For this week’s post, I had the privilege to “talk” with Brady a few days after he was the guest host on #wjchat, a weekly Web journalism chat held through Twitter. There were a few questions we had to cut because of time and hope to ask and explore them here. [NOTE: Play back the raw interview here]

Can you tell me a little about your background? Mainly, what was your first Web journalism job? How did you start? What was the environment like at the time? The culture?

The first Web job I had was in 1995. I’d been a sportswriter at The Washington Post for a while, and had always been interested in new media, as they called it back then. I had a Prodigy account, an AOL account and even an eWorld account. Loved the idea of getting information whenever and however I wanted, but there was no practical application for a journalist to work online in the early 1990s. But then The Post launched a subsidiary called Digital Ink, and I joined in April 1995 to help it launch The Post’s first online adventure. We were a channel on a dial-up proprietary system called AT&T Interchange, which launched in late 1995. But we jumped on the proprietary bandwagon right as the Web took off, so we quickly shuttered our presence on Interchange and I was sports editor [for] the team that launched Washingtonpost.com in June 1996.

The culture was totally freewheeling and wide open, and none of the Web-print newsroom tensions existed at that point because, frankly, very few people at the paper gave a crap about what we were doing. We had an amazing creative bunch of folks there at that time, and many of them are still in digital media. It was a blast.

You have an amazing Web journalist, pioneering career. Your last adventure was with the D.C. local start-up TBD. Can you describe the news org for folks? And, the question on people’s minds, the reason why you left it?

The concept of TBD was to produce a local news operation that wasn’t just on the Web, but OF the Web. What that meant, in my view, was avoiding the trap of producing traditional journalistic forms and just throwing them up on the Web. To truly be OF the Web, you have to produce journalism in ways that works in that medium. Sometimes, that still means producing a traditional all-text narrative. But, more than that, it means truly engaging with your audience, which we did via very aggressive conversation and newsgathering done via social media, via live chats and by building a network of more than 200 local blogs and linking to them and selling advertising for many of them. Being of the Web means linking to other sites, so that you can become the first stop for readers interested in a topic and expose them to multiple voices in a region. It means not viewing mobile at something you have to do to check a box, but truly making an effort to produce a mobile site that thinks about that kind of information someone would want when disconnected from a laptop or desktop. It means not viewing the Web as just another platform. I hate the term “platform agnostic.” I think it’s totally backwards. Some content works on multiple platforms; most of it does not. So we tried to blend these elements — all of which had been done separately in other places — into a unique local blend. And the audience response and traffic suggests TBD is on to something. And many of the calls I’ve gotten about consulting are asking for guidance on how we built TBD, which suggests others see it as a viable model as well.

As for why I left, despite the vision I just laid out, ownership of the company I worked for, Allbritton Communications, suggested we were out ahead of the audience and that we should scale back some of the aforementioned elements and focus on hiring more reporters and scaling back on the stuff I thought made us unique. We tried to find a middle ground, but in the end, there just wasn’t any. Both sides were pretty strong-willed in what they thought was right, and, as I told my friends, when you get into a significant dispute with the owner of a company, you’re always the one who ends up leaving.

True. What do you make of the reactions about your departure? It seemed to be the talk of Web journalism, for better or worse.

Well, I think the fact so many people were so surprised suggests to me that they also thought we were doing something interesting, different and worth watching. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot we were still struggling with, and the site launched with about half of what we originally envisioned. So we had a ways to go. But the reaction, the comments I’ve gotten and the desire for many others in media to get more details on what we were doing suggests there’s something there. And people should continue to keep an eye on TBD. Erik Wemple is a tremendous editor, Steve Chaggaris has done an amazing job leading the TV side of TBD and there’s a ton of talent there that will continue to do interesting things, assuming management doesn’t declaw the good ideas over the coming months.

You talked a little about it during #wjchat, but can you talk about what’s next for you. What are you looking for? You mentioned people want to talk to you about replicating TBD’s successes, is that the immediate future for you? What’s your dream gig, anyway?

Honestly, I don’t know at this point. Going to start consulting next week, and have a few gigs lined up, some longer term and some one-day jobs. But I want to be patient and wait for something that’s the perfect fit. I know what I don’t want to do, and that’s go back into a newsroom full-time and evangelize the Web anymore. I freely admit to being tired of that particular part of working in legacy media. I have reached the point where, after 15 years, the burden of proof really needs to shift to those who have decided to keep their heads in the sand. I don’t think I should have to explain to journalists why they need to pay attention to the Web; I think the companies they work for are owed an explanation by those folks as to why they’re not paying attention. To be fair, I think those folks are in the minority in newsrooms now, but many still holds positions of significant power, and getting the Web and print or TV or radio to work together requires real effort from both sides, and that effort needs to start from the highest levels of a company. But if I can find a job where that’s not a key component, that’s great. But what’s most important to me in the next job is to replicate the startup feel that the folks at TBD had for a while. The ability to launch something new, with a talented staff you get to hire and supportive management, is something I want to do before I get out of the business. I felt like we were close to that at TBD, but didn’t quite get the complete support of management there, though Robert [Allbritton] deserves a lot of credit for having the guts to support the idea.

Why do you think that is… that makes leadership/management still not understand or value the Web and its opportunities/possibilities? And what advice, if any, do you have to those that are still in newsrooms fighting this good fight?

Well, let’s be honest: A lot of it has to do with revenue. The legacy businesses still drive a significant majority of the revenue. And no one is suggesting — as I often see ill-informed types write on Twitter — that most of us digital types want companies to shut down those businesses. We don’t, and they can’t. But you see places where 80 percent of the revenue is from a legacy business, and 90 percent of mindshare is going toward the legacy business. To me, to have an effective long view, companies should be spending half their mindshare trying to build a business model in the medium that is clearly going to the future of most of these companies. That’s the frustration. I think people get that the Web is a huge part of the future, but for whatever reason, it’s still hard to get those folks to actually focus on it.

As for those still fighting the good fight, my advice is the same as its always been: To be successful getting newsrooms engaged in fighting on the Web, you have to show them what they get out of it, other than an occasional pat on the back. Find a few pioneers in your newsroom who are willing to try anything, then make sure the rest of the newsroom knows about those successes, which inevitably appeals to the competitive nature of journalists. And do everything you can to make sure successes are celebrated at the highest levels of the company. One of my criticisms of the management at Allbritton is that they never got TBD and Channel 7 together to share an overall vision of why the entire project had been greenlit. You need air cover from management in cases where you’re trying something new. The mangers and staffers lower down in the org have to make the day-to-day work, but without public top-level management support, it makes the battles in the trenches much harder.

Can you briefly talk about how you got started with TBD. Did someone approach you? Did you pitch the idea to someone?

I met with Robert Allbritton when I was doing some consulting for Politico, and he asked me what I was interested in doing next, and I mentioned local as something – based on my experience at The Post – [that] seemed like a real opportunity. He was interested, so I went off for a few months and pulled together a business plan, a competitive analysis and a strategy for the site. He thought about it for a while, and decided to go ahead and do it, to which I owe him greatly.

Because of time, we had to cut out some audience questions from #wjchat … I’d like to ask you a couple of them here. The first one is from Saleem Khan (@saleemkhan): If you were launching a news startup today [@TBD-scale and bootstrapped] what would you do differently?

First one is obviously [to] pick a niche. (Although we did that at TBD as well, though it was a big niche called “local”). As for what I’d do differently, I think the first part is to have a sales force with deep digital backgrounds. That was the original plan at TBD, and we hired some talented people with digital chops. But the company changed the structure before launch, and all those folks were put under the TV sales structure, and all soon left. I think that was a mistake. The TV sales forces did a pretty good job of selling the site once it launched, but we struggled to get traction in any sales area outside straight CPM-based display, and I don’t think that’s enough to support the site long term. That’s why we had the blog network and wanted to focus on selling geo-targeted ads and maybe even get into providing some self-serve tools for smaller local advertisers. But we didn’t get anywhere with those, and do think some other revenue streams will be needed. So my biggest piece of advice is to hire people who know the medium in which you’re living.

The next question comes from Sarah Fidelibus (@verbalcupcake): What startups have particularly impressed you? What have they’ve gotten “right”? Who has a biz model that you think is working well? Examples? What are they doing right, and how so? (These were two separate tweets from Sarah.)

I think there are different types of startups that have impressed me, and in different niches. On the news side, I do like what many of the non-profits are doing. I think ProPublica does phenomenal work on the investigative and data sides, and it’s been interesting to track local startups like MinnPost, Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego and Bay Citizen. I also find myself fascinated by location-based services like Twitter and Gowalla. I am not quite sure how they tie into local journalism yet, but there’s an answer there, which [is] why I check in just about everywhere on FourSquare. I think that’s the only way to really learn about these things. I am also really interested in what SB Nation is doing here in DC. They’ve done a great job of aggregating strong voices throughout the world of sports, telling stories in a more fun and more open way than most sports sites, and they seemed to have managed to tap into the community nature of sports that even an amazing site like ESPN can’t quite go at as hard, because they have so much stuff from their various platforms to promote.

As for the business models, I think we’d all agree there [isn't] a massive list of new news sites that are making a ton of profit at this point. Honestly, that’s part of the reason the TBD idea seemed so interesting for me to pursue: I think, even if we figure out how we best evolve journalistically to the Web, it won’t much matter if we don’t get the business side figured out. And as someone pointed out during the wjchat the other night, I think the business side is farther behind in figuring out the Web than the newsrooms are. But neither side is where it needs to be yet.

Agreed. The last crowdsoured question comes from Andy Boyle (@andymboyle): I heard you very much dislike the “Web producer” title of people. Or so you said at Nebraska. Tell us more?

Yeah, not a big fan of that title, but only because I don’t think a lot of people in legacy newsrooms know what the hell it means. As a result, I think sometimes Web producers are treated like technical people and not the journalists that they almost always are. So you hear stories where a Web producer is handed a headline and blurb to post by a newspaper staffer because that person doesn’t realize the producer actually can do that task as well. There are a lot of titles on Web teams that don’t always explain what someone actually does. Sad that issue still exists, but I do expect that, over time, titles will flatten out and everyone will understand what everyone else does. But, sadly, we don’t seem to be there yet. I think, what it really comes down to is that, as long as people understand your skill set and what you do, you can give them the title of the “king of the universe” if you want. Understanding who someone is ends up being far more important than what they’re called.

Titles certainly have been somewhat of a joke in the Web journalism world. I was feeling good about my “Director” title until I met a “Senior Director.” But putting those labels aside, how do you describe your skills… how do you describe what you do in journalism? Meaning, I’m a journalist… more specifically a Web journalist. But, I’ve been describing what I do as being more like a Mad Scientist for journalism. A guy that bridges tech and journalism for the advancement of storytelling/journalism. How would you/do you describe what you do?

I am a journalist who speaks multiple “languages,” if you will. I understand the differences between platforms. I am a journalist who advocates assessing a story first, and then determining the best tools to tell it effectively, as opposed to going into a story knowing it’ll be text or video or photos, etc. But it’s a good question. I’ve never really boiled it down to a sentence. I guess I’d call myself a journalist who has found his true home in digital, but still rents a house in other media.

Ha! Well said, sir. I have so many more questions to ask… but we are running out of time. Let me ask you one final question that I’ve been asking journos for the last few months. In your career, you’ve had your ups and your downs… not to sound to negative, but as Web journos we get frustrated… but any way you look at it, we’re still here trying. Why? Why do you stay in this business? What keeps you going and fighting and evolving? Why are you a journalist?

Well, as to the question of why, I saw “All the President’s Men” in the theater with my parents when I was seven, and am probably still one of the only kids who always thought it was a cooler movie than “Star Wars.” So I fell in love with journalism at that point. But in the early years of my career, I started getting really interested in technology as well, and damn near almost quit the business in 1992 to go get a computer science degree. So the last 15 years of my life have been wonderful, as I’ve gotten the chance to mix two real passions. As for why it’s important to keep pushing, it’s trite and simple: The journalism business — and I use the word business intentionally — is in trouble, and journalism remains a crucial piece of our democracy and I fear for its future. Even though the money isn’t where it needs to be on the digital side, I find it thrilling to be aboard the ship that [is] going to eventually be the rescue ship. So that, to me, is where I find the excitement and desire to charge on. Having said that, I’m at a point now where I’d rather go off and build a whole new digital ship and leave the evangelizing to others. I’m starting to believe the future of journalism may well be a whole host of shiny brand-new ships as opposed to the repainted ships of old. I expect the major media companies of today to be around going forward, but they’re going to have to survive against a whole host of new competitors.

Well, I never thought I’d see a sentence that [would compare] both “All the President’s Men” and “Star Wars” … perhaps one can argue that Woodward and Bernstein were the Luke and Han for newspapers in their day.

I always said that the character of Darth Vader had nothing on Ben Bradlee in that movie. He was a much cooler cat, if you ask me.

Ha! Well, thank you Jim for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

My pleasure. Thanks for the great questions, and for hosting wjchat the other night. Fun times.

I’m glad you enjoyed it!

Robert Hernandez is a Web Journalism professor at USC Annenberg and co-creator of #wjchat, a weekly chat for Web Journalists held on Twitter. You can contact him by e-mail (r.hernandez@usc.edu) or through Twitter (@webjournalist). Yes, he’s a tech/journo geek.

The Post’s formidable brand isn’t politics alone, but, to resort to an overused phrase that once had real meaning – the “intersection of policy and politics.”

The Post brand was created in the mid-1960s, when its new managing editor (and later executive editor), Ben Bradlee, transformed the Post’s pokey, provincial Washington staff into an agile, probing team of correspondents that effortlessly toggled between policy and politics, often in the same article. Propelling this transformation were the big ideas of the 1960s: Cold-War strategizing, the civil rights revolution, the persistence of poverty in postwar America, renewing hollowed-out cities, landing a man on the Moon – just for starters.

It didn’t last forever. As big ideas shrank in size after the 1960s, the Post’s politics/policy brand lost some of its momentum and relevance. The vacuum in ideas in Washington was gradually but relentlessly filled by politics. The capital became Circus Maximus II, whose broad oval extended from Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street NW. The increasingly electronic, short-attention-span media was delighted by the circus, because it was less expensive to cover and most of it could be presented as heart-pumping horse races, with a sprinkling of sassy asides from the regulars in the grandstand and clubhouse.

On cable TV, whose growing popularity paralleled the triumph of politics, deep reporting was replaced by sound-bitten punditry, most of it supplied by consultants to the money-oiled Democratic and Republican campaign machines. (Two honorable exceptions to the cable circus are The Rachel Maddow Show and The Joe Scarborough Show, both of which try to negotiate that intersection of policy and politics.) To its credit, the Post clung at least to the spirit of the Bradlee policy/politics manual, and in sometimes path-breaking ways. The Post brand was diminished, but it still had value that could be weighed on a scale.

Now, sadly, Post Politics looks like a move to de-emphasize the Post’s honorable legacy and restructure its Washington coverage according to Circus Maximus II.

This downsizing of the Post brand has to delight the founders of Politico, John Harris and James VanderHei, both of whom left the Post to exploit more completely Washington’s seizure by total politics. Politico correspondents shuttle between the Capitol and White House on Pennsylvania Avenue and its ad salespeople troll the lobbyists’ offices on K Street and its environs. But the auguries for Circus Maximus II aren’t that promising. Big ideas are starting to come back.

This isn’t wishful thinking. Start with the evolution of one of the country’s most politicized issues – how to improve the education of children, particular those representing minorities. For the past several years, the No Child Left Behind law has been one of the hottest political debates in Washington. The debate continues, but the sound bites are being replaced by real discussion about how to better educate children. It’s happening because of the accumulating evidence that NCLB did not close the gap between the education of black and Hispanic students and others. There’s now space for policy ideas that seek to save the best of NCLB but add elements that engage the entire community not just teachers and what happens in the classroom.

Other big ideas are on the horizon:

• Health reform legislation will, because of how it was written, generate a steady stream of ideas to cut costs while also improving care. Rants against reform will lose their power as the nation is forced to get serious about health costs that, on a per-capital basis, are double and more those in other Western countries.
• The new Fiscal Reform Commission has a broad mandate to come up with serious proposals to reduce the national debt to sustainable levels. Sound bites on cable shows won’t cut it in the sobering debate that is already unfolding.
• Cities, towns and villages everywhere are struggling with the twin challenges of becoming more livable without going bankrupt. While this sounds like a local or state issue, the feds are intimately tied up to what happens in communities of all sizes as the consequence of federal stimulus funding.
• Energy policy has been a can kicked down the road since the first oil crisis in 1967. It’s a sound-bite favorite on cable. But the oil spout in the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana is already prompting a serious national conversation about an energy strategy that goes beyond our present, overwhelming dependence on fossil fuels. “Drill, baby, drill” won’t shape this conversation.

By jamming its Washington coverage into the politics-as-a-horse-race oval of its Post Politics page, washingtonpost.com is poorly positioned to exploit the comeback of big ideas and re-establish the power of its brand. The handicapping headliners of Post Politics completely missed how libertarian Rand Paul, winner of the Kentucky Republican senatorial primary, boxed himself into a position outside the Civil Rights Act. Instead of camping out on Circus Maximus II, the Post should be planting its flag where Bradlee put it in the mid-1960s – at that intersection of policy and politics.

A model for doing just that exists right in the Post newsroom. Young correspondent Ezra Klein covered the long battle for health-care reform legislation in the style of an unbuttoned wonk with a mischievous sense of humor. His blog is refreshingly called “Economic and Domestic Policy, and Lots of It.” But Klein’s blog doesn’t appear to be inspiring other Washington coverage in the Post, although the Post Politics page did make this recent stab at finding the policy-politics intersection (see below). Resigned Rep. Mark Souder should be grateful that his sexual escapade with his part-time staffer was interpreted as a policy initiative.

Today’s Post editors have Web tools to make policy-accented stories come alive in ways that were unavailable to the Post in the 1960s. The tools are built around what’s called “data visualization.” Huge globs of data about school performance, health care costs, etc., have been pouring into cyberspace for a decade or more. What’s new is that now these globs can be converted into visually useful information that can make policy debates as exciting as the World Championship Wrestling-type pundit square-offs on cable TV.

How data visualization can alter policy debates – for the better – was dramatically demonstrated during the closing days of the acrimonious congressional battle over health-care reform. GOP House Minority Leader – and Circus Maximus II ringmaster – John Boehner decided to show how impossibly complex the legislation was by portraying it in a PowerPoint diagram that was Rube Goldberg, or maybe the Pentagon, squared. But then reform advocates countered with real data visualization to show what the legislation would do, and not do. The graphical rebuttal required none of the bent arrows, dotted lines and curlicues of Boehner’s diagram.

You won’t find current innovations in data visualization on the Post Politics page. What you’ll find instead is a clunky, pre-21^st century guide to congressional action and dull “meet-you-member” bios of lawmakers. Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander, in a glowing article on the debut of Post Politics, referred to the site’s “slick interactive” map of the status of 2010 congressional races. But the map doesn’t let the user do the most basic visual analysis of the races to see how the balance of power might change on Capitol Hill against different variables.

Instead of trying to out-Politico Politico, the Post should be using its website to mash together politics and policy with all the textual verve of the Post’s national staff of 40 years ago but with the added wizardry of today’s data visualization. If it did, its brand would once again shine brightly – at Circus Maximus II and beyond.

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, take 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, pledge 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!

Weymouth’s first salon was to be about health care. The now-infamous promotional flier promised a “spirited” evening. But so what? There is “spirited” debate about health care all over the media 24/7. What the Post should be doing is creating a 21^st-century democratic salon where health care can move beyond debate to action. The salon should be on washingtonpost.com, and it should go way beyond creating a dead-end talkfest involving health care providers, congressional and administration officials and Post writers and editors.

The missing invitees at Weymouth’s salon were Americans who
1) don’t have health care,
2) don’t have enough to protect them from a major illness or
3) are well covered but whose health isn’t any better for that.

There are, according to some respected estimates, almost 46 million Americans without any health insurance . Add the other two categories, and you probably have a grand total of 100 million or more people who are squeezed in the health care crisis. Their documented stories of denied health services, bankruptcy from uncovered bills and treadmill treatment should count for at least as much as what a health industry CEO or member of Congress has to say.

Washingtonpost.com could build the online salon where those stories could be heard, and, more important, acted on. It could set up sub-sites in metro areas that cover a cross-section of all U.S. demographicsand are known for both high and low health care costs. The recent and widely referenced New Yorker article by Atul Gawande on how health care costs in McAllen, TX, far outpace costs in prevention-focused metro areas but leaves residents in worse shape could be a template for a countrywide examination of medical technology and physician entrepreneurialism run amok.

The goal of this online salon would be not just airing health care issues, but pinpointing what’s broken in the system and coming up with affordable ways to fix it.

This would require a washingtonpost.com committed to engagement, but, so far, that’s not part of the site’s mission. It seems more interested in adding bells and whistles, including trying to be funny, like in this embarrassingly inept political skit inspired by Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

An online salon about health care that reaches out to the millions of Americans who are uninsured, under-insured and wondering how much health their insurance has bought them wouldn’t produce too many laughs. But it might help prod Congress to pass legislation that would let the U.S. finally join all other industrialized nations in providing for universal coverage. That’s something that Katharine Weymouth’s salons, however good the food and wine might be, would never achieve.

[And now, OJR editor Robert Niles adds his thoughts:]

While I agree with what Tom’s written, I want to add a couple more points: First, let’s not dismiss the power of off-line events to reward, strength and ultimately expand online communities.

Offline meetings represent a powerful and significant development in the relationship between an individual and an online community. It’s the moment when a relationship goes from being casual to representing a more lasting commitment. People so inspired to be willing to travel to a physical space to meet in person with other members show by their action a commitment to the community far greater than simple browsing and posting the occasional comment.

These are individuals around whom you can build new initiatives, support far larger membership and create a critical mass than will make additional classes of advertisers and funders take notice. Online publications from BlogHer to New West to DailyKos have made offline events part of the business and promotional strategy and the Post, like other papers, would do well to consider their lead.

Second, let’s not overlook these offline events as potential sources of revenue, as well. Most folks might not be willing to pay for online content, but they are willing to pay to attend conferences. And sponsors are willing to pay to have their names and logos attached to events that attract their customers.

So how is this any different that what the Post proposed (then abandoned)? We’re talking about building extending a new publisher’s relationship with the public – not with a handful of big-money insiders. And doing it on the record – a record that will be enhanced by the reporting of hundreds, or, if you are fortunate, thousands of readers who take the next step in their relationship with you by attending.

If newspapers are to remain relevant in a newly competitive media marketplace, they must not be content simply to inform readers. That won’t help them stand out from the crowd of other information sources. They’ve got to provide information so engaging, so compelling, that it moves readers to action. An offline, physical gathering can be one of those acts. Engagement in the formation and execution of public policy can be another. (Heck, not to be too crass here, but pulling out the wallet and buying something from an advertiser ought to be another action, as well.)

Here’s the good news for the Post: People hated the salon idea.

Why is that good news for the Post?

If you don’t care about the Post and don’t care to have a relationship with it, you wouldn’t care who the Post publisher ate dinner with and how much she charged. The fact that so many people reacted like a jilted boyfriend to the Post’s plan demonstrated that people do care about the newspaper and want it to be in relation with them instead of K Street bigwigs. People want a Post that answers to them, not to the lobbyists.

Why not, then, give the people what they want?

But just how “strong” will Book World be online?

When the Los Angeles Times eliminated its free-standing print Sunday Book Review in 2008 as part of its nonstop cost-cutting, the section was reincarnated online as Books in the Living section of the Times website. In addition to reviews, book-sale reports and a literary calendar, Books features a blog called Jacket Copy. But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality. Overall, the online Books isn’t capitalizing on the strengths of the Web – particularly community building – and it doesn’t seem to have preserved the critical authority that was a hallmark of the print Book Review. Browsing through the skimpy site, you get the feeling it’s produced on a shoestring. There is no Steve Wasserman or Digby Diehl – past editors of the Book Review – setting and executing high standards.

The Washington Post is not going through the same financial duress as the LA Times, which is a helpless appendage of the fast-sinking and bankrupt Tribune Co. But the migration from print to online life, whatever the circumstances, is always tricky.

The print Book World was distinguished by both its gravitas and sprightliness. Holding it in your hands was like eavesdropping at a literary salon through which passed the likes of Morris Dickstein, Dahlia Lithwick, Laura Miller and George Packer, not to mention section regulars like critic Jonathan Yardley and essayist Michael Dirda, both Pulitzer prize winners. The only thing missing was the well-stocked bar.

Happily, Yardley and Dirda will continue to appear in the online Book World. Strangely, though, the lustrous brand name “Book World” seems to have been dropped. The departmental logo is now just “Books.”

It’s too soon to make sweeping judgments about the online Book World (or Books), especially whether it will meet the same fate as the online version of the LA Times’ Book Review. But it is dismaying to see how dull the newly unveiled site is, even in its pupae form. Yardley and Dirda are there, thank goodness, but they’re barely promoted in 8-point type.

The blog Short Stack, created back in 2007, is now daily, but, like the similar LA Times blog, has multiple authors, which impedes it from developing a personality to which readers can relate and react. The blog also seems to be limited to one entry per day. That’s way too leisurely to grab users’ attention and get them to join in what is now basically a one-way conversation. Why not at least add a paragraph or two at the end that wraps up always plentiful literary and publishing news and gossip?

The Post – and the LA Times – could learn some lessons about creating an online book section from the Guardian in the UK. Its site is big and splashy, but has enough gravitas to do a “Top 10″ on books about Rome that includes Robert Graves’ “I Claudius.” The entire section draws loads of comments from users. (You have to wonder if some other newspapers that have eliminated or cut back on book coverage couldn’t learn from the Guardian too.)

For all their literary excellence, the print Book World and the Times’ Book Review weren’t suited for reader participation (beyond rationed letters to the editor). The medium was truly the message – a one-way message.

Kassia Krozser, founder and editor of the lively blog booksquare.com (“dissecting the book industry with love and skepticism”), said in a discussion on PBS’ News Hour last July: “What we’re getting online is, people are excited about books. They want to talk about books. And that’s really incredible….”

And how. Librarything.com, one of the earliest reader sites, claims 500,000 users. It recently sold a 40 percent stake to AbeBooks,com, which specializes in selling used, rare and out-of-print books

Fast-growing Shelfari.com last year completed funding whose investors included Amazon, the champion online bookseller.

Book World shouldn’t mimic sites like Librarything or Shelfari. But it now has a potential audience of 10 million unique visitors – more than 10 times the potential readership it had in the Post’s Sunday print edition.

What an exciting new chapter this could be in Book World’s life – if only the publishing and editorial bosses at the Post inspire it to be written.

The Washington Post does great journalism. Jonathan Krim, assistant managing editor/ local at washingtonpost.com, documents several examples in his response to my recent piece “Washington Post needs to do some structural work on its shaky new strategy.” Except Krim mislabeled this journalism as a serious attempt at “deeper and broader [community] engagement.” It isn’t.

The best example that Krim cited – “Fixing D.C.’s Schools” – actually shows how the Post, particularly its website, remains stuck in this great paper’s legacy of investigative journalism, where the investigators, who are word, not action, people, remain in total control. The series, put together by a team of 12 reporters, editors, videographers and others, is a devastating indictment of how the District public schools educate their students. But the articles, fine as they are, offer no avenues of help to District parents who have children in one of the worst public school systems in the country.

“We need a community…We need parents are every school who are involved,” says April Witt, one of the series reporters, in an online Q & A. Witt comes close to sounding like an action person, but, that’s not the direction washingtonpost.com chose to go with “Fixing D.C.’s Schools.” Krim cites the series’ school-by-school database as an example of community building. While the database admirably pinpoints academic, staffing and infrastructure problems at each school, it has nothing to say about the pitiable lack of parent resources. Yet an email survey of washingtonpost.com readers during the series identified parental involvement as the third most-cited problem with D.C. schools.

The school system’s new chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee (who reports to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty), agrees. Her five-year plan [PDF file] to turn D.C. schools around says bluntly: “Too many of our students’ parents are uninformed consumers of public education who blindly support the District’s public schools without full knowledge of the significant deficiencies of the schools they champion. DCPS believes that if it effectively arms parents with the knowledge and tools they need to understand what a quality education looks like, they would demand action and accountability.” To do that, the system has created an Office of Community and Family Engagement. But because the office appears to exist mainly on paper, it can’t meet on-the-ground needs that are proliferating as Rhee and her team attempt to carry out their five-year plan, which began with the 2008-09 school year.

“There is no PTA and a lack of interest in getting involved,” said one community member at a recent forum on the plan. “I looked around tonight and there were very few parents. There were only six teachers in attendance. We say we want to engage the community. But, when you look around you see the community isn’t in the room. But, the community is here and many people want to be involved and engaged.”

The Post series could have helped to close this gap by creating online sub-sites in each community where parents and others could air their frustrations and, more important, put pressure on the school system to deliver on its promises to provide parents with the knowledge and tools they need, and in many cases can’t get.

I don’t pretend creating sub-sites would be easy to do. It would involve washingtonpost.com deploying editors – I prefer to call them “impresarios” – who would help parents become grassroots versions of the Post’s vaunted investigative journalists. Empowered parents could connect the dots between words and action – something no investigative journalism, however deeply it digs, can achieve by itself. (I use “words” here generically for all content.)

For all its multimedia razzle-dazzle, the Post‘s “Fixing D.C. Schools” series was rooted in the old journalistic way of doing things – tight, top-down control. The Q & A sessions – one of the few places where the public-school community has a voice on washingtonpost.com – contain this stipulation: “…washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control…and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.” Not very welcoming.

What Krim seem to resist understanding is that good and even great journalism doesn’t guarantee community engagement. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (at least the younger Hearst) understood that their papers’ dramatically written and displayed stories of outrage had to be followed up by reform. They helped to make that happen – often by pulling governmental and other levers that no publisher or editor today would dare touch.

Today’s newspapers have to figure how to catalyze connecting the dots between words and action. That’s what real community engagement does. With the enormous potential of its online platform, the Washington Post could lead the way, and, in the process, re-invent its credibility and influence in a media world that is going through a full-blown revolution that will, surely, create jaw-dropping winners and losers. In the midst of these convulsions, the Post is assembling a new team of editorial leaders. Will they push washingtonpost.com toward a new paradigm – call it Web publishing 3.0 – that finally connects the dots between words and action?

In her first major statement as publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Weymouth late last year announced a seemingly Zen-inspired long-term strategy of three pillars. The pillar that caught my attention was the second:

“Providing utility, engagement, and convenience for our local readers.”

“Engagement”! Weymouth gets it, I said to myself, the Post is going to build a 21st century community to stay relevant, and financially healthy.

But after reading her whole “The Road Forward” document, I think my optimism may be misplaced.

Weymouth details what the Post will do about utility (“make the paper and washingtonpost.com go-to places for local information”) and convenience (“make it possible for [local consumers] to complete many… transactions on the site”). But nowhere does Weymouth expand on how the Post will promote engagement.

How odd – and disturbing. It’s great that the Post will work ever harder to help its readers and users find movie listings and streamline their shopping. But what, if anything, does it plan to do about helping to turn them into a community that can make the District of Columbia and its suburbs – home to many of them – better places to live?

Metro Washington is, as Weymouth says, an “affluent, highly educated, growing market,” but that demographic jargon doesn’t really define the 5.5 million people who live, work and play – with increasing difficulty – in that “market.”

The District, with 104,000 people living at or below the poverty line, has the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. Its child poverty rate is the highest.

While metro Washington’s suburbs don’t have poverty rates anywhere close to the District’s, they are starting to feel a sizable hurt from a recession that the federal government recently discovered began in December 2007.

The home foreclosure rate in metro Washington increased 574.94% in 2007 – the third highest increase in the nation. In one area in suburban Maryland (including Bethesda, home to thousands of Weymouth’s “affluent, highly educated”), foreclosures soared 1,288 percent – the highest increase of the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas.

Last May, USA Today featured this man-bites-dog lead sentence on a story: “The Washington area may be home to the nation’s power brokers, but it isn’t immune to the infrastructure woes that plague big cities throughout the nation.”

“The rupture [of a water main that closed 800 restaurants] follows a series of recent disruptions for Washington area residents, including a blackout in downtown Washington, a Metro subway train derailment and track damage caused by the heat,” the story said, and quoted officials who said the water system is “aging, overtaxed and underfunded.”

Just before Christmas 2008, another water-main break – in that same “affluent, highly educated” Bethesda – turned a major commuter road into a roaring river from which nine motorists had to be rescued, three of them by helicopter.

In Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, home to yet more of Weymouth”s “affluent, highly educated,” there is a severe shortage of recreational facilities.

“We are shoving so many kids on these fields. It’s unbelievable,” said Beckwith Bolle, president of the Ashburn Soccer Club in an article in a local community paper. “Right now we are putting 1,500 kids [a week] on fields with room for only 600.”

As metro Washington’s local governments see their tax revenues continue to shrink in response to the double-digit plunges [PDF] in housing valuations, human and infrastructure needs will become even more critical.

In the midst of so many challenges within its major coverage area, wouldn’t this be the time for the Washington Post to go all out for community engagement, and to do so with its most powerful platform – washingtonpost.com?

I am a regular user of washingtonpost.com, but when I sign in, I don’t really feel as if I’m part of any kind of welcoming community – not the way I feel when I sign in on Facebook.

On Facebook, my community consists of people I’ve connected with and who’ve connected with me. They all have names (real ones, not Internet handles) and they enthusiastically share their interests and missions, often giving me a “poke” to get involved. If I want to fight poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa or global warming in the U.S., or do any number of other desirable things, big or small, thanks to my Facebook friends, I know where to go.

I get no such community guidance, much less inspiration, from washingtonpost.com. Most of the site’s users hide behind handles, making it difficult, if not impossible, to forge connections.

It’s high time it was said: You can’t build a robust community through anonymity. Washingtonpost.com has clung to this outdated Web convention because it didn’t want to do anything that threatened to decrease traffic to its site. (This could change with the recent resignation of washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady, who was an ardent defender of letting users choose to be anonymous.) Meanwhile, pure-play social networking sites like Facebook, where members say exactly who they are, grow rapidly.

If washingtonpost.com made engagement as high a priority as utility and convenience, it could create a Web-based community that would become a powerful force for good in metro Washington. Such a site could throw a continually searching spotlight on the region’s serious problems, especially as they are made worse by an economic crisis that we are told may rival the Great Depression. More important, such a site could be the platform for connecting the dots between words and action in finding solutions to those problems. In the coming era of economic hunkering in, wouldn’t washingtonpost.com users find help on community building more valuable than how to speed their shopping transactions?

Not incidentally, a fully engaged washingtonpost.com would ensure the Post’s relevancy as its once-super-profitable, high-penetration print product becomes more marginal.

In a recent column, the New York Times’ David Brooks – an astute chronicler of social-cultural transformations in America – wrote:

“People… moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.”

Washingtonpost.com could be the nexus of many of those meeting places in metro Washington. But that won’t happen unless Katharine Weymouth orders her team to strengthen the most important section of the Post strategy’s second pillar – engagement.

So how bad actually is LoudounExtra.com? Let’s look.

On the LoudounExtra homepage, I am greeted with this above-the-fold spread:

My squinting eyes try to read the reverse-type blurb, but before I can finish, a new image/blurb is automatically rotated in the space.

After figuring out how to retrieve the original blurb, I pull up the story. Big mistake.

The operative graf:

“After an hour-long hearing during which the lawyers’ oral arguments were interspersed with questions from the justices, the two sides began the long wait for a ruling that is not expected until mid-September.”

Got that? There won’t be any news about the school for more than three months, but here are 640-plus words of if’s and maybe’s – with a photo showing students from behind (an unflattering view that even a beginning photographer should know to avoid). Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. And this is happening on a 24/7 website of one of the best newspapers in the country?

(In fairness to LoudounExtra, it partially came to its (news) senses later in the day when it provided on-the-fly (though far-too-broad-brush) coverage of severe storms that swept through the area.)

The Post started LoudounExtra to attract Internet users in one of the fastest-growing counties in the U.S. Most Loudoun residents, in contrast to those who live closer in to Washington, don’t read the print edition of the Post. The majority of Loudoun residents are in their family-rearing years. If they use washingtonpost.com – the gateway to LoudounExtra.com – they don’t have the time or inclination to read thumb suckers about something that might happen in three months. Besides, the school that may or may not be built would only affect a minority of families in sprawling Loudoun.

I browse over the rest of the homepage, up and down and from side to side. All told, I encounter a blotchy hodge-podge of about 55 headlines and teasers: “Living in LoCo…Political Battles, Luggage Sale…10:30 a.m. – Glenfiddich Farm Cooking Class, Light Moroccan.”

I look for something, anything, about Hillsboro – a hamlet in mostly rural western Loudoun where I used to live — but there was nothing. When I do a “Hillsboro” search of the site, the top-ranked articles were six months or more old.

The team that developed LoudounExtra was headed by online local journalism guru Rob Curley, whom the Post hired after he earned a national reputation for how he mixed and matched multimedia, undiscovered databases and funny, informative and sometimes weird user contributions to transform the Lawrence, Kan., Journal-World site into a hugely popular virtual town square, and then worked his same magic at the Naples, Fla., Daily News. Curley, who is leaving the Post and joining the Las Vegas Sun with five members of his Post team, said in the WSJ article:

“I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day,” Mr. Curley said. “I dropped the ball. I won’t drop it in Vegas, dude.”

But I’m not sure that LoudounExtra will find its mojo by sending its staff to deliver speeches at Rotary meetings. For Curley, who was the Newspaper Association of America’s “New Media Pioneer of the Year” in 2001, that sounds so 20th century.

LoudounExtra’s problems begin with how it’s mapped. As the WSJ article points out, people don’t live in “Loudoun.” They live in communities within the county like Ashburn, Sterling and Broadlands – each a sum of many particulars (geographic, demographic, historical, occasionally quirky) that add up to identity as specific as a strand of DNA. Kind of like Lawrence, KS, where Curley found the inspiration to do his hyperlocal pioneering.

But Lawrence has a super-special identity. It’s a college town – home to the University of Kansas, with its 25,000 students, the most important of whom are the 17 who play on the closely followed and passionately embraced Jayhawk basketball team. Shrewdly, Curley and his Lawrence Journal-World web team found myriad ways to tap into that passion to help produce content that drove monthly page views from 500,000 to 6 million.

Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent to KU and its Jayhawks in the 10 or so communities of Loudoun. But that doesn’t mean hyperlocal can’t succeed in those communities.

Curley and his team did produce some rich hyperlocal content in Loudoun. But it was mostly what he calls “little J” – Little League, proms, crime blotters. But because each community didn’t get its own homepage, the little J news was lost in the welter of headlines and promos of the single, countywide homepage.

A community site should have two tiers – one for the little J and one for what Curley calls the “big J.”

In Lawrence, with a population of about 89,000, plus the big KU campus, it wasn’t hard for Curley and his team to produce a lot of big J. But how do you do that in an Ashburn or Sterling or Broadlands, which are a lot smaller than Lawrence and don’t have any news-generating institution even close to KU?

Mike Orren’s Pegasus News, which covers more than 150 communities in Dallas/Fort Worth, has come up with some encouraging answers. Most of the Pegasus communities, like those in Loudoun, don’t have any KU-type institutional news generators. Yet Orren and his team of editors – who function more as impresarios – have teased out some excitement from all of them.

Pegasus gives each community its own homepage. But it’s not overly provincial. From their registered homepage, users can hop, ski and jump to nearby communities – actually all 150-plus. They can also easily zoom out to the Dallas/Fort Worth metro area.

Pegasus’ community homepages also are sleek and clean – in contrast to the mish-mash of LoudounExtra’s single, countywide homepage. There are fewer headlines and promos, and they stand out because they’re crisply, and often cleverly, written (“Burglars take aim at Arlington gun store“).

But as lively as Pegasus is, it still hasn’t produced the passionate engagement that Curley often sparked in Lawrence.

The answer, I believe, is to build a site that encourages people to express, in a variety of ways, how they think and feel about their community. I’m talking about a lot more than restaurant or shopping reviews. What makes residents proud? What are their opinions about their schools, recreational facilities, police protection? Who do they rank as their community’s first citizens? What volunteer groups do the best job? What’s the No. 1 problem?

The answers and counter-answers – which could include a simple A to F grading – would generate a huge amount of news about what works and doesn’t work in a community. Public and private leadership, which is mostly missing from comment on current hyperlocal sites, would be under enormous pressure to respond, especially when particular criticisms – a shortage of ball fields, unfounded school improvements, a shabby neighborhood shopping center – draw supporting comments.

To produce this kind of passionate engagement, a site would have to be carefully structured and developed. A different topic for discussion and grading could be promoted each week. Individual grades would be converted into overall scores that would be prominently featured on the homepage. Periodically, topic grades would be averaged to produce an overall community grade. This would produce some rivalries among nearby communities, adding to the passion. There would have to be controls to prevent one contributor from posting multiple grades for one entry and other safeguards.

An engaged hyperlocal site would also embrace the goals of social media. Tools tailored to what people want at their community level (e.g., who can help to raise funds for local charities, who wants to join a movie club, who wants to share nanny-hiring intelligence, etc.) would be provided.

The site should also enthusiastically embrace business potential. Registrants would be rewarded with a card – handsome and snail-mailed – that would entitle them to a 10 percent discount at participanting restaurants, stores and services. In a gesture to community giving, those businesses would, several times a year, declare a week when 10 percent of all revenues from card-bearing customers would go to selected local charities.

All this, of course, would be harder to put together than making speeches to Rotaries. But if hyperlocal wants to build a better model than LoudounExtra and get its share of what Editor & Publisher calls the “astounding” growth in online local ad revenues — currently $2 billion annually – it doesn’t have any other choice.

As the President of the National Education Writers Association, I have the annual privilege of handing over top awards won by education reporters from around the country. Now I’m thinking that privilege bears some responsibility, such as fessing up about times when education coverage dips below award-winning levels.

That happened Tuesday morning when I opened The New York Times and saw an article that did little more than regurgitate the American Association of University Women report making the dubious case that the “boy troubles,” as in boys falling behind in school and graduating from college at lower rates than girls, are a myth. Odd, I thought, a rare fumble by the Times.

Then I picked up The Washington Post, and there on page one was an article that did the same. At least this article had a dissenting view, but that’s not the point. Somehow, the AAUW had managed to pass off its advocacy report as research, not just to the Times and Post but the Wall Street Journal and other publications as well. (E-mail queries to the Times and Post reporters sent Thursday were unanswered as of this posting on Friday.)

When the surprise wore off, I had to smile: kudos to the public relations geniuses at the AAUW. Consider the odds behind their achievement. To succeed, the AAUW had to convince reporters that:

The AAUW provides unbiased research in the area of how boys perform in school. (Wait, does their mission statement even say anything about boys? Why are they dabbling in this?) Here, the group had to count on reporters being unable to recall the shaky “call out” research from its 1992 report, where girls were supposedly being shortchanged in school in part because teachers paid more attention to aggressive boys calling out in the classroom. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that entire report was riddled with problems. Here’s an interesting analysis of the AAUW’s track record as neutral researchers. (Full disclosure: At the time, I gave that report a full ride absent a single critical perspective. Hey, I thought I was doing my young daughters a favor).

So, the AAUW pulled it off again. Reporters had forgotten about that 1992 report. No data were offered to dispute the notion that the boy troubles are really a race issue. No challenge to the college-going data. Everything, a clean sweep. I hadn’t planned on writing about the report, but when my editors saw the blowout coverage the report received they asked me to blog a debate editorial on the issue.

At this point I have to declare my own bias. I’ve been writing about the boy troubles for years and I’m convinced they’re real, not only in the United States but in scores of countries around the world. You can view this as either making me prejudiced or informed enough to acknowledge a reporting fumble. Your call. From my perspective, this matters because the ideological chaff thrown up by groups such as the AAUW stands in the way of educators taking a serious at what’s happening to boys. Economists say the changing economy means men and women today (unlike in the past) get exactly the same benefits from a college degree and therefore should be graduating at the same rate. Only they aren’t. By 2015 women will earn, on average, 60% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. Something’s not right here; that’s a lot of men not even getting to the economic starting line with that all-important diploma.

My final take the AAUW’s coup: short-term victory, long term repercussions.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/080523whitmire-education/feed/ 6 http://www.ojr.org/080320niles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=080320niles http://www.ojr.org/080320niles/#comments Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:36:53 +0000 Robert Niles http://www.ojr.org/?p=1457 For those of you not spending the day at work watching NCAA basketball tournament games (or for those bored by an inevitable first-round blow-out), let’s take a look at a few innovative online projects that newspapers have created to build traffic off public interest in the annual college playoffs.

Many newspaper websites offer contests in the week leading up to the tournament, inviting readers to fill out the 65-team tournament bracket with their picks for winners in each of the games. It’s the (legal) online version of the ever-opular office betting pools, with the not-so-legally-insignificant difference that the prizes are coming from sponsors and not money put up by the participants.

That’s fine. It drives some traffic, and people like making picks without having to put any of their own skin in the game. But everyone’s doing that. What else is out there?

I found a few interesting examples.

First, the Los Angeles Times offered an option on its Flash tournament brackets that I’d not seen before:

It’s a geographic map that shows where each of the 65 teams are traveling from and to for the first-round matchups. The NCAA sends teams flying all over the country in an effort to balance the competitive level in each of its tournament regions. I found it fascinating to see, in one glance, just how far some teams have to go. Plus, this graphic provides a handy way to answer the inevitable first-round question: “I’ve never heard of that school; where is it from again?”

Click on the “Bracket” option at the top of the graphic, and you return to the traditional bracket chart, which readers can fill out by clicking team names.

The Washington Post and USA Today produced their own NCAA tournament webpages, but what caught my eye is how they also spun the idea of filling out a tournament bracket and applied that to different forms of entertainment.

The Post got a head start by starting earlier this month a single-elimination tournament pitting characters from the TV show “Lost” against one another. Readers voted for the characters they thought would survive in each head-to-head match-up.

USA Today seeded 64 entertainment celebrities and celebrity couples and created a reader-vote tournament to find the “winner”:

The WaPo and USAT tournaments exemplify the power of reader interactivity. Sure, they are fluff. But they, like the interactive NCAA tournament brackets, are fluff that get people reading, clicking and spending time on their newspapers’ websites.

Industry veteran Vin Crosbie last week pointed out on Poynter’s online-news e-mail list that U.S. newspapers have a huge problem in eliciting repeat visits from their online readers:

“If you download the NAA’s spreadsheet of the N//N data and calculate medians, you’ll see that the median user of those top 100 U.S. newspaper sites visited only 2.58 times per month and saw only 15.03 Web pages on a newspaper site per month. That’s not much: a visit only once every 11.6 days and 15 Web pages all month.”

My wife is fond of citing her Suzuki violin training that “it takes 21 days to form a habit.” (“And 12 steps to break it,” I shot back the first time she told me this.) Whether habits form in 21 days or not, website publishers help their readership numbers by creating features that inspire readers to come back to a site, and reward them for doing so, day after day.

A reader-vote tournament, such as the Post’s and USA Today’s, does this. Unlike traditional online polls, these build upon each other, sending the winners in one day’s poll on to the next’s, inspiring readers to return. Unlike the NCAA tournament, which you can follow on TVs, websites, cell phones and newspapers, these tournaments are available only on their creators’ websites. So you gotta come back there to vote, and to see who won in each round.

Take it a step further: Include each day’s match-ups and results in one of your daily update e-mails, and invite those readers following the tournament to subscribe to it. I’ll bet you many of them continue to get and read that daily e-mail, finding other news and features on your site, even after the tournament’s done.

If you want people reading the great reporting on your news website, first, you’ve got to get them in the habit of coming to the site. Don’t overlook the value of interactive reader-driven online events, such as these, in helping you to do that.

]]> http://www.ojr.org/080320niles/feed/ 0 http://www.ojr.org/qa-with-travis-fox-video-journalist-for-washingtonpost-com/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=qa-with-travis-fox-video-journalist-for-washingtonpost-com http://www.ojr.org/qa-with-travis-fox-video-journalist-for-washingtonpost-com/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 12:32:44 +0000 Sandeep Junnarkar http://www.ojr.org/?p=1174 Shortly after Travis Fox joined the Washington Post in 1999 as a photo editor, he picked up a video camera that was sitting in the newsroom and slowly began producing a few pieces for the Web. Not that anyone was watching these videos–not even the Website’s editors. The joke in the newsroom at the time, says Fox, was that he didn’t want the executive editor to watch the videos because the pieces would invariably crash his computer and he worried that might dampen the editor’s laissez-faire attitude.

“It was a great place to learn and to let my own style come to forefront,” says Fox. “I didn’t have deadline pressure, I didn’t have editorial pressure, I didn’t have many viewers.”

How times have changed. Fox is now one of seven “Video Journalists” for the Washington Post. He has produced pieces out of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and the United States, viewable here. This year, two of his pieces “Fueling Azerbaijan’s Future” and “Hurricane Katrina Coverage in New Orleans” are nominated for Emmy awards.

Travis Fox in 2004 reporting on tsunami damage to a Sri Lankan fishing village.

OJR spoke to Fox about how the role of an Internet video journalist is evolving at the Washington Post and what makes compelling video for the Web.

OJR: You said that hardly anyone was watching videos on the Washington Post site at first. What was the turning point that led to the creation of a “video journalist” at the Post?

Fox: I think it was the Iraq war. And it was doing stories that are high profile enough that people couldn’t help but notice. That’s when the top editors both at the Website and the newspaper noticed. They had known me before, obviously, but this was a chance to show that in a high pressure, dangerous situations we can tell stories and we can do journalism that’s on par with the newspaper.

OJR: How were these videos different than those on television that they made the top editors want to nurture this media?

Fox: I can’t speak for them but the fact that it was different from television was not necessarily so important. It was the fact that we were doing it. And I think my style in general is different from some parts of television but not all. It’s not reporter driven and it’s not celebrity-anchor driven. That’s not to say that it’s not heavily reported and heavily narrated because a lot of them are. I would say the ones we did in the beginning were more different from television–they were more character-driven pieces, less narration. We still do those types of pieces as well but we mix it up with more heavily-narrated pieces.

OJR: What is your subject’s reaction to being in a multimedia presentation versus being in the print version of the Post? Is there still a preference nowadays?

Fox: I think when I say I am from washingtonpost.com and I have a video camera they automatically think Washington Post and they think video and the two don’t match up–much to their surprise. I think it depends on where you are. I do a lot of foreign coverage and I think abroad it is not as surprising as it is here in the States. But I think here especially, in the last year, Web video is becoming so common that it is surprising fewer and fewer people. I should also say that a lot of my pieces do air on television in different forms. So I always say both. I say that it’s for the Washington Post online but also for possibly for other places.

OJR: So do you frame shots differently for the Web and for TV, or do you work with the same material for both?

Fox: In terms of the production of the video, I think they are pretty close to being the same. You can make the argument that the video screen is smaller on the computer monitor, therefore we should shoot tighter. But shooting tight is a good technique, whether you are shooting for television or for film. People typically sit closer to their computer screens than to their televisions, so proportionally the Web video looks bigger. I don’t think it makes any difference.

In the beginning, there was the notion that you should have everything on a tripod to be stable because any sort of camera shake would cause the pixels to be refreshed, which would slow down your processor, which would slow down your computer. So that’s still a concern, if you are dealing with slower computers.

I would shoot it the same way, whether it was for television or whether it was for the web. I have a certain style and a certain way of shooting, that’s considered a Web style or Web way of shooting perhaps because that’s where I learnt how to do video. But it also works on television.

OJR: Do you cut it differently for TV than you do for the Web?

Fox: These are interesting questions. You know my friends who work for television tell me that I am so lucky because people actually click my videos. That means they want to watch them. Whereas their shows on television are in the background when someone is making dinner. And at the same time I am jealous of them because it’s a better experience when you are on your couch and watching it on television than when you are on your computer monitor.

So there are different ways of thinking about how to cut it. This is something we constantly talk about and we constantly deal. How tight and how fast moving to cut it? On television you want it to be fast moving because you don’t want anyone to click on their remote control and go to the next channel, right? You want to keep their attention all the time.

Whereas on the web you don’t want someone to go to a different Website. Obviously you want it to be tight and you want it to be fast moving. I don’t have the answers but it’s a different medium and it is interesting to
think of it in different ways.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried with which you were pleasantly surprised?

I think the key is always finding the right balance between the different media. So when to do a video? When to do some sort of Flash graphics? When to do panorama? What’s the combination? When to do a blog? And how to integrate them all? How to do that without getting completely overwhelmed by everything?

There are several projects that I think have been successful. Those would probably be ones where you took the various media and combined them in a way that was logical, using a blog for user feedback and conversation; using the panoramas to give you a sense of place; and using videos to give you a sense of people, the character, the location, and then combing the two to give you a full picture of the story. As opposed to just doing a video, just doing a blog, just doing a photo gallery. I think those are the most successful examples.

OJR: What new ways of conveying a news story have you tried that fell flat? Can you tweak it to make that idea work?

Fox: The project I am thinking of is both a success in some ways and a failure in others. I did one in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami. It’s using videos to capture the characters’ stories, panoramas for a sense of place and destruction, and a blog to update the stories that you initially got from the videos. In the beginning I feel like it was very successful in combining those media and telling the story, but at the same time this was one where we underestimated how much effort it would take to maintain the blog over the days and the months after the Tsunami.

OJR: So when you try something like that again or if you’ve tried something…

Fox: I’ll think twice about it…

OJR: …you’ll think twice about it. That’s a big issue: maintaining a blog.

Fox: Yeah, I think the lesson is that you just need to decide whether the story is worth that long-term work commitment or not. Or you see how it is for the first few months and you see what kind of readership you get and
then you decide what to do with it at that point.

OJR: Is there a model that has worked well that you plan to keep working with?

Fox: My job now is really to do evergreen projects. I’m not really doing news. I covered the Lebanon war and Gaza this summer but typically I am supposed to be doing these evergreen-type projects. And I think that’s also a good model that we have tried in the past and we’ve liked so much that it is now kind of institutionalized.

These projects are thematic in nature. The themes will be reoccurring in the news. The themes, the issues that have been in the news, and will be in the news over and over again. The nuclear issue, and Iran, groups like Hamas or Hezbollah, for example. I did a piece a couple of years ago on the fence in the West Bank that Israel is building. This is an issue that’s in the news over and over and over again. The piece had stories from each side of the fence, panorama photos, and a Flash graphic showing the route of the fence.

And now every story the Post has about the fence (we have had several and we will continue to have several in the future) this project will be linked to them This project gets traffic over, and over, and over again. Traffic on the web is not like a subscription to a newspaper–the same people reading it over and over again. You are going to get new traffic from different places constantly. Because this project is a couple of years old, our regular users have already clicked on it but the new user who are coming in to the new story from Yahoo or from Google are going to click on it. And it is going to draw traffic and it’s going to give depth to the article. Now I am setting out in the next year to do these types of projects that are reoccurring themes that are in the news.

That’s not the nuts and bolts but that’s an example of trying something that has worked well. This Israel fence story is more than two years old and it continues to get good traffic and that’s something that we noticed. So that’s essentially a good model–not covering news on a day in and day out basis but the kind of stories that have legs and can go on for several weeks, several months, several years even.
OJR: You started with photography and moved on to video. How do you think your role is likely to evolve over the next five years?

Fox: I am content with video. Video is where I have made my mark. Video is what I want to do. I am not interested in doing still photography. There are many gifted still photographers out there. But it’s more difficult for single individuals to produce videos from start to finish because traditionally television news has worked in a crew. It is a more unusual for people like me who produce video from start to finish. I’d like to keep exploring that. This video journalism vision of single authorship throughout the process will get you some really interesting results. And as the technology gets simpler, if more individuals shoot and cut video–like they create writing–you are going to get a lot more interesting styles, and a lot richer body of work as a whole. I am very committed to that process.

OJR: What about the role of video journalist within the paper and Website?

Fox: I think I it will be much more integrated with traditional news reporters at the newspaper. I think we will be working much more collaboratively. I would guess we are going work on their stories or work with them to develop their stories into video. We have had some successes with that but we haven’t nailed that down as much as we really need to find the right working relationship. We don’t want them to turn into television reporters, obviously. I don’t want to produce that type of video and we want to give them the time that they need to do newspaper reporting. But we want to be able to leverage their expertise into the video.

I would say the direction we are headed in is that I will continue to do my own video reporting, but at the same time probably become more integrated with the newsroom–both the dotcom and Post newsrooms are becoming more integrated.

I did a piece in Azerbaijan with Philip Kennicott, a Post reporter, that was nominated for an Emmy. That’s an example a successful collaboration. We didn’t actually work together ever– even our trips didn’t overlap to Azerbaijan–but we compared notes and we shared the reporting. He went first then I went second. He wrote the script and I voiced the script and then I fed him my reporting and he fed me his reporting and we came up with something. So to me that’s the kind of collaborative effort I am talking about.

OJR: Are there compelling pieces like that that you decide not to cover? Not because of time, not because of budget, not because of the topic itself, but that a new media treatment just won’t be compelling.

Fox: No, I think there is always a compelling way to cover a story. But I don’t think that that means in video. Certain stories are visual and good for video. Katrina, the tsunami, they are good in video and photographs. Certain stories are better in video but not so good in still pictures. And some stories are tough to do in either medium. For example, in Lebanon we did a series on Hezbollah during the war and this wasn’t war action stuff, this is more of a behind the scenes of Hezbollah as an organization. I think in video it worked out really well because you get a sense of the characters and how the organization works. But in still photographs that would not be a very compelling photo essay. In southern Lebanon I was working with print reporters and photographers and it was really interesting to see where the focus of each of the group lied. I chose to go do video somewhere in the middle between the print reporters and still photographers.

A story about the new budget on Capital Hill would probably be tough to do in either stills or a video. That would be more of a print story or a Flash graphics story.

OJR: The Azerbaijan piece, did it appear on Web only?

Fox: Online and it also appeared on television on PBS’s “Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria”, it’s on the podcast, it appeared as an article in the newspaper. This is convergence. We are leveraging this over multiple platforms.
We said that in some ways we are functioning like a production company. We are producing videos for the Website, for our podcast. We were also selling them to television.

So this is an example where we sold it to television, which is not only a very good money maker, it essentially pays for the expense of going abroad and covering the stories which aren’t cheap. It is also a way to market our content to a lot of different audiences. Something like ten times the people that saw it on PBS saw it on the Website and at the end of the show Zakaria said something like “for more of this video go to washingtonpost.com.”

OJR: Collaboration in the newsroom is more of a journalistic change. What impact do you expect from technical changes?

Fox: What’s really going to be exciting is the Internet as a delivery means not as an end media. For us to really compete with television, we have to get our videos to your living room television screen. Because no matter how good it is on the computer it’s never going to be as good as when it’s on your TV or when it’s on your high-definition plasma screen, right?

So I think in the next five years–or even sooner than that–we are going to see the Internet used as a means of delivery to compete with cable TV. We are already seeing that it’s technically possible. Getting Internet content delivered to your television–either through your TiVo or through the new Apple set-top box that is going to come out or through whatever box–and watching it on television in the same high definition quality as cable television, that is exciting. So think about that when you are setting your TiVo or whatever box you are going to be using in the future, you select a Survivor episode, news reports and the latest Washington Post documentary. And the next day, when you sit down to watch them, they will all look the same but one of them came through the Internet and two of them came through cable TV. But for the user it won’t matter.

I think a glimpse of that is through our video podcast that’s on iTunes. That’s kind of the first glimpse–it’s a small screen but it’s essentially the on-demand television that we need to get to. We sell the advertising against that. So we reap the benefits of that and we put it up and users download it and do whatever. But you know as soon as we make the jump onto your television, that’s really when things are going to get exciting. The industry is excited about Web video not because it’s good content or unusual content or it’s better than television, but because of the advertising. Advertising on television in general is lucrative and to be able to capture that type of lucrative advertising by bypassing the juggernaut of cable or broadcast is very exciting.

It’s not just for me or for newspaper sites, it’s for people running their blogs. You can now essentially be your own broadcast station. It’s another one of those milestones that we are crossing on the Internet.

Sandeep Junnarkar is an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism (The City University of New York). He has reported for @times, the New York Times’ first presence on the Web, as well as News.com. If there is a new media journalist who you would like to see featured in a Q&A, email Sandeep here.

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