Flash journalism: Professional practice today

Mindy McAdams is the author of “Flash Journalism: How to Create Multimedia News Packages” (Focal Press, 2005).

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

User feedback drives five principles for multimedia news on the Web

Interactive multimedia features can be challenging for users: Where do I have to click? How do I stop and restart this animation? What navigation options do I have? Multimedia content producers should take a look at their work from a user’s perspective.

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.

Graphic

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.

Graphic

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.

Graphic

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

Bob Cauthorn wants to lead your publisher into the Light

[Editor’s note: This is a sidebar to Old-school community journalism shows: It’s a wonderful ‘Light’.]

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.