What's wrong with us?

May 1, 2008 by

SUNNYVALE, Calif. – I am on the road today, attending the “NewsTools 2008: Journalism that Matters” conference at Yahoo! The conference is the work of the Media Giraffe Project, which bills the event “a concept/design mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs.”

Today’s event focused on the ‘concept’ half, with ‘design’ – whatever it might turn out to be – left for tomorrow’s agenda. Organizers eschewed a traditional, panel-oriented format in favor of asking participants to design their own sessions on the fly. That format offers great potential, for keeping topics fresh and audience members engaged. The risk, however, is an event that resembles a junior high school mixer, with everyone glued to their seats around the perimeter, afraid of initiating contact with anyone.

To the organizers’ credit, many volunteers stepped forward, and the participants I spoke with reported the sessions they attended worthwhile, though not revolutionary. I meant to hop between concurrent sessions, but found myself sitting through my first choices until their end, engaged in the discussions.

We will be interviewing some of the participants about their initiatives, in future articles on OJR. And I hope to bring you reports of some of the research and production tools and operational solutions we examine tomorrow in a future column.

But today, I’d like to start with the problems — the challenges and roadblocks that I saw, or heard others describe, during today’s sessions. How many of these sound familiar to you?

Impatience with unsolved problems

I don’t know of anyone who’s launched a website, or other computer application, and had it immediately work well and serve its audience completely. Nope. It’s alpha, beta… then launch, usually followed by a quick succession of revisions and patches. With users providing valuable feedback along the way. Developers accept that a project is not complete until it has had some time to live in the field, used by actual consumers.

This, of course, is not the way most journalists work. They keep their stories internal, password-protected within their newsroom’s publication system, until it’s been desk-edited, copy-edited, sometimes lawyer-vetted, skedded and copy-edited again. That’s created a cultural expectation within the journalism business that one’s product will be complete when it goes to the public.

With the exception of a few early adopters of open-source journalism, the public beta is a foreign concept to most reporters. But a willingness to test, even to fail, in front of the public is a requirement for technical innovation. If you’ve become used to having everything “just so” before sending it our into the world, you’re bound to feel disappointment, then frustration, when that world changes and people rapidly want new and different things to try.

That’s the tone I heard underneath many frustrations expressed today (and at previous industry events). Even when the industry is making progress (with blogging and with online community management, for example) many journalists feel uncomfortable waiting for initiatives to play out in public. Journalists would do better to think like programmers in the sense of recognizing incremental success and not getting too depressed when initiatives fail. Keep what works, learn from what doesn’t and try again, a little differently next time.

Inbred analysis

One participant mentioned that she kept running into the same people at these types of conferences. That’s a problem. The journalism industry typically looks within itself for potential solutions to technical and business challenges online, when it should be looking to people outside the “news” industry who have taken on, and solved, many of the same challenges.

Newspapers have struggled for years to learn how to build and manage insightful, responsible online discussion communities, ignoring the hundreds of individuals outside the field who have built large, well-run and, sometimes, even financially lucrative, forums online. Some newsrooms have struggled to deploy multi-million-dollar content management systems, while open-source developers have created more stable and scalable systems at a fraction of the cost.

The situation reminds me of political parties keep hiring the same losing campaign managers, election cycle after election cycle. Again, it’s time to think like a programmer: If you want a different output, you need to try a different input. Just because someone is engaged in publishing content online that doesn’t carry the “Big ‘J'” Journalism label doesn’t mean that such individuals haven’t learned and can’t teach those who do use that label something valuable about publishing online.

Dinner isn’t all vegetables

Many journalists who whine about their inability to make money online for their “serious journalism” need to take a more thoughtful look at what they are offering their potential audience.

It’s a rare publication that rakes in the cash offering readers nothing but investigative pieces and serious, in-depth profiles. Even The New Yorker runs a hell of a lot of cartoons. Individual journalists may aspire to a career of hard-hitting reporting. But their companies also employ people who are shooting wild art at Little League games, publishing pages filled with comics and Sudoku, and running reader sweepstakes and giveaways.

If you’re going to publish a website, you can’t forget the gimmicks. As one of my colleagues asked, ‘where’s your Wingo?’ What fun, silly, engaging things are you going to do online to help make your potential audience want to spend more time with your website?

As I discussed with several other conference participants over dinner, journalists need to treat their websites like a dinner party. You can’t just dish out a plate of veggies. You need to invite your readers in, chat with them, serve ’em a drink and get them comfortable. Then you can start dishing out the food, including a main course, veggies and dessert.

Reporters who worked as specialists offline need to develop and display additional skills when they move online, including the ability to entertain as well as inform their online readers.

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Think about markets to understand the news business

April 30, 2008 by

Using economic theories with critical thinking is a trend that has become more popular in the last few years. Books like Freakonomics, where everyday situations are analyzed from an economic perspective, are teaching readers how to look at situations in a way that makes sense in economic world.

James Hamilton is a professor of Public Policy, Economics, and Political Science at Duke University. In his book, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News, he examines how economic forces affect the media. By taking this economic approach when analyzing the state of the media, Hamilton believes we can arrive to conclusions that will improve the industry. Hamilton spoke last week to journalism students at USC Annenberg.

When evaluating the continued decline in interest for hard news, Hamilton first takes a look at the industry under an economic lens – analyzing the possible theories of why the current market does not provide the adequate amount of coverage in this area.

Rational Ignorance
When people are seeking information, they usually fall under one of the following categories: consumer, worker, audience member and voter. As a worker and consumer, readers seek out information they either need to do their job, or information they need to achieve a particular goal. As an audience member, readers are looking for information that will entertain them, such as YouTube or TMZ. Voters are those who seek information simply for the sake of being informed, and usually the victims of rational ignorance –when people choose to remain uninformed due to the lack on the return on the time invested learning about a particular topic.

For example, if a person spends a significant amount of time researching a presidential candidate, his vote will most likely not have a direct influence in the election outcome. Therefore, many readers choose not to demand detailed political information, and instead let others do the work. This is also where the media falls short in balancing the information people want and the one they need. If the demand for hard news is not there, media outlets will tend to focus on other subjects.

Inadequate Investments, High Costs of Hard News Coverage, and Advertising Bias
As the demand for hard news coverage decreases, profit-driven broadcasters and news media will not want to invest their money in these types of stories. Network evening news are extremely market driven, and networks usually focus on attracting marginal viewers, which make up about 40 percent of the market. So even if the average loyal network news viewer enjoys having hard news coverage, networks are not focused in keeping them, but instead working diligently to capture those casual viewers.

As far as advertising goes, not all viewers have equal value. If a certain group of women in their 30s, who statistically make up the majority of the purchasing decisions, desire more specialized coverage, advertisers will favor this group.

Journalists as Celebrities
As media outlets fight for ratings and readership, they often attempt to make their anchors and reporters into familiar faces – therefore building a sense of comfort and loyalty with their audience. Often, time spent on turning a reporter into a celebrity has a tendency to neglect hard news coverage.

Content, Conduit and Conglomerate Ownership
If a cable company owns the news network as well, it is possible that they will prevent others in the news business to enter their market. It is important for audiences to analyze content and medium and recognize where there may be possible conflicts of interests.

Also, with more local newspapers transitioning to big corporations, the focus of the news often shifts from providing the public a service to maximizing profits.

So how do we fix this?

Hamilton believes that they key lies in changing the incentive of media outlets, and consequently, changing the incentive to seek information. He proposes the following:

  1. More media outlets should be operated by non-profit entities. By taking the profit out of the equation, companies can focus on the public interest.
  2. Subsidized information creation. Foundations should be able to subsidize information analyses, training for reporters covering hard news, and providing journalists with lowered costs when acquiring government information.
  3. Encourage family ownership of news outlets. Families may be willing to compromise a portion of the profits for the sake of providing the public with the information they need. The government should provide incentives so that families remain in the business of news and in turn, provide hard news coverage.
  4. Public policy should encourage more partisan information. Currently there are restrictions on how much money parties can spend on public information. If these were removed, information would reach more potential voters through advertising.
  5. Government subsidy for information creation and infrastructure. In addition to providing funding for political and government information, government should invest in improving the current way information is distributed.

When asked about possible influences and bias, which could happen with partisan coverage of news, Hamilton believes that as long as institutions are transparent with their goals and identity, the public can draw their own conclusions.

Overall, Hamilton’s economic view of the media industry can provide us with insight on how we can combat the challenges we encounter as journalists. By taking a macroeconomic approach and focusing the attention on the media outlets, we can hopefully achieve a balance in providing the public with the appropriate information.

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Where do you want to work?

April 28, 2008 by

Almost everyone working within journalism today feels the economic uncertainty that is challenging the industry. Many of us are worried about our jobs, our incomes… and our ability to do accurate, influential work.

But let us back up for a moment, and think about an industry without such troubles. Let’s take concerns about “how to make money online” or how to avoid newsroom cutbacks off the table.

As the Internet has accelerated economic chaos within the journalism business, it has created new publishing opportunities for individual reporters. Now, you can go on your own, explore your passions, and have your work become the focus of a 24/7 community.

But would you want to? Assuming you could make as comfortable a living as a solo blogger as a newsroom reporter, which would you pick?

more at twiigs.com…

Please take a moment to share in the comments your vision for an ideal job in journalism.

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