Robert Niles on OJR

How to avoid what's happened to American newspapers: Part two

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:53:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Following my talk in Singapore last month, I decided to delve deeper into the question about what newspaper publishers outside the United States can do to avoid the market meltdown that's already claimed a few papers in the U.S.... and endangers the survival of many more.

Last week, in part one, I urged managers at news publications to become eager consumers of online communication technology - "Management should use and consume technology like a starving man at a free buffet." I wrote that people in the business of producing communication in new media first must learn as consumers of that media. Too few managers actually use the platforms that they are employing people to develop for, leaving them clueless about that technology and unable to provide leadership in those media.

This week, it's time for....

Step 2: Management should use its experience with communication technology to build a social network that drives reporting and revenue at its publication

Jeff Jarvis urged attendees at the Singapore event to "think like a network." With that, he meant that rather than look to do everything in-house, with paid staff, news organizations should begin to look for opportunities that a network of readers, customers and partners could provide.

At this point, most news managers should be well familiar with asking readers to help "crowdsource" news reports. This is the Web 2.0 version of the old "tip line," but with far more sophisticated data management. Instead of some intern working the phone, writing down tips from readers, those tips can be incorporated into an online database in real time, creating emerging narratives of data for reporters and other readers to construct. And if you don't want to get that sophisticated, crowdsourced tips at least can fill a reporter's in box with plenty of eyewitness reports, helping strengthen and enliven a story.

But if all you are using your network for is crowdsourced story tips, and the occasional database, you're missing the full power of what a reader network can do for your news publication. Networks provide not just editorial power to a news organization, they could provide economic power, as well.

I'm assuming that you've already followed my advice from part one, and that you're using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools to build initial relationships with people in the communities that your publication covers. Here are the next steps:

1. Get to know all the major bloggers covering your community.

If someone's publishing in your community, and drawing significant numbers of readers to his or her site, that person needs to be on your radar. (I'll leave to you to determine what is a "significant" number of readers in your community. Try this: Find the median number of pageviews today to the new news articles posted on your website. Anyone who gets more visitors than that on a daily basis is reaching a significant audience.)

Make a list, and keep it updated. Yes, some of these bloggers might not be folks that you'd want to have any association with. And some might be spewing absolute nonsense. But you should be aware of what's going out to the public in your community, and keeping your eyes open for potential allies and partners. (Or sources that need to be refuted.) To do that, you've got to build this list.

2. Know all major bloggers and independent web publishers covering your publication's signature beats.

Same logic, but applied to topical blogs and website in addition to geographic-focused ones. Sharp beat reporters should be reading these blogs and websites already. As a publisher or newsroom manager, you need to get lists of these websites from the reporters on your publication's top beats - the ones where you want to draw national and international readership to your website.

The Los Angeles Times has for years been identifying - and hiring - bloggers covering LA. sports and the movie industry. And I've been working with the Orlando Sentinel for years, swapping links and sharing tips on the theme park beat. Those types of relationships should become routine for every news publication.

3. Keep a list of all Twitters in your community with 1,000-plus followers.

4. Work with mathematicians at your local university to apply social networking models in finding the most influential Facebook users in your community.

Numbers 3 and 4 will help you identify the "influencers" in your local community who can amplify your messages to a broader audience that you can on your own. Newspapers and other news publishers are used to having the most prominent voices in their communities. But in a more competitive, and more distributed, communications marketplace, even the local newspaper needs help in reaching to all corners of a community.

Every newspaper I worked at employed someone (or a whole office) charged with keeping track of community demographics, to watch changes and developments within the community so that their sales and circulation teams could find the most likely new customers.

That's important work. But social networking provides news publishers an opportunity to focus its community analysis to a much finer resolution. Now, news publishers can, and must, identify specific individuals who can help the company expand its editorial and business influence within the community.

But what's in it for them, the cynics among you might ask?

Large news publishers aren't the only ones struggling in this economy. Everyone's looking for additional sources of income. Why not approach bloggers and publishers on your list, and offer to become their ad representative?

The Internet's greatest threat to newspapers lies in reducing the barrier to entry to the news marketplace, allowing thousands of new competitors to lure advertisers away from existing publishers, or at least to help reduce the price of ads in the market. But what if you were the one selling ads for those "competitors"?

Many news publishers have attacked Google because its search engine and news pages have become the new "gatekeepers" for millions of readers who might have turned instead first to newspapers for daily news and information. To me, this is a silly argument. The real damage Google's done to the publishing industry is to become the economy's largest ad sales company.

Why let Google sell ads for your local and signature beat bloggers? You've got a sales force. Why aren't they doing that work?

Let's let the network work both ways, too. Jeff Jarvis suggested at the Singapore gathering that local bloggers should be able to sell ads for their city's newspaper, as well. Neighborhood and micropublishers can reach small business advertisers that larger newspapers can't, in a cost-efficient manner. Why not structure ad packages for these smaller advertisers and let your partner bloggers sell them, in exchange for a cut?

News publishers must reimagine their publication as the nexus of a local online community, rather than allowing it to continue as self-contained entity, operating distinct from that community.

Many news critics, including Jarvis and including me, have urged publishers to report what they do best, and link to the rest. By getting better to know who's publishing in and for your community, publishers and their staff will be informed to do that. But it's also important that news publishers and managers not see social networking as only an editorial or promotional operation.

The social network provides a business opportunity, as well. So don't simply report what you do best, and link to the rest. Sell what you sell best, then invite your network to sell the rest.

In a competitive environment, you need friends and allies. By adopting the technology that enables social networks, and by building those networks within their communities, news organizations abroad - and in the United States - can better position themselves to avoid the failure that's crippling so many publications in the U.S. news industry today.

How to avoid what's happened to American newspapers: Part one

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:14:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Following my talk in Singapore last month, I'd like to delve deeper into the question about what newspaper publishers outside the United States can do to avoid the market meltdown that's already claimed a few papers in the U.S.... and endangers the survival of many more.

This advice applies not just to newspaper publishers outside the United States, but to all news publishers, including online start-ups and still-profitable U.S. papers, who haven't yet had to resort to crippling staff or feature cutbacks to remain in the black.

Of course, much of what I'm going to say today is reflex for OJR readers. Consider this, instead, a second source that you can quote to a boss (or print out to show), to, uh, persuade her or him to do what you've been urging her or him for months to try.

My advice will come in two parts, the first today and the second half next Wednesday. So, let's get started.

Step 1: Management should use and consume technology like a starving man at a free buffet

The leaders of any news business must be able to understand new communication technology - not simply as an executive, reading reports from an underling - but as a consumer.

Every successful newspaper person I know started learning the business by reading the paper as a child. They all had a passion for the paper, and for news, and started reading their local papers, cover to cover, at an early age.

So when time came that they worked within the industry, they understood - from thousands of hours of reading its products - what a paper was and what the people working there should produce.

Just as every great writer and editor first learned by reading, every great tech developer I know learned by playing with, tinkering with, then hacking and rebuilding technology, from computer programs to entire systems. You learn to become a producer by being a consumer first.

So why should anyone be surprised when newspaper companies led by executives who communicate via printed memos and land-line telephone calls fail to produce digital products that resonate with their local audience? (Please don't make me name names here. I'm trying to keep this positive advice, not a hit piece.)

If you want to connect with today's online audience, you need to ditch the memos and land-lines. Make the next round of layoffs target the executives' secretaries and administrative assistants. Lose the filters and be a leader; it's past time for upper management to communicate electronically, to communicate directly with their co-workers, customers and audience.

Everyone in the organization should have a smart phone, and use its Web browsing capabilities. (This will also help kick reporters off their desks and out into the community, where they belong.)

Management should communicate via text message (for short messages) and e-mail (for rare, longer messages) - never via a printed memo. In fact, smart news organizations should ban all paper communication within their offices.

Managers should quit communicating via phone calls, unless they first schedule a call through an electronic message. (This doesn't need to, and probably shouldn't, be a long-term change, but it's an important short-term change to force tech-phobic managers to change their communication habits.)

If a manager needs to have a voice conversation with someone not in the same room, he or she should try to use Skype or a voice chat service instead. (Hey, let's see how many reporting jobs we can save by cutting phone bills!)

Instead of banning employees from having Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts, they should be required of all managers, top editors and beat reporters.

(Banning a newspaper employee from having a Twitter account is like telling a reporter that he or she can't talk in public anymore. How stupid is that? How can someone report if he or she can't communicate? And if you're limiting where and how reporters can report, you're limiting what in the community your organization will cover. Not smart when you're fighting for market share.)

Don't know what's the appropriate way to use Twitter or other social networks? Not sure what to say? Fine. As I said, you have to consume first, before you can learn to produce. So get started reading others' Twitter feeds. Here are 10 great ones with which journalists and newsroom managers can start:

http://twitter.com/agahran
http://twitter.com/CharlotteAnne
http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu
http://twitter.com/KDMC
http://twitter.com/mediatwit
http://twitter.com/NiemanLab
http://twitter.com/romenesko
http://twitter.com/stevebuttry
http://twitter.com/TechCrunch
http://twitter.com/yelvington

Complement these by following existing feeds from your organization's staff. A manager should follow every feed that his or her company produces, too. If that's information overload because you're producing too many redundant feeds, well, shouldn't you know that so you can do something about it instead of just turning off your audience with that overload?

While managers and reporters should experiment with new tech, they don't need to stick with stuff that's not working for them and that others aren't adopting it. Google Buzz? Bleah. Second Life? If you want to spend your life in a virtual room with no customers and a bunch of other marketers, go ahead.

Ultimately, the CEO, publisher, editor, ad manager and all section editors in a news business should be blogging.

Use the combination of Twitter (in short messages) and the blog (for longer thoughts) to communicate with the public what you're doing, and why. And these managers should accept and read the comments appended to their blogs, as well. (Note: I have no problem with publishers screening replies and denying to publish ones that they deem offensive, spammy or wildly off topic.)

News executives must find time to answer questions asked in their comments. If they want to rebut certain comments, go ahead, but do so judiciously, no more than once or twice a day, depending upon the volume of comments received. The point is to show readers that you're engaged, not that you're game for a fight. You're trying to organize a community, not bully it.

Ultimately, however, the larger goal here is to get managers comfortable with, and conversant in, online communications technology.

This comfort can't be outsourced or delegated. As news communication businesses shift from print to online, their managers must become as comfortable and conversant in online communication as they were with the printed word. Otherwise, their leaders are reduced to followers, and their businesses run adrift.

So here's your to-do list. Get started.

Next week: Step two.

Creation or aggregation: What is the real added value of today�s journalism?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:27:00 MST

By Robert Niles: The following is an edited transcript of remarks I delivered last week at the WAN-IFRA Future of News Media and Journalism Conference in Singapore.

Generating original content, or aggregating someone else's? If you're running (or starting up) a news website, which model should you choose?

Actually, this is a trick question... because they're the same thing. In journalism, our "original" content always has been the product of aggregation.

Let's take a look at the newspapers where I've worked over my career, from a small daily in Bloomington, Indiana to the Los Angeles Times. Each paper has published reports from wire services, from feature syndicates, from freelancers... even letters and op-ed articles from readers. That's aggregation. Even the supposedly "original" stories ultimately were works of aggregation. We aggregate interviews from sources; we aggregate documents that we ask find or ask for; we aggregate our observations of people, places and events.

If we weren't publishing aggregation, if we truly were creating original content, we'd be writing fiction, spun from the creativity of our own imaginations. As journalists, we try not to do that.

This is a false choice: creation versus aggregation. The newspaper industry long ago optimized the use of aggregation for its medium. So the choice really becomes: Shall we use aggregation the way that the newspaper industry has always done it, or aggregation the way that it's being employed by a new generation of online start-ups?

What's the distinguishing characteristic, then, of this new form of aggregation that we're now seeing online? Well, it's that it's being done really cheaply. It's very inexpensive. They're using automation, like Google News does, and social media, like Facebook, to bring together sources of information for far less expense than people in the newspaper industry can do that with a traditional newsroom model for reporting, editing and page design.

That provides online aggregators with a significant cost advantage in the competitive marketplace that all news publishers now face. But is there any social value in the cheaply produced aggregation that we're now seeing proliferate around the Internet?

My academic background is a bit unusual for journalism: My undergraduate major was in math. So, ultimately, this reduces to an equation for me. The value that a publication ultimately has in an information marketplace is equal to what readers (or advertisers or funders) are willing to pay for it minus what it costs to produce it. That's it. If that resulting number is positive, then there's value in what you do. If it is negative, then you have a problem.

The expense of producing content is so low for many aggregators that they don't need nearly as large a community of individuals to find great value in what they produce for them to be in the black. If a relatively small collection of people find value in getting information from the particular mix of content that aggregator provides, that gives them enough revenue, usually from associated advertising, that they can remain in business.

The irony is that a larger scale metropolitan or national newspaper can deliver huge value for an audience, with massive advertising revenue and direct sales, but that's still not enough revenue for its owners in this competitive marketplace, because their production expenses are so large. So even if a traditional newspaper delivers more social benefit to an audience than an online aggregator, the difference in production costs favors the online upstart.

So the challenge for the newspaper industry now is to take a look at what these start-up aggregators are doing and perhaps, from that, learn what traditional newsrooms can do to change, to aggregate the information that they've been collecting from their communities in ways that are less expensive, and that would better serve the community.

That's a word - community - that I hope we use a lot in the remainder of our conversation here today. I agree with Jeff [Jarvis, who spoke earlier that day to the conference] and Reginald [Chua, the editor of the South China Morning Post, who also spoke that day] that we, ultimately, are in the community business. We might think of ourselves as being in the publishing business, but we should take a step a few degrees over to the side and look at things from the perspective of being in the community business. From a different angle - see, I'm going back to math again - then the pathway to the future might become more clear.

The key to success in any business is to find where the market's pain is: What is the community's need? So your role as a journalist, trying to remain viable in your marketplace, is to understand what the pains in your community are. (I wrote about this in Doing journalism in 2010 is an act of community organizing.) Then, once you've identified the need, think about how you can use information that you can collect - to aggregate - to meet those needs, to alleviate that pain.

If reader-contributed content is to be part of that solution, and I believe that it should be, then don't make the mistake of segregating it within its own section of your website. The community you serve must come together on your site, and that includes bringing together readers (both sources and audience) and staff writers.

Even our traditional newsroom sources are using new ways to communicate with the community now, going around us. They're on Facebook and Twitter; they're blogging and e-mailing lists of supporters. They're talking in existing online communities, message boards and social networks within the broader community. Let's catalogue those avenues through which people in the community are communicating with each other and think about how we, as journalists, can create a network that will bring all those avenues together. And to do so in a way that will help use to play our role as the organizer of the broader community. Let's keep aggregating community voices, but start doing that more and more with automation and social media tools.

So how do we do this without adding even more expense to our newsroom operations? Again, let's learn from the upstarts. We need to be developing and employing more journalist/programmers, people with IT programming skills and a journalism sensibility. Some journalism schools in the United States are adding this to their curriculum. At Northwestern University, my alma mater, for example, the Medill School of Journalism has created a program to train programmers to create news applications for the next generation of computer-assisted research and reporting. We need people who can create tools that support thriving, responsible online communities, instead of relying on off-the-shelf commenting and discussion forum tools that are too easily hijacked by trolls. We need people who can take government data and industry data and create living applications that makes that information available to the public in ways and formats that they understand and that they can do something with.

This is another way that we can create value: We ought to create fresh ways for the public to take our data, our reports, and let them easily aggregate it within their own blogging, Tweeting and social network publishing. We talked earlier about how YouTube helped take over the online video market by providing easy to use code that allowed anyone to embed a YouTube video on a blog or website. We need journalist/programmers who are creating ways for us to reduce our distribution expenses by empowering our readers to become our own distribution network.

We've got to get over the mindset that aggregation is a bad thing. That mindset keeps us from developing tools that allow readers to aggregate our content, and by doing so, becoming partners with us in an information community.

So how do we make money off all of this? Let's not forget that for many readers, advertising is content. People like to read certain ads. Why shouldn't we create distribution channels for people to aggregate and syndicate our ads, as they might do our stories and blog posts and links? When people are interested in our content, including advertising, we must find ways to push that content out to a larger share of the community.

Think like a network. Why not strike deals with other blogs and websites covering your community to sell ads onto their sites, allowing your ad sales force to remain the market leader within the community? Trust me, those publishers would welcome the extra revenue, even if the paper took a cut. And why not go the other way, as well? Let bloggers who can reach and service smaller, neighborhood advertiser sell into our newspapers and newspaper websites, and let them take a cut of that revenue? It simply expands our reach into markets that our sales forces can't afford to service, at no cost to us.

The specific model that you employ will be as unique as the particular community that you choose to cover as a journalist. But to find that model, then to create it, we must first stop demonizing aggregation. It's long been the foundation of our industry.

So let's instead view this crisis as an opportunity - to reconnect with our communities and to recreate journalism in ways that better serve the 21st-century needs of those communities.

Why I love NBC for blacking out the Olympics: A cautionary tale for all publishers

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:30:03 MST

By Robert Niles: Lots of folks have been bashing US broadcast network NBC for its coverage of the Winter Olympics from Vancouver, Canada. But allow me to take some space today to congratulate NBC. Thanks to the network's decision to delay broadcast of many Olympic events - sometimes as much as 10 hours after their completion - I haven't had so much fun watching an Olympics in, well, ever.

Huh? I hear folks asking. People have been roasting NBC's decision. Do I actually support it?

Heck, no! But by denying me the chance to watch the Olympics live (which are taking place in the same time zone where I live, by the way), NBC's pushed me to search the Web for live video and coverage, allowing me to find lively, even wildly entertaining, streams of coverage that I'd never have found if I'd been able to watch the games live on my TV.

That's an important lesson for all news publishers. If you don't provide the information that your audience wants, in the manner that they want it, people not only will they seek alternatives... but they might find ones that they strongly prefer to yours.

Me? I've been spending more of my days than I'd like to admit following the games on Twitter, the official Vancouver games website and whatever European and Canadian video streams folks on those sites have led me to. Vancouver's website has a nifty widget on its real-time competition results pages that allows you to read what other folks reading the same page are posting to their Facebook status update about the event.

Not only does that provide you with the feeling of being in a packed dorm lounge or sports bar talking about the games (even when you're alone at your computer), it's also become one of the go-to first sources for Americans looking for links to live video streams of the games.

Thanks to other folks I've found through these social media streams, I've been exposed to EuroSport, CBC and other networks' coverage of the games that I'd never have seen if I'd been able to watch NBC. Frankly, I've gotten a kick out of watching Lindsey Vonn attack the Whistler downhill while listening to commentators with rich Irish and English accents. Or to sit with my son and daughter watching the half-pipe competition, while my daughter picks out words from the commentators' French, translating them to my son and me.

Even when I don't understand the commentators' language, I don't miss results, since those stream live on my computer screen, thanks to the Vancouver website. And emotion transcends any language. In fact, it's been a treat to experience these games as the global event they ought to be, rather than as a reality show focused only upon American athletes.

Of course, NBC doesn't want me, or any other Americans, to do this. NBC spent billions to secure the exclusive broadcast rights to the games within the United States. If anyone outside the U.S. were able to stream video to U.S. residents, that could undermine NBC's investment in those broadcast rights.

But I'd argue that NBC's indifference to its audience is doing more damage to that investment. Chatter on the social networks turns to deep suspicion, even hostility, when video streams that have worked for hours go down within moments of being posted on the Vancouver Facebook stream. (Especially when those streams are replaced by notes that they were removed "at the request of the copyright holder.")

My wife peeked over my shoulder as the women's downhill stream died. When I explained what was happening, she replied, "What? Do we live in the Soviet Union now?"

Hey, she's a writer, too, and dishes hyperbole professionally. But it does seem a bit much that a major corporation can employ the force of law to keep U.S. citizens from... watching an Olympic ski race at the same time as the rest of the world watches it, instead of eight hours later.

NBC and its handful of supporters counter that strong ratings for the games, even on the west coast where the delays are longest, show that Americans prefer to watch the games in prime time, rather than when they happen.

Allow me to suggest that there might be another variable in play here: The fact that Americans are cleaning up at the Vancouver games. Nothing pumps TV ratings in the U.S. like Americans rolling in gold. Heck, not only did I watch Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White on the Web live, I tuned in and watched
them again on NBC in prime time.

NBC could have had me as a consumer twice those days. It could have offered me live coverage of the events I wanted to see on NBC or online, plus serving up live social media streams that I instead found elsewhere. Heck, the network could have joined with Olympic broadcast partners in other nations to make those international feeds available on an official NBC website, capturing the page views and serving me the ads that I instead watched from other sources.

Then, NBC could continue to repackage the day's highlights in a slickly produced prime-time wrap-up, as it now does, for those viewers who want the convenience of watching after work and dinner.

Part of the appeal of the international feeds, for me and for others on the social media feeds, lies in how they stick with the competition, rather than cutting out non-medal-contender athletes from other nations in favor of feature stories, promotions or more commercials, as NBC does in prime time. This helps viewers develop a feel for and, eventually maybe even a passion, for the individual sports of the Olympic Games.

Ironically, NBC has a financial interest in developing that passion within the U.S. audience. The network owns Universal Sports, a cable and HDTV broadcast channel devoted to year-round coverage of Olympic sports. You'd figure that NBC would at least use the games to promote the existence of Universal Sports, but I've not seen a single promotion for that channel in all the coverage I've watched on the flagship network. Nor is NBC using the Universal Sports channel (which I get over the air as a digital channel in Los Angeles) to show live coverage of events of less interest to U.S. audiences. All I've seen on the channel is taped coverage of pre-Olympic events.

Instead, NBC is cleaving to its strategy of betting it all on prime time, hoping that U.S. athletes win enough gold to keep ratings up. And when consumers like me turn to online alternatives to get the coverage they want, NBC calls up the lawyers and orders them to shut that coverage down.

Sounds a lot to me like the recording industry's response to consumer demand for online music in the 1990s and 2000s, and the ongoing response of some in the newspaper industry to consumers' flight to online news sources.

But you can't fight your customers. The Internet was designed to route around disruptions, and the architecture (to that extent, at least) was brilliant. Its users have adopted that same spirit, too. The recording industry didn't make file sharing services irrelevant by suing them out of existence. They became afterthoughts only when Apple's iTunes provided a better alternative that (largely) met consumers' needs.

And despite the doom-and-gloom coming from many newspaper managers, many online sites are thriving, producing original coverage of their local communities and topic niches, providing alternatives to diminishing daily newspaper coverage.

Given these precedents, it pains me to see NBC making the same, short-sighted mistakes. The network's blowing a chance to expand its reach to millions of new viewers by learning to build a continuum of coverage that extends across television, cable, digital broadcast channels and the Internet, using social media and international connections to forge a more loyal audience of consumers for the network and its advertisers.

But NBC's loss is my gain. Because the network isn't doing that work... I'm doing it for myself. And so are thousands, and potentially millions, of other consumers in the United States. Not everyone's gone as deep as I have in searching out online video, but millions are using social networks and alternative online news sources to keep up with the Olympics, instead of only turning to NBC.

NBC can do all it wants to make us watch the Olympics its way. But that heavy-handed control didn't work for the recording industry, isn't working for newspapers and is hanging a huge opportunity cost on NBC.

Top 10 reasons why you ought to apply for the News Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:37:00 MST

By Robert Niles: You have until midnight Friday (Pacific Time on February 19, 2010) to apply for the 2010 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp.

Why should you apply? Because we'll be bringing 20 journalists to Los Angeles in May for an intense, one-week camp in entrepreneurial thinking, and showing you how that applies to publishing a news website. By the end of the camp, you'll not only have been trained in the right mindset to run a successful publishing business, you'll have materials in hand with which you can pursue the funding that you'll need to continue your journalism career.

Oh, and we won't charge you a thing for this: It's free. (We'll even kick in $250 to help get you to LA.)

You need more reasons to drop whatever you were planning to do today, and apply? Here are 10:

1. When you work for yourself, you'll never get laid off.

2. Entrepreneurship provides you an option to extend and develop your career that no boss can take away or control.

3. Whatever unmet need you see in your community, as an entrepreneur you can attempt to meet that need, without having to wait for your bosses or co-workers to arrange a meeting to discuss it. Then discuss it again. And again. And again.

4. If you think you can run this place better than you boss, why not give yourself the chance to prove it?

5. That said, you didn't learn journalism from people who'd never worked in a newsroom. And you won't learn to run a business from other journalists who've never launched one.

6. Our camp is run by people who have launched and run businesses. And we're bringing in camp faculty who've done that, too.

7. This isn't the Knight News Challenge. We're judging *you* more than your specific idea for an online news business. (We expect that most campers will end up changing their concepts before finding a successful one, anyway.) Surely you have time today to tell us about yourself, and why you're a person who not only ought to remain in journalism, but also has ideas about how journalism can help more people in your community?

8. Do you know the difference between your audience and your customers? You'll need to, and if you come to this camp, you will.

9. You'd be attending the camp with 19 other people as awesome as you are. You wouldn't want to miss meeting them, would you?

10. Somebody needs to fix this industry. Why wait for someone else to do it, when you can play a part?

Here is more information about the camp. And here is the application form.

Now, get going. And good luck!

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 11:48:00 MST

By Robert Niles: [A reminder: We're taking applications for the 2010 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Please consider applying if you're looking for better training on how to make your online news publishing efforts an income-producing business.]

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

But the Internet hasn't just created more advertising space, driving down its price. It's also developing millions of new writers, diminishing the economic value of writing itself as a craft.

Before the Internet, most people never wrote outside the classroom. A few might pen an occasional letter to distant relatives, or an annual letter with the family's Christmas card. Today, people are writing more than ever before - sending e-mails, updating Facebook pages, posting to discussion forums and blogs. Not just students, either. The Internet enables adults to continue writing throughout their lives, using the written word to inform friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about the goings-on in their lives.

Nor is our new era of hyperliteracy limited to the written word. The ubiquity of digital cameras (including those on cell phones), as well as video cameras such as the Flip, gives people the opportunity to develop unprecedented literacy in visual communication.

In the film era, you didn't want to waste shots, so people didn't take many pictures. Today, people shoot exponentially more images, and in situations where they'd never have lugged along a camera before.

When I was young, a child rarely got his or her hands on a video camera. Journalism students learned video in the classroom, sharing cameras and with limited practice time.

Today, students come to journalism school having shot video for years. My nine-year-old son seems to have an HD Flip in his hands more often that not - he's learning to tell the stories of his life through video as much as through the written word.

As the 21st century progresses, going to school to major in writing and shooting stories will become like going to school to learn breathing. What's the point? It's a ubiquitous activity that everyone learns on his or her own long before college. With so many more people getting their 10,000 hours of writing and shooting early in life, more people than ever are able now technically to report to others the news that they encounter.

What's the value in being a journalist when everyone is doing journalism?

Yes, news organizations must find new production models that allow them to remain profitable in a competitive publishing market. But news publishers must also reconsider whom they're hiring. Journalism schools must also reconsider the instruction that they provide.

There's no longer any use in merely teaching people to write to a formula and conform to a specific stylebook. While those skills had enough value a generation ago for an individual to build a career, the new, hyperliterate media marketplace has rendered those skills - in isolation - as practically worthless.

Sure, such skills have value - I compared writing to breathing before, and just try to live without breathing sometime. But no one other than elite singers pays for breathing lessons, and no one pays anyone else to breathe for him or her.

Journalists who wish to continue earning a living from their work must bring something else to the table. For some, it might be superlative writing ability. Great storytellers always will be able to command income for their work, but let's not forget that there are thousands of starving would-be auteurs for every James Cameron.

Reporting skill and knowledge provide a more feasible route. While millions can write and shoot well enough to communicate with a broad audience, significantly fewer have the expertise to discover and analyze fresh information of interest to those audiences. Many folks will be able to report the news when it happens in front of them, but there remains great market value in knowing how to dig up news when it's not out in the open.

To do that, the stenography model of journalism must die. Many random people off the street will be able to paste together a "he said, she said" story. What the hyperliterate media marketplace needs are experts who can analyze, and advocate for, information in the public interest.

That demands journalists who have professional-level training and experience with the beats that they cover. It demands journalists who have the analytical skills, including training in statistics, to make sense of datasets and to find the stories buried within them. It will demand journalism schools to become significantly more selective in the students that they admit - choosing only those with the academic skills and performance to meet these new demands.

The era of the journalist as mere scribe is over. As we contemplate how the industry will endure as it moves from monopoly to competition, we ought to remember that fact, as well.

Have you talked with a customer recently?

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:10:30 MST

By Robert Niles: To encourage OJR readers to apply for our 2010 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, I'm writing again on some of the things you need to know, and skills you might need to develop, to become the successful publisher of a thriving news website.

Much of what you'll learn at the camp, should you be one of those selected to attend, focuses on mind-set. The skills necessary to run a news website are remarkably similar to the skills needed to work as a reporter. But the mindsets of a successful entrepreneur and a newsroom reporter, unfortunately, are very often quite different.

To that end... have you talked with a customer lately? (Or a potential one?) By "customer," I mean a person who writes - or might someday write - you a check to fund your site. (Your current boss does not count!) It could be an advertiser, a subscriber or a non-profit foundation. You can't publish a website - or run any business - without customers, and if you're even just thinking about doing that one day, you need to learn what your potential customers are doing... and what they want.

So for my post this week, I offer not some provocative opinion but an assignment - some entrepreneurial homework. Find some people, at least one, who you think might someday, possibly, provide some financial support for that website you might start (assuming you don't have one already). Then start a conversation.

Ask how they are reaching their audience now. In what other publications are they advertising? Where else are they placing ads? Are they using direct mail? E-mail? Where did they get, or build, a subscription list?

How are they using social media? Do they have a Facebook page? A Twitter account? A blog? What kind of business are they seeing from those efforts?

How are they using this advertising and direct audience communication? To build brand awareness? Brand affinity? To let people know about special offers, or to distribute discounts? Are they using social media and other forms of direct audience communication for customer service? If so, how? And how is that working for them?

For foundations and other investors, ask what other efforts they now fund. Why those? Are their current grants having the effect that they wished? What are they looking for now in considering future grants?

Do any of these questions sound familiar to you? Might some of these be the same questions you're asking about your own efforts?

Publishers and their customers, whether they be advertisers or non-profit funders, remain citizens of the same communities. Their common interests as members of those communities bind them in more ways than their particular roles separate them.

As a publisher, or a would-be publisher, you need to know the needs of your customers. So you might as well start learning them now. Most businesses that have employed news media in the past to communicate with an audience are just as confused now as news publishers. They used to have a reliable communications medium to reach their audience and now... many of them don't.

Sure, some have figured this out. And some of those now prosper. Just as some journalists figured out this Internet thing years ago and have built nice little (or big) businesses for themselves. But many remain lost, looking for a new solution to reach the audience which will supply the customers that they need.

Just like you.

Remember what I said about the "skills necessary to run a news website [being] remarkably similar to the skills needed to work as a reporter"? Well, here's one example: All this assignment requires is interviewing. Journalism 101. Easy, right?

And don't get hung on up the ethics of talking with potential future advertisers, either. You're not promising anyone anything - no preferential reporting, no free ads, heck, not even a discount. All you are looking for is information, and, one should hope, the beginning (or extension) of a community relationship.

I would even agree to share what you find with the folks with which you talk. As I wrote earlier, many of these advertisers remain as confused and eager for information as you might be. From personal experience, I've held on to advertisers that I know I would have lost because I shared with them information I'd learned from other campaigns on my site about what types of creatives appealed to my readers and what didn't. Sharing information shows goodwill and concern for their success within your community. (FWIW, I never share specifics about competitors, but I do share trends.)

If you remain concerned with the propriety of this assignment, start by approaching people running businesses and foundations you respect and admire. Since you have a choice, why start with folks you don't like? You're more likely to gain valuable insight and build a productive relationship with people you respect, anyway.

So what's the mindset change here? It's not in how you get this information; it's in what you will do with it. You won't simply write up a story, publish it and let it go... with little or no concern for what happens next, save for how this might lead to another piece in the future.

As a publisher - as a news entrepreneur - you'll use this information to find an unmet need in your community (a "pain," we'll be calling it at the boot camp), as well as a channel through which to meet that need. You'll take this information and complete it, by using it to build a service of value to your community.

That's a change in mindset that distinguishes reporters from publishers. Again, I'd like to invite all OJR readers to apply for this year's camp. Let's work together to build more great news publications, to serve more communities in need.

Will Apple's iPad save the news industry?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:12:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Will Apple's new iPad help the news industry?

Sure. Any new device that encourages people to read and watch more information will help publishers. With a larger screen than Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone, and far better display than we've seen from the Kindle or other e-book readers to date, people moving to the iPad from those devices should be expected to increase their "screen time," since they'll be using a more aesthetically pleasing device.

But can the iPad save the newspaper industry? What features in the new device might help financially struggling newsrooms encourage more people to pay for news delivered online?

Slow down, folks. First, if you haven't watch this years-old clip from Fox's old Mad TV sketch comedy show, please do now. It's best not to place any industry's hopes for survival upon a device whose name elicited so much ridicule from one half the population that Twitter users immediately moved "iTampon" to the top of the Trending Topics list in response.

I know that many news managers desperately want some technological innovation to come along that will turn back time and make people fall in love with printed content again. But paid circulation and readership were falling at most U.S. newspapers long before the World Wide Web made it easier for people dissatisfied with their local newspapers to find many more alternatives. The problem isn't the Web - it's that people have been rejecting and, in increasing numbers, continue to reject paying for the content offered by newspapers' newsrooms, in any medium.

The only ways that a new publishing platform will increase revenue for a publisher are:
- If the platform replaces a previous platform, allowing the publisher to reduce access to its content, and thus, increase price;
- If the platform expands availability of its content, allowing entry into a new customer market;
- If the platform provides a more suitable medium for its content, increasing its desirability, and thus public demand.

The iPad, and eReaders in general, don't replace any other publisher platforms; they merely provide an additional option. Nor do these readers significantly expand the availability of content beyond that already established by the Internet and smart phones.

Someone will devise content that's perfect for the iPad. It will likely take advantage of the device's larger screen and portability and involve individual customization. (It'll likely do much more, too.)

But after a decade and a half of online production, most newsrooms haven't substantially changed their print-focused production process. It's hard for me to imagine that the iPad coming along will now force that change, when Web browsers and smart phones didn't in the past.

No, newsrooms that are suffering in the market need to quit looking for new revenue models and quit longing for new delivery platforms. Instead, they should focus on one thing...

If you aren't connecting with an audience and customers, you need to improve your content so that you do.

When PhDs can write engaging blogs on the topics of their expertise, reaching an affluent worldwide audience, can you really afford to continue employing a general assignment reporter, who has no advanced degree or relevant industry experience, and may have finished somewhere in the middle half of his or her high-school graduating class, to cover the same stories?

Can you afford to continue clinging to the myth that print narrative "writing ability" is somehow more important than research analysis skills, professional knowledge and a long memory for reporting in a complex, technological age? (Are you still using clips to make hiring decisions?)

Can you afford to keep taking a hands-off, "impartial" approach to reporting on problems that affect the survival of the community you cover, thus enraging readers looking to you to stand up to the liars, crooks and charlatans in the community?

Neither iPads, nor paywalls, nor government subsidies will long save a publication that too few care to read. Is your news business in trouble? Quit longing for saviors, and start producing better content.

Build a better journalism career by shifting your focus from writing stories to creating assets

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:59:37 MST

By Robert Niles: We're now taking applications for the 2010 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp at the University of Southern California. I hope that OJR readers will apply for the camp, which will bring 20 journalists to Los Angeles for a week in May for intensive instruction and discussion about starting and growing an online news business. To encourage you to apply, I'll be sharing on OJR for the next few weeks some of the topics I'll be discussing in greater depth at the camp.

Many of these concepts will reduce to changes in the mindset that journalists bring to the practice of our craft. As journalists, we (should) understand the power of language. Simply changing some of our vocabulary can result in a profound shift in our practice of journalism, a shift that ultimately helps us create a more financially secure career for ourselves, while better serving our readers' needs as well.

As journalists, we typically frame our job as producing stories, usually for a daily edition. But as the combination of a poor economy and an increasingly competitive publishing market drives more of us into entrepreneurship, that focus must change. As an employee, your job is to perform a task that, in conjunction with the work of other employees, creates value for the company. But you don't need to concern yourself with what those other employees are doing (except, of course, for how their work affects your ability to do your job) or the big picture of how all your work creates value. Just make your deadlines, and file your stories.

But with "work for someone else's newsroom" jobs become scare in the news business, smart journalists need to start thinking more like entrepreneurs. Even if your goal remains a newsroom job, an entrepreneurial mindset can help you develop the assets that will make you a more valuable job prospect, as well as develop your ability to see which newsrooms are most likely to endure in this increasingly competitive environment.

Notice the word I just used: "assets." To me, that's the word that should replace "stories" in your vocabulary as a journalist. Too many of the journalists I've seen try to make the transition to running their own blogs and websites remain mired in the "story" mindset, endlessly creating newspaper-style "stories" or even brief-length snippets for their blogs. But they fail to create assets of enduring value that ultimately provide the income that they need to remain viable businesses online.

What do I mean by "assets"? A URL is an obvious asset, but you don't need a particularly good one to prosper online. (I was lucky in that I was online early enough to snag at least one really good URL asset for the price of a domain registration. But plenty of late-comers have built great websites using otherwise silly or nonsense URLs.) Long term, the site you build at your URL should become your greatest business asset, but you'll need to build many smaller assets within that site first.

An active reader community is an asset, one that has the power to elicit compelling reader-generated reporting and writing, as well as advertising support. But that takes time to develop, as well. (Though you certainly should work on it!)

Look first toward creating evergreen assets that readers will continue searching for years in the future. These pieces should be written with search engine optimization in mind, and be stored at unique, easy-to-link URLs that are prominently featured in your site's navigation.

In 1995, I wrote a short series of one-page tutorials on statistics that continue to be read by a couple thousand people each day. Those assets helped subsidize the next websites that I started, by paying their hosting fees and for some start-up equipment (laptops, cameras, etc.) I'd recommend that any journalist looking to establish himself or herself online start by identifying evergreen assets that he or she could create: how-to articles; sharp, concise explainers of complicated issues, smart guides to popular destinations, etc. Take what you know from your favorite beat and dive in.

Don't fall into the trap of looking for popular search engine bait. How many people in two years will be looking for the Conan O'Brien/Jay Leno posts that so many folks wrote last week? The most valuable assets have enduring value.

Once you've written a few asset pieces, allow that mindset to affect your future reporting and writing. How will your work today help sustain an existing asset or create a new one? Your goal should be larger than posting another item to a blog, or adding another story to an index page.

If your content management system supports it, keyword tagging your blog post provides one way to build a long-term asset. Smart use of tagging can help you create an SEO-optimized landing page that summarizes and links to your best work on a valuable keyword or phrase.

I've long advocated that journalists and newsrooms create "wiki"-style explainer articles for stories of enduring interest in their communities. Edit them in-house, but link to them whenever you write a post or piece about that story, as a way for infrequent visitors to get "up to speed." They're great search engine bait for the curious, as well.

Changing your mindset from story-writing to asset creation shifts your focus from a single element of news production toward the larger process of serving an audience. Ultimately, your audience determines if something is an asset. After all, if no audience sees value in it, it has no value.

It's depressing to look at Google AdSense or other online ad tracking reports and see how little money some individual stories or blog posts earn. You need a critical mass to build income - a growing collection of stories earning money over a long period of time. So you'll need to extend the life of what you write, so that it continues earning income year after year. (Like the stats tutorials. This provides one more reason to stay away from fad news, as well.)

Let me reassure you that you'll still be writing many incremental stories and blog posts even if you make the switch to thinking this way. But keeping asset creation in your mind will help you find ways to incorporate even that incremental work into larger narratives that can grow into valuable assets. And refocusing on the audience will help your growth as a community organizer, someone who can build the large and engaged readership community that ultimately becomes a site's greatest asset.

Is anyone on staff actually reading the mobile version of your news website?

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:22:00 MST

By Robert Niles: I've long complained about online news publications that automatically redirect all requests from mobile devices to their mobile home page. The practice kills deep-linking online, which is especially frustrating when the deep link comes from the news organization's own Twitter feed.

But today, I'd like to highlight another frustrating practice by some news organizations - publishing incomplete articles to the mobile version of their websites or smartphone apps.

I'm illustrating two examples here today, but I've encountered so many on my iPhone over the past several weeks that I often wonder if many news organizations employ anyone to actually read their mobile publications, or if they merely entrusted their mobile versions and apps to automated processes.

With mobile news attracting a growing audience, news publishers simply can't afford to take the Ron Popeil approach to their mobile publications - "set it and forget it." They must devote some eyeballs toward a backread of all that they produce.

Unwatched content online inevitably becomes broken content - whether it be an automatically generated mobile app, a reader-driven forum or columnist's comments page. Watch your content, and it might still break, but at least someone will catch the problem, allowing for a swift fix.

Earlier this week, I tried to read a story on USA Today's otherwise delightful iPhone app about a survey questioning Americans about President Obama and his performance to date.

That's where the story on the iPhone app ended. You couldn't scroll down to take that "closer look." The story abruptly ended right there.

Now, here's how the story looked in a laptop Web browser:

You can see that USA Today had built a table-driven display, featuring an individual representing each of the several categories of respondents that USA Today had identified in its poll.

Now, here was the front page of the travel section on MSNBC's mobile version last night:

Hey, I love Hawaii! Let's click and take a look at some of those tips for a cheap trip to Oahu:

Uh.... huh? Yep, that's it: a head, a deck and a shirttail. No article.

Let's now fire up the laptop and see how the piece looks in the "normal" version of Safari:

Oh, it's a photo gallery. It appears that MSNBC hasn't yet devised a way to transfer content from online photo galleries into mobile pages. Indeed, MSNBC frequently uses this technique for travel articles, especially with tips and "best of" lists, and none of them ever comes up fully on its mobile site.

Neither of these were isolated examples, buried deep within their mobile versions. The USA Today article was on the "top stories" tab of its iPhone app, and the Oahu "non-article" was the lead piece on its Travel section.

Clearly, these omissions represent significant usability failures for these publishers, as well as any others guilty of the same errors. If you can't port an article over to your mobile version in a useable format, better not to attempt to publish there at all.

But, better yet, news publishers should take the advice that many online journalists have been offering from years - quit encasing your content in a single, specific format. Store it XML, or some other format, that can easily adapt to multiple publishing formats for multiple devices. Then assign someone to look at the product, before or after publication, to ensure that it's come through properly. If it hasn't, hold that article until you can fix it. It's time to show mobile readers some love, and not hope that they'll remain content with whatever feed your tech crew wrote.

News organization's desire to create impressive Web graphics and presentations becomes counter-productive when those presentations are not available to mobile users. It doesn't matter how pretty your design team makes something if the fastest growing segment of your market can never see it.