OJR front page archive for July 2009
Eight tips to keep your mobile website readers happy
July 30, 2009
The past few weeks have found me on the road quite a bit, as I visit theme parks around the country for my "day job" website. So I've been using my iPhone to keep in touch, via WiFi, AT&T's 3G network or, when I'm really out in the sticks, the Edge network.Smart phones provide a great way for people to work productively during "down" moments throughout the day. And for road warriors to stay in touch, even when driving the nation's Interstate highways. (Okay, when riding on the Interstate. I'm a stickler for not using the phone when in the driver's seat.) Heck, earlier this week I set up and did two radio interviews while in the car.
But as useful as smart phones can be, their effectiveness can be undermined by information providers whose sloppy or ill-advised design keeps phone readers from getting the information they want. Here's what I wish Web publishers would do to make reading the Web by phone easier:
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So... what is the future of citizen journalism and social media?
July 28, 2009
In 1996 I was a communications student at American University, and had just discovered the Internet. I became an addict overnight. At that time, the public communications students were required to take many of the same classes that journalism students did. However, there was an innate understanding among my classmates that the journalism students were different. And they were. In many ways the training was more rigorous, and journalism was the only communications track that focused heavily on ethics.Fast forward 13 years. Today, as a Web professional working for OurBlook.com, I find myself researching the "decline" or, depending on whom you talk with, the "transformation" of the same industry my professors helped me cultivate an almost obsessive respect for. The culprit? The same computer phenomenon I fell in love with in all those years ago.
In December 2008, OurBlook.com launched a Future of Journalism project. The website is a collaborative, Web 2.0 platform created for the exchange of research, information and dialogue on national and global issues. For both this and other topics, research is conducted in two steps:
1) Interviews with industry leaders are collected and published online.
2) An online book is created using the the interviews as a research base.
Given that the editor of the site is a retired journalist himself, and the founder has a long history of philanthropy in the journalism world, we expanded our research to include subtopics such as citizen journalism and social media.
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Can objective journalism endure, after Cronkite?
July 23, 2009
Editor's note: Larry's thoughts on Walter Cronkite provide us an opportunity to talk about what journalism is, and might be, in the Internet era. I'll follow Larry's piece with a comment of my own, and I invite you to do the same. As a journalism professor, the death of Walter Cronkite is a reminder of what journalism was and may never be again.
When my college students ask me who I think the best journalists in the business were, my first answer would always be Walter Cronkite. Like most young people, most of my students tend to get their news from local television, the Internet, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Most of them do not read newspapers. Very few of them were familiar with Cronkite.
"Walter Cronkite was and always will be the gold standard," ABC News anchor Charles Gibson told the Associated Press. "His objectivity, his evenhandedness, his news judgment are all great examples."
Walter Cronkite was everything a journalist was supposed to be. He was truly fair and balanced; not in the Fox News sense. He was thorough and prepared and he asked the tough questions that needed to be asked of politicians and government officials, whether they were liberal, conservative, Democrat or Republican.
Back in 1972, Cronkite was voted as the most trusted person in America. Since then, the public's trust of journalists has eroded over the years due to various scandals and controversies involving plagiarism and fabrication.
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Staking out newspaper survival in Web analytics
July 21, 2009
This is part two in a two-part series on Web analytics and the future of news. [Part one]The news industry is caught in a destabilizing position – each newspaper is going to have to come up with its own unique algorithm to give advertisers a sense of their audience.
The new metric that advertisers increasingly care about is something called "engagement" – how users are actually interacting and spending time with the site. But because each newspaper website offers unique content, there's no blanket measure for creating a uniform "engagement" score for the news industry from different points of comScore or Ominture data.
"We can't boil it down to X percent of unique users plus your time on site plus page views," said Alan Segal, director of audience development at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He explained that the formula in Atlanta would be different from elsewhere. "Engagement for us looks different for us versus the New York Times," Segal said. "It depends on your market and what the goals are and how you interact with your community."
Why engagement? Because it's a more robust way of looking at the world than just uniques, page views, visits, or clicks per minute.
As Alex Langshur, president of the Web Analytics Association, said, "Measures that reflect audience engagement are more valuable than metrics that just measure raw numbers."
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How early online newspaper production tools led the industry down the wrong path
July 16, 2009
Wisdom is the ability to see your life and career not simply as a line going forward from wherever point you are, but as an arc that extends from the past into the future. That's why I believe it is important to teach online journalism students about the history and development of the Internet and for online news professionals to remember the early days of their craft. (It's also why I find books like Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" so interesting.)I've written about how legal precedents shaped the thinking of early online news managers. Today, I'd like to suggest that early online publishing technology affected industry thinking in profound, and, ultimately, tragic, ways as well.
For those of you who weren't working on a newspaper website around 1996, let me take you on a trip into the pensieve (or, down memory lane, for those of you overdosed on Harry Potter references this week). I started on the Rocky Mountain News website in November 1996, and was the only person at the paper updating and maintaining the news side of the website. Every morning, I came in around 5 am, selected a couple dozen stories from the newspaper, then called them up on the paper's ATEX terminals. One by one, I sent a copy of each story to a queue we'd created which interfaced with the Pantheon Bridge program on a Windows NT box in the paper's computer room.
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It's time to retire newspaper circulation data in favor of Web analytics - But which ones?
July 14, 2009
This is part one in a two-part series on Web analytics and the future of newsNewspaper circulation numbers are taken as report cards for survival. When worse than expected for too long, these numbers forewarn of future layoffs and corporate restructuring – and at the very worst, the death of a newspaper.
But we're putting our emphasis, energy, and nostalgia in the wrong place. The future is in Web analytics, but this extends beyond just knowing about page views, unique users, and visits.
"If newspapers have any chance of making it in an online and social media world with an ad based model, we've got to see much more living and dying by analytics," said Dana Chinn, a lecturer at the USC Annenberg School of Communication.
Nonetheless, a print mentality dominates our current understanding of the media landscape.
Consider, as an example of the formidable significance circulation numbers have in our industry, a June 15, 2009 AP story about the troubles facing the Boston Globe:
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Don't dismiss journalism schools just because newspapers are in trouble
July 9, 2009
Larry Atkins teaches Journalism at Temple University and Arcadia University.In light of the decline of newspapers, you would think that college students would be staying away from the field of journalism in droves. Thus far, that's not the case. But will university journalism schools change their approach in the way they teach future journalists?
According to Inside Higher Ed, applications to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism have gone up around 40 percent higher than last year. Applications to Temple University's Department of Journalism have remained steady over the last few years. In March, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported that due to student interest and potential demand, the University of Pennsylvania is working to propose a journalism minor.
But how are the Journalism schools and departments accommodating this interest to the changing realities of the journalism profession?
According to Dr. Andrew Mendelson, Chair of Temple University's Journalism Department, "In some ways, we anticipated the new reality. Six years ago, we changed the curriculum to add more multimedia exposure. We require students to do reporting in all types of areas—print, Web, audio and video. In addition to this cross-platform format, students specialize in newspapers, magazines or photojournalism."
"In addition, we recently added an elective in Entrepreneurial Journalism, started by Professor George Miller, in which we teach students how to become their own business model by freelancing or starting their own websites."
"We're also doing more career workshops. Some are with the Career Center and deal with networking and preparing resumes. We also have business practices workshops, which deal with legal issues, contracts, and how to market yourself."
A recent trend of journalism programs is getting students out of the classroom to cover events and issues in the community.
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Memo to Katharine Weymouth: Put your salon on the Web
July 8, 2009
Former Washington Post staffer and frequent OJR contributor Tom Grubisich checks in with his take on the recent near-scandal at the Post - the paper's attempt to sell access to its reporters and editors through high-priced, off-the-record "salons" at the publisher's home.After Tom makes his points, OJR editor Robert Niles jumps in and adds additional thoughts on how this episode ought to provide inspiration to news publishers trying to preserve and extend healthy relationships with their readers.
The most surprising thing about the Washington Post's pay-to-play fiasco was not the Jack Abramoff-worthy pitch (“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate. Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth....”), but that the Post was wasting its time on a brand-building project that ignored the potential firepower of its nine-million-user-strong website.
Could any brand building be more ridiculously behind the curve than salons at the home of the publisher? Weymouth's grandmother, Katharine Graham, was known for her Georgetown salons, but in-between those evenings she did things like hire Ben Bradlee to create a first-class newspaper, took the Post public but without the Graham family yielding corporate control to Wall Street, and, while the new public company's financial future hung in the balance, pledged the Post's fortune and sacred honor by standing solidly behind the initially risky Watergate coverage of young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Talk about brand building!
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Newspaper columnists ought to be the perfect bloggers. So why aren't more doing it well?
July 2, 2009
Newspaper columnists ought to be the perfect bloggers - the best write in a lively voice and forge a strong connection with their readers. Their work build an ongoing conversation with the communities they cover. Frankly, they've been blogging (in print) since long before anyone other than academics and soldiers went online.So why aren't more making a successful transition to online publishing? Why are so many columnists living under the same fear and uncertainty that's consuming their newsroom coworkers? Those are a couple of the questions that I sought to address last weekend when I spoke to the annual gathering of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.
This year's conference theme was "Survive and Thrive." (Well, we've drilled down to the basics now, haven't we?) My talk was "Tips on Branding Yourself," and I was joined by Erika Stalder of ABC Family.
I told the group that your brand in the Internet era is the public's perception of its relationship with you, a sentiment that Erika concurred with, citing a similar quote from Amazon's Jeff Bezos: "Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room."
Anyone writing online needs to come to this understanding: That what matters most in determining your online success is how your work is understood and acted upon by its audience - more than what your intention with the work was or the process that you used to create it. You can do work you believe to be great, but if no one reads it or no one who does cares, what was the point?
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