The most important blog on your newspaper's website

May 16, 2007 by

It’s been a smoky spring here in the Los Angeles area. Last week, wildfires burned both the city’s Griffith Park (one of my favorite places on Earth, by the way) as well as the resort island of Catalina. In both incidents, I watched TV coverage, listened to radio reports and hit up news websites. But I kept finding myself coming back to the breaking news blog on latimes.com.

How many acres have burnt now? How much of the fire is contained? Where’s the worst threat at this hour? For those essential questions, which readers wanted immediate answers, the Times’ breaking news blog delivered.

Newspaper.com managers, take a lesson. If you do not have a breaking news blog ready to go on your website, get started on building one. Today. The blog is the ideal format to deliver information in a breaking news situation. There’s no reason to continue relying on traditional newspaper narrative formats online when editors could better serve their readers with the far more online-friendly blog format.

I discovered the power of breaking news blogging during the Columbine High School shootings in April 1999. At the time, I was the executive producer of the Rocky Mountain News’ website, in charge of its editorial operations. Despite the fact that the Rocky then sold more papers in the Denver metro area than any other publication, we were a small staff, as was typical at newspapers at the time, usually with only one or two online editorial employees on the clock at any given moment.

When the shooting happened, as with any major breaking news story, the demand for information was immediate. The Rocky was preparing a extra edition for that afternoon, but we couldn’t wait for those stories to clear the copy desk. So I blew up our hand-built, flat-file website home page and started using a bullet-point list to provide the latest facts and data we could find, in reverse chronological order.

I was blogging, though no one I knew had ever used that term yet. Nor did we have blogging software; I wrote our updates in HTML and FTP’ed them to our server. But I loved the format. We got updates from Rocky reporters via a helpful newsroom editor (remember back when union issues at many papers precluded reporters from producing work directly for their websites?), watched televised sheriff’s press conferences, listened to police scanners, scoured the wires, made calls to neighbors and I posted every piece of information we found, attributing it to the source where we got it and noting where it conflicted with other information that had been reported on our site or on TV.

When the paper’s extra edition stories were ready, we posted those to the site, but by then, our news blog had even more up-to-the-minute information. Without having to take the time to do a write-through whenever we had new information, we could get that information online faster. And readers did not have to wade through a write-through to find the newest facts and data.

“Using blogs to cover breaking news can be a great benefit to the reader, especially on fast-moving stories,” latimes.com editor Meredith Artley wrote in an e-mail when I asked her about the Times’ recent efforts. “With the Griffith Park and Catalina fires, the developments were coming in so quickly — percentage of the fire contained, evacuation information, anecdotes from people living the experience. In an article format, some of these developments may be lost somewhere in the 3rd, 4th, 5th paragraph of the story. With a blog, it’s crystal-clear what’s fresh.”

With blogging software now so widely available, there’s no excuse for newspaper editors not to turn to blogging when major news breaks. Nor should editors have to invent a reporting process on the fly, like I did eight years ago. Here are some steps that newspaper.com editors should take to prepare their newsrooms to publish a top-quality breaking news blog the next time a major story breaks in their community.

1) Select a blogging tool and have it ready to go.

This step might seem obvious, but there’s more to it than one might envision. Ideally, your blogging tool should support tagging or categorization, so that you can have a unique URL for each breaking news story. What happens if you have two stories that break close enough to each other that they overlap? Or if a person Googling for information about an old breaking news story finds your URL? Tagging or categorizing each post should enable you to create an unique URL for each story, rather than sending all readers to the same newspaper.com/breakingnews URL. You might not think that you’ll need this functionality now. But if you take a little extra time to build it in now, you will thank yourself later.

Part of having your tool ready to go is to decide how the blog will be linked to from your front page, as well as the rest of the site. “A reader… seemed to misunderstand that the posts were from reporters, not readers,” Artley wrote e about the Times’ fire blogs. “And there were a couple of comments from folks who seemed unpleasantly surprised to be clicking on a headline or photo and getting a blog instead of an article. So we’re considering ways to signal that better, but I don’t want to get into overlabeling the site.”

2) Identify and train your bloggers.

It’s not enough to have one or two people assigned to blog breaking news. You need to identify and train enough bloggers so that one of them will be in the building at all times. You also need to ensure that someone else can cover the bloggers’ “normal” routines, since the bloggers will be too busy during breaking news.

You’ll also need a plan for how information will get to the bloggers. Establish a central e-mail address, phone number and/or instant message account to take bulletins from staff reporters and make sure everyone in the newsroom knows them. In a breaking news situation, off-duty reporters and even those not on the metro desk often have the first reports from the scene.

Artley suggests testing your blog reporting process in a controlled environment, such as during a trial.

“We had a test drive with the Phil Spector trial blog,” she wrote. “We knew we would have reporters with Blackberries in the courtroom. We got to set it up and plan. We also tried the breaking news blog again with the immigration march downtown, and, again, we planned how that would work — who would file, who would post, who would approve comments, and who would take care of images. Of course it doesn’t all go smoothly, but if you can plan a little bit, you’ll be much more prepared for when news breaks.”

This is also the time to make an organizational decision on what sources you will report in your blog. Will you cite what TV stations or other competitors report?

3) Have a plan to backread and edit the blog.

You should not insist on posts going through the normal newspaper editing process before hitting the blog. You won’t ever beat TV, radio or other blogs that way. But someone should be assigned the task of reading posts as they go live, to immediately correct typos, misspellings or other obvious factual errors. (I found a few lingering goofs on the Times blog last week.) Don’t assume that someone in the building, or some reader, will tip you to errors. Make sure someone specific is charged with this important duty.

4) Go for broke.

Once you have this system in place, why reserve it for infrequent occasions?

A newspaper reporter at an industry seminar last fall asked me what her organization could do to improve its front page design. I told her, “Make it a breaking news blog.”

I think one of the reasons that Kevin Roderick’s enjoyed such success with his LAObserved site is that many people prefer reading a blog-style narrative to picking their way through the mess of hyperlinks that compose the typical newspaper.com home page. Roderick reads dozens of stories from local Los Angeles media each weekday and selects the best of them to summarize and link on his blog. It’s a broadcast news writing model, really. But it works.

Why not assign sharp editors to be your “anchor” on each shift through the day, blogging your paper by selecting and summarizing the best stories, as they become available? (Readers who want to drill down to other information on the site may still use the site’s navigation to find specific sections’ story archives and other features.) And in a breaking news situation, the front page blog can morph into the breaking news blog.

Either way, the readers in your community will come to see your paper’s home page as the place to go for a friendly, authoritative voice that provides the very latest news about their community. And after all, isn’t that what a newaspaper website’s home page ought to be?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The silliest, and most destructive, debate in journalism

January 3, 2007 by

Welcome back. I hope that the New Year finds you in good health and resolved to do whatever you can to help make online journalism a more accurate and enlightened source of influence in our world.

Perhaps this will be the year that we can end forever the silliest and most self-destructive debate in our industry, that of “mainstream” vs. “citizen” journalism. (Here’s today’s example of journalists promoting this totally unnecessary division, courtesy the St. Paul Pioneer Press.)

Journalism is journalism, no matter who does it, or where. Let me show you one recent example where a “mainstream” news report could have benefited from adopting “citizen” journalism techniques, as a way of illustrating the missed opportunities that this “you’re one or the other” attitude can create.

The Los Angeles Times yesterday ran an intriguing story by staff writer David Streitfeld on Amazon.com. [“Amazon mystery: pricing of books”, Jan. 2, 2007.] Streitfeld had noticed that the price of an item he’d wanted to buy from Amazon had increased between the time he’d selected it and he went to go pay for it the next day.

Price shifts like this are not uncommon online. Most travel websites warn buyers to purchase right away, as airlines and hoteliers change prices frequently. And the price of newly issued books and music can swing wildly, as retailers put items on or off sale in an effort to dump product or cash in on a hot release.

But a two-year-old title like “The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook,” which Streitfeld sought to buy (and, by coincidence, my sister-in-law bought me for Christmas – thanks, Katie!) usually stays the same price for a long time. When Amazon hiked the price on him 51 cents, Streitfeld got curious.

He selected a variety of other items, put them in his Amazon shopping cart, and noted what happened to their prices. Many went up; a few went down. Amazon evaded questions about its pricing strategies, and analysts offered opinions about “dynamic pricing.”

Interesting, but the story didn’t offer supporting data beyond Streitfeld’s experiment. And here’s where readers could have been involved.

Obviously, many Times readers have bought books and other merchandise from Amazon. Perhaps some of them have noted similar price shifts. But some Times readers, including myself, have access to quite a bit more than personal shopping data from Amazon.com.

For 10 years I’ve included “associates” links to Amazon.com from the statistics tutorial on my personal website. Amazon’s associates program, for those who do not know, pays Web publishers a small percentage of an item’s sale price whenever a customer buys something after clicking to Amazon from that Web publisher’s site.

Amazon provides its associates a reporting tool tracks the number and price of the items that it sells via the links from their sites. That gives Amazon’s associates access to a potentially impressive amount of sales and pricing data.

For example, by far the most popular item sold from links on my personal site is a book called “The Cartoon Guide to Statistics.” Clicking through the associates’ sales data for 2006, using the reporting tool Amazon provides, I found that Amazon had sold 90 copies of the book to my site’s readers.

But, supporting Streitfeld’s report, not all of those copies were sold at the same price. Here’s the distribution:

27 @ $11.02
14 @ $11.53
22 @ $11.67
27 @ $12.21

Clearly, Amazon is not keeping prices constant for this title, despite the facts that it was published more than a decade ago and remains in print. But I wanted to dig deeper. When did Amazon change these prices during the year?

Amazon’s associates sales reporting tool makes it somewhat difficult to plot the dates of individual sales. But I could easily break down the sales data by quarter.

Q1: 11 @ $11.02, 12 @ $11.53
Q2: 16 @ $11.02, 11@ $11.67
Q3: 11 @ $11.67, 12 @ $12.21
Q4: 15 @ $12.21

The data supports the hypothesis that prices vary on Amazon.com throughout the year on well-established titles. And that the price trends higher as the year goes on.

What the Times needed was a way for associates like me to append our data to Streitfeld’s report. That way, the Times’ reporter and its readers could, together, draw a more detailed picture of Amazon’s pricing patterns. Are price adjustments based upon time an item spends in a user’s shopping cart? Or do prices move with the calendar?

Unfortunately, the Times website [full disclosure, again, especially for new OJR readers, I used to work there] does not offer a way for readers to post relevant data to a database that could test Streitfeld’s hypothesis. Nor does it even provide a way for a reader to append a simple comment to the story, where readers like me could add our experiences.

“Citizen journalism” provides professional reporters the chance to collect many more data points than they can on their own. And “mainstream media” provide readers an established, popular distribution channel for the information we have and can collect. Not to mention a century of wisdom on sourcing, avoiding libel and narrative storytelling technique.

And our readers don’t care. They just want the most complete, accurate and engaging coverage possible. They don’t how we make the sausage, or even who makes it. They just want to eat.

So let’s resolve in 2007 to set this division aside, quit arguing about how we’ve done journalism in the past and start finding new, innovative ways to do it better in the future.

Filed Under: Reporting Tagged With: , ,

Put up or shut up: Newspapers aren't the only forum for great journalism

October 9, 2006 by

Plenty of commentators have expressed their anguish over Tribune Company’s management of the Los Angeles Times. The controversy over further cuts in the paper’s newsroom this month has cost the publisher his job. Several super-rich Californians have made overtures to buy the paper from Chicago-based Tribune. Yet in all the commotion, one question remains unaddressed:

Since when is the Los Angeles Times the only place anyone can do great journalism in L.A.?

Obviously, The Times has done its share. Over the past decade, the paper has distinguished itself with multiple Pulitzer Prizes, as well as engaging daily stories that expose injustices from crooked judges to L.A.’s pathetic Skid Row. Yet failure balances The Times’ recent triumph. Tribune-mandated cutbacks have reduced the newsroom from about 1,200 to a little more than 900. That’s led to the closure of most of The Times’ suburban bureaus and a massive reduction in neighborhood coverage.

Word from the newsroom reports that Tribune wants the newsroom even smaller, to about 800 or so. That’s sparked concern from local business leaders, who fear, along with most Times reporters, that a smaller Times newsroom won’t be able to properly cover Southern California. Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and Editor Dean Baquet have protested, too. Now, Johnson’s off the job.

One might think that business and government leaders would enjoy having fewer eyes looking into their affairs. Writing in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, media critic Tim Rutten pointed out that an aggressive local press has helped communities grow, by exposing the inefficiencies of graft and corruption. Rutten correctly credited newspaper managers for helping enrich America, and themselves, over the past half century.

“The astonishing financial success of postwar American journalism rested on a recognition that an educated and increasingly urbanized readership demanded more sophisticated information on a broader range of topics than ever before and on newspaper managers’ willingness to invest in covering them.”

But established newspapers are not, and need not be, the only actors in the news industry. Rutten acknowledged that “the era into which we now are moving will involve new ways of distributing journalism — new combinations of print and online venues and, surely, avenues we cannot foresee.”

If the Tribune Company wishes to cut the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom into irrelevance, that ought to be the Tribune’s right as the LAT’s owner. Johnson and Baquet deserve credit for fighting for their newsroom. But there’s no need for those who have expressed interest in buying The Times to keep their money in their pockets, should Tribune continue to refuse to sell.

Want to protect and improve the quality of local journalism in Southern California? Great. Then go hire some of those folks that Tribune’s about to lay off and start up your own newsroom. Worried about the high cost of starting up a new print newspaper, in an era when print’s losing readers to the Web? Why bother? Simply start a Web newsroom instead. Worried about the loss of influence publishing online instead of in print? Um, didn’t we just say that print was losing readers to the Web?

Many local journalists already have made the switch to online publishing. Just scan the dozens listed on Kevin Roderick’s LAObserved.com, under the headings “Media In or About Los Angeles” and “Selected Blogs and Websites.” Contrary to the attitude of some within the Times building, many blogs and independent websites feature smart, original reporting. And many more would if they could cash a check from the likes of Eli Broad to support their efforts.

Take the $1 billion that analysts have estimated The Times could fetch, divvy it among the paper’s 900-some newsroom employees, and you’ve got a cool million-plus. Per employee. How many sharp, local investigative websites could be funded with that kind of cash? Heck, maybe a little competition might better get Tribune’s attention.

Don’t want to run a charity? Fine. Why not hire a few soon-to-be-out-of-work ad reps to go out and find advertisers for these existing and prospective local indie news websites? I’ve lost count of the number of journalists who want to start their own original reporting news websites but have not out of fear that they won’t be able to sell enough ads to support themselves. They shouldn’t have to. Let the ad folks sell the ads, and the reporters do the reporting. A smart, well-funded local ad network for indie websites, run by experienced local sales reps, could help sustain the quality of local reporting more effectively than any amount of op-ed handwringing will. And make a bundle of cash for its investors, too.

The point is, Los Angeles has a strong, entrepreneurial business community that shouldn’t have to beg to Chicago for tough, local news coverage. If the Tribune Company doesn’t want to fund that the way folks around here think it should, then fine. Now’s the time for Tribune’s critics to put up, or shut up.

The Web is waiting.

From the ONA conference…

MSNBC.com, Roanoke.com, The Center for Public Integrity and NOLA.com won the top categories in the annual Online Journalism Awards, presented Saturday night by the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Longtime OJR contributor Staci Kramer writes up the ONA conference sessions at PaidContent.org.

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: , ,
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