Robert Niles: October 2008 archive
OJR launches week-long look at the state of local online news start-ups
October 24, 2008
Next week OJR will present a special week-long series examining the state of online local news start-ups. We've looked at this "grassroots" or "hyperlocal" media in the past, but as each year passes more journalists are thinking about, and starting, these local news sites.The absence of a replicable, sustainable business model over the past few years isn't stopping journalists and non-journalists alike from launching websites to cover their communities. From San Diego to St. Louis to Chappaqua, N.Y., budding nonprofits are seeking footholds in their local markets. A few for-profit ventures are in the mix as well, betting that further declines at traditional media businesses will create new openings for their startups.
They come in all sizes and shapes, from mom-and-pop shops focused on a single community concern, to seven-figure operations that attempt to reflect wide civic interests. While nearly all of the sites struggle to find advertising dollars, the number of communities served by online-only news operations continues to grow.
David Westphal of the USC Annenberg School for Communication begins his six-part review on Monday, with an Q&A with Scott Lewis and Andrew Donohue of Voice of San Diego, a site OJR first looked at three years ago. More...
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What Doonesbury's Rick Redfern did wrong
October 22, 2008
Last week I enjoyed reading about one of America's most famous investigative reporters making the transition from print staffer to independent blogger. I am writing, of course, about Rick Redfern, the fictional Washington Post reporter from Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip. [You can find the strips on the Doonesbury website.]For those not now following the strip, Redfern, a long-time WaPo veteran in Trudeau's world, was laid off earlier this autumn and is now launching his own blog, a scenario not uncommon among many "real world" journalists. Fishing for tips, he chooses to launch the blog with an anecdote about Barack Obama playing basketball with U.S. troops in the Middle East.
The beauty of fiction is what it can tell us about our real lives. Here are three things Trudeau's Rick Redfern did wrong in launching his blog, keeping him from better immediate success online (or, from losing his gig with the WaPo in the first place): More...
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Online technology can help any website use people, not pundits, to drive public debate
October 17, 2008
My mind spent much of its thoughts this week on the U.S. presidential campaign - specifically, on this week's, final, debate between John McCain and Barack Obama. What inspires me to write this piece, though, is the disconnect between some of the hired pundits who watched, and reacted to, the debate and the "snap" polls conducted of viewers after the event.CNN's John King, for one, called the debate for McCain, only to have his own network's snap poll show that the viewers, resoundingly, thought Obama the winner. That got me thinking about the opinion sections that many newspapers run in print, and on their websites.
Many now run Web polls where any reader can click to vote which candidate won a debate or to show which position on an issue they support. These polls of self-selected readers can be useful in eliciting discussion, but are worthless in providing good data about the public's collective opinion on something.
But online polls don't have to be garbage. The same technology can be tweaked easily to enable a previously selected, demographically balanced, random sample of individuals to log in and record their votes on an issue, such as a local candidates' debate.
So, why not? More...
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The secret to a successful online guerrilla marketing campaign?
October 10, 2008
So what's the secret to building huge traffic for your news and information website, without having to pay for a huge promotion staff and advertising budget?Obviously, you need a guerrilla marketing campaign, one that encourages people to spread the word about your site, making it a viral sensation. But how can you motivate people to do that promotional work for you?
I'll share the secret to successful guerrilla marketing online in a moment. But first, I want to assure you that journalists can make money online by running their own websites. Reporters such as Rafat Ali and Josh Marshall have gotten plenty of notice for their successes, but I've also found many other publishers, through forums such WebmasterWorld, who are making a more modest, but still comfortable, living from their own websites.
Journalists looking to the Web as an option for extending their careers following a newsroom layoff won't get by on their reporting skills alone. Quality of content, unfortunately, does not determine who makes an adequate income online. Traffic does. And you need a lot of traffic to build a commercially successful website. More...
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Newspapers need to learn that great online communities should not be dictatorships
October 3, 2008
I had a conversation yesterday with a former colleague, who, like many online journalists, is trying to steer his newspaper toward a more Web-savvy future. As we were wrapping up, he mentioned that he had to go to a meeting of his paper's "standards and practices" committee.The what? I asked.
"Yeah, we have a standards and practices committee," he said. "We're supposed to figure out policies about managing user-generated content, hyperlinking and stuff like that."
Why don't you just crowdsource that? I asked.
He rolled his eyes, said "I know," then proceeded to detail some of the reasons why the paper's old guard had shot down his proposal to do just that. The reasons boiled down to two: 1) We don't trust outsiders to know what we ought to be doing, so 2) we're not comfortable letting "outsiders" influence decisions about internal operations.
What a wasted opportunity. What better way to help readers feel part of a community with the paper than to ask those readers to help craft the community's rules? More...
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