Robert Niles: December 2011 archive
Why we need advocacy journalism
December 20, 2011
When "objective" journalism decays into a cowardly neutrality between truth and lies, we need advocacy journalism to lift our profession - and the community leaders we cover - back to credibility.That's my response to a source quoted in an item posted by Jim Romenesko yesterday. The post linked a TVWeek.com/NewsPro survey that listed Syracuse's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications as the nation's top journalism school. (USC Annenberg was listed fifth, FWIW.) What caught me eye was one of the quotes Romenesko selected from the original story to include in his post:
"One reply stated schools should teach 'objectivity. Too many schools are teaching advocacy journalism.'"
Let's dive in: Advocacy is not the antonym of objectivity. Objectivity is the goal of accounting for your own biases when observing of an external reality, so that your report accurately reflects that reality. By reporting objectively, the goal is that you be able to produce an observation that others, observing the same reality, can reproduce.
There's nothing about objectivity that prohibits you from advocating on behalf of your results. In fact, putting your work up for peer review, and being able to defend it, is part of the scientific method that influenced the journalistic concept of objectivity.
Every journalist advocates for their stories - anyone who thinks otherwise has never hung around an editor's desk or been to a front-page budget meeting. So advocacy's part of the job. And as journalism schools are supposed to be teaching their students how to advance their careers, they need to be teaching their students how to advocate for their work - whether that's getting an assignment approved, a freelance gig okay'ed, or a story onto P1 or into the first slot on the website's homepage.
When I've asked journalism students why they decided to get into the field, I've yet to hear anyone respond that they were looking for a big payday. Idealism motivates almost every journalism student - and journalist - I've met. We want our reporting to help make our communities better places and help our readers live better lives.
So we get into this field looking to advocate for worthy causes, and we use internal advocacy to get our stories heard. Allow me to suggest, therefore, that the problem some journalists have with "advocacy" is not the concept itself, but those who put advocacy ahead of the truth, instead of behind it, where it belongs.
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If you're not careful, efficiency could kill your business
December 13, 2011
If you're not careful, efficiency could kill your business.That was the destination on a little mental raft trip I took on the stream of consciousness last week. I was waiting for an airport shuttle at the Hilton Tokyo Bay in Japan and happened upon this spectacular holiday model train display.
The next thing I noticed was the advertising - sponsor logos were slathered on every element of the display - trains, bridges, even hot air balloons "floating" above the scene. I suppose that recognition could have inspired several reactions, but mine was "I can't believe any of those companies would get any decent return on investment for this display."
Then I wondered what conditioned me to think that.
I looked more closely and found that the display was an annual tradition at the hotel, and this year was a benefit for children's charities supporting young people affected by the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan earlier this year. So return on advertising investment wasn't the primary objective of participating businesses.
But the charitable contributions weren't the only positive impact of these businesses supporting this display. Presumably, some of the people who designed, built and sold the trains and scenery in the display got paid. As did the salespeople who solicited the businesses' participation. That meant more income for those workers - income that not only helped support their families, but also provided income for the people whose products and services those families paid for.
It's Econ 101: Each amount of money spent in an economy creates several times its value as it circulates. That's why an increase in spending by one person or one business can reverberate in creating a bit of additional income for many. And it's also why a reduction in spending can reverberate and cut incomes for many, as well.
But it's also a lesson lost on managers and consultants who look only at the first level - the immediate impact of spending, forgetting the reverberation, forgetting the second- and third-level of spending that an initial investment can enable.
How does this affect the publishing industry, you might ask? More...
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What the Oregon blogger who lost a $2.5 million judgment should have done
December 9, 2011
You want to know the lesson of the Crystal Cox case?If you're going to court, get a lawyer.
Crystal Cox is the Oregon blogger who got hit with a $2.5 million defamation judgment for a blog post wrote, critical of Obsidian Financial Group. According to the Seattle Weekly, she was unable to use Oregon's shield law to protect her sources for the post in question, because Oregon's law does not explicitly cover online publication. Since she was otherwise unwilling to produce any sources to verify her piece, the judge sided with Obsidian and hit her with the multi-million dollar judgment.
Cox represented herself in the case, and that was her biggest mistake. Remember the old saying: "He who represents himself in court has a fool for a client."
I don't care what Cox's motivation for writing was. (Heck, as I've written many times before, I wish journalists would get far more aggressive about taking a stand and going after the crooks and cons in their communities. Neutrality shouldn't be a requirement for journalism.) Nor do I care whether Cox followed SPJ or J-school rules when writing her posts, either. That shouldn't matter. There's nothing in the First Amendment about being a J-school grad or SPJ member. Or even a newspaper or TV station employee. Freedom of speech applies to everyone.
In case you haven't committed it to memory, here's the First Amendment, again:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Obviously, though, we've got plenty of laws on the books abridging the freedom of speech and of the press - defamation laws being just a few of them. And ask the protestors at the Occupy encampments around the country about their right to peaceably assemble.
Fact is, the First Amendment, by itself, is pretty much meaningless today and is totally useless to anyone defending himself or herself in a court of law. The First Amendment is relevant only within the context of two centuries of case law that have refined its meaning within America's criminal and civil justice systems.
That is why you need a lawyer when you go to court. Because only someone with extensive legal training is going to be able to navigate that immense body of case law in order to tailor those decisions to influence a judge or jury to rule in your favor. And if there's no way to construct a winning case, a lawyer should have the experience to know how to craft you the best possible deal so that you can minimize the judgment or sentence you face. More...
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Five more lessons for getting it right, this time around
December 7, 2011
We've talked at length about finding new sources of revenue as the news industry moves from a monopoly-driven market to a more competitive one. (And that's the real change that's happening in our industry - not a switch from print to online.) But all the newly self-appointed publishers online will find themselves in the same vulnerable position as their print predecessors if they don't adopt different attitudes about management even as they work to find new customers for their publications.It's human nature to pattern your behavior after role models, and for many of us in journalism, our role models were the managers we followed coming up through the ranks of the business. But while there remain important lessons to be learned from our predecessors (treat people well, be honest, order pizza for the staff on election night), print news managers did some things that online managers must work hard to avoid, too.
Here are five lessons I'd like to offer online news managers, so that their publications don't one day end up unable to compete with whatever new competition awaits them.
Don't make the syndication mistake
Print newspapers helped do themselves in by trading locally produced, staff-written content for less expensive content from national syndicates. While that might have save money in the short term (no benefits to pay, less salary and wage expense), syndicated content helped make many newspapers look the same as their counterparts in every other community across the country.
That's no big deal when newspapers were publishing in individual, independent markets. But once the Internet fused the publishing marketplace, syndication-driven newspapers had too little unique, original content to distinguish themselves. Really, who's going to read some op-ed columnist or the AP report on last night's game on your website versus the hundreds of other sites offering the same, exact articles? We found that answer - no one.
Creating original content remains relatively expensive, at least up front. And the Internet has made syndication easier and cheaper than ever. (Hello, YouTube embeds!) But publications need unique, original content to attract the audience that attracts advertisers. You've got to offer something that no one else does. (And simply offering a different mix of the same content available elsewhere isn't good enough.)
Ultimately, what I'm saying is: I wouldn't bet my future on a business model built on aggregating content equally available to other publishers. It didn't help the newspaper industry and it won't help sustain the online news industry, either.
This does not mean that you shouldn't look for and publish content from outside sources. I remain a huge fan of well-modeled user generated content. But that content needs to be original and unique to your site. More...
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Which online retailers do the best job of helping sell your eBooks?
December 2, 2011
I thought I would share some potentially interesting information about the effectiveness of various online stores in driving eBook sales, based on my personal experience over the past months.If you're not a regular reader of OJR, last summer I wrote about my first effort in eBook self-publishing. I'm a big believer in eBooks because I see them as a medium where readers have proven that they are willing, even eager, to pay for content. Forget about chasing pennies from paywalls. Go where your readers are buying eBooks by the millions, instead.
Newspaper publishers have been publishing books for decades, but the printing and distribution costs have limited those efforts to only the most highly popular subjects, such as national championships by the local sports team and blockbuster investigative works. But eBooks lower the cost of production and distribution substantially. Now, many more long-form investigative works, ongoing columns and popular long-standing can be converted to eBooks, with good profit potential.
Adding eBooks to your repertoire provides you another revenue path to supplement advertising, underwriting or whatever else you're using to bring in revenue today. I'd encourage publishers to look beyond repurposed content, and consider how original eBook content might fit within your news product mix. Find the right story, and the demand is there. From paying readers this time.
If you're interested in getting started with eBooks, please click into our archives and take a look at my three-part introduction to eBook publishing. Today, I'm going to refine my original advice by letting you know what I've learned from selling eBooks through several popular online bookstores.
When I started, I submitted my eBook to four retailers that would accept works from first-time self-publishers: Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble and Google Books. I linked to all four stores when marketing my eBook to the readers of one of my websites. (The book was a collection of stories from that site, re-edited and with a few additional chapters.) I signed up for the various retailers' affiliate programs, not only so that I could make a few extra cents from each sale I referred, but also so I could get some information about how many sales were being driven by me, through my website, and how many were bring driven by links on the retailers' stores.
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