Robert Niles
Pasadena, California 
Homepage: http://www.robertniles.com/
A long-time math and computer geek, Robert Niles turned to journalism after graduating from Northwestern University and deciding he couldn't stomach becoming a management consultant. But the lure of marathon coding sessions proved too strong. Robert soon quit his job writing editorials for a red-state newspaper, and he began making websites instead.
Robert started with online tutorials showing other journalists how to use math and data, then branched out to niche sites on theme parks and the violin. These sites often involve readers as reporters, inviting them to contribute to the sites' coverage.
The Online News Association and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism honored Robert's ThemeParkInsider.com in 2001 with an Online Journalism Award for Service Journalism. The Webby Awards named the same site a finalist for Best Guides/Ratings/Reviews Site in 2005.
Robert also has worked as a Web editor, editorial writer and reporter for several newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald and the (Bloomington, Ind.) Herald-Times.
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These articles are the work of their author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of nor an assignment by OJR.
July 2, 2009
Newspaper columnists ought to be the perfect bloggers - the best write in a lively voice and forge a strong connection with their readers. Their work build an ongoing conversation with the communities they cover. Frankly, they've been blogging (in print) since long before anyone other than academics and soldiers went online.
So why aren't more making a successful transition to online publishing? Why are so many columnists living under the same fear and uncertainty that's consuming their newsroom coworkers? Those are a couple of the questions that I sought to address last weekend when I spoke to the annual gathering of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
This year's conference theme was "Survive and Thrive." (Well, we've drilled down to the basics now, haven't we?) My talk was "Tips on Branding Yourself," and I was joined by Erika Stalder of ABC Family.
I told the group that your brand in the Internet era is the public's perception of its relationship with you, a sentiment that Erika concurred with, citing a similar quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room."
Anyone writing online needs to come to this understanding: That what matters most in determining your online success is how your work is understood and acted upon by its audience - more than what your intention with the work was or the process that you used to create it. You can do work you believe to be great, but if no one reads it or no one who does cares, what was the point? More...
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June 25, 2009
very major breaking news events offers its lessons to the news organizations that covered it. And today's death of singer Michael Jackson should lead newsrooms to reexamine how they handle breaking news in a hyper-competitive, instant-publishing environment.
I wrote last week about how news consumers used Twitter to express their displeasure, in real time and with a critical social mass, with CNN over the news network's coverage of the developing election protests in Iran. Yesterday, Twitter again became the forum for a global event, as millions gathered on the microblogging site to share rumors about, then to confirm, then to mourn Jackson's death.
AOL's celebrity gossip site TMZ appeared to have been the first to report the singer's death. Other news organizations, appropriately, waited to confirm Jackson's passing themselves before reporting the news.
But thousands of Twitter users did not wait for additional confirmation before retweeting TMZ's report, or sending out their own tweets about Jackson's death. Even after the Los Angeles Times confirmed the passing, other news organizations held back before publishing the news to their Twitter feeds and e-mail alert lists. More...
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June 17, 2009
As Iranians took to the streets over the weekend to protest the country's recent election, thousands of users of Twitter were staging a protest of their own: against CNN for not devoting as much attention to the Iranian situation as Twitter users wanted.
The hashtag #CNNFail became one of the top trending topics on Twitter Saturday night, as Twitterers expressed their outrage over CNN airing repeats of feature interviews instead of live coverage of the protests.
On Saturday, I retweeted this comment from @pinoy2com: "#CNNfail is 4th most Tweeted keyword. A turning point for audiences signaling what they wanted covered by mainstream?"
Indeed. The virtual protest provided several valuable lessons for online journalists who wish to retain the respect and loyalty of their audiences in an increasingly interactive world. Here are 10 lessons from #CNNFail: More...
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June 12, 2009
When I was teaching online journalism, the most difficult aspect of the craft for me to teach was its most unique: online journalism's ability to harness the collective reporting power of its audience.
Sure, I could lecture all semester about moderating discussion forums, eliciting thoughtful reader comments, recruiting guest bloggers and structuring a crowdsourced reporting project. But instruction provides just a small part of the learning experience. Learning demands exercise, repetition and feedback, as well.
Journalism educators traditionally have done well to introduce their students to a professional working environment. Students initially turn in their work, on deadline, to an instructor who serves in the role of an editor. Later, students move into actual newsroom environments, working for student newspapers and broadcasts, under the director of more experienced students, and sometimes, faculty advisors. They practice their craft, interviewing sources, reviewing documents, working with editors and producing work for public consumption. Feedback from editors and instructors completes the loop, preparing students for professional life in a newsroom.
The academic calendar, unfortunately, frustrates efforts to extend that model to online publishing. We can publish newsroom-produced reports just as easily as we could in print and on air, but one semester (or worse, one quarter) rarely provides enough time to build an audience large enough to create a significant amount of user-generated content [UGC]. More...
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June 4, 2009
The impending collapse of many news organizations is providing thoughtful journalists with an opportunity to reinvent the practice of their craft. What should be newsworthy? What should be the impact of a news story? Working for their old employers, many journalists paid little attention to such questions. When they did address them, too often it was with simplistic answers that had little relation to how the public actually perceived their work.
As old newsrooms shrink, or close, journalists now can address these questions in the context of new opportunities, whether they be self-publishing or working with other journalists in new, online start-ups.
Let's look at this within the context of a personal example More...
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May 25, 2009
For a generation, journalists have been steeped in a culture of failure. Even during boom years, newspapers laid off employees, offered buy-outs, froze the hiring off new employees and cut the pay of the ones they kept. When the Internet brought unprecedented competition into the news business, and Chicken Little's sky really did fall, the industry amplified its toxic narrative: "No one can make money online." "Journalism is doomed!"
But it isn't. All that's doomed is the reactionary management philosophy of monopolists who could not adapt to world where people, not papers, controlled the narratives of their lives. Good riddance, I say. Journalism is not doomed; people can make money publishing online. All that needs to change to make that happen is journalists' toxic attitudes toward themselves and the value of their work.
That was my message to the participants at the Knight Digital Media Center News Entrepreneur Boot Camp this week. We met at the USC Marshall School of Business for five days, working through a curriculum outlined by myself, KDMC's Vikki Porter and Tom O'Malia of the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Marshall. We brought in a team of four faculty to finalize the camp's curriculum and instruct the campers: Mary Lou Fulton, Susan Mernit, Ken Doctor and Vin Crosbie. And we supplemented each day with expert speakers, including SEO expert Danny Sullivan, Dan Gillmor, entrepreneurs Shoba Purushothaman and Staci Kramer, and attorney Michael Overing.
Every day, the campers started by giving us their "elevator pitches" for their projects. Over the week, the pitches sharpened from rambling four-minute speeches to tight engagements of 20 seconds or less. At the same time, they learned how to flesh out their pitches into five-minute multimedia presentations, which they presented Thursday morning to a panel of business finance experts, including Lloyd Greif.
More...
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May 19, 2009
This week, OJR is helping present the
KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at USC. We've brought 15 aspiring news entrepreneurs to the USC Marshall School of Business, where they are learning the basic of eliciting financial and community support while creating a small news business. They are building upon their existing journalism skills, learning how those skills have (or have not) prepared them to move from being reporters to publishers.
You can follow our Tweets about the camp using the hashtag #uscnewsbiz on Twitter.
I'll write more about the camp, which ends tomorrow, with a wrap-up on Friday. But today, I wanted to dive into one important topic that we covered in a dinner conversation on Sunday evening.
Our invited speaker was Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Land, and a long-time expert in search engine optimization [SEO]. Danny's a news entrepreneur himself, having grown his 1996 Webmaster's Guide to Search Engines into two online news publications. (He also maintains a blog at http://daggle.com/, which I recommend for his sharp observations of the online news business.)
I asked Sullivan to come speak to our campers because of the importance of SEO to any boot-strapped online start-up. With few resources to draw readers to a new website, SEO provides start-ups a low-cost opportunity to get their site's links in front of an interested audience. The only cost is the time to learn these tips, and the effort required to implement them. More...
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May 15, 2009
Last week, I reviewed how
a 1995 court decision led the newspaper industry to withdraw from interactivity with its online audience at a crucial moment, crippling the industry's ability to compete with new online rivals.
Today, I'd like to take another trip down the memory hole, and show how the newspaper industry could have had the favorable position it now seeks from search engines... if only the industry hadn't adopted policies which gave that advantage away.
Recently, newspapers executives have been approaching search engine companies, notably market leader Google, asking the search engines to change their ranking algorithms to move up results from newspaper websites, arguing that they are more authoritative than other sites, given newspapers' experience and large reporting staffs, and that they are often the original sources of much information republished online. More...
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