Thursday, January 25, 2007
Frontline on the News Wars
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Trying something new
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Ouch
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.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
What the hell is a wiki, anyway?
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:
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.
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.
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