OJR front page archive for April 2009
South Los Angeles community news website offers lessons for all
April 29, 2009
A century ago, The New York Times routinely ran short items on its inside pages about church socials, fund-raising efforts by community groups, programs at public schools. These news nuggets defined the robust neighborhoods of Manhattan and the city's four other boroughs. Though eventually lost as the daily emphasized foreign and national news, these news blurbs from neighborhood are in vogue again a century later, this time on hyperlocal news websites.These intensely local news sites, now firmly established on the emerging journalism landscape, offer readers more than news about chicken dinners and church functions, of course. Many of them devote energy and money to produce meaningful journalism from and about under covered urban neighborhoods and isolated rural communities. These places are not the easiest communities to write about; distrust of the media runs high, especially in urban communities of color. But enhanced coverage of urban, working-class neighborhoods of color -- long ignored by mainstream media -- is one of the emerging trends of hyper local news sites, including the new USC Annenberg School for Communication news site, Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, recent winners of a $25,000 grant from the J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism through its New Voices program, a community news initiative funded by the Knight Foundation. http://www.j-newvoices.org/
Intersections: The South Los Angeles Reporting Project, www.intersectionssouthla.org, is a multimedia news site with multiple layers of community engagement, classroom instruction and different forms of news delivery. Willa Seidenberg, a colleague and director of the award-winning Annenberg Radio News, and I have collaborated for the last year on this project, building community and school ties, constructing infrastructure, rethinking our classes and offering new courses designed to give students a deeper understanding of urban America and its institutions. It's all an effort to engage residents in telling their own stories and to train a new generation of journalists to see communities as a whole.
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Do we really need large organizations to do good journalism?
April 24, 2009
Yesterday, USC Annenberg's director Geneva Overholser tweeted:I seek names of 10 most interesting thinkers (not pronouncers) on how we will support journalism in the future: scholars, journalists et al.
I don't presume to count myself among the 10 most interesting people in anything, much less thinking, but Geneva's tweet did inspire a few thoughts, which I considered important enough to share.
First, my experience in both traditional and independent online publishing leads me to believe that the core methods of supporting reporting have not, and will not change as a result of the Web's emergence. Advertising, purchases, organizational grants and individual donations have supported everything from newspapers to magazines to NPR stations in the past and are continuing to support many websites today.
As I wrote earlier this week, advertisers remain eager to support publications that cover their market, and others individuals and organizations are willing to help support community-building publishers in other ways, including sponsorships and direct underwriting of coverage.
What has changed is the number of publications chasing those supporting funds. That means less money, per publication, than newsrooms could count on receiving in the past.
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Communities are key in building websites' advertiser support
April 21, 2009
If a website's editorial mission focuses on building community, as I've argued, so should its advertising sales strategy focus on community as well. Don't fall into the trap of selling potential advertisers nothing more than numbers; don't neglect to sell them on the opportunity to support the community that you are building.I got to talking about the subject recently with my colleague Sasha Anawalt, who runs several arts journalism programs for USC Annenberg. She was talking about the frustration that many arts organizations feel when watching the the reporters and critics who have covered them lose their jobs. These theaters, dance companies and orchestras fear that without news coverage in their communities, their audience - and potential audience - will hear less about local artists, which could lead to less interest and less support for their organizations.
It's not just arts organizations that share this fear. In a blog post last year, tech blogger Mark Cuban, who owns the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, argued why he believes that pro sports needs newspapers to prosper.
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Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek
April 16, 2009
Think about the traffic statistics you refer to when you look at Omniture or Google Analytics data for your site. Unique visitors? Pageviews? What do they actually tell you about your audience? The ubiquitous unique visitor metric treats your most passionate and thorough users exactly the same as those of the one-hit scan-and-scram variety. And pageview tallies are so apples-to-oranges in these days of Flash and AJAX that they're rendered almost meaningless. If you really want to describe your audience, it's time for some new metrics.But what else is there? The folks at BusinessWeek think they have an answer, and it's not about how much content users consume but rather what they do with it. I asked BusinessWeek's online editor, John Byrne, about his team's efforts to go beyond pageviews and visits to quantify something more inscrutable: user engagement.
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Don't lose your voice online
April 15, 2009
Author Ralph Keyes this week rightly slammed news organizations for using cultural references in their news stories that leave many readers under the age of 50 in the dark. But do not rush to assume that the solution is to strip articles of metaphors and other references, which can help readers identify and understand the news. Instead, smart newsrooms should take a close look at their language, and make a stronger effort to deploy writers who, collectively, can use a broader range of cultural references to appeal to wider audience of readers.Keyes called an over-dependence to decades-old references "retrotalk," including comparisons with 1950s television characters, early 20th Century pop tunes and even antiquated farming techniques.
Journalists who lace their copy with such retro terms or names risk alienating those who are too young to get the allusions. Even common catch phrases that hearken back to earlier times may be puzzling to younger readers: stuck in a groove, 98-pound weakling, drop a dime, bigger than a breadbox, or a tough row to hoe. (As one giggling third-grader asked when his teacher used this one, “Isn’t 'ho' a bad word?”)
Keyes' piece roiled the journalism Twitter community, some rushing to spread the word, others to criticize the criticism.
Count me among the fans of lively cultural references in news reporting and analysis. But also include me among those who have grown sick of reading repeated, stale references from a generation to which I do not belong.
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New grassroots life for investigative reporting?
April 9, 2009
Might investigative journalism be ready to be re-born at the grassroots?Until recently, this question wasn't even asked much. If there was worry about what would happen to watchdog reporting with the decline of newspapers and other legacy media, it was expressed at the national level. It's why the launch of ProPublica,, the investigative journalism non-profit, got such acclaim, and now why many of us will be paying close attention to the establishment of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.
But look what's happening now at the community level. Last summer came the launch of Texas Watchdog, which got one-year foundation funding to play watchdog over state government and other Texas institutions. Two months ago Investigative Voice in Baltimore sprang to life. Now David McCumber of the dear-departed Seattle Intelligencer is trying to rustle up funding for an investigative journalism site focusing on issues in the West. And a gang from the RIP Rocky Mountain News is aiming to launch InDenverTimes with the idea of making investigative work one of its centerpieces.
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No one owns the news
April 8, 2009
Whether you are working in computer programming, or business development, or the arts, creating something new demand a curious mix of hubris and humility. Hubris to believe that you are the one talented and knowledgeable enough to find the new way. And humility to know that you do not yet know that way and must work to discover it.The legacy news industry today's got the hubris part cold. The humility? Not so much. News companies' sense of entitlement regarding the news that they report is preventing them from developing the new business practices that they need to profit in an increasingly competitive information market.
Witness the temper tantrums that major news bosses have thrown during the past seven days about the use of news stories online.
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You've got to know what you stand for to survive in journalism online
April 3, 2009
Established journalists and newsrooms making the transition to online publishing should not do so with the assumption that editorial content provides their strength in a competitive online information market. Often, the editorial content established journalists provide is not what online readers want, or even what they need.That's a harsh realization for many journalists, who have worked intensely to cover their communities for years. But effort and will don't deliver readers. Information that engages and rewards them does. Journalists, and their managers, need to take a hard look at how they are producing information, so that they don't repeat the same editorial mistakes that have driven so many readers to online competition.
A stunning assertion in the Los Angeles Times last month got me thinking about this topic.
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Top 10 business mistakes that newspapers must avoid as they go online-only
April 1, 2009
I'd like to welcome the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the world of pureplay, online-only local Internet sites. They have a heckuva a jumpstart with their level of web traffic which any local site would be thrilled to have. Unfortunately, there are many other items that they must put in place to succeed. To their credit, they have taken some good first steps. The first and painful step was reducing headcount which reflects the reality that revenues will be lower for awhile. However, no business can cost cut your way to a successful business. The second laudable step was outlining how they plan to position themselves as a digital marketing agency with their advertisers selling everything from Yahoo display ads to paid search from all the major search engines.Nonetheless, this is all moot if they don't develop a viable revenue model to go along with it, something they have no apparent experience with since the Seattle Times had done all of their advertising sales as part of their JOA. The painful truth is that 99% of the local Internet plays have proven how NOT to develop a sustainable model. Some newspapers have claimed their online properties are profitable but this is a suspect claim since they weren't burdened with the costs borne by the print product. In other words, most local online plays are subsidized by an offline counterpart which the P-I no longer has.
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