Robert Niles on OJR

Walt Disney vs. the news industry: How bad management is killing newspapers and their websites

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:24:46 MST

By Robert Niles: I've attended many journalism conferences over the years, but our industry offers nothing like the event I attended this week. As many of you might know, my primary job these days is running a theme park news website that I founded nearly a decade ago. So this week I drove up to Las Vegas for the theme park industry's largest annual event, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions' Expo.

What does this have to do with journalism, you ask? Nothing.

Which is everything. (Hang with me, okay?)

Wednesday afternoon, a source I've had a good relationship with introduced me to several former Walt Disney Co. employees who are now legends within the theme park industry. Each worked with Walt Disney himself, and had gathered for a panel discussion about Walt's management style. The question they were to answer was... what could Walt Disney's approach toward management teach today's industry leaders?

Plenty. And not just in the amusement business. Walt Disney's management philosophy contrasts sharply with contemporary management practices in the news industry, especially within "legacy" media companies. Might I suggest that difference in long-standing management tradition helps explain the sharp contrast between the recent financial performance of the Walt Disney Company and the newspaper industry? Disney today enjoys a market capitalization of nearly $55 billion, and its share price is up 13% over the past five years.

How many newspaper companies can report that?

So let's look at how Walt did things, and compare that with how things are done in the news business. (Full disclosure: My first full-time job was with the Walt Disney Co., and my mother, sister and wife have worked for Disney in the past, though none of us do now.)

Yes, if....

Harrison 'Buzz' Price, the consultant who suggested that Walt build Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. and Walt Disney World south of Orlando, Fla., described the difference between responding to an employee suggestion with a "No, because..." and a "Yes, if...."

Walt was a "Yes, if..." type of manager, Price said. Walt wouldn't shoot down anyone's idea with an immediate dismissal, but would challenge that employee to improve upon his idea.

Richard Sherman, the composer who, with his brother, wrote many of the Disney Co.'s most famous tunes, including "It's a Small World After All," told a story about a studio executive who disapproved of a gag in a movie the studio was making. The criticism made Walt furious, Sherman recalled.

"'I don't care if you don't like it,' Walt said. 'Tell me what we can do to make it better.'"

Walt created an environment where his employees ("cast members" in Disney lingo) felt welcomed, and empowered, to speak freely - to Walt and to co-workers. "You were one of the members of the team and were free to talk," Sherman said.

Ideas - the lifeblood of a creative business - could come from anyone in the company. And Walt often challenged employees to perform in areas where they'd had little or no formal training.

"You never know what you might find when you give someone an opportunity," said Marty Sklar, the UCLA journalism student Walt hired to write a newspaper for distribution in the Disneyland who ended up becoming president of Walt Disney Imagineering, the design company that oversees the development of Disney's theme park attractions.

There is no Walt Disney managing today's legacy news businesses. (Yes, ABC News is part of the Disney Co., but Disney acquired it long after Walt's death, and the news division does not share the same management tradition as the other divisions of the company which once reported to Walt.) Disney's management style has nothing to do with today's news business. Which I see as a huge problem for us.

Walt's management style empowered the company to cultivate fresh ideas. Yet management practice within today's news business has smothered creativity.

As a newspaper online producer in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I'm quite familiar with the "No, because..." speech, especially on projects relating to editorial coverage and social media. Newspapers blew millions on new products designed to replicate print advertising models online ("Bona Fide Classifieds" anyone?), but actively kept employees from pursuing truly innovate online models, ones that engaged readers as active participants in online communities. To many legacy news managers today, "social media" means little more than flame wars in poorly designed and managed comments sections, appended to news articles that were republished from a print edition.

Ugh.

How many online news pioneers have left newspaper companies, either to work for online giants such as Yahoo! or to strike out on their own? Anthony Moor today spends his last day at the Dallas Morning News before leaving for Yahoo!, becoming the latest in a long line of pioneers to depart legacy media companies.

Consider Walt's amazing reaction to that critical studio executive. Rather than indulge the employee's negativity, Walt challenged him to do better. I've worked with too many editors who equated managing with dishing out abuse. Walt showed that a more positive management style didn't have to gloss over flaws. It simply demanded focus on what could be done better in the future, rather than looking back to place blame.

For the past decade, legacy news managers have indulged in the blame game. First, it was parasitic bloggers, then thieving search engines. But it was always someone else's fault that revenue was tanking and readers were finding alternate sources for information. The only time most news industry managers look to the future is to envision a way to bring back the past - with its information monopolies and fat profit margins.

"The one thing that [Walt] never let is forget was it is all about the audience," Sklar said. Yet following discussions within the industry today I hear much talk about the industry's bottom-line needs.

The audience doesn't care about saving newsroom jobs or keeping journalists in journalism. Nor should it. The people who provide true value to the audience will be the ones who will be able to earn money from that audience. That was true in Walt's day and remains true today. If people won't pay for your content online, maybe that should tell you the content you're delivering doesn't provide enough value to the audience.

Cutting back on producing better content won't make them more likely to pay, either. (The Disney Co. strayed from its traditional philosophy tried that approach in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and, ultimately, it cost then-CEO Michael Eisner his job.)

Losing money with a negative approach, and cutting back to preserve the bottom line in response has put the legacy news industry into a death spiral. And it can't find its way out, in part because managers never learned to see beyond defined models and roles. Newspapers segregated online staffs from their print reporters for nearly a decade, too rarely allowing employees to develop into the multi-talented programmer/reporters and journalist/entrepreneurs who power today's online news start-ups. By waiting too late to unleash their reporters as online community leaders, legacy news managers squandered their employer's market power in the new medium.

So... can legacy news organizations survive?

Well, I wouldn't be a very good follower of Walt's philosophy if I answered "no," would I?

Can legacy news organizations thrive online? Yes... if:

They diversify. The consolidation of the news industry has left it in the hands of too few managers - many of whom are simply too rich, and too near retirement, to feel the desperate need to do something creative that their former employees now feel. News companies should raise cash by selling many of their titles to new, local owners. With more owners in the industry, we have a better chance of finding innovative managers who can provide leadership to all.

New owners reconnect with the industry's pioneers. The news industry doesn't need to discover how to profit from social media. Or how to better use online publishing tools to crowdsource reports from within a community. Plenty of individuals have figured out those, and other, problems. Many of those successful publishers once worked for legacy news outfits. It's past time to call them home, and work together to find creative new models for journalism, the way Walt worked with his employees and contacts to build a new industry (with theme parks).

They put the audience's needs above all. It's tough to hear... but no one cares about us. It's our job to care about them, though. If we can find ways to deliver news and cultivate communities that engage, inspire and inform readers, they will find real value in spending their time and attention with us. And when value is delivered, value is received, whether that be through subscriptions, advertising, event admissions, donations or other forms.

I can't stress this enough: the economic model of journalism is not broken. What is broken is current news managers' perception of the value that they're delivering to the public.

Refocus on the audience - reconnect with them through all the available tools online, and managers once again can enjoy an accurate view of what their audience is getting, and how well they value it.

That's what Walt would do. That's what we need to do, as well.

Starting your news website: How to get the most promotional value from Twitter

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:22:23 MST

By Robert Niles: Thank you to everyone who sent along comments about my last piece, Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners. In response to a few comments, today I'm going more in-depth on how to most effectively use a promotional channel for a news website - specifically, how to get the most from Twitter.

A Twitter feed provides one more forum for you to show the best of your site's work to an audience. Ideally, the Twitter feed should encourage people to click to your website, as well as to use their Twitter feeds to spread the word about your feed (and your website and brand), to other readers you haven't attracted yet.

Again, these tips are designed for beginners to social media - journalism students or mid-career legacy media journalists who are making the switch to online publishing. If you are an online news veteran, well... click the comment button and share your best advice, too!

Assign a person to Tweet

Some news organizations have chosen to automate their Twitter feeds, treating it like another form of RSS feed. While there are tools available to populate a Twitter feed from an RSS feed, you'll have the flexibility you need to maximize attention to your tweets by putting a real, live person behind your Twitter account.

You need retweets

The key to eliciting clicks through Twitter is to extend your tweets beyond the reach of your followers. That happens when the retweet your posts to their followers, and so on, and so on. Retweeting powers your links exponentially. So how do you elicit retweets?

You don't have a 140-character limit

It's actually 135 characters, minus however many characters are in your Twitter handle. Why? Because that's the most characters you can use while still allowing someone to prepend "RT @yourhandle " to your post. Yes, Twitter's rolling out a more automatic retweet feature, but it won't be supported on the many clients and mobile applications through which many people access Twitter. So, for now, keep your tweets under your shorter character limits.

Retweet, to be retweeted

In order to be retweeted, your posts must first be seen. In addition to posting sharp, useful tweets, encourage influential Twitters to follow you by following them and retweeting their best posts. Don't get spammy, because that will only damage your reputation. Nor should you retweet posts that have been retweeted umpteen times already. But don't keep a great fresh post to yourself. Share it.

Follow those who retweet you

By watching what others who retweet choose to feature, you'll have a better idea what retweeters are looking for. That should help you sharpen your posts.

Never wait to tweet

As soon as a story hits your site, tweet the link. If people can get your news faster through other sources, such as e-mail alerts, Facebook pages or even others' Twitter feeds, they'll use those sources instead of your Twitter feed.

Do the TV tease

If you've ever taken a broadcast writing class, here's another place to apply what you learned. Write your tweets to encourage readers to click the links for more detail. Make your tweet a question, with an implication that the answer lies behind the included link. Strike passive voice and state-of-being verbs from your Twitter vocabulary. Use imperatives. Want people to click your Twitter links? Make them want to click.

Break news

Sometimes, you need to be so quick to tweet that you don't have time to get a post on the website first. Don't stress. Go ahead and post what you know in a tweet, then tweet again later with the link, when you have it. ("Here's the latest we've learned on today's blah, blah: http://bit.ly/....)

A picture is worth... another 140 characters

Arm yourself (or your staff) with Twitter-enabled camera phones. Then post photos to your tweets, when appropriate. Photos help place your readers at the scene and enable you to engage in visual storytelling. You can play some great verbal/visual games with cryptic Twitter captions, leading readers to click a photo link where the image will explain the original tweet.

Ask questions

The more ways you initiate engagement with your readers, the more likely they are to engage with you. Ask them questions through your Twitter feed. Elicit their eyewitness reports. Quiz them on the news. Ask them about their interests. Heck, you can even play games for prizes. (Think radio call-in contests here. It is a great way to build a followers list, fast.)

So, then, I will close this post with a question of my own: How are you using Twitter to drive traffic to and interest in your publication?

Starting your news website: A checklist for students and mid-career beginners

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:54:00 MST

By Robert Niles: My post today is intended for students, mid-career journalists or anyone else thinking about starting an online news site, but without the faintest idea of how to start.

Here is your guide and checklist.

Now, I'm assuming that you already know how to report and how to write. I'm not covering that. Nor will I be getting into more advanced issues surrounding how to manage a business that includes contractors, freelancers and employees. Those are topics for other days. Today's post simply provides a check-list of technical tools that you'll need to get a basic, one-person news site on the Web, to lay a foundation for future expansion and success.

A domain

Before you do anything else, establish your brand. The Internet domain you select and register will be the brand of your website, so it should be something that:

Accurately describes or echoes the site's content
Is easy to remember, and to spell

If this is going to be a one-person website, or a website driven by you and your personality, make it yourname.com. Or, if you want a little extra flexibility, something like, oh, yourlastnamepost.com.

The most popular domain name registrar is GoDaddy.com. I've used them, without problems. Register the domain, but don't opt for any extras, such as hosting or an e-mail account. You can find sources for those later.

A blogging tool

Start with a blog. Not an online newspaper, or a discussion forum, or a wiki or any other potential form of online content. Go with the blog. It's the easiest way to start, and requires the least amount of tech knowledge, as well as minimal change to your writing style.

(At least initially. Over time, you'll find that you use a very different voice for blogging than for traditional newsroom writing. But I will address that topic in a couple weeks. Let's leave it aside, for now.)

The comments that readers submit to your blog will provide your first steps toward building an all-important community of readers. But, at first, you must be their leader, eliciting their input through the posts of your blog.

Here is your first choice: I'm giving two free, and fine, blogging tools to choose from: Blogger and WordPress.com. For what it's worth, WordPress also offers a more powerful publishing platform, a piece of software that would need to be installed on the server that hosts your website. You're not at that level yet, but if you're looking toward the future, that WordPress tool provides one option for developing a more robust website than a simple blog.

Blogger, on the other hand, is part of Google, and hooked into the many services and widgets that the search engine giant now provides.

Again, I've used both. I like the simplicity of Blogger, but appreciate many of WordPress' features as well.

One important point. The account name that you select for your blog on either of these services must be the same as your domain name (without the .com part). If you can't get that account name on one service, you need to go with the other. If you can't get it on either, you should select a different domain name. (As soon as you can, you will need to arrange to have your blog publish to your domain name, but that's not necessary to start. You just need to have control of the domain name.)

A promotional channel

Now that you have a brand and a blog, you'll need a way to promote them, and to start connecting with your emerging community of readers. Create a Twitter account for your website (ideally, using that same brand name), then a Facebook "fan page" for the site. You'll use the Twitter account and posts to the Facebook page's wall to let followers and fans know about new posts to your blog.

But don't limit yourself to only posting when you have something new on the blog. Use these services to engage in thoughtful banter and conversation with your readers, and for short observations that don't merit a complete blog post. Twitter's also a great service to use when breaking news or covering a live news event.

A way to track promotional clicks

When posting URLs to Twitter and Facebook, first convert them to shorter URLs using the bit.ly service. First, it will save you valuable characters in trying to stay under Twitter's 140-character limit. Even more importantly, bit.ly provides data on how many people clicked your link, and what other Twitter users "retweeted" it. You'll find that information wonderfully valuable in evaluating how well individual posts resonated (or didn't) with your readers.

Readership metrics

You will need to know how many people are reading your blog, as well as where they are coming from and how they are using your site. Readership metrics are essential. Blogger can hook you up with Google Analytics and WordPress.com includes its own traffic-tracking tool. But I would sign up for Google Analytics using either service, and for Quantcast's tool as well. You'll post a tracking code into your site's template which will allow these services to count your readers, and gather a bunch of other useful information that will help you gauge the power of the content on your site.

Quantcast provides somewhat simplistic demographic data to publishers using its tracking code that, when combined with Google Analytics data, can give you a helpful first look at the makeup of your audience.

An advertising network

Now that you have a place to publish, a way to reach people, and a method of tracking them, it's time to think about money.

Join an ad network so that someone else can sell ads into designated spaces on your website, so that you won't have to worry about this important step initially. In the future, ad networks will fill space that you (or an ad rep) do not sell directly to advertisers.

Your options here are Google AdSense and Microsoft's pubCenter. AdSense should come as an easy plug-in option if you are running a Blogger blog. Otherwise, you'll need to sign up and add the code yourself. Microsoft's stirring up the market with its new Bing search engine and might yet develop some lucrative market share.

You'll need to watch your analytics with a sharp eye to optimize your content for these services, if you want to make any significant amount of money from them. But it can be done. (Full disclosure: I make about mid-five figures annually from AdSense income. I stopped using pubCenter before Microsoft introduced Bing, but am keeping my eye on trying it again in the future. Still, I did make several hundred dollars a month from Microsoft when I used its network.)

Business cards

Now, we go offline. You'll need a handful of business cards - with your name, brand, e-mail address, phone number and URL - to hand out to sources, readers and potential advertisers. (You won't necessarily know which of those categories the folks you meet will fit in, by the way.) You can go with a freebie or low-cost online service such as VistaPrint (beware of its attempts to sign you up for extras and subscription services you don't want or need), but if you're starting a local news website, you'll do far better for building your community relationships if you go with a local printer.

Ideally, with one who might want to advertise with you at some point in the future. ;-)

Bookmarked production widgets

Your site, and your business, is up and publishing now. So let's start adding some functionality to the site. Here are some handy services and widgets to bookmark, which will help you produce more engaging content for your website.

Photo editing: Picnik or Photoshop.com
Photo hosting: Picasa
Video hosting: YouTube
Quick reader vote polls: Twiigs

An ad server

An ad network will get you started, but if you want long-term viability (and you are not going the non-profit route), you'll need to sell ads directly to advertisers. And when you sell an ad, you'll need a way to display it on your site, tracks its impressions and its click-throughs.

Google AdManager is a free ad server that runs on Google's servers, so there's little tech work involved in set-up. You can even use it to have AdSense sell your remnant inventory, so you can replace the AdSense code in your site's templates with AdManager's.

A rate card

Of course, to sell ads, you need to know how much to charge. A simple rate card is a PDF or .doc file that lists the ad sizes your site's design supports and how much you charge for each 1,000 impressions (called a "CPM") in those slots. Make it easy on your advertisers my offering simple packages in round dollar amounts (e.g. 10,000 impressions for $50, 20,000 impressions for $100, etc.)

What to charge? Take a look at the CPM you are earning from AdSense or pubCenter (the "eCPM"). Go with the higher figure. Then assume that Google or Microsoft is taking about a third of what they charged the advertisers for those ads. So multiply your eCPM by 1.5, then round up to the next dollar. That's a solid starting point for how much you should charge. Many publishers charge more on the rate card, then discount down to whatever level then need to to make the sale.

Your first rate card sheet also should include a few nuggets of positive information about your website, such as its monthly readership, whatever demographics you have and a testimonial or two. That information can help sell potential advertisers on the value of running ads on your site.

For the future: A more advanced development platform

If all goes well, the quality of your reporting, your writing and your engagement with your readers will result in traffic swelling and readers clamoring for new ways to interact with you, and with each other, on the website.

At that point, you'll need a more sophisticated publishing system than a simple blog. You'll need to move your site off Blogger's or WordPress.com's servers, onto another Web host, where you can run a more advanced content management system ("CMS") such as Drupal or the more newsroom-specific Django.

Nothing to worry about now, but something to keep in mind.

For the future: An advisory board

Ultimately, your success as an online publish will be measured by your success as a community organizer and leader. Great community leaders do not try to go it alone. When you've made some loyal friends on the site, it's time to start thinking about formalizing those relationships by asking a select few to become an advisory board.

Lean on those board members for feedback on your vision for the site, as well as for leadership within the site's community, by posting to the site, setting an example for other readers and referring you to potential story sources and advertisers.

You might start this effort on your own, but if it is to succeed, you will need the help of many others. Plan for that day, so that you will be ready when it comes.

Does your site really need to be in Google News?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:23:11 MST

By Robert Niles: With print newspaper circulations crashing faster than the reality-TV hopes of Balloon Boy's family, you could forgive newsroom managers for chasing every available source of new readers. For many online publishers, affiliated with newspapers or not, the Holy Grail of traffic is inclusion in the Google News index.

Get in Google News, and links to your stories will be e-mailed to millions of Google's news alert subscribers, whenever your stories hit the right keywords. Post a hot story quickly, and you could end up on Google News' highly clicked front page.

But is inclusion in that index or other search engines' news indices really worthwhile for the majority of online news publishers? I'm going to argue... no. (Well, at least it's not worth making a fuss over.)

Why on Earth wouldn't a news site want the higher public profile and increased traffic that inclusion in Google News could bring? Look, if your site's goal is to appeal to a global audience, especially ones looking for news related to specific keywords and phrases, you need to be in Google News and should do everything you can to get included. If you are CNN, or the New York Times, you need to be in Google News and optimizing your pages to perform well within it.

But what if you aren't looking to reach a global audience? What if your site's focus is local, as are the readers your advertisers want to reach? What if you are trying to build an online community, cultivating ongoing relationships with a core of contributing readers?

"Drive-by" visitors from search engines inflate your site's traffic stats, but they don't help you reach those goals. Worse, traffic numbers plumped by infrequent visitors clicking news alerts create a distorted picture of your website's health and viability.

Many newspaper executives might take some comfort in the large number of readers visiting their newsrooms' websites. But let's look at how engaged those visitors are with these websites.

Or, more accurately, how they are not.

An Editor & Publisher report on September 2009's Nielsen Online report on the United States' top 30 online newspaper websites (by most most unique visitors) showed that the mean amount of time spent for that month on one of those websites was just nine minutes and 22 seconds.

That's a tick under 19 seconds per day on average, if you considered each website visitor the equivalent of a daily subscriber. I doubt that even the speediest reader can get through many articles - much less any advertisements - in under 19 seconds.

So, clearly, online visitors are not as valuable to today's news websites as daily subscribers to the local newspaper were a generation ago. Diminishing engagement with their audiences, whether reflected in lower print circulation numbers or by less time spent on the website, is what's driving legacy news businesses' failure to hold on to their once-lucrative advertising market share. No one's going to pay top dollar to reach an audience which isn't there.

Start-up local news publishers must act smarter. Work to build your website by developing local community contacts, not fattening the visitor logs with out-of-market visitors driven in by search engines. Use social media to encourage current readers to invite new ones. Build content and report stories that local readers will want to recommend.

Looking over the metrics for the websites I manage, I see a clear pecking order in the amount of time spent on the site versus the way a visitor accessed the site. Here's that list, from most time to least:

People referred to the site via an e-mail forwarded by a friend or colleague
People searching for the site's name in a search engine
People accessing the site via bookmark or direct-typed URL
People accessing the site via a link in its e-mail newsletter
People accessing the site via its Facebook page or Twitter feed
People accessing the site via a direct link from another, non-search website
People accessing the site via a link on another social bookmarking site (i.e. Digg or StumbleUpon)
People clicking from Google News
People searching for a term in a search engine

For what it is worth, there's a cliff-like drop-off in time spent between the social bookmark links and the Google News and search engine referrals. In my experience with my websites, people whose initial visit to the site is driven by a referral from a friend or colleague, or from searching for the site's name in a search engine, spend far more time on the site and are far more likely to return than those referred by a search engine.

As an industry, we've got to develop a deeper reading relationship with our audience. From the data I've seen, the shortest route to that goal lies in building traffic through human connections, not search engines and their news pages.

Okay, so traffic from search engines isn't helping build a loyal audience for community-focused publications. But it can't hurt, right?

Maybe it can. Forgive me while I drift into speculation here, but I'll do this as an appeal to readers who might be more connected with the "dark arts" of Internet marketing than I am. Of the sites I've run over the years, the ones included in the Google News index have encountered a far, far greater incident of spam attempts in comments and other UGC features than those not included in the index.

And that's not explained simply by site popularity, either. My two biggest family-owned websites are not in the Google News index, but OJR is. And OJR elicits exponentially more comment spam submissions than the other two sites, despite the fact that those sites receive around five to 10 times the daily traffic of OJR. (It's gotten so bad that we now hold all comments not from site authors for approval before posting on OJR.)

If you're ready to dismiss that observation as a single data point (and you should be), allow to me suggest that others may be experiencing the same. Speaking with other Web publishers, I've heard those whose sites are in the Google News index report getting hit with platform-independent comment spam at a far higher rate than those whose sites are not. (This isn't to say that sites not in Google News don't suffer spam attacks. The highly popular sites not in the Google News index tend to be blogs and forums running off-the-shelf publishing software, which from time to time attract spam attacks targeted specifically at those publishing systems. But those attacks are aimed at the publishing platform more than at the individual websites.) These submissions are typically human-generated, and include link spam either in the comment itself, or on the reader's site profile page.

Are spammers targeting sites in the Google News index? I haven't spent enough time with the black hats of the 'net to know, despite my suspicion. Consider this my appeal to those who have to provide an answer.

In the meantime, from a system administration stand-point, I want my website to be well-known to people in its target community... and completely off the radar of spammers and search engine black hats. To me, that means:

selecting a publishing system with an enthusiastic support community that's aggressive about security,
making sure that my site's home page uses sound search engine optimization techniques to appear at the top of results pages for my site's name and its community name,
and spending my energy to cultivate connections within my target community, offline and on, staying clear of link swaps, black hat SEO and becoming a spammer myself.

Getting into Google News? (Or Yahoo! News or Bing's news page?) Meh. Put that at the bottom of your priority list. As an online news publisher, you have better ways of building your readership community. Focus on those, instead.

Freedom of the press ought to belong to all... not just to approved 'journalists'

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:39:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Can you do journalism and not be a "journalist"?

Do people declared "journalists" get special speech and press rights that other American citizens do not enjoy?

Can anyone enjoy the right to free speech and free publication, even if that individual is not a full-time professional reporter?

These are some of the important legal questions that American politicians and bureaucrats must confront now that the Internet has made possible for people other than employees of major media companies to reach large and widespread audiences.

In recent weeks, federal officials seems to be favoring a view that certain individuals enjoy more speech and publication rights than others. New regulations from the Federal Trade Commission and a proposed federal shield law create legal double standards for individuals creating information for the public - one for employees and contractors of media companies and another for everyone else, including self-employed publishers.

This split calls into question what the First Amendment means, and whom it was intended to protect. Henry Mencken famously said that "freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." [*Update: Jay Rosen tweets that the correct source of the quote, "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" is A. J. Liebling. Citation here.] But with the Internet making a "press" available to anyone for free, does that "press" have to be of a certain type, or reach a certain number of people, to qualify for First Amendment protection?

The FTC this month published new regulations on the disclosure of advertiser-sponsored messages which could force bloggers and other independent publisher to publicly disclose every book, CD or sporting event admission that they receive in the course of their work, or face thousands of dollars in fines. Yet the FTC explicitly exempted offline, established media publishers from the new regulations.

Book blogger Edward Champion interviewed Richard Cleland of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection last week, prompting an evisceration of Cleland's remarks by DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas. Mark Cuban also publicly mocked the FTC rules.

Personally, I would love to see a strong crackdown on deceptive advertising. Businesses should not have the right to mislead the public by paying other parties to republish specific advertising messages, without disclosing that they are paid ads.

But the Supreme Court has granted First Amendment free-speech protection to quite a bit of commercial speech. And there's a huge difference between paying a blogger to republish a specific commercial message and sending another blogger a free MP3 of a new music track to review.

The FTC should recognize that difference. Cleland's remarks and its own guidelines (see page 47), however, suggest that the commission's leadership remains oblivious. The concept that bloggers can cover their beats critically, and not merely as shills, seems lost upon the FTC.

I do not believe that the purposed of the First Amendment was to provide legal protection to specific class of corporations, namely, newspaper companies. The intent was, and should continue to be, to empower the people of the country, collectively and as individuals, to keep a watchful eye on their government and communities, and to speak in advocacy of their beliefs.

The Internet has fulfills the Founders' promise of a free press to the people. No longer is "freedom of the press" limited to an elite few, as was the case in ~~Mencken~~ Liebling's day. People who have devoted their careers to reporting and publishing news should welcome this functional expansion of the First Amendment, providing us millions of new potential allies, engaged in our communities. A handful of clueless bureaucrats in the FTC should not be empowered to stand in their way.

Nor should established news organizations welcome what the FTC is trying to do. Unfortunately, the New York Times has, writing in an recent editorial:

"This is a matter of principle, not medium, and the new rules are not an excessive burden. The guidelines state that endorsers must disclose payments in cash or in kind from companies whose products they endorse. Telling a commentator flogging a product online to disclose commercial ties does not constitute a challenge to free speech."

I welcome reading the Times' movie critics noting in each of their reviews how they saw that film for free. And for the Times' book critics doing the same for the books that they review. I suspect, however, that will never happen. Why? Because the new rules are a matter of medium, and are not an excessive burden only to those, like the New York Times, who have been exempted from following them.

Here's hoping that Congress strikes down the FTC rules before they take effect. Or that a deep-pocketed blogger, such as Cuban or Kos, takes on the FTC in court, not leaving that task to middle-class online journalists who lacks the bank account to challenge the feds.

There ought to be no special class of citizen called a "journalist." Anyone who does journalism, even if for just a moment in their lives, ought to enjoy the protections of the First Amendment when they choose to speak or to publish. Otherwise, we are ceding to unelected corporate employers the power to determine who gets First Amendment rights, or not.

Freedom of the press belongs to all Americans, and not just to the newspaper industry - despite what the FTC and the New York Times would have you believe.

No more whining at 2009's Online News Association conference

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:20:00 MST

By Robert Niles: SAN FRANCISCO - If there's a theme to this year's Online Journalism Association conference, it'd be: "No More Whining."

Several of us have commented on the lack of the whining from newspaper-dot-com employees, which weighed down past ONA gatherings. Perhaps now, at long last, a tipping point of online news managers from traditional news companies have moved beyond the old print-driven model of trying to protect crumbling monopolies, and instead are now embracing competition, so that they may engage it.

Or, maybe, most of those folks got laid off and now they have no choice but to compete.

Either way, the focus has moved beyond protecting the past and on to finding one's way through the future. As Paul Bass of NewHavenIndependent.org said during a session yesterday, "The only people who think journalism are dying are working at dying news organizations."

ONA appears to be making long-overdue advances to those not working for those "dying news organizations." One of the all-day pre-conference tracks yesterday was devoted to talking about how would-be entrepreneurs could fund start-up online news initiatives. This morning, ONA President Jon Dube announced that the organization would run a one-day training seminar in Ann Arbor, Mich. next month "tailored specifically to the needs of 100 independent, community, non-profit, displaced and employed journalists, bloggers and entrepreneurs in the area," according to an ONA press release.

[Note: the following graph was changed to correct that non-FT online journalists always could join ONA as associates, as Jon Dube just reminded me.] At one time, ONA barred many independent online journalists from joining the organization as professionals, by requiring that applicants be able to document that they'd earned the majority of their income from working in online news. (That was easy for employees of newspaper-dot-coms. Not so easy for many influential news bloggers and freelance reporters, many of whom were relying on outside or non-Web income to survive as their blogs grew and found revenue.) Those who couldn't do so could join as associates, but up until recently, they could not vote for or serve on the board. To the organization's credit, it has now opened its board elections to non-full-time pros.

This year's ONA event explicitly acknowledges and discusses alternate models for news companies and initiatives, as well as alternate career paths for journalists. Yesterday, Jay Rosen and many others tweeted a link to former Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple's keynote address at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. Temple's piece damns an old-media obsession with doubling-down on old habits in order to protect the institution's business model. The Rocky Mountain News, under the direction of the E.W. Scripps Co., cleaved to its print ways as its audience (both readers and advertisers) shifted to the Web.

The Rocky should have known better since, unlike almost all other U.S. dailies, it published in a highly competitive media market, locked in a newspaper war with the Denver Post. Just as wrongly as the French building the Maginot Line, the Rocky believed that the front in its war was being fought in print, ignoring other possible models and methods for serving local readers and advertisers.

I have a unique perspective on what happened at the Rocky, bring the editorial and technical head of the Rocky's website during 1996-1999, the early years in the narrative that Temple offered in his speech. I could write a "Rashomon"-like response to Temple, but allow me here merely to note that our small Web staff had developed a hyperlocal news network strategy and a daily, downloadable audio newscast in 1997, a reader-driven, Yelp-like local entertainment guide in 1998 and one of the Web's first live news blogs, covering the Columbine shootings in April 1999.

The Rocky's failure was not in developing new services and models, it was in management failing to embrace them. As Temple wrote, the print side never promoted any of our Web initiatives. In 1999, the paper convened a task force on the Web, and including no one from its then-current Web production and tech development team. That task force led to another business management shift at the website, after which I left to take a job with the Los Angeles Times and the new management team dropped almost all the interactive features we'd developed.

Temple urged his audience to look beyond the old ways. At ONA, plenty of speakers and participants are doing the same as well. Take the serendipitous route, and create a site such as Debbie Galant's Baristanet. Or put together a smaller, local version of the non-profit ProPublica and Center for Public Integrity projects, as Bass did with NewHavenIndependent.org. Explore the still-lucrative segment of B2B news publishing, as E & E Daily Publisher Kevin Braun detailed.

Oh, and don't forget about niche-topic online news reporting (which yours truly and many others are using to stay in this game).

If there's still a weakness in the event, it is that the ONA conference remains a one-way event, with speakers lecturing from the front of the rooms. Journalists have been listening to sources their entire lives. Collecting and publishing information is not their weakness. Acting on that information often is. Journalists making the transition from an old model into a multitude of new ones need to learn not just to listen to new ideas, but to act upon them. A more hands-on approach, such as that found a so many tech conferences, could help lead not just to inspiration, but fresh new projects and initiatives emerging immediately from ONA events.

Still, inspiration is not a worthless result. It's a welcomed one, given the negativity that's defined too many journalism gatherings in recent years.

"Journalism will survive the death of its institutions," Placeblogger.com founder Lisa Williams told a ONA session yesterday. Those who are willing to consider and embrace new models will be the individuals whose journalism careers survive that passing.

Build your ties to the community to build your news site's revenue

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:53:00 MST

By Robert Niles: There are two types of advertisers in the world (in my experience, at least):

Those who track every placement, counting the clicks and conversions, to determine how much new revenue each placement generated, minus the cost of creating and running the ads.

Those who buy an ad because they like the publication, and want to support what it does for the community.

As a publisher, I thank all my advertisers and appreciate their support. But, man, oh man, I do love the second type.

For them, the decision to support a publication isn't simply an economic transaction - it's an act of passion. And passion is contagious. Someone likes what I'm doing so much that she's putting money down to support it, with no thought to whether she gets it back? Hey, if someone believes in me like that, I want to work even harder to justify that faith.

Those are the advertisers who buy banners on Little League and schoolyard fences. You'll find them in the back of community theater programs. For them, buying an ad is not simply like buying raw materials or supplies - an initial investment that enables greater return down the road. Sure, they're hoping for that, but for them, buying an ad also makes a statement - that they are a proud member of the community and spending their money to support other community institutions, as a result.

Now, to attract these community-minded advertisers, you can't think like the first type of advertisers yourself. If you're not contributing to the community, why should they contribute to you? If you see your relationships with advertisers as strictly dollars-and-cents, why shouldn't they feel the same way about you?

You can't make an appeal to the second type of advertisers part of a start-up business plan. Those relationship build more organically, and only after a publication has established itself as a valued part of their mutual community. (I'd also argue that you can't attract the first type of advertiser until you've established a viable audience, either. Which is why news websites need either enough cash in the bank to fund them until they build an audience, or need to operate as bare-bones, bootstrap operations until then.)

How do you appeal to these advertisers? For the first type, you need detailed audience data, including audience size, demographics and behavior. For the second, you need to demonstrate your service to the community: unique coverage that keeps the community well-informed, a respected forum for individual voices, advocacy for the public interest.

It also helps, in reaching out to the second type of advertiser, to show your personal community ties. It's much easier for the owner of a family-owned, local paper, born and raised in the community, to show those ties than for a publisher or ad rep for a corporate-owned paper, who just moved into town from out-of-state.

It's also easier to make these sales when you're adding, not cutting, coverage and features of service to the community. Community-minded business owners will pitch in to help a neighbor in need. But they expect their investment in you to go to protect services, not profit margins. If you're cutting coverage of schools, churches or other community institutions, you'd better be in the red or at break-even, with the fat cut elsewhere, before going hat-in-hand to local advertisers of the second type for additional help.

As a website publisher, I want to get together with other website publishers to make a case to this type of advertiser that some news websites are worthy of this type of community support. As corporate-owned newspapers cut back their coverage of local and topical communities, some online site are stepping forward.

Next Wednesday, my colleague Sasha Anawalt will write on OJR about the National Summit on Arts Journalism that she is helping host at USC one week from today. Anawalt put together this summit in part to uncover new models for arts journalism, as traditional news organizations reduce or eliminate their coverage of the arts.

I've shared with Anawalt my belief that arts organizations can help sustain coverage of their programming by redirecting advertising dollars from publications that are reducing coverage and losing readers to those which are expanding coverage and attracting more readers as a result. It's emotionally difficult for me, as a former newspaper employee, to make a case to advertisers to cut back their spending on newspaper advertising. But newspapers that withdraw from a community are no longer as deserving of that community's support as publications which are increasing their engagement with it. My loyalty lies with journalists, not necessarily newspaper companies.

Like many OJR readers, I've also been following the recent attempts by the newspaper industry to reach out to Washington, both to appeal for anti-trust exemptions to allow for price-fixing of online news, as well as for tax breaks for the news industry.

If revenue from the first type of advertisers no longer provides enough income to fund the ambitious reporting that great newsrooms can do, why not reach to local communities instead of to Washington? Why not turn first to those you serve most closely, to build upon the relationships you've established with them, to help preserve and sustain those community ties into the future?

Then it stuck me: Maybe that's exactly what some folks at the big newspaper chains are doing. They're going to their community: Washington. As multi-billion-dollar conglomerates, they have far more in common these days with the other big corporations that address their business challenges by lobbying Senators and Representatives than they have with smaller, more community-focused local businesses. (You know, the type that they bought to amass their chains.)

Building a community can help build a business. And if some news companies feel more comfortable building their business on K Street than on their publications' Main Streets, I think that ultimately explains more about the predicament they're in than anything that's happening online.

Eight things that journalism students should demand from their journalism schools

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:07:00 MST

By Robert Niles: The new semester is well underway at almost all the nation's journalism schools. Students have received their syllabi, explaining exactly what the school expects from its students during their courses.

But what should students expect from their schools? Sure, they're getting classes and instruction, but those alone won't be enough for most journalism students. Their educations must extend beyond the classroom syllabus if they are to have the best chance to compete in what has become a brutally competitive information marketplace.

Unfortunately, that experience can "fall through the cracks" of a college education, if students do not seize the initiative to demand it. So here is my list of eight things I believe every journalism student must demand from his or her journalism school:

Role models
Students should demand access to working journalists, in addition to the adjunct faculty. Most schools provide that, frequently bringing guest speakers on to campus. But such events often are not required, leaving students to take the initiative to attend.

Not only should they do so, they should let the school's faculty and administration know what additional voices they'd like to hear from, too. Programming speakers can be a pain. Most schools would welcome students' feedback on guests and events, despite many students' reticence to speak up about them.

A mentor
Access to potential role models outside the school's faculty is just the first step. At some point in their careers, students need to deepen their relationship with at least one role model, and adopt that individual as a mentor.

In teaching our "boot camp" for news entrepreneurs earlier this year, Tom O'Malia of the USC Marshall School of Business insisted that campers find a mentor to help guide them on their journey as news entrepreneurs. Mentorship provides crucial guidance in any professional's lifelong education. Students cheat themselves of opportunity if they wait until mid-career to find a mentor, or if they never find one at all. (Not finding a mentor in my early journalism career remains my single greatest professional regret in life.)

Like a romantic relationship, a robust mentorship can't be forced. It must develop, naturally, between two people. But that does not excuse students to be passive in seeking a mentor. They must actively engage with potential mentors during their time in school.

Employment contacts
Yeah, sure, education is its own reward. Yada, yada. But when you're spending this kind of cash to get a degree, you'd better demand some help in getting a job once you're out of school.

Job fairs featuring reps from newspapers that just laid off a quarter (or more) of their newsroom staffs shouldn't count anymore. Students must demand that their schools begin engaging with publishers who aren't laying off staff and losing market share. Sure, it's nice to meet folks from the big newspaper chains. But journalism schools must start building relationships with emerging online news publishers in their communities, with people who can either hire their graduates or at least provide the entrepreneurial mentors that they will need.

Economic consolidation is coming in the independent online news business. The schools that build relationships early with the Scripps and Knights of tomorrow will be the ones who place more of their graduates with these emerging firms. No, they likely won't hire as many grads as the old Scripps, Knights and Gannetts did back in their day. Which makes it all the more important that j-schools have a chair for their grads when the music stops.

A place to hack
Online is becoming the dominant news publish medium. And online publishing will not look the way it does today 10 years from now, just as it looks little now like it did 10 years ago. Students need forums in which to explore and test their interactive publishing skills. They need sandboxes in which to play.

While traditional syllabi train students in established story forms, students must demand time and access to explore emerging forms, in social media and whatever else they might dream up. Hacking isn't simply programming; it's an attitude that encourages people to find new uses for old forms. That's something journalism desperately needs. If a school doesn't provide those opportunities for its students, they must demand it.

Work experience
Every j-school I've ever encountered has a placement office where you can get applications and contacts for internships, part-time jobs, freelance gigs and full-time work.

I'm not talking about those.

Students need to demand directions to the school's general placement office, where they can find jobs that have nothing to do with journalism. Every j-student needs to spend at least a few summers working outside the field, learning what work's like for other folks. These shouldn't be the type of jobs that other college students take to earn a few bucks; these should be the type of jobs that some people do for a living.

Great journalists draw upon a wealth of personal knowledge and experience. Work provides as much, if not greater, opportunity to develop that as the classroom does. I spent my summers as an undergraduate working at Walt Disney World. I never dreamed that job would affect my journalism career, but that experience eventually led me to start a theme park news website that's become my primary source of income.

The fewer, or narrower, life experiences a student has to draw upon, the fewer such opportunities that student will have later in life.

Deep knowledge of a field other than journalism
I'm making the same point here, but from the academic perspective. Today's publishing market has little place for the general assignment reporter. Readers have instant access to experts writing on any topic imaginable. A journalism graduate must be able to report with understanding and write with insight to compete with the many other available news sources online today. Academic study in one's beat field provides the foundation upon which a journalism student can build a lifetime's personal experience and reporting to help inform their writing.

Don't slide by with the minimum the j-school requires you to do outside the school. Students must demand, of themselves and of their schools, rigorous coursework in the fields which they will cover when they graduate.

Getting your name out there
Here's a scenario I often described for my students, when I was teaching:

"Imagine that you are a news publisher. Your budget's tight and you can hire only one j-school graduate this year. You've got hundreds of applicants, many with great clips. Some you have met, and like. And a few have started their own online publications already.
"Who ya gonna hire? The student with potential... or the student who's already got 50,000 unique readers a month?"

A generation ago, no students brought an audience to the table. All anyone had was potential, and employers hired based on that. That's no longer the case. Students who bring their own audience have measurably more value to an employer than those who do not.

Don't get caught behind those students. Get your name out there, now. Find opportunities to publish your best work online, with your name and photo prominently attached. Engage with readers in comments and forums. Demand that your school provide its students with every opportunity to do so.

Journalism schools must act as agents for their students, promoting them to potential employers and readers from the first day they start reporting on campus. Developing potential isn't enough in this competitive environment. Students need j-schools that will help them offer not just potential, but results.

Passion, not excuses
The worst thing that journalism schools can do to their students is immerse them in a culture of failure. Instructors do that anytime they complain about the state of the news business, griping how much better it used to be and how awful bloggers/forums/websites are.

Students need passion for their field they are about to enter, and complaints and excuses from those who have left it.

There are more news sources available today to readers than ever before. More eyes are watching our governments and our business institutions. The public can speak for itself to a global audience, moving closer to fully realizing the potential of democracy. Experts are becoming storytellers, offering greater detail and deeper insight to the readers who want that.

I can't speak for you, but this fires me up. It should fire up every journalism instructor, too.

There are so many opportunities out there for our journalism students today. But they won't be able to engage those challenges if they've been steeped in a culture of a failure, knowing no other way to work in journalism than to be hired by a shrinking newspaper chain.

Students must demand better than that from their journalism schools. Those schools owe it to their students to deliver.

Can the Web forge a marriage between newspaper investigations and documentary filmmaking?

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:29:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Two weeks ago, Thomas Maier at Newsday pinged me about a project he and the team at Newsday had just published - an ambitious multimedia investigation into the aftermath of U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific. I asked Thomas if he'd answer some questions for OJR readers about the project. His responses got me thinking about the ways that newspaper investigations are naturally evolving into the same space as documentary filmmaking, thanks to multimedia convergence on the Web.

Having sat through so many PBS shows and pledge drives where hosts offer up copies of the network's documentaries on DVD for $20 a pop and up, Newsday's initial steps into documentary production suggest, to me at least, a possible alternate medium for newspapers to pursue their so-far elusive paid-content dreams. Forget about reading text on the Web for a moment. How about getting folks to pay for newspaper-produced investigative documentaries on Blu-Ray and DVD? Or pay-per-view or short-term rental via cable, satellite or movie distribution networks such as Netflix? What are the possibilities for long-form video news storytelling?

Robert: Walk us through the short tour of what you folks did, and how you did it. Whose idea was is it to do the video element, and how long did that take to produce?

Thomas: From the very earliest stage, this project was conceived as a multimedia investigation because of the wealth of photos, archival footage of nuclear bombs bursting in air, and the dramatic life stories of the Marshallese who were put back deliberately on their radioactive island as part of Brookhaven National Lab's 43-year study for the U.S. government. Ideally, we were hoping to combine Newsday's tradition of hard-hitting investigative reporting with a narrated "Frontline"-style documentary that could be shown on the Web in nine "chapters", averaging about five minutes or less. With our new owner, Cablevision System Corp., there was also a new opportunity to offer this 32-minute documentary as a single complete presentation without "chapters" on Newsday's on-demand channel -- a new emerging medium that offers the chance to tell our story not only on the small screen of a laptop but also on the much larger at-home TV screen, where the visual and story-telling impact is even greater.

In 2006, I stumbled across a university website that contained many once-confidential documents about U.S. nuclear testing during the Cold War that was made public during the Clinton Administration. Though much has been written about the 1954 Bravo hydrogen bomb blast that covered many Marshallese in radioactive, the little-known story about Brookhaven Lab's actions in the Pacific� with serious allegations of treating people like human "guinea pigs" to learn about the impact of radiation on the human body � emerged by piecing these documents together. By 2007, Newsday decided to send photographer and video journalist John Paraskevas and myself to the Marshall Islands. John and I have worked together for many years at Newsday, beginning with an investigation of police corruption that won the national Sigma Delta Chi prize in 1986. John is generally known as Newsday's most accomplished video journalist, and I've had a long interest in video journalism, dating back to Columbia Journalism School where I won the 1982 documentary prize for an investigation of the mob's influence at the Fulton Fish Market. Although things at Newsday have been topsy-turvy with three owners since our 2007 trip, John and I continued working on this project when our schedules allowed until the documentary finally appeared along with a 5,000 Sunday magazine piece and on-line sidebars in August.

This project revealed how Brookhaven researchers deliberately returned 250 people to their bomb-contaminated islands in 1957 in order to study the flow of radiation through their bodies. When the Marshallese developed cancer and thyroid problems over the coming decades, more than 100 were paid $25,000 to have questionable thyroid surgery, often without their informed medical consent. For years, they were not told about the rising amount of radiation in their bodies from living on their contaminated homeland, not until they all fled in 1985, leaving their islands abandoned. Now the Obama administration and Congress is being asked to pay for 2007 Nuclear Claims Tribunal award of $1 billion to those from Rongelap, the most affected Marshallese people, whom the Tribunal ruled were deliberately put back on their islands for "military and scientific concerns."

Our print story and on-line sidebars detailed exactly how things happened, while the video was meant as a epic-like narrative, capturing the sights and sounds over five decades of the Marshallese and the team from Brookhaven, one of Long Island's most esteemed institutions where six Nobel Prizes have been won. It became Newsday's first investigative documentary, with hopefully many more to come.

Robert: Did you have to go outside the newsroom for help on this - with production, or at least, training? What help did you get? Did Cablevision get involved?

Thomas: John Paraskevas and myself produced this whole thing as team, with the support of investigations editor Steve Wick, magazine editor Tim Healy and multimedia editor Arnold Miller. In the reporting, John filmed all of our interviews and I edited all the sound bites into a log sheet with time codes, and wrote the script along with numbered photos and clips that pertained to each segment. We were very fortunate to find and collect photos from Brookhaven Lab's files, the Defense department's color footage of US nuclear testing, videotaped testimony given before the Nuclear Claims Tribunal as well as personal photos and footage from those interviewed. Both John and I worked with Final Cut Pro (something I think ALL print reporters should know how to do) on various segments along the way, as well as the narration and the use of Soundtrack Pro in providing background music. John kept an eye on the visuals and I did on the story-telling. We both have a deep and long-time interest in documentary-style video. John has produced more in-depth video segments than any Newsday photographer and I've produced about 25 separate video stories in the past year. Yet neither of us had been involved in something this seemingly overwhelming.

Although Newsday produced this project independently, Cablevision's News12 news director Pat Dolan was very gracious in his support. I'm particularly excited by the prospect of making a full-length version of the 32-minute documentary, which we called "Fallout", available on Newsday's new on-demand channel on the Cablevision system.

Robert: Is this the most ambitious video project Newsday has done to date? What does a typical Web video project at Newsday look like?

Thomas: By far, this is Newsday's most ambitious and complex project of any sort involving video. Most newspaper videos are raw visual grabs off the daily news, usually with little or no narration and largely defined by the persons or events being filmed. It is still rare for print reporters to play the role of producers or narrators, synthesizing reporting into a script that is written for the ear as well as the eye. Increasingly, though, this "YouTube" approach is giving way to a more polished presentation, more like the videos found on "Hulu", which will undoubtedly be appreciated by a smart, affluent suburban audience like Newsday's readers. Both John and I have been involved in other videos stories of more than five minutes in length, but nothing fully integrated as a 32-minute investigative documentary. We wanted to tell this video in the best form of narrative writing, centering on two main characters � Dr. Robert Conard, the long-time head of Brookhaven's program and John Anjain, the mayor of Rongelap, most seriously contaiminated Marshallese atoll whose own son died on radiation-related cancer. Over the years, the initial friendship of these two men � which turned to distrust and bitterness � reflected the essential drama of our documentary.

Without a doubt, this was a full-fledged investigation in Newsday's tradition, both with some really tough reporting here with Brookhaven and U.S. Energy Department officials, and with some very real human logistical and linguistic challenges in the Marshall Islands. During our trip, for instance, we flew about 800 miles in a prop plane to the still abandoned radioactive island of Rongelap, accompanied by two Marshallese bomb survivors who recounted their experiences. Some told us of loved ones who died from radiation, how they got sick or had surgery because of "the poison," as they called it. In taped on-the-record interviews, they told us what it was like to have their growth retarded by radiation or to worry about birth defects among their children. With the help of a translator, we returned with more than 50 hours of taped interviews and B-roll from our two-week trip.

Down the road, I think the emerging medium of Newsday's on-demand channel will provide a wonderful opportunity for multimedia projects. If newspapers are going to go "behind the wall" � asking readers to pay for their website offerings � quality journalism will undoubtedly be a main draw. But on-demand cable offerings by newspapers � with HD television viewed on large screens, selected from a menu available whenever people want to watch � may become a natural showcase for investigative and indepth reporting. Where those watching a postage-stamp player in a computer during lunchtime at work may get antzy after a few minutes, a well-produced local documentary report told in "60 Minutes' or "Frontline"-style may be very appealing to both the audience at home and advertisers. But for John and myself, the sheer challenge of this project � of "flying by the seat of your pants" with a new, emerging medium � was enough fun and excitement to carry us through days and nights of exhausting work.

Robert: How did you decide to draw attention to the video, in print, on the website and within the article? Did you look at any studies or existing data on effective promotion, on-page placement and linkage of online video? If so, what did they tell you?

Thomas: How the stories were played and promoted were decided by Newsday's editors. With help from our multimedia editor Arnold Miller, we prepared a 15-minute promo � pulled from some clips of the documentary � that appeared on Newsday's website starting five days before the project appeared. Of course, down the road, newspapers like Newsday might offer a permanent window on their site where in-depth documentaries can be highlighted, and in-house print ads might draw the readers attention to upcoming documentary productions that would be of interest to potential viewers. I'm sure as things change, we'll get much smarter.

Robert: Have you considered a broadcast/cable presentation of the video, in addition to the Web presentation?

Thomas: Yes, indeed. We're in the process of re-editing the nine-part Internet version of the documentary into a full-length, non-stop 32-minute presentation for Newsday's on-demand channel, available to Cablevision's Long Island audience. We've also discussed the possibility of showing the documentary some night this fall at a local cinema along with a panel discussion.

Eventually, I think this new medium of on-demand cable will be the most defining place for newspaper-produced documentaries, particularly if the topic is wide enough and interesting enough to attract a sizeable audience. It will allow video presentations to "breathe" with better visuals and sound presentations, and a pacing that is more engaging to folks sitting on the livingroom couch at home.

Robert: How do you measure the impact of the project, and the video in particular? Circulation, traffic, media mentions, social media links? Policy changes? How do you think you should be measuring the impact of a project such as this?

Thomas: The project had an immediate impact, with the Marshall Island president requesting a meeting this fall with President Obama to discuss the 2007 Tribunal award and whether the U.S. pay will any of the $1 billion damages, including $34 million for "emotional distress" to those people who were deliberately put back on a contaminated island. Ultimately an investigative project like this one showcases your intent to keep your audience informed of the most vital issues in the community. Long-time Newsday readers have come to depend on this "watchdog" journalism. Our late editor, Bob Greene, would be proud of that Steve Wick and I, two member of the old Greene team, were now producing investigative documentaries, trying to carry on the tradition.

Robert: Why did you break the video into so many parts? How do you find the sweet spot between overloading people with a too-large file and losing viewers by having too many segments to click through?

Thomas: Getting a feel for just how long a segment should be turned out to be one of the most vexing questions for us. Our opening chapter was built around our trip with the bomb survivors to abandoned Rongelap island. We used that trip as the vehicle to briefly summarize the consequences of the decision by Brookhaven and U.S. officials to gamble with the lives and health of 250 people, by putting them back on a radioactive island with the intent of studying them. So that first segment � sort of a billboard for our findings -- was our longest. The rest of the chapters � which recounted the entire story from the very beginning in the 1950s and reaching chronologically up to today � was told in smaller segments, each around 3-4 minutes. I'm not sure there is an easy answer -- except to edit things so that not a moment is wasted. When writing books, I've learned that short chapters keep the reader moving along. But I didn't want to create a rigid template that squeezes out the essential pleasure derived from story-telling (a growing problem in print newspapers these days with cost constraints). Ideally in the future, each chapter in a video documentary on the Web should automatically be linked on a playlist, so they effortlessly move from one to the next. In this case, the chapters were on a carousel and Newsday viewers simply had to click to get the next chapter. Obviously, this documentary wasn't a quick video grab of a car accident or celebrity sighting, but a long-form story on a website where people usually spend time during their lunch break. Down the road, the name of the game will be to get our viewers to stay with our website for more than a few minutes, and I'm sure hard-hitting investigative videos, if they become a steady diet, will allow newspapers to extend the amount of time that viewers spend on their websites. Great stories, well told. It's the oldest, hardest, most successful skill of all.

Robert: I notice that you have links to buy the video: How's that going? Is the revenue there significant?

Thomas: Videos produced by Newsday are routinely offered for sale, and I'm not in a position to comment about revenues and such. We've had some inquiries about whether we'll be selling the whole documentary as one unit, and I think that format may be the best way to go. I'll be curious to see if we soon offer documentaries like this for sale through on-demand channels. In the near future, I think Newsday's effort to produce videos on news, sports, documentary and local programming -- offered via on-demand channels for cable viewers at home -- may emerge as a big part of the newspaper's efforts and may be even more attractive to advertisers than the Web. This is, of course, for others to decide. Speaking as a journalist, I'm looking forward to more projects told through HD images, vivid sound and music, and becoming a better narrator of my own scripts.

Robert: How do you would justify future multimedia of this magnitude to a skeptical, cost-conscious management? (And if your management loves you now and is willing to fund future projects, how would you advise journalists in other newsrooms to elicit that kind of support?)

Thomas: The future for smart literate newspapers and magazines is clearly in multimedia presentations, showcased in ways that reflect who you're trying to attract as an audience. The old style of newspaper editors who prefer simply car accidents and cop arrests, turning the Web into a police blotter, are quickly fading. The challenge for newspapers will be in translating the "brain" of the newsroom � all those reporters working beats and developing sources and able to write print stories on deadline � into compelling and complementary video that can be quickly produced, scripted, narrated and edited with the quite efficient technology already available today like Final Cut Pro and Avid. Developing video and print stories together � under the same newsroom umbrella and not as separate units wary of one another � is the only way to go. That's especially so if your idea is to extend and capitalize on the affluent, well-educated audience of a suburban paper like Newsday and bring it profitably into the video age. This is no easy task, but it should be embraced by any journalist who wants to bring their stories to the widest audience possible. I do believe any print reporter � armed with a small HD camera and after some quick training on Final Cut Pro � can produce a five-minute video to accompany the next important print story you do. In this particular case, John Paraskevas and I worked together because of the sheer volume and complexity of the materials and because we've worked together as a team, not only as friends and colleagues for years but also as each's toughest editor. Documentary-making is the natural video expression of the newspaper investigation series. It's only a matter of time until newsrooms and their audience realize this.

Join us on OJR on Wednesday, when Kathlyn Clore writes about a coverage opportunity that many local news sites are missing - municipal traffic reports.

Howard Owens shows how journalists can become successful news entrepreneurs

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:34:00 MST

By Robert Niles: Howard Owens was starting online-only news sites back in the dark ages of the Web: 1996. Starting with a "hyperlocal" in San Diego (before that was a buzzword bingo staple), then moving on to several communities devoted to RVs (that's right, the big campers), Howard eventually found his way to E.W. Scripps in 1999. We met then, when I was editing the Rocky Mountain News' website and Howard was helping build the Ventura County Star's site into one of the best small-newspaper websites in the nation.

From there, Howard grabbed more industry attention by helping establish the Bakersfield Californian as one of the nation's leaders in news convergence, finally making his way to GateHouse Media, where he started his latest project, a hyperlocal news site called The Batavian.

Howard's split from GateHouse earlier this year, and took The Batavian with him. Today, as he has for the past decade, he remains a model for the next stage of journalism - this time, for print industry veterans moving out on their own, as journalist/entrepreneurs.

I swapped e-mails with him last week, discussing his journey in website publishing.

Robert: The element that most seems to freak out journalists thinking about striking out as a local news publisher is the business side. What in your previous experience most helped you in running the money side of things at The Batavian, and what new skills did you have to develop for this gig?

Howard: Maybe to my embarrassment, I've done a lot of different things in my life. I'm not one of those people who came out of high school or college with a clear vision of "this is what I'm going to do with my life." I've worked in Law Enforcement (USAF), politics and sales, in addition to my journalism career. I started in journalism, really, in elementary school, and then drifted in and out of it over the following decades. My online career has included two Web start ups (three, now, if you count The Batavian), freelance Web development, programming and executive positions at three different newspaper companies (including two with revenue responsibility).

Billie, my wife, asks me all the time how many people could do what I do. It's not that I'm so great at it. It's that I just have a broad skill set.

I can report and write news, sell ads, build ads, keep books and formulate and follow a business strategy.

But those are my abilities. I'd ask any aspiring publisher: What do you have going for you (read between the lines in the following to help you answer the question)?

Great reporters are resourceful. They don't take no for an answer. If one official won't answer a question, they'll go find a document or dig a little more until the official feels compelled to answer. What ever it takes to get the story. No wall is too high or too thick once a good reporter sets his or her mind to reporting a particular story.

That drive is the first pre-requisite to being an entrepreneur.

Let's not forget, my wife helps me, too.

What I do probably isn't a one-person operation. I might be able to do much on my own, and not many people may have the same skill set, but many pairs of people do. Find a partner.

At a minimum, you and/or your team needs to be able to handle content, sales, ad building, community relations and bookkeeping.

You probably don't want to start with more than two people. And it's best if the two people are married or living together to save expenses.

If you're a boot-strapped start up, you've got to keep expenses low and be willing to sacrifice. Also be prepared and willing to put in long hours.

One last thing I want to say about what I can do vs. what others might be able to do: Many, many aspiring publishers are going to have a tremendous advantage over me -- they've probably lived in the communities where they might start their online news business for a lot longer -- if not their whole lives -- than I lived in Batavia before starting The Batavian. I've been fortunate that the community has embraced Billie and as I as they have, but for a well-connected journalist in a town he knows well, he's greatly going to cut the marketing arc of his business and probably know several business owners who will start early with advertising just to help him or her out. Plus the coverage will just naturally be better from the beginning.

The other thing I would encourage any aspiring publisher to do is study Clayton Christensen and Michael Porter. Having a firm grasp on disruptive innovation and competitive advantage will serve any business owner greatly in fashioning and maintaining a strategy.

All said, none of this is hard. It's just hard work. Be prepared and willing. Slackers won't prevail.

Robert: It's hard enough for a lot of journalists keeping on top of sources while covering a single beat. How do you keep track of your news sources *and* your advertisers *and* potential news sources and advertisers as a local online publisher?

Howard: Well, first off, I make mistakes. I've not made too many factual mistakes on the news side, but I've missed appointments or not followed up as quickly as I should have with advertisers. This has undoubtedly cost me money.

But I just try to be organized and I get better at it all the time.

I don't' work out of my home. I have an actual office I go to. I know a lot of people want to make a virtue out of telecommuting, but I think it's very important to first, have a place to go to work; second, have an office downtown where you're showing a commitment to the community and the business community. I can't stress enough how important our downtown office is to the perception of The Batavian in the community. A lot of people tried to discourage me from opening such an office. I'm more convinced than ever it was the right thing to do.

But that's getting off track: An office helps me be organized, too. I may be just one person, but I have two desks -- one is the newsroom and the other is the business/sales office. Depending on which hat I'm wearing, I sit at a different desk. Different computers. That way I'm not distracted with other tasks and I have a clear perception of what I'm doing at any given moment.

I use spreadsheets, Quickbooks, calendards and my iPhone to keep track of accounts, sales, appointments and stories.

A small thing, but I have a backpack that serves as my mobile newsroom and I make sure it's always ready to go, batteries charged, tape in the camera, extra of everything I might run out of, etc.

As for sources -- it's a small town. I just get to know people over time. Sure, I keep some lists and have my directories, etc., but I just track things as I always have. The news side of it feels no different than when I was a reporter at a small daily paper. There was never a time in my career where I wasn't doing some cop reporting as well as city government, schools and water agencies, etc. Maybe guys at big metros haven't experienced that, but it's not hard.

The other thing is, I no longer feel obligated to do watchdog, investigative, enterprise journalism. I realize that's important, and I've done some of it with The Batavian, but as I've come to better understand my own disruptive strategy, I concentrate more on what I call cheap news. While we're in our "building a business" phase, the most critical thing we can do is post frequently. If I'm working on a big story that will lead to one post, I might miss an opportunity to post 12 other things, and those 12 things will do more to build audience than that one big thing. If I'm successful, eventually the business will be big enough that we can afford more enterprise reporting, but we're not there yet and I no longer feel guilty about it.

So I do a lot of scanner reporting, meeting coverage and one-source stories.

Cheap news.

Also, our content partnership with the local radio station, WBTA helps. I don't have to get to everything. The station's owner and staff cover things too. It's a great relationship, too. We have a sort of budget meeting at least once a day and share what we're working on and divvy up the work if necessary. It also helps to have a professional colleague and fellow small media business owner to commiserate with.

Robert: Who are your role models as an independent online news publisher? Why?

Howard: Obviously, Baristanet and West Seattle Blog are great inspirations. Mike Orren is a friend and mentor of sorts. But a site that doesn't get a lot of attention but figured prominently in planning The Batavian -- and I've spoken and written about this site many times -- is NewzJunky. Both the idea that we could build a strong local audience and the ad model we use were inspired by NewzJunky.

Rob Curley is a good friend and we've talked about local journalism many times over the years. We share a strong mutual interest in William Allen White. White and the small town independent newspaper publishers of the late 19th and early 20th Century are also an inspiration. I got a glimpse into the bio of many such men while with GateHouse. I loved traveling to visit the small dailies GHM owned and learning about the history of the papers. They were all started by entrepreneurs. People forget that few if any papers started as chain-owned entities. These were people who took great risk, experimented and bootstrapped their way to success.

I think about White, in particular, nearly every day as I go about doing what I do.

Robert: What's the biggest mistake that you see other independent online news start-ups make? And conversely, what is the biggest mistake that you see traditional newspaper companies make in trying to defend (much less expand) their space in these markets?

Howard: The worst mistake any news publisher can make online is to try and recreate the newspaper online. Newspaper publishers have been doing it for more than a decade, and I had a role in my previous jobs of perpetuating that mistake. Many former print journalists who think their future is online want to build sites that emulate these newspaper sites. And they want to do journalism just as they always did it in print.

If you're not striving to be 100 percent web native in your operation, you're going to diminish your level of success.

I'm not saying we've hit this perfectly with The Batavian, but it's certainly our goal to be web native and throw out everything from newspaper think that we can.

For start ups, the other big mistake is not having a business plan. If you don't know how you're going to make money, you'll eventually fail. You need to have executable ideas that are sure to work on the revenue side and then work the revenue side of your business just as hard, if not harder, than your content side.

Robert: What's been your most satisfying moment running The Batavian? And the most frustrating?

Howard: Well, it's always a thrill when you're out in public and people rush up to you and say, "You're The Batavian guy! I love your site. I'm addicted to it." Nobody ever told me they were addicted to my newspaper reporting.

But one single moment -- getting this picture:

http://thebatavian.com/blogs/howard-owens/4th-challenger-baseball-season-opens-blast/7169

Challenger Baseball is run by Genesee ARC for special needs kids. I went out to their opening game this year because a local friend of youth sports was going to get an award and I wanted to get a picture. I got there just at the start of the last inning of the last game and thought I'd take a picture or two. I walked around the batter just coming to the plate. I happened to snap my picture of the first pitch with just the right timing to catch the ball connecting with the bat. It was the first over-the-fence home run in Challenger Baseball history.

It still thrills me that I happened to catch that moment in a picture.

Robert: How do you identify and pitch a new, potential advertiser? What do you need to have in order to make that pitch successful?

Howard: This could be a seminar -- I started going to the businesses first that were advertising the most. These are people that understand the value of marketing and want to get their name out there as much as possible. With them, it's just a matter of convincing them you have the audience they want to reach. You don't have to sell them on advertising or on the Web.

My pitch has changed and evolved much over the months.

I started out with a pitch that emphasized all the free ways a business could promote themselves (none ever used these options, but it was a great conversation opener with people I didn't know).

Now I start by talking about our commitment to local business. We don't take chain-store advertising. We do all we can to promote a "shop local first" attitude among our readers.

Many people talk about hyperlocal news, but they never talk about hyperlocal advertising. For the same reasons you don't put national news on your home page, you don't put national businesses on your home page. It's the wrong message. You have to be about promoting local business.

That's one thing the various national plays in they hyperlocal space, from Patch to ~~GrowthSpur~~* don't get. There's no substitute for a local media business owner going into a local business and talking directly with the local business owner and being able to connect on a shared interest in promoting the local business community (and you can thank William Allen White for teaching me this).

*Update from Howard: After an e-mail exchange with Mark Potts, it's obvious I wasn't clear on what GrowthSpur was about. Early on, I saw mention of GrowthSpur as an advertising network and took that to mean GrowthSpur would make as part of what it offered publishers was access to non-local advertising revenue. Mark assures me that isn't the case. I apologize to Mark and the rest of the GrowthSpur team for lumping GrowthSpur in with non-local provisioners. In fact, one of the GrowthSpur team members, David Chase, has been directly helpful to The Batavian. David's experience and knowledge in strategic local ad sales is unmatched.

Robert: What do you see as the key in growing your audience at The Batavian? Would that translate to other independent online news sites?

Howard: Wish I could afford marketing.

The first rule of disruption is to find a job to be done for a consumer that isn't being done. Find unmet needs and meet them.

We have done well going after the local news audience that wanted free, frequently updated, very local news and getting them involved in the site. But these were people who were already news consumers or otherwise invovled in their community.

The next disruptive challenge is to find a way to appeal to non-news consumers. I firmly believe that if more people who have been ignoring newspapers and even television news found The Batavian, they would get hooked in because they would see so many names of people they know on the site, or so much about their community presented in a way that is easy and entertaining to consume. One of my goals is to increase community engagement/social capital (in the definition of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone), and we can only really be successful at that if we start attracting the people who were turned off by traditional journalism.

That's a tough nut to crack.

For aspiring publishers, they're going to have to find a way to market what they do. There are inexpensive and even free ways to do this, but they will need a plan and work that plan hard. It can be done, though.

Join us on OJR Friday, when we talk with the folks at Newsday about how they put together an ambitious multimedia package they just published.