Lopez suggests), political blog roundups tend to exaggerate the perception that American voters are firmly divided along party lines. Roundups acknowledge non-partisan and moderate blogs, but not as often as they link to stridently partisan blogs. Justin Gardner, leader of the ideologically mixed group blog Donklephant, thinks Americans are more often centrist than party-line, and he hopes blogs and blog roundups will eventually reflect that. “I like the position that we’re in,” he says of Donklephant. “We don’t have to rally the troops sometimes when we know that the poll numbers aren’t what we would want.”

CNN Internet Reporter Jacki Shechner, who primarily talks about stalwart right- and left-wing blogs during her short blog segments on “The Situation Room,” said centrist bloggers don’t get enough coverage. “I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t start including them some more,” she said.

New connections

Though they too often show new blog readers a narrow spectrum of ideas, roundups might reinforce the role of traditional news outlets while improving the debate for those already immersed in blogs.

Technorati CEO David Sifry hopes roundups will at least help bloggers and established journalists share traffic and ideas. “This is actually a synergistic relationship and not a parasitic relationship,” Sifry said.

As third-party monitors, mainstream news sources can also increase communication among bloggers who wall themselves off with RSS feeds and one-sided blogrolls. Laer Pearce of the conservative Cheat-Seeking Missiles, who was linked in a Times roundup, says he’ll pay more attention to such features in the future, if only to explore the blog world outside of his own ideological circle.

Roundups can enrich debate by encouraging both new blog readers and bloggers themselves to digest conflicting and nuanced opinions. “I’m more apt to add blogs I like to [my RSS feed] than ones that I don’t,” e-mails Pearce. “That’s a mistake, because intellectual honesty, not to mention fresh ideas, depends on exposing yourself to a broad diversity of views.” This all seems obvious, but it’s a good reminder that even a medium with the potential to open debate can give people tunnel vision.

Want to put multimedia content on the Web? You’ll quickly find out that the free Flash player and the Flash authoring application top the list of solutions at most online news organizations.

“[Flash] allows us to put together audio, video, still pictures and text in a single format and put it out as an executable file. There’s not much else that really allows us to do that across platforms,” said Jim Ray, a multimedia producer on the broadband team at MSNBC.com.

“It provides a way to distribute a variety of media without having to download different programs. It’s the only program that can do it all,” said Jen Friedberg, a staff photographer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“For producing graphics online, it’s the tool of choice,” said Juan Thomassie, a senior designer at USAToday.com.

The Singular Plug-in Solution

Flash addresses two key needs in online journalism: integrating multiple media (content), and reaching the widest possible audience (compatibility). Other browser plug-ins allow online users to watch video or listen to music, but the Flash player has the advantage of working well on both Windows and Mac platforms, in multiple Web browsers, and without popping up branded or unpredictable players outside the browser window.

“Flash is the only thing that brings everything together,” said Ray Villalobos, director of multimedia for Mega Communications and former senior interactive producer for the Orlando Sentinel. “The penetration of the Flash plug-in allows me to assume people will have some version of the plug-in.”

In June 2005, more than 93 percent of Web users in North America, Europe and Asia had a video-capable version of the Flash player already installed, according to a study sponsored by Macromedia.

But beyond the utility of Flash, what’s more interesting is what journalists are actually doing with it.

Putting the User into the Story

José Márquez, a producer at KQED Interactive in San Francisco, creates online animations to explain California’s political issues. He feels optimistic about the potential of Flash for journalism.

“It absolutely taps into what a computer can do that TV, the radio and newspapers can’t do: Allow the user to determine what they’re interested in, as well as to place them within the polemic of the story,” Márquez said.

Users appreciate having the ability to choose, according to Mega Communications’ Villalobos. “The things we get the most traffic out of is when the users get to decide what they’re going to see,” he said. “You can’t do that on TV. You can’t do it in print. Online is the only place where you can redefine how stories are told.”

Both Villalobos and Márquez talked about tapping into their experiences as video game players. Designing an online story is “more like playing or writing a game,” Villalobos said. “You can have a completely different experience every time you play the game. That’s what makes the Web exciting. People like the infinity the Web provides.”

Users’ active engagement distinguishes online from other media. “Every medium has a type of project that’s perfect for it. Print lends itself to a good linear story. Movies can have a flashback at the beginning and then bring you forward to the present. Online is really the only medium where the users define their experience by their actions,” Villalobos said.

Márquez has a lot of freedom for experimenting in his current position, in which he produces interactive graphics for the companion website to a public affairs news magazine TV series, California Connected.

“I’m just beginning to figure out some way to create an environment that’s welcoming, surprising, engaging, human and also humane,” Márquez said. “An environment in which people can actually learn something about themselves. That is the role of a journalist — to tell a story so that the listener can learn something about him- or herself.”

Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects, said her studio’s online work aims to create spaces where people can both understand things in new ways and share ideas with others.

“In time, I think more organizations will be thinking about ways to attract audiences and create ways for them to participate. Not just to chat, but to change things. News organizations may not want to be part of that, but audiences do want that,” she said.

“Flash doesn’t provide in and of itself a way to be participatory, but you can use Flash and other programs to bring that about,” Cornyn said.

Naka Nathaniel, a multimedia producer for The New York Times, said he considers multimedia journalism to be “much more intimate” than other journalism. “That’s probably why many people get into journalism in the first place — to try to make a difference. To really make a connection, whatever the story happens to be,” he said.

Because of the intimacy of “the way the technology works — just you and your keyboard and your mouse,” he said, “you [the user] really feel for these people. You want to help them. At the end, we’re able to provide a pathway for you to follow. You can contact an aid organization, or contribute. It’s a step beyond newspapers, television, magazines. That’s one thing Flash allows us to do — pull everything together neatly into a circle.”

An Era of Experimentation

Jen Friedberg, a staff photographer at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, said her first Flash project took about three months to complete. “I didn’t know Flash. I didn’t know Pro Tools. I didn’t know how to use the MiniDisc recorder. I had to go buy the MiniDisc recorder. It was a lot of trial and error,” she said.

“So I finally got that one up [online], and my editor said, yeah, that’s cool. But it took you three months. And everyone else [on the photo staff] said, that was too much work. We’re never going to do that!”

That was three years ago. During this past summer, most of the photographers who work with Friedberg have started gathering and editing their own audio. No one forced them. It’s something they’ve decided they want to do.

“Captions get cut down or rewritten. That’s been a source of long-term frustration (for photographers),” Friedberg said. “People like the audio because they finally get to tell what’s really going on in the photo. The majority of photographers here really want to get that information out, and they are frustrated by not being able to.”

She prefers the audio accompanying an online photo story to feature the voices of people in the photo, not the photographer or a reporter. “That sends me into a rage, when the reporter talks for the people,” Friedberg said. “It makes me think some slacker didn’t get his audio in the field and they’re trying to cover it up.”

New York Times multimedia producer Naka Nathaniel pointed out that sometimes the circumstances in the field prevent him from gathering audio. “In North Korea, they seized all my gear,” he said. Except for two cases where military officers wanted to be videotaped, Nathaniel was limited to taking covert shots with a small digital still camera.

“I walked away with only a fifth of the art that I normally have because of the limitations placed on us there,” Nathaniel said.

The resulting story looks quite different from many of the collaborations between Nathaniel and Nicholas Kristof, an Op-Ed columnist for the Times. Lacking in visual material, Nathaniel resorted to “documentary tricks” such as zooming in on headlines from newspaper clippings to help move the story forward.

“That’s not my preferred way,” he said. “But the bigger picture is, you don’t have to limit yourself. You can find what’s appropriate for the story.”

Nathaniel’s documentary techniques will look familiar to most people. There are other people out there, like KQED’s Márquez and his colleague Marc Phu, who try to tell stories with Flash in a way that’s not comparable to any traditional journalistic style. “I don’t think that what I do is considered to be journalism,” Márquez said. “But I believe that in five to 10 years’ time, it will obvious to people, to people younger than us, that what we are doing is journalism.”

The work of people such as photographer Friedberg may be more recognizable as journalism, but on reflection, it’s not exactly like anything that exists outside the digital realm.

“Multimedia is its own entity,” Friedberg said. “It takes the best out of documentary radio and the best out of documentary photography. Television doesn’t have the time to tell a long narrative. Newspapers don’t have space anymore to run 60-inch stories, or more than one or two photos with a story. Flash allows us to bring all that back together and tell a story with more depth than in any other medium.”

The Best Tool for Certain Jobs

Theresa Riley, director of P.O.V. Interactive, has a staff of two working for her; together they create a companion website for each documentary aired on the PBS series “P.O.V.” When they agree that a site needs a Flash element, they hire freelancers to produce it.

For a recent documentary explaining how guns from New York end up in Kosovo, the team wanted to combine an animated map online with video clips from the film. “We didn’t want the annoyance of another pop-up window,” Riley said, and that’s why they decided to use Flash.

In the “P.O.V.” documentary “Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story,” the central character talks about modifying cars, and it’s not exactly clear what he does to them, Riley said.

“We thought his voice and personality were so compelling, and we wanted to do a photo gallery of his cars. We wanted him to tell his own story. That’s why we wanted to use Flash,” Riley said. “We really wanted to show big pictures of the cars, and with video, we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”

Mark Adams, a freelance multimedia producer and photographer based in Atlanta, said his desire to combine sound and motion with still photography goes back to Kodachrome. “I remember sitting around with friends and putting together a slideshow, popping chromes into the tray, turning on the stereo and hanging up a sheet in the living room,” he said. “I loved that immersion with all your senses.”

Reproducing that experience in Flash can be a challenge. “It’s really hard to integrate it really well,” Adams said. “It’s easy to put too much in there and overwhelm folks.”

The challenge must be faced, though, according to Jim Ray, a multimedia producer at MSNBC.com.

“If you haven’t started to think beyond telling stories with photos and text, you’re walking into the tar pits,” Ray said.

Not Your Father’s Breaking News

The caveat about learning new skills and experimenting with new ways to tell stories is that you usually cannot do it with day-to-day headlines.

“We’re not out breaking Watergate,” Ray said. “It’s not the right medium for that. What we can do is take a complex issue and make it personal to a user who comes to our site and help them understand it better. We can provide a context and a different way to experience that story.”

KQED’s Márquez admitted that what he does is “certainly not investigative journalism. But I am taking facts — often very dry facts and statistics — and trying to turn those into a story that will motivate people to take action or to learn more.”

At many online news sites, text still dominates the home page — but the journalists who work with Flash have a different perspective.

“Animation has become part of the way we tell stories online. It’s an option we use to give more credibility and reality to the piece,” said Juan Thomassie, a senior designer at USAToday.com. “We’re always thinking about making the story animated if we can, and more interesting to the readers. I think it has changed the way we tell stories dramatically. You can’t just copy a news graphic and paste it on the Web page and expect it to engage the reader.”

Sometimes there’s just not enough time. Deadlines still dictate what’s possible.

“Ideally, early in the planning stages, before reporters and photographers are assigned to a story, we like to be involved at that point, to make sure the content gathering keeps our needs in mind,” Thomassie said. “If we don’t find out about it until the night before, we’re often not able to produce an interactive graphic.”

Animated graphics do have a place in breaking news, though. Alberto Cairo was in Madrid, creating infographics for the website of El Mundo, on March 11, 2004, when train bombs killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,500. While the news site had multiple millions of page views that day, “about 1 million” were solely for the infographics pages, he said.

What’s Coming Next?

Alberto Cairo spent five years working with animated infographics online at El Mundo. This past summer he moved to Chapel Hill, N.C., to teach multimedia journalism as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina.

“For me, as an infographics designer, the capability the program has to integrate a database into infographics is very important,” Cairo said.

The appeal is not only that Flash can be used to display data clearly and compactly in graphical formats. The data can be pulled from the database into Flash dynamically. If the ActionScript allows it, the Flash package need not be revised. It can display new information as soon as it is added to the separate database.

“Flash will generate the pie chart or the bar chart automatically. It’s a very new world for us, all of us [who] have a print infographics background,” Cairo said. “It’s very demanding, but at the same time, it’s very gratifying. It lets you develop your skills as a designer in a very broad sense of the word.”

Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects, explained how the Sonic Memorial Project incorporates a database with the Flash-based Sonic Browser to allow users to explore a collection of audio recollections about the World Trade Center.

“The Sonic Browser makes the project much more special than it would be if it were just an online database,” Cornyn said.

Not everyone agrees that Flash makes a good partner for databases. Adrian Holovaty, an editor at washingtonpost.com and former lead developer for World Online, the Web companion of the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, argued against using Flash in cases when users might want to link to specific segments of the package, or send a link in e-mail.

“Flash is good for things such as video that can’t be broken down into nuggets of information. But otherwise, information should be broken down,” Holovaty wrote in an instant-message conversation.

Information broken into discrete chunks can be linked to other chunks. “Linking is pretty fundamental. Every piece of information should be linkable,” Holovaty said.

After looking at The New York Times’s Flash map of the 2004 U.S. election results, Holovaty said it would be better if individual Web pages in that package were devoted, for example, to the 1964 Texas election results and to a state-by-state comparison of 1980 results. “We’re not talking about manual HTML pages, though — it would be all automated,” he said. A comparable example (without Flash) would be the chicagocrime.org site he developed.

“Flash is certainly appropriate in some cases, but my opinion is that if a small news organization is going to invest resources in the Web, it ought to invest more into databases and making data ‘smart’ than into one-off Flash projects,” Holovaty said.

No Software Is Perfect

Joe Weiss, an interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., was one of the earliest adopters of Flash in journalism, but that doesn’t mean he’s unequivocal about it.

“Flash is a bridge technology for me, and while I can praise its limitations the way an artist would praise the limitations of watercolor paintings, I dream (literally) of a better, more powerful tool,” Weiss wrote in e-mail.

“The limitations [of tools] always invite very creative solutions,” observed Alison Cornyn, director of Picture Projects. “I don’t think of them as frustrations. I think about how we can do what we need and how we can push it. Let some of the limitations create new ways of solving the problem.”

“I view Flash as just another tool in your bag when you’re trying to tell a story,” Mark Adams said. “Would the story benefit from being told with the help of Flash? Not all stories will.”

Before Flash reached its current level of utility, “we used other software, other means, [such as] JavaScript rollovers and animated GIFs,” said Juan Thomassie, of USAToday.com. “We all still use Photoshop. We all still use FreeHand or Illustrator. But it always seems to come down to Flash when it comes to putting it on the Web.”

Another solution for multimedia might emerge and displace Flash, just as Flash displaced some previous tools and methods. The Web never stands still for long.

“With all the changes we’ve seen in just the past six years, it wouldn’t surprise me if something else came along,” Thomassie said. “But they would have some serious catching up to do. With each year and each version of Flash, it becomes harder for anyone else to catch up.”

Links

Interactive Narratives

Joe Weiss’s blog

Work by Naka Nathaniel for The New York Times

Multimedia from the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram

chicagocrime.org, a non-profit browsable database developed by Adrian Holovaty

California Connected interactives

Jen Friedberg’s portfolio site

Ray Villalobos’s online portfolio

Mark Adams’s portfolio site

Picture Projects

P.O.V. Home

P.O.V.’s Dying in America: A Chronology

P.O.V.’s Speedo: A Demolition Derby Love Story photo gallery

Interactive graphics from elmundo.es

Interactive media from USAToday.com

Multimedia from MSNBC.com

Digital Storytelling, a panel session including Theresa Riley, Director, P.O.V. Interactive

How do users interact with interactive multimedia infographics? How do they scan, browse, read and interpret them? And what do these experiences mean for journalists and designers producing multimodal news presentations for the Web? We wanted to answer these questions.

With a user-centered approach, we tested interactive graphics covering the tsunami disaster in Asia. The graphics in the sample were produced in Flash and published by nytimes.com, bbc.co.uk, Spanish elmundo.es and German zdf.de. The test series was held in February 2005 in the media reception lab of the University of Trier (Germany) with 15 subjects, all students (average age: 23.1 years). The tested graphics were shown in different combinations and sequences. Usually each subject was confronted with two different graphics.

We applied methods from usability testing to capture the subjects’ responses. For each stimulus, eye tracking was followed by a thinking aloud sequence. For the eye tracking an IView-X System from SMI was used, a corneal reflection system with a sampling rate of 60 hertz.

Our findings produced practical hints on how to create better interactive graphics, bearing in mind users’ expectations, behavior and reception strategies.

These are five principles that producers and journalists should seek to follow:

Principle 1: Avoid an information overload

Combinations of text and visualizations always risk providing more information than users can cognitively process in an organized way. But producers are tempted to put as much of their material as possible into a single feature: extensive photo galleries, timelines with full agency reporting on the different stages of an event, multilayer maps, eye witnesses reports in picture and audio.

From a user perspective, interacting with such a packed multimedia feature means solving various tasks, often simultaneously.

• Finding, understanding and interacting with the navigation options (including internal links inside the feature)

• Getting an overview on every page and an orientation of the user’s actual position inside the feature.
• Interpreting information from various presentation modes (text, graphic, photo and animation) and integrating them into a coherent mental representation.

This bundle of tasks — some of them operational, some of them content-orientated — is often more than the user can handle. Sometimes users won’t find all of the navigation options. Or they ignore parts of the content. And sometimes the overload can lead to irritation, disorientation and finally to a drop-out.

Example 1 (from nytimes.com): The timeline navigation bar (here highlighted in yellow on the left) controlled three content areas (orange). Users’ attention jumped between the map and the navigation bar. The text in the news ticker got no attention; the wave height was ignored by almost every user.

Principle 2: Have users’ expectations concerning interaction functionality in mind

Users tend to interpret any salient graphical element as clickable. That presents a problem for producers and designers, who may want to decorate or fill space.

In text-dominated forms the standards for hyperlinks are widely accepted: Links are underlined or in a different color or both. But standards are still developing for interactive graphics. Currently, links can hide behind every element: Buttons, legends, keys, points on a map, words.

Many producers try to establish consistency by using similar marks for clickable points and standardized navigation systems. This helps users, especially frequent ones. Nevertheless, the only way many users explore interactive graphics is with an extensive trial and error mouse excursion.

Example 2 (from elmundo.es): Test subjects clicked on salient elements — in this case the box marking the epicenter and the red arrows — expecting either to get a close-up or further explanation. In fact, there was no navigational option within this screen.

Principle 3: Be careful using animation

Animation tends to attract (or distract) users. Blinking, flashing or fading arrows, dots and circles are guaranteed magnets for attention and clicks. If there is text competing with animation, the text will lose.

Animation will also raise expectations of functionality, as in the example below.

Example 3 (from bbc.co.uk): The flashing red dot marking the epicenter distracted readers’ attention from the text and it encouraged users to click on it (and in this case it is not clickable).

Producers should make sure that users do not click in vain on elements with animation. Give users functionality.

When using animation it also might seem necessary to add some explanatory text or legends. But users can have trouble integrating that information when an infinite animation loop is grabbing attention. It can be helpful to let users start and restart the animation, which leads to the next principle.

Principle 4: Let users fully control the interaction

If using video, audio or animation, give users clearly marked buttons to start, stop and restart. When using online media, users are not in a lean-back position as when watching TV or listening to the radio. Interactivity and non-linearity are characteristics of Web-based media that users expect.

Be careful with automatically starting multimedia or audio sequences. Anyone who has ever been surprised by an unexpected video or sound when entering a website knows the experience of frantically searching for the off button, or just leaving the page by clicking the browser’s back button. Users, of course, have the same experience. So producers should clearly mark when a click starts an animation, video or sound, and clearly mark how to stop.

Giving users control over their interaction requires a navigation system that allows orientation within the graphic. That includes a clearly marked “home” button. Users tend to see Flash graphics as an independent website, regardless of whether the images are integrated in a page or are separate in a pop-up window.

Principle 5: Involve users in testing your graphics

It’s the usability, stupid. Ask a sample of typical users to click through the graphic and to comment spontaneously on it. Watch carefully, ask for their navigation strategies and expectations, take notes. Even with just three or four users testing the site, you will find elements that are unexpectedly problematic for users. This simplified think-aloud test and other methods from usability testing have proved useful for evaluating interactive and multimedia presentations — and for identifying user needs.

Why is a user-oriented perspective helpful? Newspaper design and presentation have been ingrained by decades of use. But design standards for online news sites have changed in just a few years. Users and producers have developed expectations about positions of home buttons, navigation bars and link labeling. Interactive graphics are still in an early stage of this evolution. Integrating animations, text and audio in a user-controlled system is still a challenge, especially when it comes to telling a coherent, navigable news story. And technology is evolving fast: the shift to broadband access allows producers to integrate heavier multimedia content and to create new forms of presentation.

Although the interactive news business is still experimenting with that, standards are rising. Our analysis of the interactives produced by the leading news sites found some trends: these sites have set up their own standards for interactive news presentation. They tend to differ between the sites, but not that much. Top navigation bars are widely used, sometimes combined with a browser-like linear back-and-forth navigation.

Links to the tested graphics

nytimes.com: Asia’s deadly waves

bbc.co.uk: The tsunami desaster explained

elmundo.es: Asia bajo el tsunami

zdf.de: Flutkatastrophe in Asien

I first ran into Bob Cauthorn when he was giving a speech at a Western Knight Foundation seminar. He talked about how the mainstream media was missing a really crucial story: An entire way of life in small-town America was disappearing, maybe forever, yet accounts of this rarely show up on the national radar. It’s only during election years, when reporters trail after politicians in the fly-over states, that any attention is paid to people who aren’t plugged in to the hip urban flavor of the month.

This really put the hook into me, and it’s one of the reasons I went out looking for a story that took place in a small, out-of-the-way place. The fact that I was able to find such a compelling story in Point Reyes delighted and excited Cauthorn, and I rather suspect that he might have been planning to use this story in some of his future speeches, rants or presentations.

So here, in its entirety, is my conversation with Cauthorn:

OJR: A recent article said that “if newspapers are the cockroaches, the Web may be Black Flag.”

Bob Cauthorn: Yeah, I saw the BusinessWeek piece. But you know what they’re missing? And this is the thing that I keep trying to drive home, and it’s so frustrating. People need to make a distinction between newspapers and journalism and the newspaper companies that currently run newspapers and make the decisions. The companies that run newspapers and make the decisions, they’re the ones that are in error. It’s not the concept of journalism. It’s not the concept of newspapers. It’s the companies who are producing a product that is failing. That people don’t want. This is basic – if Detroit makes a car that people don’t want to buy, their business future fails, correct? If people make a newspaper that no one wants to read, and since circulation’s been dropping every year annually, nationwide since 1987 … if people make a newspaper that nobody wants to read because the most experienced readers of that newspaper walk away from it – I mean, everyone knows what a newspaper is, right? From a brand perspective … everyone knows how to use it, it’s ubiquitous, it’s cheap, everybody at one point or another has tried it. There’s nobody in America above a certain age who hasn’t at one point or another tried a newspaper. The whole goal of branding and advertising exercises is to try to get someone to use your product once. Well, newspapers have that. Yet, the most experienced users, the most sophisticated customers are walking away from newspapers … BusinessWeek needs to talk about the companies that make newspapers are failing. And they’re making a product that people don’t want. If I were Tony Ridder, I’d be looking hard at my operation, saying, “Now wait a minute. Maybe we need to stop defending the idea of newspapers, because the idea of newspapers is different from the companies that own newspapers. And maybe we need to look at our company and say – let’s say I’m Bob the Generic Newspaper Mogul – maybe we need to look at my company and say, “Why do people walk away from my product? Why?”

Journalism works. And the story about what happened in Point Reyes proves it.

OJR: Well, not to get too metaphysical about all this, but one of the things that struck me about this story is that David Mitchell makes his decisions based on news value rather than on what focus groups are telling him. His mission is to serve the community rather than figure out ways to swindle them out of as much money as possible.

Cauthorn: The other reality is that, particularly with small-market papers, these people are aligned with their readers because they are part of their community. The practice of modern journalism, at anything from a mid-size market up, takes place over the telephone. Newsrooms and editors have done everything possible to insulate themselves from the public, which is why they have focus groups.

I’ll tell you what. If you have your ass on the street where it belongs, you don’t need a focus group. Simple as that. And the reality is that Point Reyes proves it. Of course your instincts are right if you’re aligned with your readers. And if you’re aligned with your readers, your circulation grows. Simple as that.

OJR: One thing that comes to mind is the first President Bush, when he went to the supermarket and was just stunned by the scanner. He looked at it in utter amazement, and the rest of the country looked at him and knew in that instant that he had absolutely no clue what their day-to-day lives were like.

Cauthorn: Right. Modern journalism as it’s practiced, the companies that conduct modern journalism right now – they’re the problem. It is incredibly removed from the life of the community around it. It is insular, it takes place over the phone. It does not pay attention to reader habits. The fear – I always laugh at this – you talk to newsroom people about the news that people want to read and they say, “Well, we will just be pandering then.” As if being aligned with your reader is wrong. Not only that, but newspapers in their glory days – at the height of the power of modern journalism, in the 60s and 70s, when newspapers really made a goddamn difference – their circulation was exploding. And trust me, people who were reading about civil rights stories and Vietnam and women’s rights – these people were not reading fluff stories, you know?

The assumption that if you align yourself with your readers – somehow or another you’re dumbing down – means that you think your readers are dumb. That’s the inescapable result of that logic. And it’s wrong! Our readers aren’t dumb. Our readers are great.

You know what’s fascinating – compare the log files of say 10 newspapers, compare what they’ve read, and take shovelware sites so make it as positive as possible for the newspaper. But compare with what was read with what was put on the front page. As a measure of how aligned the editors are with their readers. Because if the editors are aligned with their readers every story on the front page will at least be a top five story. Or at least in the top 10.

I guarantee you that if you were to study this, most of the stories in the top 10 would not be one of the stories on the front page. Because we’re not aligned with our readers. We’ve got this wonderful daily focus group with real readers called the Weblog, but newspapers are afraid to see what’s in them. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know what the most popular stories are. It’s terrifying to them. Because it means that their news judgment might not be right.

OJR: Well, the argument goes that that will contain only the Michael Jackson story or the two-headed cat story or something about a porno star.

Cauthorn: Yeah, right, that’s the argument. Let me take a second to refute that. As one of the guys who launched one of the first five papers on the Web, I’ve been looking at log files longer than anybody. And I look at them every single day. And the fact of the matter is that the reading public is smart. The reading public is a helluva lot smarter than you think. And yes, invariably two of the top 10 stories are the type of thing that someone would say are celebrity news or pandering or something like that. And guess what? What’s wrong with that? If that’s what readers want, great. Serve the reader.

But the rest of them are stories of significance. The rest of them are stories of interest. The point is that if someone launches that argument … they say, “Well if we give them what they want … .” Well, look at what you just said, Mr. Editor. If we give readers what they want, it’ll be a bad product. And they’re saying that the readers are stupid.

You know what? These readers should abandon these editors. These readers should run in the other direction. Because these editors have no interest in serving the reader.

OJR: A barely concealed contempt for the audience?

Cauthorn: It’s not concealed at all. It’s overt. The irony of it is that the largest circulation growth happened when we were writing really tough stories. It happened when journalists, in a country that was segregated, were writing stories about civil rights. These were stories of great gravity. And that was the largest period of growth in newspaper circulation. The fact of the matter is that readers want newspapers of consequence, they absolutely do.

Yes, they also want more trash. Who doesn’t? Everybody reads that. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just has to be part of the mix. The problem is that newspapers today don’t realize they need to have a complicated mix of content for their audience.

Looping back to Point Reyes, what you see there, and I do think there is a metaphysical story in there – not metaphysical as in magical – but deeply emotionally compelling. And that’s why I’m delighted that you’re bringing this story to light. Because what this tells you in no uncertain terms, with a kind of heat and passion that I wish existed in the normal newsroom, that our public wants us to succeed.

Our public wants us to survive. Our public wants us to thrive. Our public wants newspapers that matter. Our public is leaving us because we are chasing them away with a stick.

Point Reyes proves it. I love it when I hear these puffed-up editors standing up talking about big-J Journalism. When they don’t know a thing about growing readership. When they haven’t brought a reader in through honest means in a decade. And they’re going to tell me about big-J journalism? Why don’t we talk about journalism period. Journalism that matters, that vibrates through a community.

OJR: Well, what Dave Mitchell was talking about was the importance of having a point of view. An informed point of view, yes, one that gives each side its say and doesn’t pretend to this false objectivity. And that’s what makes papers relevant.

Cauthorn: The mistake people are making is that they say that the reason people are leaving newspapers is because they just want a different distribution mechanism. Well, that’s nonsense. They were leaving newspapers for 15 years before the Internet arrived. They’re leaving newspapers because newspapers don’t matter to them. And if you look at any market where innovative new news products have been introduced, particularly in Europe, you’ll find that people flock back to print. This isn’t a media choice.

Certainly people love digital media. They love it for different reasons, though. The simple fact is that they’re walking away from papers because it doesn’t work from an editorial standpoint.

The argument that someone is leaving newspapers because of lifestyle choices and the Internet is like somebody making steam engines in the 1940s saying, that “Hey, we’re making the right product, it’s just that lifestyles have changed.” No. Why don’t you make a different goddamn product.

OJR: The problem is that everyone seems to be married to whatever consultant took their money last, looking for a magic bullet, one little solution that they can stick in and then they don’t have to worry.

Cauthorn: The reason they’re looking for a magic bullet is that we’re talking about a class of newspaper person – primarily the executive class, who are a bunch of people who inherited a monopoly and have done a terrible job of managing that monopoly. The only people who’ve done a worse job of managing a monopoly are the Telcos. These are not creative people; these are not people used to creating things.

These people follow each other like lemmings. The existing belief has nothing to do with creativity. They don’t value creativity; they don’t value controversial thinking.

Somebody like me scares and enrages these people. When what they should be doing, is that they should be saying, now give me some of that mojo.

Of course they’re frightened of this. They just wish the world would go away. They’re the guys with the steam engine, going “Well, steam cars are still good in many ways. They still have a valuable role. We’ll sell three this year.”

OJR: Look! We put a new handle on it!

Cauthorn: Yeah, “Look! We’re moving away from wooden rims!”

OJR: I see a lot of parallels between the movie and television industry and newspapers.

Cauthorn: The challenge on that is that there’s more than an economic argument to be made for movies. By the time I take my family out, it’s more than 60 bucks. And that’s not like buying a 50 cent newspaper. And when all you have to do is buy a DVD, because of the quality of home theaters, if you track – this might be something you could do for OJR – the sales of home theater equipment and the release volumes of DVDs and plot that against audience sizes, you’ll find that the lines crossed a while ago. As quality home theater experience gets better, people … . 50 cents is not such a barrier to entry, and Christ, because there are so many specials out there, you can get newspapers for a couple of pennies a day, right? In most markets. This 50 cents is not such a big part of our disposable income.

Nobody’s going to say, “Oh I’m going to log in so I can get it so I don’t have to pay for it.” People are going to the Web for their news for other reasons. They want to control their information consumption, they want things packaged differently, they want a different media experience, they don’t like the hierarchical thinking.

I mean, part of the problem is the hierarchical thinking at traditional newspapers. They don’t want to be exposed to that, there’s a lot more entry points in digital media – there’s a whole bunch of other reasons for that. It has nothing to do with the cost. The idea that somehow or other we’re going to get people to pay for content is also hallucinogenic.

Here’s an interesting thing that Peak Media is trying to do – group them together and maybe get people to pay for content that way – but content per se, Christ, the cost of a newspaper has never deferred the content. Never in any meaningful way. Not for the last 55 years.

OJR: Are weeklies going to have to move to the Web?

Cauthorn: No, they won’t have to. They want to. But they won’t necessarily have to put all their product up on the Web. The weeklies and small market papers have got significant mojo. This is good stuff and this is the soul of journalism. I sometimes wish we could transplant some of that thinking to metro markets because, I tell ya, we’d get a lot better newspapers if we did. The reality is that yes, if weeklies were to go to shovelware models of delivery, they would have problems on their hands. However, there are real interest plays in journalism that weeklies can engage in. It has to do with blogs, citizen journalism, being the host and the focus for that. Use your weekly newspaper brand to be the focus for a very compelling kind of on-line experiences that don’t duplicate print behavior.

Part of my mantra about how to build on-line newspapers, because I think our on-line papers are built just as badly as our print products, is that you need to not try to duplicate the print experience. You need to try to do something different. Then you have the best of both worlds. Then you don’t hurt your circulation as much in print – well, a small percentage will move from print to online. But a lot of people will find that they have a use for both if you build your product right.

Weekly newspapers are a wonderful experiment for that. Now let’s imagine what an online newspaper would look like if we didn’t just repurpose our existing content. If we invited new comment from the community, we focused on community calendars. Things that would be of value each day between the publication of the newspaper.

Let the community speak on those days between your publishing dates, and then you have your piece in print on Friday. I think this would be really interesting, because then you have a really dynamic model where you’re flowing readers back and forth between print and online.

The kind of thing that we could do be doing in metro markets, but that would require – oh my God – creative thought.

OJR: Can the Web help a newspaper become this place that David Mitchell talks about, where a community comes together to work out the issues that matter to it?

Cauthorn: Well, the Web can certainly enter into this. The heartening message, the reason that everybody, when you write this story, should have it pinned to their chest, frankly, is that this should remind everybody that our public gives a damn. While the newsroom may have contempt for the public, well, guess what?

The public doesn’t have contempt for us. If we make the right product, they’ll fight for us. They will fight savagely for us. They will fight for a free press, you know? Well, if we stop embedding reporters – nudge nudge. They will fight for a free press, they will fight for a free newspaper even if they disagree with the newspaper sometimes.

OJR: Well, that’s what happened in Point Reyes, where some of the biggest critics of the paper came forward and said, “Look, we just can’t let you go under.”

Cauthorn: What’s fascinating is that – look at that in light of what I said earlier about pandering and making a newspaper be what the readers want. Our public is telling us, “Man, you make a newspaper that we care about and we’ll fight for it.” That’s what’s so beautiful about this. I wish we could see this all over. Now, interestingly enough, in San Francisco we had a fascinating development in the last year. The SF Examiner that had fallen into utter disrepute. It was just a mouthpiece for just an extreme political interest. They have focused on just serving San Francisco very aggressively, they’re giving it away for free as a tabloid, and it’s making a mark now. On a daily basis, it’s beating the San Francisco Chronicle on San Francisco news. With a staff of six reporters. It’s growing rapidly, and everywhere you go, you see people reading the Examiner. It’s fascinating to see how well a newspaper does when it tries to align itself with its community. And it’s reaping the benefit.

The Point Reyes experience holds up. If a newspaper honestly says throw out the focus groups and ask why aren’t people fighting for us? Why aren’t people wrestling to get that paper every day? Could that mean perhaps there is a problem with the product? Maybe we have to re-think our product? Not more graphics, but change the content model.

We’re very comfortable talking about business models, but let’s talk about content models. What we need to talk about is looking at a paper in a new way … to break things down so the print piece is this and the online piece is that, and they’re not the fucking same thing. You know? We need to be creative and attack this in a brand-new way.

Because newspapers have got, and Point Reyes proves it, newspapers have got a really exciting future. If they address the product. If not, then BusinessWeek is right. But again the BusinessWeek distinction has to be drawn. The people who make the product now are wrong. That doesn’t mean that the concept of newspapers is over.

When Detroit was losing to the Japanese, nobody ever said, “Well, cars are wrong.” They said the product is wrong. Why isn’t anybody looking at papers and saying that it’s not the concept of newspapers is wrong – it’s the product that these companies are making that is wrong.

OJR: To continue with your automotive metaphor, you can look at GM, which basically got addicted to making huge profits off their SUVs and is now in a dead end, and Chrysler, which unleashed their creative people and built cars that people want to buy.

Cauthorn: Exactly. Just think what’s going to happen when online people start to redesign newspapers. And trust me, that’s going to happen. Because of what they’ve learned. The online folks, they’re the rebels within the newsroom by definition anyway. And they’ve paying very close attention to what readers have done. Their religion – if you read online, where someone is one click away from making another choice – your religion is knowing what your reader wants. If it’s not, you’re in big trouble.

The fact of the matter is that the idea that our best online people are not running newspapers right now is shocking to me. Because if you want to reward success, look at the people are succeeding. Get some of that mojo in the rest of your operation.

OJR: OK, how about the concept that by delivering a story the Point Reyes way, by dragging it out in the soap opera model – is that something that can be translated elsewhere, that can get traction?

Cauthorn: Well, this goes back to my whole concept of content modeling. The reality is that there is narrative structure from one day to the next in stories. What we do in a typical newspaper is that … we spend more time rehashing the previous day’s events rather than actually providing news. Now for a weekly, the rules are slightly different because a lot has happened in that previous week, so there is a narrative skein to be unraveled. But clearly in an online context, people really do want a genuine narrative to take place. The narrative structure in this world is slightly different though because it is a hyperlinked world.

OJR: So you can have context. To find out what’s gone before – it can be only a click away.

Cauthorn: Exactly, I mean how you bundle together your previous coverage really matters. It can be very enriching. But in my experience, people very seldom actually go back and read online – well, let’s say we have a 10 part series – people very seldom go back and read the previous day’s parts, even if they enter for the first time on part number eight. This is an interesting thing that I haven’t quite gotten my head around.

This intrigues me. This whole question of how narratives are spun online. I’ve played with it in a lot of ways. What I think is happening is that people are afraid to follow the previous coverage in a series online because they don’t know how much of an investment of time they’re making. I think if there’s a visual reference – because you can’t tell someone until they click that a story is 70 inches long. However, if you turn a page, you can see, “Oh geez, I don’t have the time to get into that.”

This is a real formal concern of the media itself. Doing fairly sophisticated long narratives online is still a real challenge. I don’t think anybody’s really cracked the nut yet on how to do that. It’s a real interesting area. It’s one of the things I’ve come back to time and time again. You have to really have that whole package there. But this is where print excels, one of the areas that print can continue to own, going forward.

OJR: What are the prospects for weeklies and small town papers?

Cauthorn: Other newspapers think that this is a strength that is unique to small towns. And that’s not the case. Most of our metro areas consist of a collection of small towns. Are cities are smaller than we think they are, you know. You have a historic example in the Orange County Register, where a paper said, “We’re going to cover this entity known as Orange County.” And it was not until the 1970s as a distinctive entity – it was series of small towns. Newspapers today can create the concept of significant regional differences that therefore have their own interests and therefore have their own coverage and therefore have eager readers – if they were to do it. If they were to go down that road.

The problem with zoning has been that it’s always been undertaken as a circulation exercise rather than as a journalism exercise.

OJR: To crush any competition that might try to spring up.

Cauthorn: Yeah.

OJR: Anything else to add?

Cauthorn: Yeah, there’s these small weeklies within communities which are very interesting. Here in SF we have 14 neighborhood newspapers. And these are intriguing. They’re all profitable. They write about stuff the metros don’t pay any attention to. They’ve all got this significant niche. If you look at them and the alternative weeklies, which of course grab the young audience, you really have to start to ask yourself if we’re not misunderstanding today’s metro market as a series of small towns basically strung like pearls. That leads to some interesting questions about how a dominant daily would play into that. But these look like small town newspapers for all intents and purposes. They talk to advertisers that nobody else talks to you. You can learn about a school bake sale.

OJR: Like in Point Reyes, where there’s an environmental law that could cost every homeowner there $60,000 to re-do their sewage system. You tell that to a homeowner… .

Cauthorn: You’re relevant. That’s right, you’re relevant. They’ll buy you next week. See, this is the point to drive home about Point Reyes, is that every newspaper leader in America and every journalist in America should be paying close attention to what happened there. Because there’s a message for everybody. There’s a very powerful moral for everybody and it should be viewed as an opportunity to renew our compact with our audience. A compact that we’ve walked away from over generations.

And the message here – and it is a “It’s a Wonderful Life” kind of moment – the message here is that our readers are waiting for us to come back home.

We’re the ones who have strayed. It’s not the readers who are straying from us.

It’s us who have strayed from our readers.

That’s why Point Reyes is incredibly important story, because this tells you that all the things that those of us who love newspapers hope is the case, that people really do love us – are true. And it really is true also that what we’ve done right now is look at ourselves in the mirror and say, “OK, we’ve failed the very people who want to fight for us. We can turn around and fix this. Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go save newspapers.”

Somehow or other, I don’t think Tony Ridder is going to listen to me on that, do you think?

Wait until September hits. Oh my god. The Baltimore numbers which are down 11 and 15 percent for daily and Sunday, you’re going to see that across the country. You’re going to see a bunch of papers that are down 8, 9, 10 percent.

We gotta start firing editors. We have to at some point or other face the fact that the circulation numbers are down because nobody wants to read this fucking product. Make it the product we want, and we’ll read it.

OJR: Make it be relevant.

Cauthorn: That’s right. This is not a complicated business.

Video highlights

I was trying to ask legendary editor/publisher David Mitchell the Big Important Question: how to save the soul of American journalism, but the wind shifted direction and the stench made it impossible to talk.

It’s understandable. Mitchell’s second-story offices of the Point Reyes Light (weekly circulation: 4,100 and rising) are in a converted creamery only a country block from the cattle yards that still supply the good people of Marin County with their curds and whey.

I’d been trying to interview Mitchell about the state of journalism today – because not a day goes by without another thumbsucker being inflicted on us, wailing and gnashing about how the whole profession is headed straight for Satan’s jaws.

I take the thick fragrance of manure that chokes out my question to be a rather literal form of cosmic commentary on the whole subject.

Nonetheless.

In the fall of 2004, Mitchell’s one true lifelong love, his newspaper, the Point Reyes Light, teetered on the brink of extinction. The San Francisco Weekly did a story – “Can the Light Stay Afloat?” – about how Mitchell had been steadily draining his meager inheritance to run the paper at a loss, a story that was then picked up nationally – it even made Romenesko.

Then, in a scene straight out of the 1946 weepy Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, the good townsfolk of Point Reyes, Bolinas, Tomales, Stinson Beach et al., came together and basically passed the hat and bailed him out.

“Almost every day when people wrote in to renew their paper, someone would say, ‘Here’s an extra twenty bucks.’ We got lots of people who just gave us $100. Even people who didn’t hardly have two nickels to rub together stepped up and gave us $5.

“And then sixteen of them wrote in and said ‘Raise your cover price. Take it up to a dollar. We need the Light because we don’t have any city governments out here. And the Light is providing us with a forum for us to work out civic issues.’ ”

Somewhere, Tribune and Cox and Gannett execs are weeping at the thought of having such a devoted readership – one that not only keeps subscribing, but forms fan clubs devoted to your paper and then demands that you raise your price.

At this point, with the fall circulation reports looming, most circulation managers would settle for just not hemorrhaging readers. Heck, some circulation managers would settle for not having to wear an orange prison jumpsuit for the next couple years.

In 1979, the Light won the Pulitzer Prize for community service for its investigative stories on the violent and paranoid Synanon cult. In 1984, Paul Michael Glaser, still fresh from “Starsky & Hutch,” played Mitchell in a made-for-TV movie (with the embarrassing, Skinemax-like title, “Attack on Fear”) based on the book that Mitchell wrote about the experience.

The Light has been famous ever since for its uncompromising integrity. And to this day, the paper has a reputation for being the training ground for strong, accomplished reporters and editors. [Full disclosure: My wife, Janine Warner, worked at the Light from 1991-92. While working on this story, I stayed at Mitchell's house and even took a dip in his real-live Marin County hot tub.]

One more thing: Much of what follows seems to be about weekly newspapers, one of the oldest forms of journalism. Hardly appropriate for the Online Journalism Review, with its readership of the bleeding-edge, newest of the new, budding media moguls. But the parallels between this small print outlet and online news are really rather marked. Mitchell and the Light teach a lesson applicable across the spectrum: Readers can find a news outlet so appealing that they will fight to keep it alive.

Let your readers help you

Running a news site on a budget that won’t buy much more than a roast beef sandwich and a couple turns on the PlayStation is an increasingly necessary skill. The Light’s success is a relevant example.

Big papers can just throw dozens of reporters on a story (the New York Times famously called it “flooding the zone,” while the Los Angeles Times more cynically referring to “unleashing the flying monkeys”). But if a small paper commits too much to a single story, the expense can drag it under.

“They [the big papers] would send a couple reporters out into the field, and they would do research for several months, come back and give you a blockbuster story, a main bar that skipped over six pages and three sidebars and all the rest,” Mitchell said. “You’re asking a lot of your readers to go through all that volume of stuff.

“Because we can only cover a little of the story each week, we keep the story in front of our readers week after week. Because of space limitations, we’re also forced to do that.

“So in the long run, this is why issues in weekly communities don’t quickly come and go – the way they do in so many big-city papers.” Even a small operation like the Light can integrate the Web into its operation. And it’s not by putting all its content on the Web and hoping that readers will go there – it’s by using the Web and its readers in a way that allows it to report on the community better than ever.

A recent hot scandal (well, by the Light’s standards) showed how. The story involved a run-in between tourists and park rangers in which pepper spray was deployed.

“One reader – a bus driver – got a hold of me and said if you go to the New York City Citizens’ Review Board, they’ve done a study on the use of pepper spray, and the dangers, when it’s appropriate,” Mitchell said. “They not only tell you what’s safe and what’s good and what will work and when not to do it, they tell you what the law is and what the police training is.

“Another person came to us and ‘Hey, you don’t realize it, but there’s a Web site for the law enforcement ranger association. You oughta check that out.’ ” Mitchell said. “We went to the Web site and we found that rangers who worked out here … were writing in [and] held Marin County residents in absolute contempt.

“The things they would post on their own Web site – they considered us about like Osama bin Laden, or at least we loved him, if not being part of Al Qaeda.”

The Light’s smart, dedicated blending of its oldest resource (its readership) and the newest (the Internet) allowed it to take what would have been just a small story, at most a funny Sheriff’s Call gone wrong, and turn it into a cause that is having a transformative effect on the community. The story has woken readers up to a festering problem in their midst, and they’re starting to take steps to demand real changes. This is almost a textbook example of real beneficial watchdog journalism.

When you stumble onto something that sparks some real reader reaction, then your project starts to become a thing, where people start talking about your coverage and you keep covering it because everybody’s talking about it. Even if you don’t manage to catch lightning in a jar the first time around, Mitchell points out that there have been many instances where the paper started out looking into one story and wound up going in a completely unexpected direction.

“Researching a news story should be done with the same approach as empirical science,” Mitchell said.

“You set out to prove or disprove that hypothesis, and that gives you the starting point. There’s been many times that we started out, this was our working hypothesis and discovered, no, when we really got into the story, it was something else altogether.

“But at least that gave us a way of asking questions. And then we keep hammering at it.”

Live in the community to report on the community

One of Mitchell’s requirements is that his reporters live in the community – which can be a bit of a hardship because it’s so expensive in West Marin. But he insists – because so many stories will come from just listening to people in the check-out aisle, or at the post office. Many journalists for metro papers are covering communities that they don’t live in – and wouldn’t be caught in after dark.

Bob Cauthorn, former vice president of digital media at the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed out that most of the disconnect between newspapers and their audience has happened because “the practice of modern journalism, at anything from a mid-size market up, takes place over the telephone.”

“If you have your ass on the street where it belongs, you don’t need a focus group,” Cauthorn said. “Simple as that.”

This has important implications for the online world, where the name of the game is to try to find a niche in which you can prosper. As broadband penetration spreads, as more and more cities start creating wireless Web zones to attract businesses, national and international news will arrive via the Web.

“National news? Piece of cake. Anywhere, everywhere. I can get Pope coverage pretty much anywhere,” said Mark Potts, one of the founders of the all-local citizen journalist startup, Backfence.com.

Potts and his investors are betting that as local businesses grow more accustomed to the Web, as more people rely on it for information, there will be a crucial gap opening up that they can fill. A site that tells you how to find a good local plumber, what the Little League schedule is, and what the City Council is doing to try to solve the traffic problem could be a real force. Thus, start-up ultra-local sites could find themselves duking it out with weekly newspapers like the Light.

Invest in your coverage

If you’re reading this, you are probably well aware that plunging circulation figures have collided with corporate demands for 20-30 percent profits and produced a very nasty climate. We’ve all seen the cycle at work – revenues are down, so the newsroom staff has to be cut. Resulting in a thinner, watered-down product, a product the public doesn’t like. So numbers go down even further, budgets have to be cut again, thinner product. Rinse, repeat.

Mitchell took the opposite approach. In the 1990s, he noticed that Mexican immigrants were pouring into Marin County and that even tolerant locals were starting to get a little uneasy. So Mitchell cut his own salary to fund an ambitious series of stories about all the other waves of immigration that had washed ashore (in some cases, literally – they were shipwrecked while on their way to somewhere else).

“We still, ten years later, are getting letters to the editor about this. It was significant. It really told where did the old families come from that made this community, why did they come here, how are their lives different from the relatives who stayed in the old country,” Mitchell said.

The Light’s coverage produced the conclusion that the current wave of Mexican immigration was no different from any of the preceding waves. The immigrants were facing the same difficult journey, the same problems assimilating, the same fear and hysteria over a purported “invasion” that would ruin things, and ultimately the same slow process of integrating into the community.

The stories delighted the old guard families who had been in the area for generations and then helped bridge the gap between the established and the newer waves of immigrants. The stories brought people together, taught them about each other. They provided a staging ground for people to begin to talk to each other.

New models for community news?

Cauthorn envisions weeklies embracing a model where they publish their print version to establish which issues are at the forefront. Then the weekly’s Web site becomes the host for the discussion by the community.

“I think this would be really interesting, because then you have a really dynamic model where you’re flowing readers back and forth between print and online,” Cauthorn said. “The kind of thing that we could do be doing in metro markets, but that would require – oh my God – creative thought.

“Newspapers in their glory days – at the height of the power of modern journalism, in the 60s and 70s, when newspapers really made a goddamn difference – their circulation was exploding,” Cauthorn exclaimed. “Trust me, people who were reading about civil rights stories and Vietnam and women’s rights – these people were not reading fluff stories, you know?

“The assumption that if you align yourself with your readers – somehow or another you’re dumbing down – means that you think your readers are dumb. That’s the inescapable result of that logic.

“And it’s wrong!

“Our readers aren’t dumb. Our readers are great.”

Cauthorn finds an important lesson in the readers’ rescue of the Light, one that he hopes the other news publishers will pay attention to. “This tells you in no uncertain terms, with a kind of heat and passion that I wish existed in the normal newsroom, that our public wants us to succeed.

“Our public wants us to survive. Our public wants us to thrive. Our public wants newspapers that matter.

“Our public is leaving us because we are chasing them away with a stick.

“Point Reyes proves it.”

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More from Bob Cauthorn

A complete transcript of David’s interview with Bob Cauthorn about the Light and journalism today.