Hello from Kathleen McCoy

Video snippets from the Rage City Rollergirls

2011-10-21T19:20:00.000-07:00

Rage City Rollergirls Slideshow, Oct 1. 2011 bout

2011-10-07T21:41:00.000-07:00

Monarch butterflies, 2010 Ski for Women

2010-02-07T22:56:00.001-08:00

In the dead of winter, so see such vibrant, BIG butterflies was an enornous treat. How did they do it?

Enjoying JAWS: Women & Journalism Symposium at Snowbird

2009-10-02T23:20:00.000-07:00

I'm at 8,000 feet at Snowbird in Utah, attending the Journalism & Women Symposium

Up at 4, Pete taxied me to the airport at 5, and I was airborne by 6:30, doing homework at 35,000 feet.

This group is an impressive assemblage of long-serving strong women journalists. They are gathered to consider the future of the craft they devoted themselves to, and women's role in its future. Lots of young journalists got fellowships to come.

One of my favorite things today was listening to Becky Wade read Maya Angelou's appreciation for the Texas journalist Molly Ivins shortly after she died in 2007. Molly Ivins Shook the Walls with her Clarion Call appeared in the Washington Post on Feb. 2, 2007, just days after Ivins had passed. It's worth the click through to read. I can hear Angelou's strong voice as I read it.

Becky Wade, by the way, was one of the three women journalists who sued the New York Times in the 1970s over its treatment of women journalists. Pulitzer Prize winner Nan Robertson told the story in The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and the New York Times.

It was a long day of travel, more as the conference unfolds.

Holidays: My Mom came to visit

2009-01-04T23:42:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to share this image of my Mom. Taken on the Coastal Trail at 8 a.m. Dec. 27, out walking the dog Clare. My Mom is 86, lives in San Diego. We walked every day out on that trail, sometimes for two hours at a time, watching dawn arrive on the way home. And it was c-o-l-d the whole time she was here. She's great.

Making my dog stay up too late

2009-01-04T04:37:00.000-08:00

It's 3:27 a.m. on my last day of holiday vacation. Come Monday morning, I'll be out at the bus stop at 7:12 a.m. in temps predicted to be minus 2. I've got a good coat, good boots, an iPhone, a newspaper, the New Yorker to read on the bus. But it will be daunting. So...I think I am staying up late and deliciously anticipating sleeping in on Sunday. Last chance. And my good dog stays up too....as best she can. This isn't the first time I've caught her napping, either.

Job changes for me

2009-01-04T03:56:00.000-08:00

It's in the minuses up here -- really cold and for days on end. Here's a shot out of my bedroom window to the birch tree in my front yard. The snow on top of the branches makes me think of reverse shadows.

On Oct. 17, I ended a 26-year career at the Anchorage Daily News. But I haven't given up on journalism. I just felt like I wasn't making a significant contribution at a time when the newspaper could ill afford anything short of miraculous. So I side-stepped to a job over at the University of Alaska, Anchorage adding video and audio podcasts for their web site. And so I am back in the business of learning more new technology and practicing it. I work with great people, and the university offers a lot of cool benefits. I miss a newsroom, but one must do what one must do.

So far, I've edited a pretty short video of the chancellor addressing a committee, and an audio podcast of an economist discussing Alaska's status with respect to the crash in the US. I am also writing a story for a magazine about 6 students who are the first in their families to go to college. I'm loving the interviews and the people behind this story.

I'll be back with more thoughts on adding (trying to add) Twitter and Facebook to my life. I find I start them, but don't sustain them. I'm so slow at this, I get frustrated. Tomorrow I am gonna practice doing an audio slideshow with my dog and my voice....I have to start somewhere.

Speaking of starting, I'd like to start a master's studying business models for newspapers. OK, news organizations. We've got to find a way to finance high-quality local journalism. I hardly feel like the genius who'll figure this out, but at least I'd like to go out trying. It seems daunting. But, the only place to start is at the beginning. Here's a photo of a lump of clay I keep on my desk for the times (many) when I feel overwhelmed about where to start.

Doggie tug-of-war in the backyward

2009-01-04T03:47:00.000-08:00

Clare (black dog) and her good buddy Rudy (white dog) having a doggie battle in the backyard. Clare doesn't usually win anymore. On walks, she starts a tug-of-war, but when she can't win, she feigns disinterest. Here, she wins. She is 9 and Rudy is about 3, and he outweighs her by far. They stay over at each others' houses when their humans travel. We take Rudy for lots of dog walks in Kincaid Park. Clare is bossy, and Rudy is totally cool about it all.

Test with Flip cam

2008-10-24T16:47:00.001-07:00

Here's a video shot at Kincaid Park walking my dog Clare and our friend's dog, Rudy. Peter is in the shot. This is a test post.

Can't resist

2008-08-05T19:37:00.000-07:00

Twitter tips

2008-07-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

Just caught this on the Spokesman-Review editor's blog.

In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.

We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors need to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.

The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.

This feels like familiar territory. Our audience has discovered reader-submitted galleries and those are hot. We have a hot politics blog. Everything else is percolating at a much lower energy level. We just had layoffs and I think there's a hangover from that.

I am new to twitter and generally find good referals there to things I would find valuable to read. This SR pointer came from twitter, Jay Rosen specifically, as did, I think, these interviews with Beat Bloggers on Mevio.

Greetings, here comes my monthly post

2008-05-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

Yikes, I can't believe how quickly time nips by. And yes I am embarrassed. Between the last time I posted here, I changed some job duties at my newspaper. I had been straddling print (managing and editing print reporters) and online (video, community blogs), but now I feel more focused in online. I am producing something called the Alaska Newsreader, online only, every weekday.

The schedule is a bit rigorous, but now that I have it down (just finished three weeks of it, and don't they say if you can do anything for three weeks, you can make it a habit?) The habit I had to create was getting up at 4 a.m. to get to work by 5 a.m. to produce an opinionated aggregation of news from around the state and around the world related to Alaska.

This is not my creation, I have inherited it, and I did so with much enthusiasm. I like the service it provides to readers. I like getting to itemize and comment on a topic and then provide links to the many different ways that various news outlets have handled it. So readers get different views on a topic of interest to them.

The Newsreader is almost always in the top five most visited pages on our Website. It also has right-side content that can change constantly -- a bit of a display image and definition that you can click through to the catalogued item. I will start gathering and publishing that material this week.

This is fun, if solitary. It feels like something I can get better and better at, making it more and more fun and useful for readers.

The other aspect of my work right now is creating adn.commons, an arena for community bloggers. We host their blogs for the purpose of gathering eyeballs on our site. The premise is people organize around their areas of interest, and if we can host that area of interest on our site, we've created community (and clicks) to adn.com.

In the image below, the blue pull down menu shows our staff blogs (at the top) followed by community blogs, starting about halfway down. I hope to pull these off into a separate index page so they are easier to locate and use.

I've started about 17 of them so far, everything from an Iraq war amputee headed to Walter Reed to get fitted for a prosthetic leg, to a locavore blog to a bride blog to a chef blog to a health policy blog.

I hope in a week or so to start up a citizen watchdog blog -- the folks who show up at community meetings and pay close attention on the local level to what public officials do. We have lots of significant local, state and national elections coming up, and at least on the local and state level, it will be valuable to get their perspective on campaigning and let readers compare their commentary alongside our staff reporting. Just another way to add a perspective.

And now, it's time take my dog out to Kincaid for a good, rainy day walk. Good for the soul.

Her name is Clare and she loves Kincaid Park as much as I do.

Prodigal blogger

2008-04-12T13:01:00.000-07:00

Six months since I last posted. Last summer I came home to Alaska from the palm trees of Stanford and re-inserted myself in my newsroom, grateful for a job. Fall came, winter came, now it is spring in Alaska (snow still on the ground, sun shining brightly outside, husband Pete watching the Yankees and Red Sox on TV in the living room.) Feels like I'm a bulb that had to freeze so it could leaf out later. It's time to get back to work on this blog. Hello again!

Fighting weight

2007-10-04T00:32:00.001-07:00

My news organization is looking at right-sizing the newsprint paper for the staff it has to produce it, weighed against the hungry demands of the web, an additional effort. I think this is wise. My impulse is to simply say: "Give us the car, let us drive it, we'll adjust as we go." That means that I see this smaller newspaper as a prototype that we will change as we see what works, what doesn't. I took design thinking at Stanford and their problem-solving principles are relevant to the state newspapers are in. There is no guaranteed success. There IS the challenge to try, listen and then adjust. So the commitment that goes into thinking about the new version must be there after it is launched, to listen and adjust and remake the prototype. Fail early and often is what they used to say in that class when encouraging us to throw together rough prototypes and get feedback on them so the next version would be that much better. So, newspapers, how about it?

Just another day, and then your mind get's blown

2007-10-02T23:09:00.001-07:00

That sounds so....1960ish.
Here's how my mind got blown today.
First, a small piece of background, just a moment, really, in a normal newsroom meeting. A colleague who has been away is back, and we're talking about how to cover the final three weeks of the prep football playoffs. One thing we know readers like is the ability to post their own game photos on our site, in galleries. But instead of galleries by school, they want galleries by game.

At our meeting about the playoffs, we talk about organizing photos by game. I suggest our professional shots and our reader-submitted shots could both go in the same game gallery. I hit a nerve with my colleague, who referred to reader-generated photos as crap that would not be combined with professional staff work.

I get the point. And I think it's wrong. I was still mulling this over when I came home and read the Poynter site about a professor working to create a process for multi-thread storytelling using multimedia. This interests me right away, because I don't see multi-thread storytelling happening at my paper. I see linear storytelling, using the bells and whistles of multimedia. We are still selecting the entry point for readers.

A comment on the professor's blog directs readers to some new technology that hyperlinks photographs by content. The link is to a short talk at the TED conference. Suddenly, the world's photos -- professional and amateur alike -- come together to create a new fuller view of the world. Suddenly, the relationship between pro and am is not one of superiority and inferiority, but of collaboration. Watch for the composite of Notre Dame cathedral about 2/3rds in.

McClatchy's Howard Weaver on home turf

2007-09-22T15:14:00.000-07:00

This Alaska panel on media gave me a flashback to Stanford in May, when McClatchy's Gary Pruit joined NYTimes Bill Keller and Harry Chandler, a former owner of the LA Times, and a young woman VP from Google, on a stage to discuss how the newspaper business was going to survive.

This time, McClatchy's Weaver, who was in the Stanford audience with other McClatchy-ites, was solo in his hometown of Anchorage, talking about the situation in which newspapers find themselves. He was joined by a local TV anchor, a radio producer, and a young woman who works in marketing for Clear Channel radio. Much like the woman from Google in May, other panelists looked at Clear Channel's Corinna Delgado as a spokesperson for anyone classified as young.

Weaver, known for inspiring news staffs, inspired his audience to consider the opportunity presented by the "phase transition" (think liquid boiling into steam) that the news business is undergoing. He talked about the opportunity, the scary but amazing opportunity, this era presents to news editors who make the right choices and help readers by sorting, routing, personalizing and adding value to information. He labeled the new morning newspaper as a "printed summary and orientation to the day" for the already news-saturated reader.

He encourages media participants not to buy into conventional wisdom that print is dead. Though a declining audience, it is still the largest. Half of all adults read a newspaper yesterday, he says. But he's also platform agnostic, subscribing to a point Delgado made -- deliver news when and how the consumer wants it.

One question the panel tackled briefly was young news consumers. Delgado confessed she's worried about the narrow information habits of young readers -- if it isn't pop culture, they don't care. This morning, I saw an announcement that may or may not counter her view. MTV is re-launching thinkMTV. They describe it on their site this way:

Think MTV has undergone a makeover. We have built a brand new community site where you can get informed, get heard and take action on the issues that matter to you most.

MTV News Daily Update
Never Miss A Top Story. Get the Latest Headlines Each Day, Plus Breaking News As Warranted.

And

think MTV
Stay in touch with the issues that concern you with this bi-weekly newsletter from think MTV. We'll update you on Sexual Health, Discrimination, Education, Environment, and Global issues around you.

All this brought up my own newspaper's staff of teen writers on Perfect World. As the digital natives, they may serve to guide us on news appetites in terms of content and delivery. The idea that young people don't care about news doesn't seem right. MTV seems to have an inkling. Social networking, a new way to make community, may be the ticket in.

MTV is soliciting teens as reporters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Now that's a heck of an opportunity for a kid to get involved.

And the Knight Foundation wants to deliver up to half a million dollars to anyone who can "figure out how to push journalism into the digital age."

Here's their pitch to kid innovators:

Believe it or not, people used to read newspapers! But now of course, we're all online and on mobile, logged onto our individual gadgets and disconnected from our community. So how can we use new technology to transmit news and actually bring people together? We've got some ideas, but we bet you've got some amazing ideas!

The messy public

2007-09-18T23:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a fan of comments at the end of stories, anonymous, not even registered on the newspaper site. I'm a fan of engagement.

So it's disappointing to find out that the half dozen folks commenting at the end of a story are sniping at each other like unhappy siblings, or speculating about the sex lives of the subjects in the story. Tiresome hardly begins to capture the disappointment.

Where is the civic discourse? And how long will it be before my newspaper will adopt slashdot community self-policing of comments? I don't think newspaper editors are meant to be the only adult in the playroom, clicking off comments, cluck-clucking their distaste for the rabble.

So, tonight I watched the Jim Lehrer News Hour, and paid close attention to the interview with Andrew Keen, author of "The cult of the amateur." You can read the full interview here.

One taste:

ANDREW KEEN: The key argument is that the so-called "democratization" of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information and high-quality entertainment. By replacing mainstream media content, high-quality radio, television, newspapers, publishing, music, with user-generated content, we're actually doing away with information, high-quality information, high-quality entertainment, and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.

Well, Andrew Keen would be describing the forums on my newspaper. One of the main worries is that thoughtful people will be so turned off by the lowbrow nature of existing commentary that they'll bypass this opportunity to engage. I'm still thinking about all this. I have a great faith in the group to throw up a glint of genius, a profoundness that speaks to us all. Yet, I have seen plenty of evidence that the group fails to produce.

Still, I have faith. All true things are complicated, and the good mingles close by the bad. We need to talk about it and think about it and write about it before we understand.

So, even though I've been disappointed, I don't want to turn off public comments. I put my two bits on the cyber community to say out loud so as to be heard by all: We're talking seriously here. If you aren't, find someplace else to talk.

Here's Andrew Keen on a panel discussing the democratization of media. Think about it.

Quick observations before the week begins

2007-09-17T00:55:00.000-07:00

See that white up high on the mountains? That's not a cloud up there. That's snow. Time is passing, the season is changing.

(Note to readers: Frankly, I think every blog post needs an image, and today this is mine for you.)

Here's a few observations from this week.

Print has authority.

My newspaper invites readers to send in their "nice catch" fish photos. This is Alaska and we get a ton and post them online in a gallery that gets lots and lots of hits. We use these reader-submitted photos with the print solicitation to send in more fish pictures. Now, all the people sending images into the web are asking: "When will my photo run in the newspaper?"
I was out at a local high school talking to some students who want to start a publication. There's already a student newspaper, but in their estimation, it covers only fluff. They want the freedom to report on issues that go beyond football, prom, homecoming. They want to write about their community. Because they are digital natives, I wondered if they wanted to create a Website for their stories. NO! came the answer. Why? I asked. "Because if it is in print, it has much more authority."

Multimedia has power.

Alaska is in the midst of a political corruption scandal with many revelations emanating from courtroom proceedings. We've been working to obtain the court exhibits (which include undercover video and audio recordings) to get as much of that up on our Web site as we can. It's fascinating to hear a 70-year-old Bill Allen, who pleaded guilty to bribery, tell a courtroom which legislators he has bribed, and why. His testimony is slow and stilted, he suffered from an accident about five years ago that impaired his speech. The man sounds broken. Short of being in the courtroom and hearing him in cross-examination, listening to these audio recordings reveals a layer of tragedy worthy of a book. No entity but my newspaper is making the effort to listen to hours and hours of transcripts and prepare them to go online at our Web site. This is a huge public service. So, print may have power, but multimedia -- audio and video, seeing it and hearing it with your own eyes and ears, that is POWERFUL.

The two in combination? Look out.

Overdue update

2007-09-10T22:56:00.002-07:00

So, you know your blog is hot when the only comment you have is from a guy named Adam who's promoting his abs exercise site. That's humbling.

To be honest, this site is like trying to learn to play the piano. You have to practice, even when no one is listening. So I can definitely take this. It's the practice.

Anyway, I've been carrying a potential good post around in my head for a couple of days. I think this item would work well here, a piece of philosophy from a Silicon Valley famous person named Guy Kawasaki. In one of my classes, entrepreneurial journalism, the professor required us to read Kawasaki's book, "The Art of the Start." In it, he suggests that a start up doesn't need a mission statement, it needs a mantra.

I liked the sound of that. The only mission statement I'd been a part of was pretty bad -- filled with dead words and 5th-grade earnestness. So I believed a mantra could be better than a mission statement.

Let me cut to the chase here....I liked Kawasaki, and then I found a podcast of his, speaking somewhere at Stanford. And what he said to young entrepreneurs seemed quite applicable to the times we journalists find ourselves in. We are at sea, a dark and stormy sea, and we hope for a break in the clouds to get a good reading on the sextant. Kawasaki offers one.

He says,

Don't work to make money.
Work to make meaning.

There are three ways to make meaning.

Improve the quality of life.
Right a wrong.
Prevent the end of something good.

Nothing I've heard recently sounded more like a mantra for journalists than that. Here is the very short YouTube link. See what you think.

Comments from readers

2007-08-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

Here's a little Online Journalism Review diatribe against the LA Times for shutting off comments on stories, and recently editorializing that reader comments are as dangerous as Osama bin Laden. Hmmm.

This is a debate in my own newsroom. I weigh in on the side of allowing comments and inviting the community of commentators to police their arena. Flag inappropriate comments, talk directly to those folks about the climate and tone of discourse you want. The journalist is not expected to be the only parent in the room. To cut off the commentary is too much of a missed opportunity.

This is my job, really

2007-08-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

That's me, in the blue coat in the background. It's a sunny August day, I'm out of the office, chatting up moms and dads, coaches, quarterbacks, tight ends and cheerleaders. I'm swimming in middle-America, which today includes defensive linemen with amazingly long and vowel-studded Samoan last names.

I'm building hyperlocal, as in a sudden, new wing of our web site devoted strictly to some 30 schools statewide with football and eight with flag football teams. I want those user-generated mom-and-dad-produced photos on every single team page. I want the kids to chat online about their team and the one that whupped them. I want the coaches to argue with our two pick'em sports reporters who select the top 5 games every weekend and predict winners.

Suddenly, I wish that I had made that third effort to have coffee with Dan Gillmor down in Palo Alto. Author of "We the media," journalist Gillmor is a guru of hyperlocal and how delicate this new audience is to cultivate. I've got email lists for booster parents and harried coaches. I write thank you emails to folks who send in images. I argue with our web editor about the prep site: It HAS to be easier to use! Let's celebrate reader participation by displaying their photos BIG, with lotsa credit.

Why am I doing it? Because I believe that community news organizations like the one I work for will soon (now, even) include a blend of us and them. Them is the people who live and work in the communities we report on. Us is, well, the fewer and fewer of us left in American print newsrooms. We need them to build connection in our pages, the glue of community. They need us to hold powerful people's feet to the fire: government officials, school administrators, business people. We work for the readers. So if they can contribute some of the content that binds a community - names, faces, achievements, good work - then the newspaper's reporters can focus on their role, getting at the hard and complicated truth, facts people need to know.

OK, I'm getting off my soapbox now.

I read an interesting post today at Mediashift about all the jobs shifting from print to online. I felt like I was the poster child for the structural adjustment newspapers are making. I went away for a year, read tons on the shifting world of journalism, took a multimedia fellowship at Berkeley to dip my toes in the water, and now I am back in the work world -- making the adjustment. I haven't written or edited a single story since I came back. Instead, I've been building Web pages, learning why they scream
ERROR instead of nicely displaying what I built, and editing little videos for our Web site. Now, I want to consume Final Cut Pro and Soundslides and html and Dreamweaver tutorials in one fell swoop. I want all those skills, yesterday. Then line me up with some database management software. It's a different world, not necessarily a bad one.

A new post! Back on the team.

2007-08-26T23:31:00.001-07:00

I am back at work at my old newspaper. I started July 5, and here it is, almost the end of August. My new job is AME for Interactivity. Translation: growing audience use of our Web site.

I came back with so much energy I gave people headaches. I also very much want to keep learning -- web usability, mostly. So I'm jumpy and eager...(feel a headache coming on?) While I learn to dispense my enthusiasm in manageable doses, I also have regrets, like why didn't I make many more videos while I was away so it would be even easier now...

What I most want to know is how to make our site as user-friendly as it can be. I was thrilled to see that the Fresno Bee site won notice in the Bivings Report as one of the 10 best newspaper websites the other day, so I've been studying them. We have a good site, don't get me wrong. I just want to contribute to making it as user-friendly and rewarding a visit as I can.

I started some prep sports efforts, hence the preps image above. As long as I have been at a newspaper, the sports staff has been answering questions about why they can't do more. It seems obvious that an easy way to expand that coverage is to invite the folks participating in it to send in their photos. So, we made little business cards with our Web address for the prep football and flag teams, sent them off to distant schools and walked them around to the nearby schools. Thirty-some schools in all, or at least web pages, if you count girls and boys individual team pages.

The girls have never had much attention for their flag games, so they are thrilled. Kids are sending in photos, not just parents. The big Anchorage football schools, 8 of them, are used to the paper paying close attention to them, so coaches have been nice but not that helpful. Distant schools don't get much attention, so they've been more interested in sending in photos, just to get noticed. A Kodiak booster parent took mugshots of the entire team and sent them in on CD.

A big hit is a pre-weekend video where our sports reporter and another local radio sports reporter go on the record, in a 2-minute video, picking their top 5 games of the weekend and naming the winners. The coaches are paying close attention.

Both reporters say everywhere they go they hear about it. This is a true up-from-the-bootstraps effort. Our prep writer has never done radio or TV, so it was his first time in front of a camera. By week 3, he was noticeably more relaxed. Because production time is an issue at a small paper, we are doing the video right in our photo studio; we'll take it out to the ballfield for the playoffs. We break up the talking heads with some of our great still photos of the players that the two reporters are talking up. I have to give a lot of credit to our sports staff -- they've embraced these new ideas and leapt right in. They have a prep sports blog that 5 of them contribute to. And our photo staff has probably shot more football than ever before, just to make sure we have lots of visual excitement on the prep site.

I have been spending my Friday nights and Saturdays at prep football games, stalking the bleachers for parents with video and still cameras. When I tell them what I want,
they smile and say "Sure." And in three weeks we got about 150 photos, and growing. There's no part of this job that I don't do.
From stalking the games to shooting images to seed the web site, to hanging the banner displayed here at the city's little football stadium. It feels a lot like marketing; there was a point last week where I needed to listen to an early Rob Curley podcast about giving the readers what they want, in spades, that helped with that.

It's great fun being out of the office and hanging with the sports reporters on the sidelines, meeting principals, coaches, parents, kids.

The challenge for me is making this new part of our Web site friendly to readers. It's frustrating to succeed at getting people to send in content, but maddening that it isn't easy for them to find it on our site. That requires that I know more web management than I know, and the people who know it better than me are so busy managing our site that they can't teach me. So, it's a slower process than I'd like, but I have every confidence I'll get there. I want the user experience on the site to be intuitive and rewarding -- after all, these readers are doing work for us, about something they care about.

It's a pretty feel-good situation, although there is the downside of other prep sports not getting this same attention. We hope to grow it -- to basketball (girls and boys) and maybe hockey.

Other new ideas include video letters to the editor, snagged from the KC Star. Our state fair is on right now, and the letters editor, who is very interested in learning new skills, grabbed one of our two little hand-held video cameras and headed to the fair Friday, inviting folks to give us 30-seconds of what's on their mind. We'll find out Monday how it went. Next up in editorial is a letters blog, so writers can comment on today's print letters TODAY on the Web. I have visions of a cyber-editorial board, but about that time I could see I was causing headaches. So I retreated for awhile, to be visited again soon.

Something else our editorial staff did that got a lot of notice was running the full audio of Senator Ted Stevens most recent visit with the editorial board. It was 54 minutes long, I think. The editorial writers excerpted and transcribed some key points on the printed page, but then included the entire audio on our Web site for those interested. And people were interested. TV News picked it up, and made our use of audio the news --- the fact that we'd done this. It was fun because newspapers are frequently discussed as the old media, the old form, the "yesterday" version. But not that night, not at all. We had a many-minute TV segment that talked up how the new tools were changing the way news consumers get information. And it was tied tightly to our newspaper and its website.

Well, it's Sunday night and tomorrow starts another big week. I promise not to write so much next time. And a word to the wise: It's berry-time in Alaska.

Stormy weather aboard the Alaska ferry

2007-06-25T14:55:00.001-07:00

Hello. When I posted this hastily one night in Juneau, at the Silverbow Inn, I didn't have time to add any detail, just throw up the pictures of a stormy trip. I was on my way back to Anchorage, Alaska after a year at Stanford reveling in a John S. Knight midcareer fellowship. All wonderful things do end. I remember one of my teachers saying: one day more, and the fellowship wouldn't be as great as it was. So, the 20 of us are all journeying back to where we came from.

As you can see below, we were plagued by stormy weather out of Bellingham, Washington. We were on the graceful old Columbia, a 35-year-old, very comfy vessel. We camped on the back deck under the solarium roof, which included some toasty heat lamps. We had a three-night journey up to Juneau. Lucky for us, we weren't tent-camping out on the backdeck of the ferry, which looked more like this:

After the storm, the weather improved dramatically!

And I made it home, safe and sound, reunited with my dog Clare who'd been staying with a friend and her dog for the year.

Dance Night

2007-06-10T16:00:00.001-07:00

Caging journalism to protect it

2007-05-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

May 3 was World Press Freedom Day. It slipped by me until this morning, when I saw this post at digital deliverance, a site that monitors new media. My year away from my newsroom included the chance to meet many international journalists.
Last night I met Omar, 28, a staffer for the Washington Post in Baghdad, now getting formal journalism at UC Berkeley's j-school, paid for by the Washington Post. Because he gathered news for the Post in the war zone, and because his name was at the bottom of stories he contributed to, his safety is compromised. He is officially not here, but in another country, according to family and friends.

Two of the Knight Fellows I studied with this year have similar safety concerns when they return home. One, from the Caucasus, has had an office closed by the government while she was away. The other, covering the tribal areas of Pakistan near the Afghan border, has lost colleagues, and colleagues have lost fathers and brothers, as retaliation for their journalism in the hot zone.

Digital deliverance gives a round up of journalists who've paid the ultimate price in the past year for their work.

Last year, 49 journalists were killed in the Middle East, 27 in Asia, 5 in Africa, 4 in Europe and Central Asia, and 25 in the Americas. Worldwide, 134 journalists were in prison last year.

It's worth paying attention to; their commitment is inspiring, even sacred.

Unusual site, good information

2007-05-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

Looking at the Webby winners was useful, a good place to see what's appreciated most about the hottest web sites -- the most seductive food sites, most reliable news sites, the best personal sites. It's an amazing trip through a creative landscape. Here's one that caught me: Adobe's Design Center, and in particular, its Think Tank, with an article dated March 21, 2007 called "Just the facts: how technology is changing the news." Basically, it talks about how our news consumption habits are changing with the availability of new tools and ways to get news.

Rather than bring readers into a lab to study how they read, they went into their homes and watched their first-in-the-morning news consumption behaviors, and followed them on their morning commute to work. Researcher Liz Danzico tells us:

While the way we access news is still very much in flux, an important pattern seems to be emerging. Whereas once readers would rely on one or two major news sources for their information, they’re now relying on a synthesis—they’re relying on aggregators, RSS, e-mail alerts, and Digg to inform them. No matter what the channel, one trait is consistent: readers are aggregating their own news, requiring news and information when, where, and how they want it.

Here's a (too tiny, sorry) chart showing priorities for readers they studied. The cutline under the chart explains: "An early version of how we determined the attributes that are important to readers as they consume news. Results of our observations were charted to determine what the patterns were across people in our target audience."

Finally, her current assessment of what's important to news consumers:

* Transparency
While the distribution of content is widespread, more than ever before, people are demanding transparency. While they don’t care much about where they read their news—whether they’re getting it on the elevator billboard on the way to work or from their favorite blogger—they want to know that the source is trustworthy and the content credible. The only way to judge that is through referencing sources. Those sources can be made credible via a recognizable brand name, such as Business Week, or public ratings, like those on Digg, but transparency about where the news is generated is essential.
* Constructability
Neatly packaged stories from a single source are not what people want; people are demanding tools to bring together different sources, perspectives, worldviews, and fidelities of news. One of our research subjects, for example, cuts and pastes news headline that appear on her Yahoo! homepage into her browser search field. She’s constructed an experience that may be awkward, but it works for her.
* Timeliness and Timelessness
The freshness of data was critical to each person we observed. Checking the timestamp on stories, especially in news aggregators where people have a number of sources to choose from, was routine for many of the people we talked with. The fresher the story, the more reliable it seemed.

What we didn’t expect to find was that stories retained their relevance over time. More than a few people e-mail articles to themselves, print articles out, or convert articles to PDF so they can keep the story for reference. The arc of a news story, therefore, presents a sort of “dromedary effect”. News from the wire is perceived as important because of its newness; news that is old is perceived as important because of its reference-ability; but news somewhere in the middle (and this timeframe shifts with one’s consumption frequency) isn’t perceived as useful.
* Perspective
Twenty-nine percent of all online news readers say they get their news online because they can access a wider range of viewpoints. Half of them say they prefer getting news from sources that do not have a particular political point of view. [3] Following on the transparency trait, it’s crucial for people to understand a source’s point of view, their editorial perspective. Not only does that inform how people are constructing their news sources (they put together a fair, or left-leaning, or right-leaning news portfolio, for example), it helps them judge a single story from a suite of different perspectives.
* Engaged Action
Not surprisingly, the so-called Web 2.0 tools are often mentioned in our research. These tools aid and encourage users to assemble their own news source out of various components.
* Secondism
Many of the people we spent time with gather news from multiple locales. Although they live in New York, their mother lives in London, and their team works in India. They want to aggregate updates and perspectives from both their primary and secondary locations—as well as having instant access to global headlines.

Last note: Danzico was doing the work for a start-up news site called Daylife.

Living on the edge (read note below first)

2007-05-01T01:09:00.001-07:00

That's what they say we do in Alaska. But today's blog entry is all about flipping sailboats, something I'm learning how to do in spring sailing. So for a break from my usual discussions of new media and how it's scaring old media, here is a You Tube video that spoke to me. I saw it posted on the good ol' Alaska Sailing Club blog; I belong to that club and learned to sail there two summers ago at Big Lake. I'd been writing a few posts there about my boat-flipping experiences at Stanford. I am a very green (as in new, not as in seasick) sailor. During this very windy spring, I am trying to increase my sailing knowledge. I see from watching this video, I will improve my flipped-boat skills by learning how to step over and onto the centerboard without getting a drop of water on me!

So this post is just for fun. On the other hand, the metaphors probably still hold for journalism: If your boat flips, jump on the centerboard and right it. Then go for a helluva ride!

What's missing from local news?

2007-04-30T21:29:00.000-07:00

Ina, a fellow student in my new media entrepreneurship class, found this site -- called Topix: Your town. Your news. Your take. That handy "About Us" section on the site explains that Topix "links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums. Topix also works with the nation's major media companies to grow and engage their online audiences through forums, classifieds, publishing platforms and RSS feeds." A few of the logos for partnering companies appear below; the site shows 20, and that's not the whole list.

A quick glance at the news release archive indicates the company got a start in 2002 by aggregating news and blog sources. But, as their April 2 press release indicates,

Even with 50,000 news sources, there just wasn't enough local news - and what news there was, couldn't be tuned finely enough with algorithms alone.

So, in April 2007, we decided to open up our site, and give anyone the power to discuss, edit and share the news that matters to them.

How do they do that?

Anyone can now submit local news for any U.S. zip code to Topix through an easy web form on the web site or from their cell phone. Participants can also become citizen editors, improving the news content on the pages they edit.

Finally, here is their embedded video, asking a variety of people what's missing from their local news:

Tip sheet for the multimedia journalist

2007-04-29T23:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to rhernandez at MultimediaShooter for this handy cheatsheet on audio and video gathering. Click on the sheet to make it nice and big and readable.

Another cool student site to check out is Columbia University's multimedia page, host to student work and called NYC24. Find it here.

A smart wiki, and an unofficial and popular blog

2007-04-28T12:23:00.001-07:00

Just about two minutes ago I got an email for something new at Stanford. It is the "Stanford Wiki." If you go, watch the little mini-intro movie, which will give you how-tos, and why a student would use this wiki.

Earlier this year, students created an "Unofficial Stanford Blog." Take a look at both. The blog is a general interest posting post -- I see calendar items, new student-generated businesses, and I saw close-to-immediate posts on Virginia Tech, well before the student daily could get it into its pages. The photo at left was posted yesterday because temperatures were very high and students jumped into a fountain in front of the book story. Immediacy, if not significance, is also an element of blogging.

Both of these examples illustrate how newspapers have to change. Both represent tools and information to share in the hands of the users/creators. Notice how quickly audience finds what it wants and uses it. If the need can be identified, users validate with use.

This makes me think of all our discussions in New Media Entrepreneurship. The audience model for newspapers (mass media) conflicts with the long tail notion of small, diverse but interested audiences. How about if a newspaper created a wiki site for its community members, and let them give it life? This could be a non-journalistic (in the sense that the newspaper would not stake its reputation on the accuracy of information delivered in these wiki pages) community information source. The interested parties would create the content. And of course the newspaper could monitor the wikis for stories that could benefit from a reporter. I can think of a million ways a newspaper could use this concept. It works to make your newspaper a "place" instead of only a one-way information product.

Listen. Listen. Listen.

2007-04-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

If you are frustrated that your media organization isn't training you, please read this post from MultimediaShooter on "The Question of Training." I think creator rhernandez has it dead on.

(Funny Larson cartoon, courtesy of MediaShooter. Anything to bring a smile to your face!)

My New Media Entrepreneurship class

2007-04-26T00:34:00.000-07:00

So I'm in a class charged with launching a Web site in 7 weeks, serving the Stanford community. Most of our proposals were versions of Web sites that could host a central multimedia story, surrounded by an excellent calendar for this very decentralized campus (including where to graze for free food at conferences, seminars, and other academic sessions), blogs, and a portal into local student films that don't get wide venues, an overlooked but very contemporary niche.

The class took an odd twist, though. In our second meeting, the journalism grad students started calling instead for a marketing site for the journalism program that would ensure them a job. Not just any job, but a call from the Washington Post, wishing to hire them all. The concept of serving an audience went out the window.

I can see that an excellent site really serving readers could turn editors' heads. But a site with no readers filled with new media gadgetry? You lost me there.

The class seems to have stalled out. Or maybe this is just the way you work through entrepreneurship. I will say that students seem constrained. Our class blog is much less active than in winter quarter, and in my own work pod, kids are scratching their heads. In this group, the idea surfaced to narrow the audience to just grad students, since they feel more distant and disconnected from the campus, even though their population is fully half the student body (6,000 undergrads, 6,0000 grads,more or less)

We are reading "The Long Tail" (and serving just the grad students strikes me as following the long tail theory -- go for a smaller niche, forget about being all things to all audiences; pick an audience and s-a-t-i-s-f-y them as deeply as you can. Our other text is Guy Kawasaki (think Silicon Valley major success, venture capitalist etc etc)--his book is "The Art of the Start."

Now here was an odd harmonic convergence between entrepreneurship and good old-fashioned long-form storytelling:

I am sure many saw Gene Weingarten's "Pearls Before Breakfast" long form feature with video added? Did I say this story is l-o-n-g, and rich in philosophical and literary threads. It tells of Gene Weingarten's plot to post a truly world-class violinist, Josh Bell, in a D.C. transit station busking during rush hour. Would he stop crowds, or would people rush by without even noticing him?

Some in the class commented that no one would read anything that long; some said they surprised themselves by being drawn all the way through.

Now leap forward (or back to) entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. The story caught him so much that it made his personal blog, How to Change the World, including an invite to readers to vote on whether they thought commuters noticed or didn't. Kawasaki got almost 1,000 people to vote (93 percent said no one would stop....)

He also quipped that he had happy visions of Steve Jobs selling iPods in South Dakota .

But then he got serious, and said this:

"The lessons that I gleaned from this story are:

Don’t let the absence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is bad.

Don’t let the presence of trappings and popularity make you believe something is good.

Don’t pass by life much less let life pass you by.

He never mentioned the length of Weingarten's piece. That's the power of story.

One of my heroes

2007-04-24T10:48:00.000-07:00

I stand in awe and wonder at our luck at having the First Amendment and its subsequent body of law to protect free speech and, as partner to that, a free press. And I stand in awe and wonder at the teacher I had this semester. Professor Kathleen Black, center, welcomed a fistful of Knight Fellows into her constitutional law class, and held us gently accountable for the actions of our news organizations. It was a wonderful opportunity for a signficant overview of First Amendment law from one who knows it well, and at a time when many long-standing and comfortable accommodations of press freedom are in question.

My Knight buddies in the photo are John Briggs,Yahoo; Eric Schmitt, New York Times; Prof. Sullivan, Stanford Law School; me; and lawyer Liz Schalet, a Knight affiliate whose partner is a radio reporter in NYC.

It was a great class, and a great opportunity to learn/refresh the finer shadings.

Will work for (red) T-shirt

2007-04-16T20:46:00.000-07:00

Today I spent about three hours at "Media X: Research, Collaboration, Innovation," a conference at Stanford on the direction of new media. It was made up of 20-minute presentations from all over the media map, from a doctor showing advancements in virtual surgeries (See a mummy in 3-D!! See a missed polyp in a virtual colonoscopy!!) to why Second Life is beating out the game of Everquest. (Answer: Because you own everything you create in Second Life. Instead of signing the Terms of Agreement for Everquest -- you know, the small print you don't read -- which indicates that anything you create in Everquest is owned by....Everquest.) Citizen journalism and multimedia training Web sites duly were noted. Two unexpected things:

1) A discussion on how e-mail is damaging your closest relationships. B.J. Fogg, a professor at Stanford, spent a year interviewing 112 women living in Sonoma County about their relationships and e-mail. He chose women, he says, because they care about relationships, nurture them, and are articulate about them. Plus, he lives in Sonoma County, so it made it easy for him to get the interviewing done over such a long stretch.

After six months, he realized what the women were telling him: E-mail is no good for close personal relationships. It isn't intimate enough. For those you really care about, get back on the phone, send letters, meet up for coffee.

He even says your close working relationships are too important to handle by e-mail. This realization led him to create a new way to communicate with your voice via computer, a widget you can load onto any Web page that will allow instant voice chat, called YackPack.

2.) A fun talk by Paul Saffo, on sabbatical from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Saffo explained that Silicon Valley is built on failure, not success. Interactive TV failed so big in Silicon Valley "you could see the crater from the moon." All those talented people were sitting around when the 20-year-old Internet came along and they decided, What the heck, let's give that a shot. Look what happened: a giant success built on the previous failure.
So he encouraged the audience to "cherish failure," because the next big breakthrough will come from something that has been failing for about 20 years and is about to break open to success. His forecast: robots. Why? Because of how people are reacting to something as simple as the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Two/thirds of owners name their Roomba, and one/third take theirs on vacation.

People, he says, want to have a new relationship with technology.
Oh, and the red shirt? I volunteered at the conference, and got a red T-shirt!

Classes this quarter

2007-04-10T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here's one worth mentioning. My digital journalism class from winter quarter is back, but has morphed into "new media entrepreneurship." The class is taught by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Grimes, who covered Silicon Valley in all its entrepreneurship glory. The entrepreneurial here refers more to the commitment of the team -- everybody is invested in the success of the enterprise -- than figuring out a business model or funding. That may come later, however, as business school students are considering taking on the financing as a project. In the meantime, Stanford will fund it.

The aim is to create a news Website out of a site the communication graduate students formerly used to post their stories assigned out of various classes. It got little readership outside the communications department. It correctly has been identified as a missed opportunity, and now a handful of students, in 10 weeks, hope to transform it. The first class session left students divided: should it become an excellent aggregator of calendar and Stanford news and local blogs (valuable because this place is very decentralized; nothing is aggregated), or should it become host to a new media journalism site by the grad students. The obvious answer is it needs to be both. Be useful (with aggregation) and be surprising (with good journalism).

The reason I like the class is it's another heavy dose of the world of new media. So weekly we take tutorials in Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Flash etc. Plus, Stanford hired one of UC Berkeley's multimedia professors to come over for this quarter. I'm grateful for another dose. We've been introduced to a subscription site called www.lynda.com that has good tutorials. More as I learn more here. I am finding that some of the tutorials require no sign up; I am guessing the better ones will require the $25/month subscription. But if you made it your mission, you could learn a lot in a month. There may even be group-use discounts, for a newsroom, for example.

Another class that is interesting to me is out of the GSB, graduate school of business. It's called high-performance leadership, and it is introducing a new model. Gone is the "heroic leader" (sort of like Mom or Dad on the job, the one you expect to have all the answers). So is the participative leader, who gets lots of input from staff but makes the final decision. The new form of leadership is "shared responsibility." Here's the description from the course catalog:

Although many leadership approaches will achieve good performance, it is the premise of this course that the assumptions underlying traditional approaches to leadership frequently block excellence. This course will present a new approach that sees leadership as a joint responsibility of members and the leader. Implementing this new definition requires strong teams, shared vision and mutual influence relationships. Class time will be spent describing this approach and exploring how both leaders and members can build such teams, make vision real and relevant and develop mutual influence relationships.

The main role of the leader is not to think up the answers, but to create an environment that draws out the best from everyone, because survival in a competitive environment depends on it. Another tenet of this approach is that leadership comes from everywhere in the organization, if the ecology is healthy. That's the path to survival in the complicated times we live in, or so the MBAs at Stanford are learning. Sounds true in the news biz.

I'm also taking Islam and the West, taught by a fascinating professor, Abbas Milani from Iran, a true scholar who puts today's Middle Eastern awkwardness (that's putting it too mildly) into context historically. In two class sessions I've learned more about why the West and the Orient look askance at one another than I have gotten reading all the news accounts of the war.

I was unceremoniously bounced out of a class today; even Knight Fellows have limits. It was US Global Decisionmaking; the prof, a very famous guy here, decided no auditors. The class is small, there's no hiding from him, so I guess I'm out.

But it's not all books. I'm back in sailing this quarter, taking racing; I hope I can stay in the boat! And wine tasting 2. More of those good California wines.

Oh, one more item in a full day. At lunch I caught half a session on Creative Commons, a form of licensing that allows photographers, writers, musicians to share their work for non-commercial use, while retaining control over the material for commercial use. It's a big global movement, because the creative tools are in so many hands now. You can search the Internet for creative commons licensed-material, which you can use free for noncommercial purposes. Read about it here .

Sam Zell at Stanford: Trib buy, Google

2007-04-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

Curiosity brought me to the law school today for a talk by Sam Zell, the business dealmaker who is hoping to clinch his latest -- the purchase of Tribune. The title of his talk was "Make me an offer," and he was here to discuss the $39 billion buyout of Equity Office Properties.

But the first question out of the box came from my Knight colleague, Kevin Fagan of the SF Chronicle, asking Zell to talk about the Tribune buy. Zell deferred, saying the deal was not finalized yet. But questions persisted from around the room.

Finally, he said he bought Tribune because he thought running that company would be a "fantastic challenge," especially since he doesn't see that others have succeeded. Under his tutelage, he would not allow the kind of infighting that happened between the Chandler family and the Tribune company, which he said has hurt Tribune for the past 2-3 years. He said the LA Times buy didn't look like a bad idea, but it turned out that way.

Asked whether it might have been smarter if he could have purchased a media company like Google, Zell said:

"What would happen to Google if the content they get from newspapers was no longer available? They'd have nothing. The content on Google is being paid for by newspapers, and stolen by Google. The boys at Google get this. You're going to see new deals and formulas..."

Perhaps not unlike the new coordination between McClatchy's foreign bureaus and Yahoo announced recently.

Zell ragged on Stanford Law School for not admitting him as a young man. He confessed to hating law school, but finished it and passed the bar. Despite the pain, he said he's glad he did. "Law school shapes how you think. Everything today is legal. You've got to understand it."

Meanwhile, he was so bored in academia, he said, that as a senior in law school he made $150,000 running his own real estate company on the side. Law students sitting in front of me shook their heads in disbelief.

He railed against Sarbanes Oxley (Public Company Accounting Act of 2002), then invited the audience to his Web site where he archives his annual "holiday message" to the world. This year's was devoted to his disdain for "SarBox." Even he is into multimedia.

Not your father's TV

2007-04-03T21:34:00.000-07:00

I was noodling around a site with multimedia tutorials and blogs, a place where new creators learn from each other, thinking it would be a good resource for transitioning journalists who want to follow new storytelling paths. The site is MultimediaShooter, billing its role as "keeping track of multimedia so you don't have to."

In its tutorials section, you can link to Current TV's own production training page with sections on storytelling (what makes a good pod), journalism (case studies to learn from), to gathering and editing video. MultimediaShooter gives Current TV's video-editing section high marks. Current TV is an Al Gore effort in which one/third of what is aired comes from viewers. They call this VC2, or "viewer created content." Hence, the training modules to bring in work from The People. Up since August 1, 2005, "Current is the first TV network created by, for and with young adults."

Buck up

2007-04-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

These journalism times are indeed unsettling, with shrinking newsrooms and all. So learning why one newspaper editor is optimistic is worth your time and trouble. John Robinson of the Greensboro News & Record has three reasons why he's optimistic now. Go read them yourself here, but the first one surely will make you sit up straight and feel good, so I'll tease with it.

1. The reporters are better. I'm speaking of reporters like this who are paid for their work and reporters like this who aren't. The professionals are smarter and quicker, and more fluid and more diverse than any in the 30+ years I've been in the business. They are innovative and open to change. We're in good hands. The widespread entry of non-pros is a splendid development, bring new eyes to old and new topics. When I was editorial page editor, it was a daunting challenge to write on complicated issues day after day, knowing that there were dozens of people in the community who knew the topic better than I. Now they have access to a megaphone to inform those of us who care. How can that be anything be a valuable complement to democracy?

The tip for this came from Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine blog, where he cites his own optimism and that of a few others. On a Monday, that's worth reading.

Consider reading this

2007-04-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

"This" is a report from the Center for Citizen Media about how news organizations can forge tighter relationships with their community of readers. Download it here and give it a read. More after I read it.

The blogging-as-journalism debate

2007-04-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

I found a post on the Cairns Blog that I thought others would find thought-provoking. Should bloggers get first amendment protection? The blog writer asks Kevin Blangston, a staff attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation, who responded:

“Yes. A blogger is a journalist if they are doing journalism.”

The writer notes that this shifts the inquiry away from who is a journalist to what is journalism. And he quotes Stanford University journalism professor Ted Glasser in support of this idea:

“We shouldn’t have a two-tiered First Amendment that gives more protections to some individuals than others,” he said. “We are much better off defining the act of journalism rather than who is a journalist.”

Read blogger Anthony Sanchez' full account here.

A bit of multimedia that Al's Morning Report highlighted recently. It is a Sarasota, Fl. Herald Tribune report on 150 teachers still in state school districts despite serious issues with their behavior around students. It's called "Broken Trust." Al likes the idea that readers don't have to scroll down the page to continue reading; they get to flip a page. Check it out for navigation ideas.

Nimble, a lovely word

2007-03-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

The time sure feels ripe for training journalists. In one item below, a new study shows that editors world-wide want it for the reporters in their newsrooms. And per the next item, a different study, we learn that journalists have been yearning for training for up to five years.

First, the World Editors Forum, in conjunction with Reuters and another group, asked 435 editors around the world what they'd do to improve journalism.

Among other questions, they were asked "If you had to invest in editorial quality, what would you do first within the newsroom?".

Thirty-seven per cent said they would train journalists in new media skills, 23 per cent would recruit more journalists, 19 per cent would re-train in traditional skills, 10 per cent would add more opinion analysis writers, six per cent would replace staff with younger journalists, and 5 per cent would take another, unspecified, approach.

Second, a new book came out today that illustrates the path. Called "News Improved", it tells the stories of forward-moving newsrooms. A Knight Foundation-funded Newsroom Training Initiative over the last four years has infused $10 million into newsroom projects. The results are explored in this book, written with Knight money by Michele McClellan and Tim Porter. Among its points, journalists really want more training. Per one account of the new book's contents:

In 2002, a Knight survey of nearly 2,000 journalists found that eight in 10 newsroom staffers wanted more training than they were getting. An update to that study, "Investing in the Future of News," which was released today in the "News, Improved" book, reports that the number has increased to nine in 10.

Here's an assist to the working journalist. Take a short, 10-question survey on training in your own newsroom, and you can get a free copy of the book for your time and trouble, here.

Now about that word, nimble. I've always thought mid-sized newspapers were in a better position than big-city dailies. Their smaller size made them more flexible, able to adjust more quickly. It turns out that can be an important asset. Here's the guy who wrote the intro to "News Improved", Eric Newton, talking:

"Media evolution doesn't favor the big or strong," he writes. "It favors the nimble.

"Be nimble."

From "Sacred Facts"

2007-03-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

I keep finding inspiration, or maybe it is even consolation, in reading BBC-head Richard Sambrook's blog, title in quotes above. In general, I'm against whining about these uncertain times. Hold on tight while the spasm of a revolution passes through your work world. Frankly, all you can do, and MUST do, is the very best you can. But I refer you to this comment, called "Modern Work," from a recent Sambrook post:

In a discussion about managing constant change two interesting observations were made.

1: "Most jobs are increasingly a series of projects". This is certainly true of mine and seemed to ring a bell with all the other senior managers gathered. So when did that happen and why? And while we're all diverted on projects, who's running things?

2: When discussing "change" with teams, it sounds like an admonition (as in "Changor Die!"). Is there a less pejorative word? Progress? Improvement? Future? Forward? They all sound like doublespeak.

A word on his blog title, this from his blog's "About" section. My guess is you will find it as inspiring as I do. He quotes from C.P. Scott:

Comment is free, but facts are sacred. "Propaganda", so called, by this means is hateful. The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard. Comment also is justly subject to a self-imposed restraint. It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair. This is an ideal. Achievement in such matters is hardly given to man. We can but try, ask pardon for shortcomings, and there leave the matter.

Tipster for our times

2007-03-07T20:21:00.000-08:00

Meet Mindy McAdams and her Website. She a professor and Knight Chair for Journalism at the University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. She's got a book out called "Flash Journalism: How to create multimedia news packages," which I've added to my toolkit list below. And her Website is host to lots of multimedia reporting information, from where the free tutorials are stashed, to ways of thinking about telling a multimedia story. Go there, browse, click and read. This is good stuff to learn, and she is generous with information. You could make a study of her "Online Journalism Examples and Tips." Go there. Do it.

Tension around the "customer"

2007-03-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

My apologies for being absent lately. A bike accident (I hit a pedestrian while pumping home late one night) and the flu (down and out for half a week) left me scrambling to catch up. Nearing the end of the winter quarter, papers and projects are due.

One of my recent assignments delivered an entrepreneurial-minded quote that I thought was important to modern news organizations. It came from Shai Agassi, head of software development for SAP, the third largest software company in the world, based out of Germany. He's the Palo Alto office, and likely the future head of SAP worldwide. So in Silicon Valley, he's hot stuff.

Agassi emphasizes the customer's experience. If SAP can make the "end-user's" experience wonderful, that's a good, competitive thing to accomplish.

Here's the quote:

Sandhill.com: Do you have advice to share with other software executives?

Agassi: It is important to think "out-of-the-box" as much as possible. By that I mean, software executives need to always bring in the perspective of the customer and remember that our business is about what the customer wants to consume, not what we are trying to build. You need to picture what the customer sees when he opens the box - not what you put into it. Think about what you can do to simplify consumption of your product - that is the best thing you can do for your customers.

Creating a good customer experience is pivotal. The competitive climate demands it. Newspapers can benefit from some of this entrepreneurial thinking, by seeing themselves as their customers see them. Do your customers find you useful, necessary, compelling? Or boring, static and not enough? What are they telling you about their user experience?

For sure, newspaper Websites have to be user-friendly, fast-loading, intuitive to navigate, the very best in the business. But what those pages contain is more critical than just an excellent user interface.

News organizations have to find a way to give their customers what they don't know they want. Or even think they don't want, like eat-your-peas public policy reporting. It's a sophisticated and strategic calling.

Watching the Frontline's News War is sobering. I'm thinking here of the interview with the head of ABC News as he defends the kinds of titillating stories Dateline has turned to -- moms and their teen daughters learning to pole dance, or the hunt for sexual predators. Lowest common denominators, for sure; information evaluated as entertainment. If customers get to define news, does it mean 24/7 of Anna Nicole Smith, as cable recently delivered?

Of course there's a higher calling to news; we've always known that. It takes leadership and commitment to get there, and in this ultra-entrepreneurial era, commercial success.

I just got a copy of "News Values: Ideas for an information age" by Jack Fuller. It was written in 1996, and we're still asking the questions he posed in his introduction:

How much should newspapers reflect the beliefs of the communities they serve? How much should they provide moral leadership? What is the proper relationship between journalism and marketing? Journalism and profit-making?

Like our software entrepreneur, Fuller's pragmatically paying attention to the customer:

For the most part I have tried to locate the news values in the desires and interests of the American audience.

But he sees a big difference, a big danger.

It is often said that a society gets the press it deserves. I am not sure about that. But I know that in the end it gets a press no better than it wants. ... If the public is led to accept shoddy or dangerous goods, the public will prevail. So it is up to the newspapers to make news values compelling enough that people will see in them their deeper interests.

"Shoddy and dangerous goods." That's a scary and disturbing description, a catalyst to keep pushing for quality in these uncertain times.
The danger is that newspapers will patronize their customers, or assume their classic and now outdated role of information "gatekeeper." Here's where the concept of a new partnership with the customer might take hold -- a joint definition of needs.
I'm gonna keep reading Fuller's book, and promise to share what I learn there. I hope he has convincing guidance on where to go from here.

Meet the creator of this viral video

2007-02-21T00:25:00.000-08:00

Bear with me. First, here is the hypertext video that has been posted everywhere. My point in showing it here is just in case you missed it, but also, to then link to an interview with its creator, a cultural anthropologist talking about what it means.

Now, here is an intriguing interview with the maker, Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. He was interviewed by John Battelle on Searchblog: Thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology and more.
A taste of Wesch's thinking:

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. ... As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself.

And:

For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

The good professor has had some commentary at his Web site, and you can comment too. He expects to keep working on this. As of 2.21.2007, it had some 1,310,565 views on YouTube. He's obviously speaking to us.

The "ouch" factor

2007-02-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

This, from the Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten, is sobering. He calls journalists to church with a plea for motive self-examination based on embarrassing revelations about their peers in the Scooter Libby trial (Judith Miller, Tim Russert, Matthew Cooper):

The picture that emerges here is of a stratum of the Washington press corps less interested in the sort of journalistic privilege that serves the public interest than in the kind of privileged access that ensures prominent bylines and good airplay.

And in the baseball doping BALCO case (SF Chronicle's Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who accepted leaked grand jury testimony from defense attorney Troy Ellerman; Ellerman then went out and argued that the ensuing publicity would deny his client a fair trial):

To assert any form of journalistic privilege in a situation like that is something far worse than moral obtuseness. Conspiring with somebody you know is actively perverting the administration of justice to your mutual advantage is a betrayal of the public interest whose protection is the only basis on which journalistic privilege of any sort has a right to assert itself.

If it isn't yet clear:

Journalists consumed with a self-interest so strong that it makes them the willing dupes of manipulative sources report what they're meant to report and not the information the public has a right to know.
...both the Libby trial and BALCO case can be seen as the indictment of the kind of journalism that asserts the right to protect its sources, to protect the public interest, but to conceal its own self-interested shortcomings.

So now you want me to take video?

2007-02-20T15:08:00.000-08:00

So goes the lament from the mainline print reporter. Let me do what I'm good at...writing. Don't make me take pictures, too. Shoot video, no less.

I point out this piece, "You Must be Streaming," from New York Magazine because it addresses just this moment in journalistic history. And in the writer's view, any journalist brings tools to the table that no amateur can match, regardless of how rough the beginnings. Writer Kurt Andersen:

Whereas the YouTube paradigm is amateurs doing interesting things with cameras, the newspapers’ Web videos are professional journalists operating like amateurs in the best old-fashioned sense.

Calling this a "flux moment," writer Andersen notes how differently The New York Times and the Washington Post are handling their video effort and packaging. At NYT, the two newsrooms are merged; at Washpost, still separated. Times highlights its daily offerings, Post buries under a hard-to-find button, Andersen argues.

The article looks at an emerging video journalist from each newspaper, the Times' David Carr (with Carpetbagger blog and video, shown tripping over red carpets as he does his reporting), and WP's Travis Fox, the globetrotting one-man-band who never appears in his own videos. Two worth watching as the new medium, Web video by newspapers, emerges.

Anderson's point is to highlight this very moment, when it is all up for grabs.

The passionate, improvised, innovative reinventings, as opposed to the final, fully professionalized reinventions, are often the coolest moments in cultural history. Think of movies in 1920, TV in 1955, or public radio in 1980. ... And this very moment, before anyone professes to know much more than anyone else, is probably the beginning of the new medium’s great golden age. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Thanks to Sacred Facts for the tip to this piece.

An excuse to put my dog in my blog

2007-02-19T10:53:00.000-08:00

Meet Clare, our dog who stayed behind in Anchorage and lives with dog buddy Rudy (see white paws in one pic, white dog in other -- that is Rudy). Clare is wearing a green T-shirt because she had a few stitches on her shoulder after a run-in with a tree. My only justification for putting my dog in my blog came from reading a passage in a book about meditation. Stick with me here, this won't take long.

Have you ever looked at a dog and really seen it in its total "dogness"? A dog is quite miraculous when you really see it. What is it? Where did it come from? What is it doing here? What are its feelings?
Children tend to think about things this way. Their vision is fresh. They see things as if for the first time every time. Sometimes our seeing gets tired. We just see a dog. "If you've seen one, you've seen them all." Our thoughts act as a kind of veil preventing us from seeing things with fresh eyes.

So my point? Look at journalism through fresh eyes. See the post below, too, where a very successful newspaper publisher in Norway is doing well online. One link to his success, say analysts, is he brought in some 'fresh eyes.' I hope we can be our own fresh eyes in American journalism.

News from Norway: online success

2007-02-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

A newspaper publisher in Norway is finding financial success online, according to this business report from The New York Times. The company is Schibsted in Oslo. Noting how well things are going for this newspaper company, a Harvard business professor is making a case study of it. Says the professor:

“There’s no question they managed this transition earlier than a lot of newspaper companies, and they’re in a better position as a result.”

Besides investing aggressively in online for a decade, the publisher brought in non-newspaper managers from a business consulting firm who were willing to sacrifice sacred cows if that was necessary. Said one:

“The main thing they have done is to recognize that the consumer is king.”

Of course there are special circumstances in Norway. Schibsted dominates the online market and includes a successful classified site in its arsenal. And Norway has the highest newspaper readership in the world, so readers trusted the brand when it went online.

The Harvard professor, Bharat N. Anand, wonders: Can this success be exported?

“The big question is, ‘Is this a repeatable success, or is it a very good 10-year run?’ And how far can it travel outside Scandinavia?”

A little hope, pass it around

2007-02-16T00:57:00.000-08:00

I get excited by new ideas. Never fails. I'm on the mailing list for HBR. That would be Harvard Business Review. And they've just compiled their list of bright ideas for 2007.

Skimming the list, the word "hope" leaped out at me. It's number five on a list of 20. The authors, Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry, argue that hope is a key element in surviving tough situations: prison camps, war, accidents. How about old media/new media upheavals?

My guess is the authors would say yes:

Our contribution has been to outline the elements of hope—possibility, agency, worth, openness, and connection—in a way that guides efforts to nurture it in the workplace.

The first two are central to the definition of hope: People must see that change is possible and how they can engage personally in that change. The remaining elements have to do with how hope is cultivated in organizations: Hopeful work groups are most often composed of individuals whose worth to the organization has been affirmed, who perceive an openness on the part of management, and who enjoy an authentic sense of connection with their colleagues and with the organization’s mission. Even so briefly described, these elements suggest why hope can be an energetic force for positive change to a degree that, say, optimism alone could never be.

No love lost

2007-02-16T00:34:00.000-08:00

My post is a little late for Valentine's Day. But a pissing match between the British papers Guardian and Telegraph caught my eye. The fight is about when is a blog not really a blog. I saw it mentioned on Sacred Facts and followed the links to see what the fuss was all about.

The Telegraph says the Guardian's site (new from 2006), called Comment is free, is NOT A BLOG, dammit!

The Guardian, in the voice of its Web leader Neil McIntosh writing on his personal Web site Complete Tosh, suggests that CiF is too a blog, a group blog. Whatever you wanna call it, it is much better than the dead blogs over at the Telegraph, maintains the Guardian. (A dead blog is one in which the blogger isn't contributing much, and neither are commentators. How many of THOSE have you seen out there on the Web.)

Aside from enjoying them go at each other, I think the Guardian has an idea that would be useful for any newspaper to consider. I like a site that is a "place" for readers to weigh in on lots of stuff, including issues they choose to initiate, not just one blogger's perspective. It has a "marketplace of ideas" feel to it.

Here is how CiF describes itself:

It is a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Observer newspapers with other writers and commentators representing a wide range of experience and interests. The aim is to host an open-ended space for debate, dispute, argument and agreement and to invite users to comment on everything they read.

Here is Neil McIntosh, head of Guardian Unlimited (the Guardian's Web site) describing how they got to this working model:

The key difference was we took the focus off individuals and redistributed attention between authors, commenters, and the aggregate discussion. Breaking views and strong user debate are the key influences on CiF's front page, not the article of faith that is the newest-post-first traditional blog form. We think it improves the user experience.

It was a format based on years of blog experimentation, and frustration, at Guardian Unlimited. In particular, the massively group nature of the blog was deliberate; we built in acceptance of the reality that many interesting people simply don't have time to contribute very regularly. It's a reality the Telegraph and pretty much every other blogging newspaper continues to ignore.

Other features of the site: a political cartoon, a photo-blog by a Guardian photog, and an editors' blog, where Guardian editors talk about that day's newspaper and putting it together.

You can search A-Z through CiF's contributor list and through CiF's subject matter. And you can even see number of posts per subject matter item.

This is an upgrade to the traditional blogging site because it expands who gets to talk. Makes me think of Bruno Guissani's argument that news Web sites need to become places people go to discuss and debate. I think it makes the single-speaker blog site look primitive, or more kindly, like a columnist with limited feedback opportunity.

It could allow the site to invite high-profile bloggers for limited commentary.

Sharing this

2007-02-11T03:25:00.000-08:00

Sometimes humanity overcomes complexity. Check out the Washington Post's "on Being" series, interviews with individuals. Every person has a story. Imagine doing this with Alaskans. My mind spins.

This just in: the big bad wolf

2007-02-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

The ADN's front page got noted for being extra special today at the Brass Tacks Design "best front page." They liked the "amazing photo of the big bad wolf."

The "E" words

2007-02-09T20:43:00.000-08:00

I keep hearing two words here at Stanford, and finally decided to put them together. One of the words is "entrepreneurial," and the other is "emergent."

Shortly after arriving here, I learned this university is decentralized and you are on-your-own to learn everything you can about its riches, which are considerable. OK, I was up for that.

Then, very quickly, you are told that this school is an entrepreneurial place. If you like an idea, get out there and do it. Want something to happen? Do it. This is the home of the Silicon Valley start-up, and Stanford students talk about their impending "start ups" as if that is an expected and natural progression in life. Being entrepreneurial is highly valued.

That slides into our new life on the Internet, don't you think? People are starting blogs and wikis and personal web pages and online businesses. And the only way you learn how to do this is to jump in and do one.

Now, for emergent. This is about how things are changing right in front of us.

Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.

That came out of Steven Johnson's book, called "Emergence." I read it in Dan Gillmor's book, "We the media."

Tuck these two words into the back of your mind. They are defining our age. It's not really a time to be passive and let things happen to you. It's a time to jump in and get your feet wet in some html, some xml, some social tagging, some folksonomy and maybe try your hand at a video on iMovie.

I just saw former ADN journalist and freelancer Doug O'Harra's new work over at his Web site, Far North Science. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Go take a look. Then get entrepreneurial and emergent, and start something of your own!

Rating the 2008 Prez-wannabe sites

2007-02-09T02:04:00.000-08:00

I'm new to this site, called The Bivings Report. They describe themselves as "a source of news, insight, research and analysis on the web-based communications industry." I've started noticing their analysis of the presidential campaign Web sites. Hilary Clinton's site gets a thumbs-up in a recent post:

...this site impresses me with its lack of fluff and solid design. The red, white and blue palette is toned down for a less giddy experience. The user's eye doesn't bounce around. It goes where it was intended to go: the logo to the video to the action center. It's also only as Web 2.0 as it has to be.
...The overall initial experience is refreshingly pleasant here and I am into the content quickly without having to click through any registrations or toil through a video or splash page. High marks.

Scroll down for a thumbs-down on John Edwards conflict over firing some bloggers:

At this point the Edwards' campaign has pretty much pissed off the entire blogosphere over this (liberal and conservative). What a mess.

And, under the McCain banner, some bloggers are cautioning against being used by campaigns:

If the blogosphere wants to maintain a position of credibility, then we cannot be seen as the mud factory of the elections, especially in the primary. Campaigns (for President or anything else) that want to use blogger credibility as a channel to reach the voters need to be careful of using bloggers to bubble attack memes up to the surface.

We've only just begun.

Salmon site

2007-02-09T01:33:00.000-08:00

I wrote last week about the potential for creating a "story shell" for salmon on the ADN Web site. The idea behind it is to cluster information on an ongoing story, to make a place for readers/stakeholders to gather, get informed, discuss. Dialogue, not monologue.
No sooner had I posted than I got an email from a Canadian nonprofit with just such a site, called Think Salmon. They would love to partner and share information. Their site is still in Beta and launches later this year. It is less science-oriented, and more culture-oriented. I think a newspaper site would have room for both.

The images pictured here are from the art section of their Web site. Salmon benches, who knew? (Images posted by Aileen Penner.)

I'm also reminded of a lecture from the multimedia boot camp at UC Berkeley. Jane Stewart cautioned newspapers not to let non-news organizations leap out ahead of them with powerful Web sites. She had examples from the sports world (pro football, college athletics, horse racing, NASA) where commercial or science interests created "news" sites that were more exciting and powerful than newspaper versions of those activities/events. The cautionary tale here is to own your own turf. We could own salmon/Iditarod/northern art, etc etc etc.

No more print NY Times, in 5 years?

2007-02-09T01:15:00.000-08:00

Say it ain't so, Joe.
Here's what Arthur Sulzberger told a journalist from Haaratz.com in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland:

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," [Sulzberger] says.

My main thought on this is that it may give many other newspaper publishers the opportunity and permission to start thinking online-only, or combination of online/non-daily print.

But it's hard to say goodbye to print. And not just the reading habit, either. Tonight I ate dinner with some Pakistani friends. We dined, Pakistani-style, on the floor of their apartment with the food spread out picnic-style before us. Our table cloth was layers and layers of already-read newspapers.

Yesterday, I got a used book in the mail from an online bookseller. It came wrapped in old newspaper.

A week ago I watched a student fictional film here at Stanford about a janitor with art aspirations who would paint in the art studio after hours -- on old campus newspapers.

At a farmers' market last Saturday, I watched people carry away fresh-cut flowers wrapped in ... old newspaper.

Anybody trained a puppy lately?

Fine writing in Fairbanks

2007-02-05T23:38:00.000-08:00

Mention of the Fly-By-Night club and its dancing salmon in a recent post brought out a Fairbanks blogger, Nicole, who also misses the Fly-By.

She wrote knowingly of the deep dark winter in Alaska. (Check out the Hope Social Hall on a winter's day, photo above.) Fairbanks Funk, Nicole called it:

Fairbanks Funk is the overwhelming urge Fairbanksans get to move somewhere else. Anywhere else. It strikes as the light decreases in November, increases until December 20, and slowly fades in February.

If you attend a dinner party in Fairbanks during those months, you’re guaranteed to discuss relocating with at least three people. Each of them will have a different utopia in mind and strangely none of the destinations will be tropical. In fact, many in the grip of the funk will come to believe that moving to the ever-cloudy, often rainy Pacific Northwest would provide relief.

In our house, I know it’s set in when the hours my husband spends on realtor.com leave him red eyed and strangely idealistic. “If we only moved to Olympia,” he says, “We wouldn’t be here. Life would be better.”

Read her sub-zero adventures with two kidlets and her husband TJ from Fairbanks. Good salmon cake recipes, too!

Mourning Molly's passing

2007-02-05T23:04:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I've been down in the dumps since the news of Molly Ivins' passing. I feel lonelier without her here on the planet, fighting the good fight, and writing it so damn well.

She came to Alaska, remember? Keynoted the Alaska Press Club a loooong time ago. She told us not to feel shy about reporting on a paper way up in Alaska. Get on a bigger paper, she counseled, and you'll likely bench it more than you get game time. Here, you're out and in the fight, all four quarters.

She was my hero.

They're blogging in the Republic of Ester!

2007-02-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

I was mosying around a site called placeblogger.com, wondering if anyone in Alaska was doing a hyperlocal site. An Alaska search turned up a blog in Ester, linked to a local newspaper published there. Here's how they describe themselves:

The Republic of Ester is an independent state of mind, characterized by freedom of speech and a willingness to spout off, a lot of art, a lot of mine tailings, piles of recycled stuff, and a love of rousing discussions about politics, science, and bad jokes down at the pub of a Thursday evening.

Pay them a visit at their site. They made me homesick!

Open source journalism: How's that work?

2007-02-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

Frankly, the answer is yet to be discovered, but here's a place to check into some musing on it. Jay Rosen has launched a Web site dedicated to open source reporting, called newassignment.net. He plans to test out how professionals would work with amateurs to report news. He makes the distinction that these amateur pieces are not op-eds, but the real deal, reporting.

How exactly will that work? He's trying to figure that out now by collecting information on open source reporting, and gearing up for a test story on elections and voting experiences. Check out his Web site. There you can find a short 6-minute video of him talking about his project. And, you can even sign up to be a contributor.

Or, you can listen to a talk he gave at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society last November. The talk was called "open source journalism" and you can find it here. He talks and takes questions on his idea for about an hour and 20 minutes. (I download these into my music player and go walking in the hills, pondering the future of our work.)

One idea that emerges from it is that professional journalists will use amateurs as "smart mob" contributors to their stories. His example was the two or three reporters assigned to cover pharmaceuticals for a newspaper in New Jersey. Your source list could include a "smart mob" of people who work for the pharmaceuticals, spouses of those who work there, former workers there...etc etc. If you could put out a call for this audience to tell you what they know, you would learn more than if you were relying on your traditional sources and yourself to cover the industry.

The reporter rakes in all this info and then starts to work with it. Fact checking and corroboration are a big part of this process, according to Rosen. You may already know of Rosen's New York University Web site, Pressthink.

Salmon, anyone?

2007-02-02T23:22:00.000-08:00

Here at Stanford, I was invited to sit in on a one-day salmon-solving conference, called "Transcending Borders, Pacific Salmon and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Fisheries Conservation." It was hosted by the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Seated at the table were government and academic scientists, NGO reps, First Nation leaders, authors and a few journalists.

(The only party missing at the table was a real-live salmon; I kept flashing on the dancing salmon in the Fly-By-Night extravaganza that graced that Anchorage nightclub stage for so many years....)

The aim was to problem-solve the decline of wild salmon by engaging all these folks in conversation. Conference organizers distributed a briefing book of articles ahead of time. Unlike most academic conferences, professors did not read their latest papers. Instead, three conversation sessions were organized around these topics:

**The Players: Laying claim to salmon
**How do we know what we know?
**Fish farms: what's at stake?

Conversations like these at Stanford are highly civilized, including wine, food, and time for commentary, a modern salon as it were.

OK, the point of this blog? During the day's discussions, an academic "called out" the journalists in the room, asking us to weigh in. I had been thinking of multimedia journalist Jane Stevens' description of a "shell" on a news Web site that might host ongoing discussions of a matter of high concern to stakeholders. So what if the Anchorage Daily News created a Web page attached to its news site that was all we, and experts we approached, could deliver on salmon. The passionate could "drill down" as far as they wanted into scientific papers and data and documents. It would include a forum for interested parties. It would be dynamic, not a snapshot version of an ongoing story.

Salmon as a topic makes sense for Alaska, it is iconic for us. We have the only healthy wild runs on the planet. Who else do you know brews beer and names it after salmon? (But, from what I learned today, the joy we take in our salmon may be short-lived; wild salmon will/are losing their habitat to escaped farmed salmon.)

A colleague got excited about the idea, suggesting that it could become the Romanesko site for salmon. Journalists all over the world could write stories off the info on the site.

This is an idea in its infancy. I like it because it makes newspapers and their Web sites into a "place" for people to gather and discuss, rather than the pretense at a "finished" version of an ongoing science story. It reminds me of what the BBC is doing with its Iraq War Web site. It also reminds me of what lawrence.com is doing. William Burroughs lived there; so they are creating a repository on their site of all kinds of Burrough's info. They are celebrating, and owning the information, about an icon in their territory. We could do the same with salmon.

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times was in on the conference, and together we discussed how newspapers don't like to write the same story twice, or how incremental science stories get played on Mondays when there isn't the usual load of news. They don't seem as valued because of their incremental nature. Maybe traditional news story formats are the wrong vehicle for this information to be relayed to readers. Maybe a newspaper-hosted Web page "shell" for ongoing developments is a better vehicle. A thought.

Reader-hooking tools

2007-01-29T14:56:00.000-08:00

Here's a repository of examples of the way Google maps are being used by news organizations to deliver information. Like gas prices around town, or crime by neighborhood (Chicagocrime.org was created by Adrian Holovaty, discussed lower).

Another thing. Here is a site that will discuss good newspaper Web site design. A couple of experts from USC's Annenberg Online Journalism Review will feature a monthly column. As writers Nora Paul and Laura Ruel point out:

Research into story design effectiveness is happening in newsrooms and universities. In the case of newsroom research, the findings are regarded as competitive intelligence and not readily shared with the industry. In universities, the findings are written in academese and not readily understood by the industry.

In this column, we will ferret out the research and findings about story form effectiveness and profile the people and places who are trying to understand current practices and guide more informed design decisions. Creating stories that engage, inform, and get people to come back for more must be part of the media’s mix of offerings.

Last thought on news Web sites. Here is a personal essay from Adrian Holovaty, now working on the washingtonpost.com Web site, and previously for the World-Journal's lawrence.com site. He has forward-thinking suggestions about how facts reporters gather and write into stories also could be built into incredibly useful online databases. Having a Web site that can manage these databases sounds like the seed of a best practice.

His commentary is located at holovaty.com, a "Web site devoted to discussion of Web development, with a particular emphasis on news/information sites. Sometimes I release open-source code, too." Read a current profile of him in American Journalism Review. See him play MacGyver's theme song on acoustic guitar here. Very fun.

About LA Times going web-centric

2007-01-29T13:03:00.000-08:00

Here is how former journalist and blogger Gary Goldhammer characterized the Los Angeles Times, historically.

The Times is as fractious and fragile as L.A. itself, as diverse and as divided. Layoffs, careless leadership, and ignorance of new horizontal media structures left The Times in the journalism Dark Ages. While other papers braced for battle and embraced the future, The Times cowered in its Spring Street cave like an injured animal.

He notes that the paper has "rearranged its deck chairs" before, to no avail. But adds:

The difference now, however, is the coming tide of journalistic change is raising all boats. After all, this is not a course The Times decided to take, but rather a decision it had to make.

As part of the move to web-centric journalism, (Times editor James E.)O’Shea said all reporters would take an “Internet 101” course to teach them how to be “savvy multimedia journalists” and improve their response to breaking news. Business Editor Russ Stanton will be the paper’s first “innovation” editor, charged with molding the editorial staff into podcasters and videographers ...

Whether this shift will give reporters more job security and help bring The Times into the 21st Century is a question we will see answered in public...

Read the whole post at Below the fold, or not. I mention it here for two reasons. First, let's hear it for training. And second, the powerful inevitability of it all. Not the guaranteed success of it all, but the need to face it.

Letting readers contribute

2007-01-28T15:19:00.000-08:00

It's raining cats and dogs outside. OK, make that pea-sized ice and big splatty raindrops in sunny California. Meaning I am forgoing my walk for the moment. Here's a few thoughts from other bloggers on newspapers and newspaper websites and their ideas for potential improvements:

From journalist/marketing/new media participant Gary Goldhammer's Below the fold blog about journalism:

Interactivity, social tools and multimedia are now staples at most major papers. And they should be – moreover, the lessons of online engagement and influence of a media created by the masses, rather than a media created for the masses, must permeate today’s newsrooms and course through journalism’s 21st Century veins.

But while these advances are essential to the industry’s survival, there is more to flying above the clouds than putting on new wings. Remember what happened to Icarus when he ignored his father and flew too close to the sun.

Newspapers need to fight the battles they can win. This means getting niche and local, like magazines and weeklies. It means letting your online product be the “AM” edition, with the latest breaking news, and letting your print version be the “PM” edition, with the context, analysis and opinion readers can’t get anywhere else. And it means getting back to telling stories that matter, stories that engage and involve audiences.

In today’s age of the ever-shrinking news hole, words are a precious commodity. Newspapers need to make every word count.

And one more, post from Robert Niles on the Annenberg Online Journalism Review. It speaks to what he considers the silly fight between bloggers/citizen journalists versus members of the MSM.

He tells the story of a Los Angeles Times reporter writing about fluctuating prices on Amazon from an anecdotal experience that the reporter had -- the cookbook he wanted to buy went up 51 cents overnight.

Niles suggests that had the LA Times reporter availed himself of "citizen journalists" he could have learned and used information from their experiences of price-fluctuations of books or goods they've ordered from Amazon. Niles, as a seller on Amazon, had price fluctuation information about the sale of his own 10-year-old book through Amazon. He suggests he and others could have appended their information at the end of the reporter's story, if the Website would have allowed it.

The string of comments reflects the ongoing concern with newspapers' fears of "outsiders" mucking with a newspaper's info versus just getting to comment on it, after the fact.

Toolkit Info

2007-01-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

Scroll down a bit and look at the list of books and websites in the blue box, bottom right. I will keep adding them as I encounter them in class and online. I hope you'll pick up a book or two, and scroll through some of these web sites.

Inspiration

2007-01-27T20:22:00.000-08:00

This powerful multimedia story, called "Touching Hearts," was done in 2001 by the Herald Sun in Durham, North Carolina. A print reporter and a multimedia reporter both traveled to Nicaragua to tell the tale of N.C. pediatric cardiologists working on the hearts of young children there. The multimedia reporter was Joe Weiss. Find his story here, and remember to allow the pop up window. Make that choice by clicking on the preference button that pops up on the right.

If you watch only one segment, watch Oscar's story. (Off main page, select stories, then select Oscar.) What could be more powerful than hearing a father's words after he hears the doctor cannot save his son because the preventable illness has progressed too far. Hear the doctor's voice when he realizes he cannot save Oscar. Hear Oscar's father weep after his son dies. Hear sounds of the torrential thunderstorm that marked that horrible afternoon.

This story also appeared as a nine-part series in the newspaper, and you can select those stories off the same link above.

Something to realize about multimedia stories is the reader decides where he/she wants to go first. The story telling is non-linear. In this case, the reader can select different buttons off the opening page to proceed to info on the mission, the stories at the hospital, the people involved. This is a new twist for a print reporter, accustomed to folding it all into one story, from top to bottom.

Multimedia: here's where it begins

2007-01-27T19:56:00.000-08:00

I realize I have never shared the site where I and other students posted our multimedia projects from the one-week UC Berkeley multimedia workshop from December, 2006. Here is the site.

Here's what's good about this site:

1) Along the left hand side in a blue bar are tutorials on the many-faceted aspects of multimedia reporting, from how to choose a story that works well in multimedia, to tutorials on technique like how to do a stand up or a voice over, nuts and bolts on how to edit video with Final Cut Pro or iMovie. Even details on what equipment the school is using, in case you want to outfit your newsroom. Oh, and let's not forget web design, so tutorials on Dreamweaver and Flash.

2) Student projects. This school has been giving these one-week boot camps for a couple of years now, and the projects are posted. Take a look and see how video, audio, voice over, slide shows are used. These were accomplished in about 2.5 days by total greenhorns. With a little time, you can and will do amazing work.

From the horse's mouth: You Tube founder

2007-01-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

The BBC keeps amazing me. They are blogging and reporting and podcasting out of Davos, the World Economic Summit in Switzerland. I'm still trying to absorb it, but came across this podcast with You Tube founder Chad Hurley (left) by the BBC that is worth a look-see. Follow the link above to an 8-minute video from the founder of You Tube on what his site is about: Is it to kill television and movies? No, he says, it's to broaden the voices in conversation.

Two reasons to watch: a new multimedia reporter should NEVER feel shy about her on-the-job first-time video -- here is a hand-held, hallway video that the BBC is posting for its immediacy, not for its beauty. And two: look how young this guy is, and consider the impact he's having on how we communicate with each other. I would encourage you to explore the BBC Davos coverage, and in particular, their Davos Conversations, in which they are hoping to get viewers responding back. This is not unlike the kind of commitment a newspaper might consider from its readers. Imagine the boldness of BBC asking the world to react. Surely it would be easier to ask residents of a state to react to events in that state. Engaging the audience is our future.

Oh, and you can catch Jeff Jarvis of www.buzzmachine.com doing his citizen reporter bit. Looks like he and others joined the BBC hallway interview, video camera in hand, and jumped in to ask some questions. Catch his Davos commentary on buzzmachine, including his version of the same interview that BBC posted.

And now for the numbers, wince

2007-01-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

OK, this is a downer post. But this article from UPI tallies up the U.S.journalism job losses in 2006. And points out how many jobs have already disappeared this year.

In my Digital Journalism class, the professor is pushing us to figure out a model where amateurs could fold into a process with professionals. Anyone who wants to check out our class blog, where ongoing posts from students get critiqued and pushed along by the professor, please just email me and I'll send you the sign on. It is not a public blog but it's not a purely private blog either. I think this would be worth a working journalist's time.

Worrying about battle, the war was lost

2007-01-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

We fret over whether we'll write for a newspaper or a website, assuming the Internet will be there as a stomping ground if/when we need it. But people are already out there fighting over who will control the net. Will it be government? If it is, will Internet service providers be "state actors," required to turn over material under a court order? Does the FIrst Amendment offer protection here? If we keep government's hand out, will big business carve it up and charge admission so that the Internet isn't free anymore?

A class at Stanford, "First Amendment in the Digital Age" is looking at these questions. A class assignment is to blog on The Cairns Project as students explore the issues. (The Cairns Project is about "building a network of collective action." The Cairn reference is inspiring: "Throughout history, travelers have collaborated in building Cairns: stone monuments to mark the path and collectively navigate new territory.Together we can do what no one of us can do alone." Already I feel less lonely.

Here's a first amendment post that argues against government intervention, with a response that argues for it.

Frontline on the News Wars

2007-01-25T23:05:00.000-08:00

Maybe I'm just getting used to sitting on the edge of my seat. But when I stumbled on the promo for Frontline's four and a half hours of analysis on the state of journalism in America that will air over several days in February, I had to click through and check it out. You should too. So you've only got three minutes? Then go here and find the third purple panel that asks "What will be the future business model for the news industry? How will we get the news?" Click on Eric Schmidt's face -- he's the CEO for Google, and give a listen. Reporters won't write for newspapers anymore, he says, but they'll find an audience. Being that Google just aggregates news from newspapers, Schmidt wants newspapers to survive. Then click on Jeff Jarvis' face. He's a blogger for BuzzMachine.com. He argues that a 17-year-old walking down the street with a camera phone is a journalist. Any and everybody is, if they are witness to something the world wants to know. Where will you be working in two years? If you wonder, here's a potential flashlight into the darkness.

A manifesto for journalism

2007-01-25T00:00:00.000-08:00

Today journalist Geneva Overholser visited our Knight Fellow forum to talk about the future of journalism. She has a long view of it, having served in many capacities including as former ombudsman and syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and editorial board member of The New York Times. She edited The Des Moines Register from 1988-1995, and lead the paper to its 1991 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. She is now with the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting, Missouri School of Journalism, Washington Bureau.

What I liked the most about her talk was she said these words: "I'm optimistic."

Why? a room of journalists asked her. Given the current rocky state of affairs, what's to be optimistic about?

She had good reasons.

#1. Creativity -- lots of it -- is springing up all around the edges of the battlefield. She told the story of a tiny community in Maine that newspapers had forgotten. So the town librarian got some folks together and started a news website for that community. You can look here at J-Lab.org for a collection of new ideas. Funding for grassroots news sites is out there. J-Lab has a February 20 deadline for initiative proposals. Get the scoop at New Voices.

#2. People -- the reading public -- care. She travels and talks to lots of folks, including people who claim to despise MSM (mainstream media.) She sees them as allies because they care enough to complain.

#3. She strongly believes in public interest journalism. To complaints that newspapers have to pander to lowest common demoninators and that no one cares about "eat your peas" journalism, she demurred, and said: We (journalists) can set the appetite and taste by what we deliver. Readers may not know they need a voting guide, until we give them such a good one they can't live without it.

She admits good journalism costs money, and the current delivery models are collapsing. But she is sure good journalism will carry on -- simply on a new platform.

Read her analysis at On Behalf of Journalism: a manifesto for change.

And get a good night's sleep. There's lots of work tomorrow.

Trying something new

2007-01-23T00:41:00.000-08:00

So, I wanted to figure out how to get a photo into this blog. It's too easy for words. There's a photo button you push when composing a new blog post, you browse on your desk top for the photo you put there to upload, hit the upload button, and in a minute or so, your photo is uploaded. Fun stuff. Peter says hi. This image was taken in early January on the northern California coastline about 30 miles north of Petaluma at a sweet place called Sea Ranch. A bunch of Knight fellows rented a big house for a three-day weekend, and we hung out there walking along the cliffs over the ocean and watching seals bounce around in the waves.

Looking for real journalists

2007-01-23T00:12:00.000-08:00

I mentioned my Digital Journalism class, where we all have an obligation to blog (on a class site, not this blog). Well, my class is interested in talking to people who work at a real newspaper. If you have any interest in reading the digital journalism blog and maybe interacting online with these undergrad and grad students, let me know. The site is not private, but it's not quite public. I have permission to give you my sign on, it's OKd by the prof. So email me at kjmccoy@stanford.edu and I'll send you the link and my sign on. (My apologies: the first generation of this post linked direct to the site, and those who tried to go got a 'cannot enter' message.

Oh, and here's some reading for you. The Nieman folks have just done their analysis of the state of newspapers, called "Goodbye Gutenberg." You'll find it here. I haven't read it all yet, but there's obvious food for thought. A good one to start with is multimedia reporter and teacher Jane Stevens' "Taking the Big Gulp." Find it here.

Talk about frustrating

2007-01-23T00:03:00.002-08:00

About half an hour ago I prepared a post here mentioning some multimedia work my UC Berkeley classmates were now posting back at their home newspaper Web sites, when Google's server went down. There went my web post.

So here it is again. Technology demands nothing if not persistence. It seems so unstable sometimes.

Anyway, Vindu Goel is an editorial writer at the San Jose Mercury News and he's started a blog that discusses politics, technology, immigration -- or anything else he gets activated about. A recent post mentioned Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia. Wales' new idea is an open-source search engine that will use human intelligence instead of algorithms for searches. Here is an audio interview by a Merc Internet writer with Wales, all about his new idea, to be called WIKIA.

Ouch

2007-01-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

Bob Cauthorn is a 20-year journalist who created the award-winning sfgate Web site for the San Francisco Chonicle. He's now out of newspapers and involved online. In this talk that he gave at the UC Berkeley multimedia workshop in May 2005, he critiques print newspapers. His talk is called The Changing Rules of Journalism: the role of editors and reporters in the future. Get ready for some harsh criticism of the newsroom, editors and reporters. An example: he'd ban journalism competitions for five or 10 years so journalists will stop writing for each other (and judges) and return to writing for their readers. I didn't agree with it all, and found his tone wearing. But it's clear he's passionate about journalism and wants it to be better -- whether it's online or in print. Got a fix on "the random access reader?" Think newspapers will keep publishing seven days a week? Give Bob a listen.

What the hell is a wiki, anyway?

2007-01-16T00:25:00.000-08:00

If you are an ADN elder, you will remember "Newsbits." This was an old file on the first ergonomically disasterous computers we ever used (see, some things DO get better....). Anyway, it was called Newsbits, and anyone could post thoughts and comments. There were often running threads of commentary as one staffer or another would get exercised about a policy or an event in the newsroom and vent and argue on Newsbits.

A wiki seems to function about the same way. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, and typically without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (the original wiki) WikiWikiWeb and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.

In my digital journalism class, besides a requirement to blog on a specific site about readings in the class, we also participate in a wiki. I will explain more as I learn more. At this point, all I understand is that we will take our class notes on the wiki (in a classroom that includes a laptop for everyone in the class), and at week's end, a student in the class will rework (refactor is the term) everyone's notes into a whole-class version. The theory is that the collaborative effort will make the final version better than any one of our singular versions.

But, another note on wikis that relates to the turmoil newspapers find themselves in today. A newspaper in Southern California is retooling itself to be a multimedia news organization, which is requiring it to reorganize the newsroom. They are doing it with a wiki; every staffer has access. Issues that emerge in the wiki are dealt with at a once-a-week face-to-face meeting among the editor and any staffers who want to participate. Password to the wiki is ventura; the editor invited us to take a look at their process.

The Ventura County Star is the paper and it has a 100-person newsroom like the Anchorage Daily News. About 7 months ago, they committed to going multimedia. The editor left an empty position vacant to purchase four video cameras and four laptops with the accompanying software. Their commitment came from being beaten on a big local story. A California wildfire broke out near them; a blogger located near the fire set up shop and started blogging. Soon locals knew the best place to go for up-to-date fire info was this guy's blog. Badly stung, the paper made a commitment to go multimedia. In a more recent fire, which they handled as a multimedia event, the first images they posted were not their own, but those of readers who got to the fire before any news media could.

The editor said the initial investment was $65,000 for the equipment mentioned above, and the time of a multimedia reporter named Jane Stewart to come in and work with the staff. Their strategy was to offer multimedia training -- 8 staffers at a time for six weeks at a time. While being trained, they were freed from their normal duties so they could concentrate on learning multimedia reporting (video, audio, editing of same, and creation of a web site and placing the media on the website). Training is optional, not mandatory. Now, they have 24 newsroom staffers trained in multimedia reporting. They have temporarily stopped the training to catch up with newsroom reorganization issues. Basically, with 24 multimedia-trained reporters busy producing, they need to reorganize the newsroom for a better flow of content online.

Their first efforts, by their own admission, were beginner in nature. They learned by doing, and explained to their readers that this was their approach. Here is a multimedia story that appeared online in one form and in the newspaper in traditional story form. It is about teen females being moved out of a detention center because of the expense of running it. Take a look.

The BBC is on to it

2007-01-14T18:59:00.000-08:00

This is another Digital Journalism offering. Meet Nigel Paine, the main guy who teaches the BBC's 27,000 employees what they need to know. He's decided they need to know about wikis, podcasting and blogs. Here's a talk from him about how the BBC uses these tools to inform itself internally and externally. This is more about journalists inside an organization using these tools to share information. You'll find it here.

The talk (about 20 minutes) plays on Realplayer or Windows media, but I needed to hit the button that looks like the globe and download it onto my desk top to listen to it. Both in my multimedia reporting class at Berkeley, and now in my digital journalism class at Stanford, the BBC is coming across as basically having its act together, big time. Their drive to share what they know is applauded among multimedia journalists. This goes for their journalism as well as explaining how they get there.

Digital journalists do it differently

2007-01-14T18:24:00.000-08:00

Here's an Italian journalist who's started an online news website. In "A New Media Tells Different Stories" Bruno Guissani tries to close the gap between what we used to do, and what the new job is. This appeared in a peer-reviewed journal on the Internet called First Monday and is a current reading in Digital Journalism, a class I'm taking this quarter from Howard Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs."

Here's a taste from Bruno's piece:

"A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service, and things that are good to read, points out Melinda McAdams in her excellent account of the making of the Washington Post online venture. But a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connections, organization, movement within and among sets of information, and communication among different people

"The newspaper is no longer a product. It becomes a place. A place where people from the community stop by, make contacts and come back again to build a common future."

And this:

"The relationship between us and our readers becomes less clear in its definition yet stronger by its need. Answering your readers' e-mail as well as opening forums for debates or chat rooms on Web sites are the first steps in developing what I call a community: a group of people who identify with a certain newspaper not only because it provides news but because it allows connections, a space for sharing ideas and developing solutions. As Katherine Fulton writes, Content is people as well as information, and I fully agree.

"With this in mind, facts and information can circulate without interference and without the journalist acting as a filter. He will have to give up part of the power he used to have - based on his competence as well as on his position. The role of the journalist is changing into a more central figure, a mediator. He directs traffic, explores, becomes a facilitator of discussions. His new power will depend on his ability to animate a group of people, to develop methods and means to enliven the community, to organize information-gathering and use with the participation of the members of the community."

Seth Familian

2007-01-14T14:28:00.000-08:00

I spent a week in December at UC Berkeley's multimedia reporting workshop for mid-career journalists. We worked from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. for five days. While building multimedia projects, we listened to speakers. Seth Familian was one, a 2nd year grad student from Berkeley's business school who has worked for Faith Popcorn's BrianReserve. Why point him out? He got the room so fired up that after working all day on our projects, we forced him to have beers with us until the wee hours. I'd describe him as catalytic. His message to us was a talk he's given a few times to newspaper editors. It's "who is the new digital audience." He describes his Web site as "anticipating the future of news in an age of digital connectivity." You will find it here.

Once there, check out [clips] where you can listen to:

Make it easy to use. The first is a 6-minute talk telling newspaper editors at the 2006 ASNE conference in Seattle that the ease of use of their Web sites is extremely important. What's Google's 54-word rule? Bottom line, if it isn't seamless for the consumer, she'll click away.

Who is the digital audience? The second talk is about 20 minutes and has a little power point you can watch while you listen. This is a talk given to the San Francisco Chronicle staff in 2006 about who the new audience is, and how to get in the game. This is worth viewing because it will introduce you to some sites you may not know.

Next, still on Seth's page, go to [links], where you'll get a tour to some sites organized very visually.

Under [content visualization] check out Phylotaxis and wefeelfine and Marumushi Newsmap. Pretty soon you get the feeling that straight and orderly lines of text on an opening Web page don't cut it anymore.

The New York Times is paying attention. My Times Reader is still in beta and is a way to view The New York Times online in a modular format, instead of scrolling down (and scrolling and scrolling.) That consumer experience, again.

Maybe this will help

2007-01-14T13:31:00.000-08:00

Stomach-churning change. It's everywhere.

I've been out of the line of fire, down here at the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford since September. I'll be here through June. It's a free year at this university for 20 mid-career journalists to study anything and everything. ( Here is where you apply. The deadline is February 1. If not this year, some year; it's way too good not to try for.)

One of my goals down here, besides getting tan and drinking Napa/Sonoma valley wines, was to catch up on changes in journalism. More than an update, it's turned into a tumble down the rabbit hole. Blogs, wikis, social tagging, pro-am (professional journalists working with citizen journalists), multimedia reporting and publishing. Feel your temples throbbing?

My aim is to share useful links and resources with ADN colleagues. Some links are practical. Some links are gee-whiz. Some are out-there conceptual takes on the Creative Commons (the Internet) and the battle over who will run it. I'll give a short description of what you'll find at a link, and the link itself. I welcome additions from anyone.

Daily journalists are so damn busy, they hardly have time to look up and sniff the wind. This can help: an ad hoc guide to the changing landscape, with links to tools to help navigate it. That's the spirit in which it's offered. Whether you work for a news organization or go out on your own, the state of our work is changing radically. You need new tools, new skills. You've already got the experience. Combine both, and you're invincible.

In the meantime, I'll keep trying to soak up what I can and post it here. It's all new to me, too.