Comments from readers

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

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.

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

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

Caging journalism to protect it

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

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.