WebU

Digital Survival Guide - Part 2

Last November, Steve Buttry, from the American Press Institute put out a call to his colleagues for advice on, as he put it, how to help an old stegasaurus upgrade his online skills. Steve, I hasten to add, wasn't the old dinosaur in question, rather the request had arisen from one of his students. I reread what I had provided Steve and I think it's some pretty fair advice for any journalist who's looking to upgrade their skills, so I'm reprinting them here. But I urge you to visit Steve's original post and take in some of the really smart suggestions that came from journalists and instructors across North America.Here's what I wrote:
"Since I'm in the midst of re-vamping our own WebU's 30-course curriculum, this question comes at a good time. Unclear from the note whether this old stegosaur is looking for formal training or self-led learning.
If it's the latter, I have some simple suggestions for any journalist wondering how to get up to speed on these issues:

• Learn how to use your favourite MP3 player and free software like iTunes to catch podcasts. Start with IT Conversations - spend time with the "Most Highly Rated" list, picking and choosing topics and speakers that seem interesting. Then begin picking shows weekly. They feature some of the brightest minds in the web/digital tech field and giving them an hour or three a week of your time (while you're commuting, running, raking leaves etc) is like a free University extension course.
• Ditto Twitter. Short sharp messages you can broadcast to whoever signs up for them. Tool or toy? No snap judgements - study it, figure out what it's doing for all those tens of thousands of loyal users.
• Get yourself an RSS reader (Google Reader, Bloglines, various plug-ins in Firefox, Safari itself ) and start getting serious and organized about reading writers whose ideas speak to you. Find one you like and then spider out from there, tracking the peopel they read and refer to. Organize it in a reader and pay yourself with at least 15 mins of quiet reading time daily. Gather it all, but be choosy about what you dive into. Don't know RSS? Wikipedia is almost always a good "explain it for me" tool.
• Get a smart phone with a cheap data plan (that rules all us Canadian out) and make it a point to use SMS, to text your spouse quick bursts of info, instead of saving it up for a call. Figure out the real uses of the tech. Take pics and shoot them off to photo sharing sites or back to your paper. Use Google Gears to download your blog reading onto your phone.
• In short - if you want to understand the internets, jump right in and start using them."

Any thoughts about what might be your advice?
Bill
(Photo from Mykl Roventine's Flickr photostream, Creative Commons attribution licence)

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Why Newspapers Still Don't Get The Web

As I was preparing the "Seven Steps To Writing Like a Digital Native" guide, I was struck again by just how much newspapers are blinded to the power the web offers us.
It is, I think, one of the biggest mistake newspapers make online: failing to use the web's rich resources or at least some of them, in every story. It's a mistake is deeply rooted in our print culture — we're highly competitive and we're used to owning and controlling everything we publish. But the web is different and that mistake costs us dearly, I think because it causes us to miss out on opportunities to make our stories very useful. It stems, in part, from our failure to understand the rich traditions of sharing and connection that have grown on the web.
Here are some simple truths about web publishing that are completely anti-intuitive to print culture:

• Sharing your audience builds your audience
• Sending people away (to good information) makes them come back to you more often
• You don't have to own content to use and share it — filtering it is a very valuable job
• Your story is part of a living, moving, changing conversation in which virtually all the participants know more than you do. Your story joins the conversation — it doesn't own it.

It's the last point, I think that causes journalists the biggest concern, because it forces us to re-evaluate our role. Too often we like to think of ourselves as experts, especially by the time we sit down to write (or publish) our stories. Many of us revel in that role (we have inside knowledge about important events and people — we must be special!) and have come to perhaps unconsciously internalize that thinking, to thread it through our sense of self, our identity.
So being asked to admit that we're the dumb ones on a story, or being urged to share the stuff that makes us special (our documents, our interviews, our access to information) with our readers ... well, that's mighty hard for some.
But it's critical to success on the web.
Our stories should acknowledge the other participants in the conversation (the story) by: linking to them and to their work; by documenting our interactions with them and making that available (so our work can be judged); by linking to whatever earlier manifestations of that conversation the audience might be able to readily access, i.e. other web resources.
This is not only humble, it increases transparency around our work, and hopefully increases the audience's trust in what we do, while also giving anyone who's truly interested in the story a chance to drink deeply from the niche.
This rant is not especially new, nor original. To digital natives it's even obvious. And there are some bright lights shining in various corners of the web: I referred to this briefly in an earlier post, but the blogs built at the National Post by Kenny Yum  aren't shy about linking to outside content and in fact "Posted" does it regularly. And as the Publishing 2.0 blog pointed out recently, a New York Times blog has  embraced "link journalism".
But those examples are too few and far between.
Bill
(photo from Karen Dalziel's Flickr photostream - CC attribution licenced)

Readers reading web news just like it's the morning paper

(click for larger image)

A look at seven weeks of page view data from a mid-sized (Canadian) daily newspaper rather strongly suggests that the majority of their readers are treating the web like a morning paper.
The data, which charts the median number of hourly page views for each day of the week, reveals that six days a week, page views climb sharply starting at about 4:30 am, peaking before 8 a.m., that is before people get into work. The page views peak twice more during the day: once just before noon (lunch) and again just before the end of the work day — but each of these is significantly lower than the A.M. peak (75% and 60% of the pre-work peak respectively).
A couple of interesting points:

1) People are using the website like it's a morning paper
2) People don't plug into news when they arrive at work, at least not in great numbers.
3) People check the news site just before going to lunch and just before leaving for the day (Why?)
4) It looks like there's a real potential to grow our existing audiences (page views and ad revenue) simply by delivering fresh, relevant content at noon and at the end of the day. The increase comes from better serving existing customers, without even worrying about attracting new ones.

Here's the big takeaway though: best guess is that those pre-work readers have NOT simply dropped a paid subscription in favour of free web news, or at least most of them aren't — the numbers are just too big. The paper hasn't lost that many paid subscribers. This is most likely a new or at least expanded audience who wouldn't pay for the paper anyway.

Or at least that's my read of the numbers. Love to hear any other thoughts.

Seven Steps to Writing Like a Digital Native

Here are the seven tips I give our WebU students who are learning how to write for the web.
Stop before posting ANY story and ask yourself these seven questions about how you can enrich your story for the reader:
1) Are there original documents you can link to?
If you've downloaded a report, meeting minutes or agendas, watched a video or listened to a tape — share it. If it's living elsewhere on the web, link to it. If you have your own copy - can you scan it? Post it yourself? Tell people how they can get their own physical copy? You've already done the hard work, share it with your audience. The few people who want that level of detail will love you.
2) Are there any photographs (related videos, sound files, slideshows) online?
You don't have to own a file to share it with your audience. Need a photo of a coffee-addicted dog for a story on off-leash dog parks? Go to Flickr's creative commons site  and search for what you need. That looks for photos with a Creative Commons attribution licence - you can use the photos so long as you attribute them.
(The dog photo comes from Bruce, by the way)
If you can't get permission to post or host the file yourself - why not link to it? Just always make it clear what the reader/user can expect on the other side of the links you create.
3) Can you map it?
Mapping information - especially interactive mapping - can offer readers highly useful information. And with tools like Google's free map api or even their wsywg My Maps, a simple locater  map or a route map can be created and embedded directly into a story in a matter of minutes. Some stories might even best be told entirely as an annotated interactive map. Ask yourself if this is one of them.
4) Can you gather past stories together and link to them?
It's a conversation, remember? You've gone and dug out and re-read the old stories to prepare for your interviews and to nail down the background - why not share them? Two of the biggest complaints we get about stories we do are that we fail to follow up or provide context. Providing a sidebar or box with links to 2 or 3 or 5 related stories takes care of both those complaints. It also potentially increases our sites page views which adds up to more revenue.
5) Can you post the audio or video of an interview or performance or meeting?
If you've recorded your interview or the meeting, if cable television (or a parent or your photographer) has taped the meeting or show or game, can you post that material for people who are gluttons for the topic?
6) Can you direct them to an authoritative site for more info?
Again - you've probably already visited related, authoritative sites during your reporting of the story. Why not do your readers a favour and share those links with them? The web is all about linking. Don't be afraid to send them away somewhere useful - if it's truly useful they'll come back for more. Use verbs of power and clarity when linking ("Listen to the Mayor cry" or "Watch a distraught mother hug her baby" and "Read the original document for yourself"). Use the quote rule when deciding if you want to link to someone as "authoritative": Would you quote that person/institution in print on the issue? If yes, link. If no, be very cautious about linking.
7) Can  you invite comment or start a conversation?
Is this story - and the ongoing 'conversation' it represents - a chance for us to host discussion or debate or any kind of sharing of stories and views from and with our community? Why herd our readers and community into the Letters to the Editor ghetto? And it's not enough to just say "Have your say". Invite conversation and stories the way a good dinner party host would. The real stories are out there - not in our newsroom - and we'll never hear them unless we ask.
What tips would you offer to improve the quality of web writing?
Bill

Forty percent of the Top 50 US newspapers are bleeding red ink, says top CEO

Business Week's Media Columnist Jon Fine did us all a favour by reproducing in it's entirety a speech given by newspaper chain CEO Dean Singleton at the World Association of Newsapers' annual conference, held this year in Sweden. Singleton (whose chain, News Media Group, owns Denver Post, San Jose Mercury etc.) opened his speech with a well-placed kick to the midsection of a prone Lord Black of Crossharbour:

Thank you for once again inviting me to address the World Association of Newspapers. I spoke to you at the 2003 meeting in Dublin. My speech was followed by a presentation by Hollinger’s Conrad Black, who gave us all a lecture on arrogance, of all things.
Unfortunately, Conrad couldn’t be with us today, but I wish him all the best in his new home in Florida.

Once he's had genteelly dispatched with Conrad Black, Singleton then put the boots to just about everyone else in the troubled newspaper industry in the US:

Some newspapers in the U.S. won’t make it through this transition. Others will print smaller newspapers on fewer days. By my estimate, as many as 19 of the top 50 metro newspapers in America are losing money today, and that number will continue to grow. The large metros are the hardest hit by change, and they’re the most difficult to change.
Too many whining editors, reporters and newspaper unions continue to bark at the dark, thinking their barks will make the night go away. They fondly remember the past as if it will suddenly re-appear and the staffing in newsrooms will suddenly begin to grow again.
Well, as a former journalist, I also wish for the past, but it’s not coming back. The printed space allocated to news and newsroom staffing levels will continue to decline, so it’s time to get over it and move to a print model that matches the reality of a changing business.

At a time when print circulation is declining by 2% - 4% per year, when ad revenue is shrinking even more drastically, when 2,400 journalists were laid off,when online revenue and readership is only re-capturing a fraction of what's bleeding away, a few boots to the backside are probably in order if anyone is still standing still long enough to get hit by them.

But Singleton speech does more than issue clarion calls or whip recalcitrants — here's some of his other key points:

• Singleton estimates 19 out of the top 50 US newspapers are losing money and will fold or print smaller newspapers less frequently
• Look for even more consolidation in the industry and an accompanying consolidation of tasks which will be done more centrally and then distributed
• Cutting costs will become part of annual operations, i.e. these aren't temporary measures

His company is embarking on a number of initiatives, including:

• Tighter integration with (and dependence upon) Yahoo's ad networks to hold and place all their online ads (!?!)
• Retaining an outside consultant to design, from scratch, a news organization infrastructure that meets today's challenges, as opposed to tinkering with systemsz that evolved to serve print alone.
• Creating regional "marketplaces", hub sites, that include news sites, user-generated, customer feedback and user-generated ads.
• In the next five years, move their revenue mix from: traditional print 89%, online 7%, new (niche) products 4% to 68% core, 20% online, 12% niche.

The whole speech is well worth reading. But be sure and read the comments — aside from revealing some real bitterness and anger over what's happening within his chain, there's some thoughtful material. (Thanks to Eric McGuinness for pointing this one out to me.
Bill
(Image courtesy Andrew Magill's Flickr photostream, Creative Commons attribution licence)

Rob Curley's crew flees suburbia for ... Las Vegas

So Rob Curley has finally flopped moved on.
(See update at end of post)
One of online journalism's undoubted stars — the driving force behind a crew that created the award-winning, high on cool and low to the ground sites like LJWorld.com and KUSports.com and the Naples Daily News site — has left LoudounExtra.com, which appears to be floundering. LoudounExtra was a model hyper-local news website template he was building for the Washington Post, but after about a year he and much of his team have decamped for ... Las Vegas.
Don't get me wrong — I think Rob's a brilliant guy, and classy to boot. He didn't weave and bob when talking to Russell Adams at the Wall St. Journal, telling him:

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

I've been an admirer of Rob Curley's work for some time - and have high praise for his ability to engage and enthuse a newspaper audience - his early successes, his folksy optimism and his unabashed love of journalism and newspapers make him a sorely needed tonic.
But there has always been a disconnect between his speech and his actions. His formula for success at Lawrence, Kansas, at Naples Fla and then in Washington—a highly motivated, tech-savvy young crew pouring resources into hyper local coverage - was clearly too rich for most papers. (All three papers had much deeper pockets than is ordinary, and all were deeply interested in creating quality on line, god bless them.)
Furthermore, when you scratch Rob Curley, he bleeds ink - judge him by his actions, not his words, and we can see someone who still deeply believes in the "one to many" model of journalism, he's just putting it on the net and bolting cool stuff onto it so that it works in fascinating and fun ways. But he's not showing that he truly gets web culture.
It says here the net is all about connections, about links - it's the network of networks, stupid. People go online to get specific things done (info, email, travel, banking, shopping, distraction, research) and to connect to others. These connections, these communities swell and converge and gel and sometimes move on and sometimes put down roots. Really successful sites combine both the job thing and the community thing.
When my students study local sites and look at Loudoun Extra.com the verdict seems to be that Rob and his crew got the 'jobs to be done' thing down cold - but aside from blogs and letting advertisers share the front page sell window, they're largely missing out on the community side of things.
(As I've said before, If you want to see a local news online site that has the community part down cold - and does a pretty good job of the "jobs to be done" thing, check out the News Challenge winner, Village Soup.)
The other specific problem he faced is an all too common one: we don't align our products with the true communities, because it's cheaper to pretend a "county" is a community. It ain't.

(UPDATE: After reading more widely on this topic - including a post by Rob Curley himself, I've changed my  mind on two pieces here: my original post title was "Rob Curley's crew admits defeat, flees suburbia for ... Las Vegas." That's wrong - they don't admit defeat, even tacitly. And similarly saying he "finally flopped is, I now think, overly harsh and incorrect. As Dan Pacheko of the Bakatopia ably put it: "He's a startup guy, and this industry needs to give him (and others like him) credit for doing what he’s best at". There's been some fascinating and illuminating discussions on lessons to draw from LoudounExtra, like this piece in defence of Rob on Journerdism blog, or this more critical piece on the Bivings Report. Be sure and read the comments as well - there's a lot of thoughtful material there.)

Bill

Going (digital) Native — Four Easy Steps To Help Journalist Survive and Thrive in Web 2.0

Just got back from Mags University, a magazine and internet publishing conference in Toronto where I offered a roomful of magazine journalists a "Digital Survivor's Guide".
I had to throw my presentation together in something of a hurry as I was a last minute replacement
for Mark Briggs, a Tacoma, Washington sport journalist turned web evangelist who'd been scheduled to give the talk — from Tacoma via streaming video or something — but in the end couldn't make it.
I borrowed some from the talk Star web editor Marissa Nelson and I gave at Wordstock 2007, adding in some of the stuff I've figured out by teaching this for a year and tacking on some prescriptive steps at the end to help turn your average print journalist into a swashbuckling web savvy hero. Or something. You can see the presentation - and imagine all my stories and jokes - below:

The group was a little younger and a fair bit more web savvy than I'd been led to believe — I was expecting a room full of beginners, pretty much; people who can use email and Google and do their banking and book trips and maybe even read a web comic or two.
Instead, about half the room is on Facebook, a quarter of them had heard of Twitter, a third of them read blogs etc. That's a higher "web literacy" level than I've been finding among the students who stream through WebU and certainly a higher web awareness than average out in the wild — all of which is good news for the magazine industry.
It also made my job easier because I could push them further up that learning curve in the short time we had together.
I wanted to drill two things into their heads:

1) An understanding of how the web is changing our business model, without waiting for anybody's permission, and
2) The need to learn to think (and act) like a digital native, not a print journalist whose tacked on video or blogging onto their resume. (There's a reason Whales grew fins and flukes when they moved back into the sea...)

In order to get them kickstarted on this I recommended  a months worth of homework, 4 week-long exercises that I, uhmm, guaranteed them would give them a deeper, richer understanding of how the web works. They may not be able to pass as a digital native, but at least they'll be clutching a green card in their hands....
Here's those exercises:

1) Set up RSS: Create a Google Account and sign up for Google Reader. Subscribe to Five Feeds - Idea Factory, Seth Godin, Matthew Ingram, plus 2 of your choice. Read for 15 mins a day every day.
2) Create a Blog: Go to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and create a blog focusing on something you're passionate or deeply knowledgeable about. Post at least once a day for a week, including photos and links to related sites. Find related blogs and comment on THEIR posts.
3) Twitter. Daily: Open a Twitter Account. Post at least 3x daily. Find at least 3 people to follow.
4) Make a movie: Find a cell phone that takes video, or a home mini-dv camcorder. Make a 60 second movie - interview a fellow staffer, show off your car, do a rant - and figure out how to edit it using iMovie (on the Mac) or MovieMaker (on Windows). Upload it to youTube.

By the way, if you don't know Mark Briggs, he's written a really useful training manual for newsroom types: Journalism 2.0: How to survive and thrive in the digital age. I recommend it  — especially if you're either new to this game and want to quickly get up to speed, or if you're involved in journalism education. His writing is uncluttered yet not devoid of personality, and the information and advice betrays a mind very alive to the possibilities the web offers us. You can find his journalism blog here.

Oh. And I told the seminar participants that I'd post links to all the websites I'd mentioned during my talk, so here they are in, more or less, the order I received them in.

Conversations:
Twitter
Facebook

People Formerly Known As The Audience:
Fark
Digg
Qik
Kyte

Read Smart/Roll Your Own Web
Google Reader
Pageflakes
Netvibes

youTube Alternative
Blip.tv

Bill

It's Alive! Animating Print Publications on the Web

For some time I've been pretty derisive of the "animated .pdf" school of web publishing.
You've seen these  Frankenstein creatures: dead wood print publications that are zapped with flash magic in the lab and then propped up on a slab on the web for people to view "just like the real thing" complete with animated page turning and even swoooshing sounds as the page flips open.
A lot of people have been trying variations on this technology for a long time. Initially papers and magazines would simply post static .pdf's of their actual pages, as a "service"  to readers, but mostly I think it was an attempt to lead their advertisers online. "See? Look how nice your ad looks on the web! And it didn't hurt a bit!"
Things began getting a little out of control as different companies (Olive, PressSmart come to mind) began offering tools that attempted to duplicate the print exeprience online. The National Post — and all the CanWest daily papers — offer fairly sophisticated digital editions (which include the option of listening to a machine read each story). In our own chain we've used the technique for some advertising-
focussed sections (like the Spectator's "New Home Living" magazine) and a few complete specialty publications.
I can understand why publishers go for these little monsters: they're relatively cheap to produce and you can upsell advertisers to the product, or at least, as I said before, get print advertisers used to the idea of being on the web, but I can't really believe they do much for readers.
I mean, they really seem like a transitional technology, a crutch, or perhaps training wheels, to help print producers move into the digital age. But as the father of three daughters I can tell you from experience: you learn to ride a bike a lot faster without the darn things. You'll fall down a couple of times, but if you're depending on your own sense of balance to survive (rather than leaning on those little wheels), you soon learn what it takes to get moving.
Putting dancing pictures of our print products on the web, instead of going digitally native (think: links, rich content, searchable databases, interactive maps and graphics, audience contributions and user-controlled filtering etc)  seems like shackling ourselves.  It woud be like television networks broadcasting shows that blanked the TV screen and then simply streamed audio — radio shows — through our TV channels. Maybe that's what early television looked like, and maybe some viewers and advertisers liked it that way — at first. But it didn't last.
As I said, that's been my thinking for some time now, but lately I've seen some things that are making me re-evaluate that derision. Mayebe, just maybe there is a future in duplicating the print experience on the web. Sort of. I'll elaborate in my next post, but for now, what do you think? Are digital editions a waste of space, a crippling crutch diverting scarce web resources and attention. (Objection! He's leading the witness. Sustained.) Or are they a simple added benefit for readers and advertisers who happen to like them?
Bill

How to find video stories in the classifieds

Ever read any of the "Missed Connections" ads on Craigslist or in the back pages of your favourite alternative weekly? You know the ones that go something like:

"Me: 30-something poet with pony tail and messenger bag. You: Flustered blonde with polka-dot boots and a 30 gig Video iPod. We never talked, but our eyes met briefly on the 86-B at 9:30 pm Tuesday night when you dropped your copy of Jane Eyre..." etc.

Reading the ads can be a kind of guilty pleasure, a form of social voyeurism in which nobody gets hurt or too creeped out. But do you ever wonder who these people are?
Katy Newton did and then she did something about it - a weekly video feature for a cool new multi-media site on the Los Angeles Times site: ICU
It's a crapshoot of course - a good number of the sad souls taking out "Missed Connections" ads may very well be people you really just don't need to know about. But Newton doesn't show us the failures, only people who are entertaining, touching, even funny. Check out "Hot Guy I Hit With My Car", sample line: "He was all rugged and ... hot. The last time I hit a guy with my car he wasn't very hot."
The point is these are simple human stories that translate very well to video. They're on scene interviews whose story shape emerges in the editing, which is not always true of news coverage. This means however that there's a little less pressure to find a fabulous interview or compelling story — they clean up nicely in the editing suite. Take a look, let me know what you think. (Thanks to LA blogger, Tony Pierce, for pointing out the ICU site)
Bill

Watching Walmart Grow - and other strange uses for Freebase, "The World's Database"

Watch the Walmart Growth video here

The map was made by Toby Segaran, blogger, programmer and author of Programming Collective Intelligence.

And, if you're wondering if this means that I'm still on this Crowdsourcing kick, the answer is yes. In this case, the crowd is contributing data - lots and lots of data, which is then freely available for any geek or number nerd to come along and wring sense out of. Segaran built his Walmart growth video using data from Freebase, an open, public database that launched a year or so ago. Freebase is an attempt to build a freely accessible database of the world's knowledge. Here's how they describe it:

Freebase, created by Metaweb Technologies, is an open database of the world’s information. It’s built by the community and for the community – free for anyone to query, contribute to, build applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.
Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API.

It's a noble ambition, similar to the noble ambition that created it's cousin, Wikipedia. The difference between the two is that in Wikipedia the community contributes information by posting words, narratives, articles. In Freebase, the community contributes data - and applications that make use of that data. If you work with public databases, this is the stuff that dreams are made of. Data, raw data, and lots of it, too. If it's so great, I can hear you think, why aren't more people using it? Good question. I think there's at least two answers:  the difficulty in accessing, using and displaying the data  — ultimately this is a number nerd playground. And while I happen to think a number nerd is exactly what every newspaper needs, I'm not sure Freebase is going to be able to live up to it's founders dreams for one simple reason: data reliability.
Anyone can contribute data, anyone can edit it and that seems to pose serious problems, more serious, I think than it does for Wikipedia where errors and ommissions and bias can more easily be weeded out or at least made obvious by members.
With data - and especially applications or mashups (like the Walmart map) the data source is obscured, you can't make a rational judgement without digging past the thing (map, table, mashup etc) you're looking at and rooting around in the source data. And very few people can or will do that - which weakens the critical self-correcting funcitons a crowdsource project like this needs.
Here's how Freebase answers the question: How do I know the data is true?

Actually, you don’t know for sure. Because Freebase lets anyone edit the data, there’s always a chance that somebody has—intentionally or unintentionally—introduced a mistake. By the same token, data in the system can be cleaned up by anyone, and people make incremental improvements all the time.

What do you think? Is there a future for a public, open database project like this?
Bill

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