Kevin Dugan, who recently earned an MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business, was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile strategies for KPCC Southern California Public Radio. Other students on this team: Ashley Ahearn and Keaton Gray (both of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism), and Taran Raj (USC Viterbi school of engineering).

Southern California Public Radio faces a unique set of challenges; similar, but slightly different from the usual variety said to be plaguing the news industry. While multiple revenue streams exist for the three-station, non-profit entity (KPCC, KUOR and KPCV), the ability to appropriately balance these sources of support remains paramount to the positive perception by its members and listeners and, ultimately, the forecasted growth and impact of its news coverage.

The listener base, while fiercely loyal, can be fickle about the delivery of its local news and the manner in which support is presented. We approached our recommendations to SPCR through the lens of this existing customer base, while keeping a strategic eye on the largely untapped potential of a more diverse audience.

SCPR pays for access to news content provided by National Public Radio, enabling its member stations to provide NPR content on any platform, whether via radio, online or a mobile device. NPR offers its own online version of content, as well iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry mobile applications.

But, as a local provider of Southern California news, SCPR realizes that a more regionally-focused delivery of news should be made available to its readers and listeners on mobile devices.

SCPR’s current online news offering is to be commended, with a robust slate of content and a strategic design. KPCC, SCPR’s flagship station, does have an iPhone application which streams the radio programming live, but the digital team recognizes a broader mobile platform strategy is necessary. Enter the AMV Mobile News team.

We met with Alex Schaffert, Director of Digital Media, Jason Georges, Senior Digital Producer, and Jeff Long, Web Developer, to better understand what specific needs we might address. In addition, we met with SCPR President Bill Davis, Newsroom Manager Paul Glickman, and Director of Annual Giving Stephanie Patterson. Based on these interactions and our industry research we developed a series of recommendations that we felt would position SCPR well for the next several years in mobile news.

While smart phones, with their healthy slate of features and developer-friendly APIs, have created a new genre of content consumption and shown impressive mobile subscriber adoption rates, the majority of the installed mobile customer base owns feature phones. We have all owned these phones: they often do not possess QWERTY keyboards, attractive applications or the computing speed found in smart phones (think clamshell design). But more than 80 percent of today’s mobile subscribers currently use feature phones, and, according to five-year forecasts by Strategy Analytics, more than half of mobile users will continue to own feature phones by 2014. These numbers necessitate a strategy to cater to feature phone users, a strategy that is best implemented through the development of a Wireless Application Protocol [WAP] site.

We created a model for a KPCC WAP site that employed best practices for such an offering. Quick information, such as weather and traffic data, was placed at the top. The most important content, headlines and small pictures of the day’s top stories were positioned front and center, hyperlinked so that readers could click through to the full story. A phone number for the live radio feed was displayed prominently for those customers who preferred the classic form of KPCC’s news delivery, but who did not want to incur exorbitant mobile data fees. Various news categories were also made available on the homepage, with a WAP site “SEARCH” option situated immediately below. Finally, navigation links such as “Back to Top” and “Return to Homepage” were placed at the bottom of each page. The “En Espanol” hyperlink enabled Spanish-speaking customers to access the news in the language they preferred.

In addition, we developed a live, functioning Android application for SCPR. Taran Raj teamed with a programming colleague from the Viterbi school to create an Android application that incorporated best practices of smart phone applications.

At the top of the homepage is the option to listen live to the radio program currently being broadcast, a stream that could play while you browse news articles. Top Stories remain front and center, with article summaries, pictures, and audio versions of the story available.

Features common to both the Android application and the WAP site were the ability to share articles through one click, on Facebook, Twitter, SMS and e-mail, an important option to promote the interactive nature of mobile news as well as user engagement.

At the heart of our recommendations for both platforms was the ability for mobile SCPR consumers to contribute through the mobile device. We concluded that the option to quickly donate through a mobile text presented an opportunity not only to engender a new type of loyalty from its existing listener base, but also to attract a more diverse subscriber base. Offering the option to text a donation of $5 or $10 would enable more unsolicited and spontaneous support. The envisioned mobile membership would drive not just more membership, but a new kind of membership.

This new mobile membership would offer mobile subscribers the chance to personalize their experience, allowing them to set preferences for news categories on their mobile SCPR Homepage. More importantly, mobile members would be alerted of nearby discounts and local deals exclusive to SCPR mobile members. This feature can be enabled by programming in the application that identifies, with permission, the geographic location of the user.
This GPS-enabled form of hyper-local advertising would be attractive to SCPR’s underwriters and the network of retailers and organizations already involved in the Friends Card program offered to SCPR members. These discount alerts could be sponsored on a CPM basis or a Cost per Action mechanism, whereby SCPR would earn a percentage of revenue actually earned by vendors through these promotions.

To summarize, SCPR can reap enduring benefits through a multi-pronged mobile news strategy that addresses the needs of the feature phone user through a custom WAP site, robust smart phone applications for the Android, iPhone, and Blackberry operating systems, and the ability to donate support through mobile devices. We believe that these initiatives will drive the diversity of SCPR’s audience, increase the level of participatory support of this broader audience, and strengthen the already-fierce member loyalty SCPR currently enjoys.

USC Annenberg journalism student Dominique Fong was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile strategies for the Los Angeles Times. Other students on this team: Vibhor Mathur (USC Viterbi School of Engineering), Jason Choi (Viterbi)

Overview

Our mobile strategy recommendations for the Los Angeles Times are grounded in the “3 Ps” best practices identified by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in a report on the trend of more participatory behaviors in the way that people consume news: participation, portability and personalization. The challenge of increasing revenue within existing corporate restraints led us to consider a fourth “P,” partnership, to more efficiently accomplish innovation across multiple digital platforms while increasing revenue potential.

Participation

Because millions of mobile users already turn to the Times to stay informed and fill idle moments, the organization should seek to maximize user engagement (and, consequently, brand affinity) among existing users while also attracting new ones. Implementing four new features would advance this agenda. Expanded integration of social media by adding a multipurpose widget (like Slate.com’s right column on its website) to a mobile app or WAP would allow users to engage with content over their networks without having to leave the Times site. Another idea is a thumb up/thumb down rating option, like the Daily Beast, which lets users immediately voice their opinion about what articles are most newsworthy with the incentive that more popular content is given higher standing on the home page. Third is a save option, giving readers an incentive to revisit content and advertising in the Times app. Fourth is empowering audiences to upload content directly to the newspaper, similar to CNN’s iReport but more immediate and intuitive (using the existing website photo-sharing mechanism and possibly through a partnership with Foursquare).

Portability

The intrinsic portability of mobile phones is a strong argument to exploit geolocation, a feature within an app to track and mark a user’s location. To prevent privacy infringement, organizations should offer users the option to decline permission for detecting their location. The Times can offer targeted newsfeeds, such as alerts for bomb scares, news according to neighborhood from the mapping project, and selective, exclusive restaurant reviews from the dining and calendar section databases. Geolocation can also improve advertising campaigns by triggering ad displays relevant to a user’s specific location.

Personalization

Segmentation of audiences based on user behavior and preferences will add value to advertising packages by allowing customers to more precisely target specific user groups. Brief opt-in surveys regarding user demographics, consumption behaviors and content preferences would facilitate targeted advertising campaigns while allowing users to partially customize their content experience. In addition to global ads, the Times would also be able to facilitate more precise customer to audience interaction through localized banners or interactive ads (including “click to call,” “where to buy,” and “save for later” options) that change according to the user’s characteristics, habits and location. The advantages of interactive ads, of particular importance to tablets, are exemplified by an ad for cameras in a Sports Illustrated iPad app.

Another easily implementable segmentation option would be to enable mobile device detection on apps and the mobile site. When an app detects that it is displaying Times content on a feature phone, ads for “upgrade to iPhone” or for phone-specific games and ringtones could appear. Click-through rates have been successful for the Helsinki Sanomat, which uses Starcut, the same WAP site developer as the Times.

Partnerships

In order to move quickly, the Times should consider partnering with third party mobile ad networks that offer premium and geolocated ads, or look into licensing technology from those networks. Adlocal provides detailed metrics and real-time revenue counts as well as geolocation compatibility, as do competitors such as Acuity Mobile, AppLoop, AdInfuse and Yowza (an iPhone app that offers geo-aware coupons). Collaborative agreements with existing premium advertisers could guarantee revenue from creation of an iPad app, as Chase collaborated with The New York Times. Instead of following trends, strategic partnerships with key existing customers and leading technology firms could position the Times to advance both innovation and revenue growth, better serving audiences and customers.

Los Angeles Times WAP site with more interactive features:

USC Annenberg journalism student Rebecca Lett was part of a team of AMVmobile fellowship students tasked with devising mobile tablet strategies for the Orange County Register. Other students on this team: Kevin Lu (USC Annenberg), Drew Prickett (USC Marshall school of business), and Saravanan Rangaraju (USC Viterbi school of engineering).

The Orange County Register hadn’t foreseen the downfall of print journalism with the rise of the Internet. Ian Hamilton, the Register’s technology reporter, Sonya Smith, social and mobile leader, and Claus Enevoldsen, director of interactive marketing, had anxiously explained the Register’s position as a print news organization in hopes that we, two Annenberg students, one Marshall student and one Viterbi student, could develop a new strategy that potentially could save their business.

We put ourselves in their shoes. Print journalism, the path they had passionately chosen for themselves years ago, would never be the primary source of news again. Online publications, being free with cheap advertising, could not become a substantial source of revenue as they are.

After a decade of canceled print subscriptions in favor of reading more up to date content for free on the Internet, would people be willing to pay for online content? And more specifically, would people pay for mobile news applications on their phones and tablets (e.g. the iPad)?

In our presentation, we reconfirmed what the Register had been silently telling themselves all along – mobile is here to stay. We encouraged the Register to be early adopters and to incorporate advanced tablet strategy into their working mobile strategy.

According to our research, the tablet will be very popular in Orange County as early as next year, which means the hefty investment is likely to be worth it in the long run.

As a team, we first decided that the Register had four main sources of providing news content: print, online, mobile and tablet (in order from oldest to newest). We then determined the audience affected by these different sources to be readers, advertisers and the Register itself.

We researched, debated and consulted readers, advertisers and experts to confidently assert that journalism was moving from print towards the tablet.

From the Register’s perspective, the tablet holds the most potential for generating the most revenue. Readers are willing to pay for subscriptions because tablets deliver the most current and personalized content. Advertisements can be different sizes, different media, extremely high quality, QR coded and geo-location based, which will enable the Register to charge substantially more than they do online.

From the advertisers’ perspective, the tablet has the ability to direct ads to specific audiences, to receive and track responses to ads and to display high-quality, instantly effective ads. In other words, tablet advertising will be worth the price.

And from the readers’ perspective, the tablet will become the most convenient multimedia tool in the future. A reader can e-mail, watch TV shows and movies, listen to music, read and interact through social media in one place. It’s the improved webpage that people will pay for because it provides the intimacy of a traditional newspaper, modern sleekness, and the ability to interact with content and to share content through e-mail and social media.

The fact that there is proven future for news organizations in the tablet is a hard for print monopolies to digest, however it is a fact that must be accepted in order for news organizations to stay up to pace with technology.

I know I am speaking for my whole team when I say this experience was as eye opening to us as it was for the news organizations. And personally, my hesitations about the declining field of journalism were transformed into anticipation for the rise of an exciting, mobilized journalism.

While the newspaper industry struggles to find new definition in an Internet age, the population most at risk of being left behind is low-income communities. Local newspapers are suffering significant losses in the industry, and yet the medium is still heavily relied upon as a source of information for poorer areas where Internet access is minimal. Many of these communities are already under-served by the media, and as their newspapers disappear, the void is likely to widen. Eventually, these communities may benefit greatly from the communication tools the Internet and mobile news delivery will provide. But during this period of turbulence the digital divide could impede progress. In affected areas, the wealthy will be gaining a medium while the poor are losing one. Meanwhile, in areas with more universalized Internet access, impoverished communities will be given access to news on a scale never before extended by traditional media.

Community Journalism and Hyper-Local Markets

Communities in South Los Angeles have long been starved of media attention. Since the collapse of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1989, the newspaper industry in Los Angeles has been dominated by a single, powerful newspaper. The Los Angeles Times overshadows local newspapers such as the Los Angeles Wave and the Los Angeles Daily News, creating a monopoly on news coverage that favors broader stories over community-sensitive pieces. Stories from South Los Angeles are rare, and the Los Angeles Times has been criticized for limiting its coverage of the area to tragic or violent breaking news stories.

“The LA Times covers breaking news that they deem worth covering,” said Don Wanlass, news editor for the Los Angeles Wave, one of three newspapers based in South Los Angeles that makes an effort to cover news significant to residents in cities like Compton, Watts and Inglewood. “There’s a lot of sentiment out there that the Times only reports bad news, like political corruption scandals and shootings. They don’t go into the small communities and get some of the stories that are there to be had.”

In the mid-1990s, the Times established suburban sections, including the City Times section, as a response to the Los Angeles riots in 1992. It was partially due to the consistent lack of South L.A. coverage by the mainstream mass media that the riots were provoked, according to Henry Watson, a South L.A. resident and one of the “LA Four” responsible for beating a white truck driver almost to death on April 29, 1992. “April 29th allowed the world to come into South Central for the first time and take a look around and see,” said Watson.

The Los Angeles Times responded by attempting to bridge the information divide between L.A.’s diverse communities and extend conversation across cultural barriers. Since then, not only has the Times folded its suburban city sections, but it has also shut down its California section, folding its remaining local news into the “A” section of the paper. Watson says that lessened local coverage in the mainstream media inevitably breeds more tension in South Los Angeles. “The media only want to show the negative,” said Watson. “But they need to come here and see the positive.” It would not be inconceivable, he warned, for a repetition of the 1992 riots to emerge if South L.A. continues to be consistently ignored. Another resident, Tony Falley, says that the lack of balanced media attention has left the area to physically stagnate. “Our environment needs to be built up,” said Falley. “As far as Florence and Normandie, where the riots happened, we don’t have anything but the same stuff: a gas station and a liquor store.”

In some South L.A. cities, the Los Angeles Wave and other small community newspapers have attempted to fill the coverage gap, but declining circulation is threatening to destroy these smaller institutions faster than their national counterparts. “We try to cover the community the best way we can with the man power we have,” said Wanlass. “We have 21 cities and two reporters.”

Ironically, it is not for lack of reader interest that smaller newspapers are struggling. Although every traditional, offline news medium is suffering losses, a recent study of media consumption shows that local newspapers are more valuable to the public than national newspapers. Sixty-three percent of the public are still consuming local newspapers compared to 18 percent reading national dailies, according to the global public relations firm Ketchum. This makes local newspapers the second most valuable of the traditional journalistic mediums behind major network television, while national newspapers lag behind in 8th place. Local newspaper readership also reaches a wider age breadth, with 34 percent of people under the age of 24 reading community newspapers compared to 11 percent of the youth population reading national dailies. The disparity is dramatic in every age range, but perhaps the most extreme statistics are for the age range with the highest consumptive rate of national newspapers. A total of 26 percent of men and women between the age of 55 and 64 are dedicated to national newspapers, while 81 percent are reading local dailies.

In possession of a seemingly dependent readership, community newspapers have lost circulation at a slower pace than has, for example, the Los Angeles Times. The Daily Breeze, which serves South Bay Los Angeles, saw a 4 percent drop from September 2007 to September 2008, while the Los Angeles Times suffered a 5 percent cut in circulation. Another community newspaper, the Glendale News Press, saw a 3 percent decline, and the rural Antelope Valley Press, maintained its readership without loss.

But one of the major concerns for newspapers serving poorer communities, like the Los Angeles Wave, is the slow pace at which they are migrating into the virtual realm. Their online resources are minimal when compared to newspaper companies that serve more affluent parts of Los Angeles, and their readership still relies heavily on the print version of the newspaper. In South Los Angeles, in the urban, low-income areas that newspapers like the Los Angeles Wave serve, more than half of the residents do not have access to the Internet.

And yet, the Internet is the perfect medium for under-served communities craving attention. Already, local groups are finding ways to fill the historical media gap in their cities from the ground upward. “There are all kinds of blogs springing up in small cities,” said Wanless. “It’s becoming more and more a trend and way for people to keep up with what their city government is doing.” Blogs such as Lynwood Watch, which aggregates news from the city of Lynwood, have encouraged a new level of dialogue to emerge between residents. “It steers people to news they might not normally know is out there and encourages commentary,” Wanlass explained.

As a communication tool, the Internet has the potential to unite and integrate isolated communities with wider society and bypass some of the barriers traditional news organizations encounter, such as language. In Los Angeles, diverse cultures are alienated from the traditional media. “There’s a language barrier,” said Wanlass. “There are a lot of recent immigrants from Mexico and South America.” Not only are many of these immigrant communities cut off from media streams but, according to Wanlass, their isolation makes them more vulnerable to inaccurate or unreliable information. “They don’t speak English and they fear government intrusion,” said Wanlass. “They’re also willing to believe anything anybody tells them, and sometimes the rumors on the street aren’t always accurate.”

Being able to interact easily with one another in their own language could benefit these under-served communities greatly. In Lynwood, for example, the main form of communication is ground mail, and with so few reporters covering the area, lobbyists and politicians have seized the opportunity to exploit the lack of public awareness. In 2006, when the city government was contemplating a deal with a redevelopment agency to uproot thousands of families and build a football stadium, real estate agencies began mailing the community offering potential buy-out deals. According to one resident, some families sold their homes for fear of being evicted when the redevelopment agency took over. However, the deal with the agency was never completed. Instead, government officials were indicted for misappropriating public funds and the incomplete contract for development was overruled. Yet, a year after the indictment proceedings, Lynwood residents were still living in fear. The informational void had not only left the community “out of the loop,” but was seriously threatening their way of life. Families were contemplating selling their homes, and some already had, for lack of up-to-date news. Up to a year after the contract had been overthrown and the threat of a football stadium abolished, real estate agencies continued to play on public ignorance and scare them into quick sales.

The same thing happened during local government elections in 2007. Accurate information about the candidates was virtually non-existent, and instead, political action committees inundated the community with mudslinging campaign fliers. One candidate was accused of being a drug dealer. Another was accused of tax evasion and harboring illegal immigrants. Whether the accusations had basis in truth, it didn’t matter. Without a viable “watchdog” presence in the city, the uninhibited PACs could publish anything they wanted. Coupled with a lack of information from any other sources, these materials became the sole influencers in the campaign for much of the community. Unshakable rumors became ingrained in the public mindset, and still form much of the basis for opinion today.

Eventually, blogs may become a platform for under-served communities to create much-needed public dialogue, but until then, local newspapers remain the most important source of information for lower-income communities. Almost 50 percent of people with incomes lower than $25,000 rely on local newspapers as their main source of news, according to research by the Norman Lear Center at USC. Right now, Lynwood Watch is simply a news aggregation site, using newspapers like the Wave to provide content for users to comment on. Although it has been successful in encouraging more interaction between residents and local news topics, the site does not produce original content and much of the commentary is driven by rumors and bickering. The site is also controlled by a completely anonymous source. “The problem is that nobody knows who’s behind it,” said Wanlass. “You don’t know where they’re coming from or what their biases are.”

Grassroots Journalism

According to the blog search engine Technorati, a new blog is created every two seconds, bringing the running total in 2009 to more than 200 million individual blogs. One million blog posts are published across the world every day, and as the world of online publishing continues to flourish in accessibility and mass, a new species of journalist has emerged with it. The “citizen journalist,” belongs to no formal media outlet, has usually had little or no journalism training, but reports on the world he knows and self publishes his findings. Many mainstream media outlets have embraced this new journalistic democracy as a means of increasing the breadth of information. By syndicating reporting done by the general public, traditional media have access to a seemingly infinite store of content. Breaking news can be more fully reported immediately, thanks to photographs, video and information provided by “citizen journalists.”

“I think it’s marvellous,” said Geneva Overholser, director the journalism school at the University of Southern California. “The free press is a medium of democracy and involving people is terribly important. I like to believe in a collaborative, participatory process that will enrich the news report wherever you find it.”

Opinions vary as to the rights and qualifications of Citizen Journalists. Some, like Overholser, believe that the term “journalism” automatically assumes a certain set of ethics and practices. “What’s the point of calling someone a journalist unless they’re attempting to be reliable in their gathering of facts, attempting to present a picture as close to the truth as they can, and attempting to be transparent about their newsgathering, as well as making themselves accountable?” asked Overholser. But others say that any form of journalism, whether adhering to the formalized standards of most professional journalism or not, is better than nothing at all. “It’s just good that people are willing to participate in journalism and are interested in finding information,” said Marc Cooper, associate director of USC’s Institute for Justice and Journalism and former editor of The Huffington Post. “The more voices there are, the less oppression there will be.”

Catch-all websites, targeted at a more generalized audience in a way that emulates traditional mass media, will not replace disappearing newspapers. Instead, the future of community journalism lies with the citizens themselves. The “mass” in mass media is quickly vanishing and being replaced with niche markets and hyper-local news services. Newspapers hoping to migrate online will need to become hybrids of their former selves, involving the community they serve by opening up the news process with citizen journalists and becoming forums for public discourse. “Modern newsrooms have to engage in a never-ending conversation with their community, says Robert Legrand, contributor to the PBS and Knight Foundation-sponsored ideas lab, Media Shift. Community news coverage is fast becoming a two-way street, an intersection between those who tell the stories and those who live them.

Investigative and literary journalism are among the forms in danger. Both rely on deep-dive reporting methods: the former usually tackling political and economic institutions and the latter focusing on sociological trends. As such, these long-form species fall into the category of “deeper understanding” and are a means of information management – a way to navigate – according to Barry Siegel, former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and head of the literary journalism program the University of California, Irvine. “I’d describe it as a form of subterranean news,” said Siegel. “We’re writing about human nature, the nature of our community, and about the things that are most important in those communities, which are not always the obvious breaking news headlines.” Literary journalism, which Tom Wolfe described as journalism that reads “like a novel,” concentrates on context above immediacy, and as a result, requires more time and resources than hard news. Siegel says that he spends four months to a year on his own pieces.

In a world of infinite information, it would seem that providing context is more relevant than ever. Investigative journalism, the detective agency of the people, has acted as a “watchdog” presence, independent of government and big business, since its inception. Literary journalism, often bundled with terms like “long form” and “feature,” has meant sociological understanding and on-the-ground experience of the human condition in all its varying colors.

Tightened revenue streams have encouraged quick fixes, such as re-assigning long-form journalists to cover “short-form” news and reducing funds for contextual reporting. But for the newspaper industry, this could be a counterproductive move. The entire experience of narrative story telling is changing, according to Sue Cross, an AP news executive who oversees the wire service’s digital operation. Video and audio are feeding the experience of long-form journalism online, and instead of attempting to emulate the speed of the Internet, the newspaper industry should be embracing the change and using technology to enhance deep-dive reporting. By cutting immersive journalism in favor of less expensive, superficial forms, the newspaper industry risks losing everything that has made it a valuable medium for 300 years.

Subterranean News

Newspaper companies are in consensus about the solution to all their problems: they must shed the cellulose pulp and find a way to make content work online. But perhaps forms like investigative and literary journalism, which both have roots in print technology, are more attached to their traditional medium than innovators would like to accept. At a very basic level, the connection between these journalistic forms and the technology from which they arose has been overlooked.

What both investigative and literary journalism have in common, beyond their immersive reporting practices, is the attention they require of their audience. Even more than investigative journalism, literary pieces ask for a level of dedication from the reader that the Internet as a medium does not seem to facilitate. “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice,” Nicholas Carr examined in his July 2008 Atlantic article Is Google Making us Stupid? “But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking.” This new style of reading is one based on productivity, gleaning as much information as effectively as possible. For Siegel, this newly formed habit poses a threat to journalism that requires more concentrated attention. “The bigger problem is that people in this instant age might be losing the ability and inclination for the kind of sustained, focused effort that long-form reading requires,” said Siegel.

The traditional print newspaper, as a medium, is especially at odds with this new style of information consumption. Compared to the multiplicity of the Internet, the technology of paper is a highly inefficient medium. Content is limited, and readers are trapped within the confines of the pages themselves, rather than being able to browse through various links and sources. The efficiency and expedience provided by the Internet are qualities well-suited to a medium of mass communication. Accessibility and expansiveness succeed in attracting the broadest audience. But in many respects, paper still serves as the best medium for “subterranean news.”

According to a study of online reading habits in the U.K. by University College London (UCL), Internet users do not read online the same way they do with print media. “There are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts looking for quick wins,” the study surmised, adding: “it almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” This form of “horizontal information seeking,” as UCL labels it, is indicative of a medium that lends itself to quick and shallow information consumption. For journalistic forms that require patience, concentration and time, it would seem that the Internet is not as adequate a medium as print. By reading predominantly online, we “may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace,” writes Carr, referring to the conclusions deduced by Tufts University psychologist Maryanne Wolf. “When we read online, [Wolf] says, we tend to become ‘mere decoders of information.’ Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.”

While newspapers desperately struggle to compete with the Internet and breed their own online forms, the difference between the two mediums is being underplayed. The “horizontal” reading habits inspired by the Internet, coupled with the sheer volume of information available online, could potentially increase the need for printed, “subterranean” news. Long-form investigative and literary journalism, journalism that exists to “make sense of the world” on a deeper level, may be the answer to balancing the unmanageable amount of information unlocked by the Internet. And navigating information, learning context and studying deeper implications requires a level of reading concentration that only the print medium seems able to inspire. So while the newspaper industry attempts to shed its long-form content and emulate the Internet, the fact that sales of non-fiction books have been continually increasing seems to have gone unnoticed.

Traditional mediums are not being eliminated, but updated. Journalistic forms that appear to be disappearing, may just be trying to find a new comfort zone in a broadening landscape. In order for the print medium to do this successfully, it must embrace the qualities that make it unique, not similar, to other mediums. Paper is, after all, a technology. And after 300 years, competing mediums may be calling for a re-invention, rather than elimination, of the form.

A New Model

There is no telling what Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern will look like when it arrives in the mailbox or at the local book store. It could be a palm-sized journal made from ominous, grainy material with fold-out parts, complete with lock and key, or an epic piece of art with Asian patterns illuminating the broad jacket, a magnetic strip concealing dozens of tiny manuscripts. The quarterly literary journal, started in 1998 by author Dave Eggers, prides itself on utilizing the medium of paper in the most creative ways possible.

“I’ve always thought that if something is going to be on paper, if it’s going to be a physical object, it has to earn that existence and at least take into account the features and specifics of that existence,” said publisher Eli Horowitz. “But it’s not just preciousness; it’s also about taking advantage of things that you can do with paper. There are still things that you can do in a book that you can’t do on a computer screen.”

Rather than hastening the extinction of printed newspapers by moving attention away from the physical product to the online counterpart, Horowitz suggests that embracing the uniqueness of the paper form may serve to revive the industry. The future of print journalism is more likely to follow a philosophy closer to McSweeney’s than The Los Angeles Times. The literary journal survives solely on subscriptions and maintains a loyal readership, according to Horowitz. McSweeney’s also serves as a publishing house, selling books from affiliate authors through its website. Despite the competitive force of modern technology, such e-books and e-readers like the Kindle, the company continues to focus on producing high-quality, printed material. “We’re still trying to do things that the Kindle can’t give you,” said Horowitz. “Large things or folding things or cut-out things, things with textures… We’re always thinking: what are we making? What are the limitations? What are the possibilities?”

Creative printing options are spawning. One of the most exciting is the development of CreateSpace.com, which has the potential to turn the newspaper industry into a specification-based medium, like the Internet, without ceding its distinctive form. Currently, this on-demand printing service allows users to create their own books, free of charge. Every copy ordered through the website or through Amazon.com is printed on-demand and shipped to the consumer. The author earns 60 to 80 percent of the royalties for each sale, depending on whether the sale comes directly through CreateSpace.com or through Amazon.com.

What businesses like CreateSpace.com suggest is that on-demand printing is a very tangible possibility for the future of print journalism. For example, a new model for the newspaper industry could include customized printing, which would allow readers to pre-order the sections of the newspaper they would like to receive, the types of articles they wish to read and even the frequency of the printed edition’s delivery, minimizing waste and maximizing niche markets. Taking the specifications even further, users could choose their content by author, thus selecting to donate royalties specifically to the content-provider rather than the publication. Journalists would then, in themselves, become commodities. Even advertising could become more effective in this environment. The traditional model of print advertising, preferred by many advertising agencies, could still apply to this customized publication, but readers would be receiving news in a similar manner to which they seek it on the Internet: by interest and not obligation. Advertisers, too, could target a much more specific audience based on the selections made by the user. The process could potentially fuse the best of both print and Internet technologies: the ability for customization and the delivery of content through a traditional medium.

In honor of the possibilities for the print journalism industry, the next issue of McSweeney’s, Eggers announced, will be in newspaper form. “The hope is that we can demonstrate that if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive,” wrote Eggers in an public email to anyone who needs “bucking up” about the industry. The future of newspapers, Eggers says, begins with “creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print.” The result will be a medium that not only allows space for the forms intrinsic to its centuries-long dominance, but that embraces a traditional economic model: using quality, not quantity, to encourage sales. “To survive, the newspaper, and the physical book, needs to set itself apart from the web,” said Eggers. “Physical forms of the written word need to offer a clear and different experience. And if they do, we believe, they will survive. Again, this is a time to roar back and assert and celebrate the beauty of the printed page. Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.”

View this article on A Day Like This.

Coming Wednesday: Growing pains, part 2: Can grassroots journalism help underserved communities?

25,000 user visits in just seven days,
400 reader comments
…these were some of the results when 22 Danish online journalism students set up a website dedicated to covering the home town soccer team.

The class spend a week preparing for the project and setting up the site, http://www.agfokus.dk (Danish language). Technology costs were kept at 75 dollars, and for this modest investment of time and money they created and instant succes with fans – and a very worthwhile educational experience, both as an online journalism exercise and an experiment with dialogue-based journalism.

First some background on who we are:

The Danish School of Journalism is one of the larger journalism faculties in Europe with approximately 1100 full time journalism and photojournalism students enrolled and a staff of 110. DSJ is exchanging students with more than 40 educational partners in all parts of the world.

The course “Online Journalism & Multimedia Storytelling” has existed since 1999, and is one of five advanced practical media studies that journalism and photojournalism students at DSJ can choose during their final year. The course takes up a good part of a full semester. Focus is both hands-on and theoretical, with emphasis on acquiring the relevant skills in digital technology (photo, audio, video, Flash, basic HTML and CMS). Over the years students from the course have won national and international awards in multimedia journalism with their graduating projects. Projects are online at http://afdelinger.djh.dk/semesterprojekter.

We usually have one or more “live” online projects, always of shorter duration, during the course, and over the years we have tried many variations. Last fall I wanted to focus extensively (for the first time), on dialogue-based journalism, and for that I needed to be sure of a fairly big attentative online audience, which of course is not easy to ensure for a student project. I was guessing that some kind of spots focus could deliver an audience to an online project, but I was reluctant to go in that direction, because I feared that a large part of my students would have motivational problems with a sports-related subject.

But then I spotted an interesting “dramatic” situation: Our campus is situated in Aarhus, a city of 300.000, where the local soccer club, AGF (one of the main Danish clubs), had sensationally dropped out of the main league the previous season. As the fall season drew to an end last November, it became apparent that the team was not going to have an easy time making it back to the top league. In the last week of the fall season the team faced three “make or break” games during six days, and that November week fitted perfectly into my course programme in terms of carrying out a live online project.

So soccer it was, and predictably, at least a third of the class couldn’t believe their bad luck when I revealed the subject for the exercise. We were to focus exclusively and extensively on the team with every skill the class had acquired: Round-the-clock online coverage, still photos, audio, video, multimedia interactives — and every story element would be open for comments/dialogue.

Preparations / Information Architecture

Out of initial story idea-developing sessions came suggestions like: “Doesn’t it hurt when a player falls over during a match?” and “To date a soccer player.” It was obviously going to need some heavy-handed editing from my side to produce content that the club’s fans would actually read.

Luckily the problem of focusing on the right kind of stories solved itself, when the students as part of the preparations were asked to put together a profile of the four most likely audience “archetypes.” The students conducted interviews with fans in all layers of society, started threads in online fan communities presenting their project, and one group even spent an evening at home with a family whose entire lives seemed to evolve around the club. That particular experience revealed that the father, a blue-collar worker of about 50, literally spent hours daily scouring sports sites and online communities for any club-related piece of information and apparently his friends did the same. A surprise for most of us, who in our minds had stereotyped his age group and educational background into not being part of the online crowd.

Thus, a couple of days into the project it became self-evident for the students, that story ideas like “Doesn’t it hurt to fall over during a ball game?” had to be shelved. We were dealing with an audience of hard-core fans who would follow any URL to news and information about their team, and it was a starved audience; after the league relegation, their team was for the first time performing under the radar of national sports news and television coverage.

This led to a very clear and focused understanding among the students: We were about to engage a critical audience, experts really, who knew much more than we did about the subject at hand. Not an unusual situation for any journalist, but the process of analyzing the situation and getting to know the potential site-audience became a very meaningful educational experience transcending the sports-subject. As an added bonus, everyone became engaged in the challenge lying ahead.

Also surprisingly (for us at least), the fan base turned out to be more diverse in terms of age, geography and social status than we initially assumed, and we were able to accommodate this information into the formation of the site. An early idea that became very popular with readers was an invitation to “exiled” fans to send us their story and a photo of themselves in team colors. This led to really nice (and popular) stories from all over the globe.

For information architecture tools, I used John Shiple’s dated but still excellent basic tutorial and some additional Danish texts.

The audience is commenting

One of my big doubts and unknowns was whether we would be able to enter into a professionally and educationally meaningful dialogue with soccer fans, or if comments and debate on the site would be confined to esoteric fan discussions and banter. But I need not have worried. As it turned out, comments were for the most part positive, helpful and educating.

A few words about the set up: The site was built as a WordPress blog with every story open for comments. Commenting was not moderated, except that a user’s first comment on the site required active approvement from an editor. This worked really well, and allowed us to stop one or two comments not relating to either site or subject.

Out of 400 comments delivered on the site during the course of the week, only one thread needed a few cooling remarks from the editor. This was after the second game of the week (which the local team lost), where fans of the visiting team left some gloating remarks on the site, which in turn provoked AGF fans. Other than that, the overwhelming number of comments were positive in nature. The comments largely divide into a few groups: