WebU

Three tools to encourage citizen journalism and community engagement, or: How to start acting like a community website

I took a day away from building our massive, bloody, code-spewing, chain-spanning, content management system to get back to teaching last week and spent some time with the Metroland Editors at their annual "off-site" in Markahm, just outside of Toronto.
I sat in on several sessions and taught one: Citizen Journalism and Community Engagement, the latest in my ongoing efforts to subvert the creative stranglehold our templated websites place on local newspaper editors. Hmm. Better remember to rephrase that....
You can see my slides below - and I'll offer some links below as well, but I thought it might be worth putting some of the very basic points down here in text.
After looking at the bad (False Steve Jobs heart attack report) and the good (coverage of a recent explosion at an urban propane filling station) of citizen journalism, we engaged in a discussion of just what the hell citizen journalism was and why they were so afraid of it. Many of them aren't, as it turns out, and with good reason:
Local papers have been running citizen journalism since the day they opened their doors - the web simply offers more and different opportunities to continue this grand, and vital, tradition.
For this session I zoomed in on three simple areas: Blogs, Photos and Wikis.
We talked about blogs and blogging and the general mess most newspaper make of it when they first set out to invest in blogging (with their own staff or offering a platform to the community). Biggest mistake is believe that "if you build it they will come".
You've got to work and work hard at the community engagement part, finding and nurturing talent just as you do on the print side of things. I pointed out how poorly we tend to recognize - let alone compensate - those few brave souls who blog for us and suggested fixing that piece was critical. I then took them through my own paper's new experiment: No Excuse - the poverty project blog I used to write but have now turned over to a cadre of citizen contributors I trained before handing them the keys to the car. Early days on that experiment, but I have high hopes.
I made the recommendation I hoped I should never have to make (because it seems so damn obvious): scour the web for local posters (on YouTube, Blogger, MySpace, Live Journal etc) and feature and link to their content.
Moving on to photos I urged them to steal the Flickr photo pool idea I've seen used so well at community and even big city blogs and newsapers: create a photo pool on Flickr and ask readers to share their photo with each other and the city.
Unfortunately we had such good discussions we ran out of time and I didn't get to talk about wikis, but I think they offer newspapers an opportunity to develop powerful community engagement tools, particularily around ideas like "local memories" or histories.

Perhaps I can return to this last topic later, in the meantime, these are my slides:

Links:

CrowdSourcing
Gas Buddy - Angry motorist track the price of gas in their hometowns
Milk and Beer - A New York public radio station gets their listenters to track the price of beer, milk and lettuce in their neighbourhoods.
Mechanical Turk - A digital freelance job marketplace
Restuarantica - A restaurant recommendation site
Our Faves - The Toronto Star-owned urban goods and services recommendation site.
Pro-Am Journalism sites: New Assignment and Now Public
Crowdstorming - a crowdsourcing blog by teacher Peter Organisciak

Blogging

Blog Search  Tools - Try Google's Blog Search, Technorati, or Ice Rocket
Blog Creation Tools - Free: Blogger (which you used to build a blog in 10 mins) and Wordpress.com. Others include Vox and Live Journal.
Blog Creation Tools - Paid: Our chain uses Typepad.com ($150 US a year buys you unlimited, hosted bloging. Another alternative is to download the open source Wordpress program and then get your own web domain and host it yourself.
Live Blogging - Two companies — including one Canadian start-up — have the lead in this growing field, ScribbleLive and CoverItLive. I've used - and love - CoverItLive, Toronto area start-up.

Bill

Top 27 or so Internet Tools for Journalists, (or if not "Top" then at least mildly useful or interesting or something like that)

There was a big turnout for Wordstock, the annual journalism conference held at Ryerson University's School of Journalism in Toronto this past weekend, an encouraging sign in troubled times. Attendees seemed about evenly split between working, full-time journalists, and freelancers, and students. After a morning keynote (which I was lucky enough to deliver) the day was divided into three sessions offering 5 different workshops in each - a pretty jam-packed day. In addition to the keynote, I ran sessions on Blogging (jointly with Spec city hall blogger, Nicole Macintyre) and internet tools.

I've already posted my slides from the bloggings session (which was, thanks to Nicole, an animated, thought provoking session) and today I'm putting my Top Ten Internet Tips for Journalists. If you'd like a simple list with live links, I've posted them here.

Presenters included people like Steve Buttry (former American Press Institute trainer and now the editor-in-chief at the Cedar Rapids Gazette), freelance writer Paul Lima, current and former colleagues Phil Andrews (Guelph Mercury - Small Markets) Thane Burnett (Toronto Sun - Short Features), Jon Wells (Hamilton Spectator - Novel Writing) and Kevin Scanlon (Toronto Star- Copy editing). And a big thanks to Bryan Cantley who retired from the Canadian Newspaper Association this past summer but has carried on organzing this monster.

I'll post slides from my keynote and an abbreviated version of my text a little later this week. Right now I have to get ready for two days of teaching I'm doing at the Western Producer, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

Bill

New Job - New Blog Coming

Please accept my apologies for the hiatus — I spent two glorious weeks on-vacation and off-line at a cottage beside a small black mountain lake in the Laurentians and then returned and jumped into a brand new role with my paper and our chain (TorStar). For the next long while I'll be part of a core team building, installing and training staff on a brand new (massive) content management system that will create a common, chain-wide newsroom. Of a sort. It's an exciting and challenging job and as a bonus it means I don't have to commute. (Cue the Hallelujah Chorus.)
I will be continuing in a training role at my paper and the chain, albeit in a very different, and reduced role than my WebU project management. I'll also continue to do some outside teaching, consulting and presentation. Plus, as soon as I can elbow aside the stacks of program and application manuals and get a bit of free time I'll be rebuilding and migrating this blog.
I'll be at Ryerson University's Wordstock conference next weekend (Sept 20th) and will be giving the keynote ("Fish on Bicycles - why can't newspapers get the web right?") and two sessions, one on 10 Essential Internet Tools for Journalists and the other on the Joys and Pitfalls of Beat Blogging. And then I'm off to Saskatoon to run two days of training with the folks at the Western Producer, something I'm really looking forward to.
Over the next week I'll blog about and post some of the slides from, those presentations - which won't be nearly as good as being there, but will give you at least some sense of what I'm doing. I'd love to hear any criticisms in  advance of the presentations themselves. Simply hit that comment button below.
Here's the first of those presentations, this one on Beat Blogging - which I'm co-presenting with Hamilton Spectator's most popular blogger, city hall reporter Nicole Macintyre.
Bill

America's most popular news blog goes local, takes on Chicago

Huffington Post - the fast growing US news and politics aggregator and blog machine - has launched a beta version of their new local news model.
Here's how cheif Huffer, Arianna Huffington, described the new site:

HuffPost Chicago is part local news source, part resource guide, and part virtual soap box -- featuring a collection of bloggers who know and love Chicago, and are looking to share their takes on everything from the Cubs to City Hall to the hot new local band to the best place for Greek food (and I can testify that there is a lot of that in Chicago!).

It's the first of what the Huffington Post hopes will be a long line of local news and blog packages. The model is a simple one - and very cheap to operate: one paid staffer aggregating local news coverage and riding herd on a whole pile of local (free) bloggers.
It's classic jujitsu, using your competitor's weight against him(her). Don't try and out report the well-established, deep pocketed (despite the doom and gloom newspaper news) local news outlet: repackage the best of its content. How hard is that?
The Chicago Tribune's web columnist, Steve Johnson, was suitably unimpressed:

"... the page collects and packages headlines mostly from the Tribune, Sun-Times and Crain’s Chicago Business (other sources will be used, too) and turns them into an all-Chicago front page designed to draw Chicagoans for whom a little local news is enough.

It’s Huffington’s Sampler, compared to the smorgasbord you get on those outlets' individual sites ..."

But Johnson, whose column runs under the very 1997 title "Hypertext", ended his piece with an observation that warmed my cold little heart:

"That said, all the local news outlets can and should borrow the big idea from Huffington Post like it borrows their stories. There’s no reason the Tribune, in 2008, shouldn’t be offering its online readers a Chicago page packed with the most interesting and important local news, no matter which outlet is reporting it."

If only that view was widely shared, newspapers would begin to have a chance on the web. Probably the number one job people want done is simple: find me interesting/useful stuff on the web. That doesn't mean we try and compete with Google or their mighty search index and algorithm, but it does mean we need to get serious about curating the web's information for our readers.
Bill
 

What the propane depot explostions taught me about coverning breaking news on the web

Here's probably the key lesson I learned from closely watching the Toronto media race to cover Sunday morning's propane depot blast, a breaking news story that killed two, destroyed five homes and rendered 10,000 people temporarily homeless:

Speed of delivery ain't the biggest change the web brings to the news game - duration is.The story lives in time, and your job changes as you move further away in time from the event.

This was not the case in the days of the 2x daily newscast and 1X daily press run: breaking news happened, we scrambled like hell to gather as much info as close to the event as we could, then we'd spend as much time as we could sifting and filtering and checking and producing. And at last, on deadline, we'd deliver a high value product.
But when we can talk to people LIVE from a breaking news event, the rules are different. And when people - anyone - can talk to the WORLD live from the event without us, the game has changed almost beyond recognition.
That's the thing newspapers still don't get about covering breaking news on the web.
Here's the formula:
When it starts, when the thing has just happened, think televsion news, or radio from the old days — be immediate, be instant. Tells us what you see, what you hear, what you know — and very importantly what you don't know. Be omniverous. Slurp it up and spit it out: people are desperately hungry for news of the big event and don't mind if they get fed some chalk with their cheese.
Then, slowly, bring the power of your newsroom to bear. Filter information more finely. Fact check more closely, use your superior access to seek out and broadcast authoritative voices more often.
Finally wrap it all up with a bow — package the damn thing.
Simple, huh?
But here's the trick. Newspapers in particular are very, very good at the 2nd phase - it's what we all recognize as "journalism": We flood the zone with bodies and talent who use their reporting and investigating skills and their access to dig out the facts, to contextualize the emerging information, to pull it together and make sense of it all by squeezing the pieces into narratives.
The final phase is handled by the stylists and the designers, the artists and packaging folks. Simple straight-forward skill sets - make sense of this riot of information and do it on deadline please. We're good at that.
It's the first phase we suck at.
And we suck at it because we can't compete with the resources of an always-connected city, of a populace that is plugged into the net and each other every waking moment, that is walking around with video and still cameras and computers in their shaking little hands or crammed into their pockets.
We suck at it because we don't want to admit that we can't compete, that the random, unfocused noise thrown off by connected citizens (i.e. amateur journalists) during a major breaking news event is superior to our early hours efforts.
But it is.
This was very, very clear Sunday morning when, as I pointed out in yesterday's analysis of the coverage, for the first five or six hours, ALL the best photos and videos and incident colour came from citizens, not pro "journalists".
This is only sensible — "citizens" are everywhere, everywhen. And these days they're kitted out as well as any reporter. And at least 20% of them are  used to producing content for the web — that's a lot of content when a major story breaks. It's content that published in a hundred locations: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Live Journal, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.TV, Photo Bucket, on blogs and yes, in the comment sections of newspaper web sites. Why would anyone rail against this tide?
And yes it has, as I noted yesterday, a high noise to signal ratio, it's full of errors and myopia and it lacks perspective and maybe insight — but all of it is better than what you've got with one editor sitting behind a computer and three photogs and four reporters scrambling for their boots and their car keys.
So our challenge is how to harness that information in that first frantic hour or hours. Based on what I watched yesterday, here's my thoughts on how to plan for breaking news.
When breaking news happens:

1) Scramble your jets — Obvious. Do what you always do: flood the zone with reporters and photographers and videographers. Only keep them on a short leash - have them calling and texting and Twittering short burst of info (text, photos, videos if that's possible). They need to learn to share as they go - but to keep going, keep digging.

2) Staff your desk — Get someone listening to the scanners, working the radios, answering the phones. Get another person hooked up to your website and live blogging - with timestamps - events as they happen. (Embed Coveritlive if you can) Speed is everything.

3) Offer a platform — Open a forum, or the commenting section on a static blog post, or (if you have no other alternative) a special email address or fax or phone number where people can just show up and tell their stories;  share what they've seen, what they know, what they've felt. A place where they can see each other and talk about what they've experienced. Cull material from here.

4) Set your traplines — Quickly scour  your platform and YouTube, Search.Twitter.com, LiveJouranal, Facebook, Technorati; GoogleBlogSearch, Blip.tv; Vimeo; Photo bucket, etc.  People are posting content —find it. Invite readers stories, images, videos. Ask questions inside the live blogging stream. Let readers see themselves answering them, (that's critical to maximizing contributions).

5) Curate the web — Start filtering the citizen contributions,searching out the best content and featuring it, pointing to it, highlighting it. (Get a reporter busy verifying it, if that seems necessary). Be the place that people can rely upon to have found the best stuff.

6) Pull it all together — After the first hour or so it's time to increase the signal to noise ratio. Feature verified info (your staffs and citizens). Prepare write-thrus and best-of's. Start packaging this stuff, bringing in context, old or related stories and documents and downloads from around the web.

All the while publish to the web, telling people what you know and what you don't know. And promising to update continuously. And keep your promise. There, you see? It is simple.
Bill

Propane depot explosions expose shortcomings in breaking news coverage by newspapers living in a Web 2.0 world

photo courtesy http://www.photojunkie.ca/

About two hours before this morning's grey dawn, a series of explosions tore through a propane depot in the northwest corner of the city, shaking buildings and homes, shattering windows and waking people as far as 10 kms distant from the scene. Fire and smoke shot to heights equal to a 20 or 30 storey building and led many to think (worry? fear?) that a jet airliner had crashed, a terrorist attack had  taken place, the city was being bombed.

This was breaking news with a capital 'B' and at this point, six hours distant from that 3:30 am blast, it offers some intriguing lessons in how coverage of these events is evolving in a world where digital cameras and web access are almost ubiquitous.

Bottom line - in aggregate, citizens journalists out-performed their professional counterparts getting news out faster, offering more details, and better images and videos. They also made more mistakes and had a high noise to signal ratio. Mainstream media were slow off the mark and while they depended on the citizen journalists, they failed to make the most of the possibilities that material offered. See the bottom of the post for my thoughts on how to do that.

Toronto's a media-rich city: four paid dailies, two free dailies, several city news blogs in addtion to more than a dozen local radio and television stations. I can't cover them all, but took a look at the four dailies (The Globe, The National Post, The Star, and The Sun) and the two big place blogs (Blog.TO and Torontoist).

I did a similar comparison earlier this year (when the transit union launched an unexpected, but legal, strike on a Friday night at press deadline time) and the results are pretty similar - none of the dailies have figured out yet how to blend the strengths of their newsroom (speed, accuracy, access) with the new possibilities opened up by an always connected citizenry - but most of them are trying.

The Star, with the city's biggest newsroom (although I can't imagine they had more than a single person on duty when the first blast hit), produced the fullest account, with pretty admirable speed. Police, fire, eyewitness reports, plus links to two of the eight or so citizen videos of the blast I found online. The article had commenting enabled (they don't always) and you got a bit of a flavour of the impact on the city, which is useful, if basic.

The Globe and Mail seemed entirely asleep at the switch, relying entirely on Canadian Press for it's text story, still photos and video. (CP's video was quite good actually, blending citizen video with their own images and overlaying professional reporting and a very competent voice-over.) The Globe (and the Star) both appealed to readers to send them stories, videos and photos, but if they got any, neither acknowledged it.) Lots of comments, though, including people offering links to other sites with video of the blasts, the Toronto Fire Dept's live response web page, even academic and news references to other propane explosions and the risks the storage depots pose. Good stuff that a smart web team might have referenced in the story - but their readers did it for them. It's a stark demonstration of how people use — or want to use — the web: to share information, to learn more by sharing what they know, using the familiar web tools Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, the collective memory of the web itself.

NY Times Top Twitter-er, But Newspaper Readers Not Flocking to Sign-Up For The Service

Twitter has been called everything from a game-changing microblogging tool to a mind-boggling waste of time. 

Here's how Wikipedia describes it:

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as tweets) which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

But the key to Twitter's success lies in the fact that users can subscribe to each other's tweets and receive them via their PDA's, their smart phones, as text messages, or in emails, or via the web.

It's an odd idea, but the funny (and with it's frequent outatges - infuriating) little web publishing tool caught on among the digirati during the uber-hip 2007 South by Southwest event and enjoys a still-growing popularity, espeically among the tech crowd who live in an always-on, always-connected universe and love the way Twitter allows you to connect instantly or asynchronously with your friends and followers wherever and whenever you are.

Twitter fans like to brag that users repeatedly break big news (earthquakes, election results) before the mainstream media, but I'm not sure just how much more useful is a tweet that announces "Holy crap - Earthquake!" as opposed to the US Geological Survey bulletin that arrives three minutes later with solid information about the epicenter and quake strength.

Still, newspapers jumped on the twitter bandwagon last year and by September almost 50 papers had accounts pinging readers with tweets that contained the latest headline and a link to the story as soon as they were posted to the web.

Ten months later and Erica Smith, a newspaper graphic designer and blogger has done some digging and turned up 303 newspaper Twitter accounts, offering a list of winners and losers based on their percentage gains from the previous month. (See the top ten list, below)

What really struck me, however, was how very few readers have signed up for this simple breaking news alert system. While the New York Times primary account has 5,199 followers, the average number is a paltry 131. Hell, you could almost telephone each one of them, if that's the numbers your service is pulling.

I'm not sure what to make of this: readers don't want breaking news fast? (I doubt it); They don't want to pay texting fees to get that news? (a real possibility for many); They just haven't heard of Twitter because they're not living inside the Tech bubble and echo chamber? (highly likely) or some combination of these and other reasons?

Does that mean newspapers shouldn't offer the service?

I don't think it means that at all. Using TwitterFeed or a similar service you can set this up at no cost to your company - it's a set and forget service that will keep pumping out the breaking news tweets until you tell it not to. And those few hundred (or so) readers who subscribe to the service are likely to be very happy you're providing it for them, and knowing Twitter, that means they're also likely to say nice things about you, on Twitter and elsewhere. Serving your customers and building good will is worth it anytime.

Here's Erica's list, rearranged by one of her readers to show just the top ten by number of followers:

@nytimes: 5,199 followers
@popcandy: 2,088 followers
@wsj: 1,230 followers
@nytimesscience: 940 followers
@nytimesarts: 934 followers
@nytimesnational: 905 followers
@nytimesbusiness: 896 followers
@nytimesmovies: 812 followers
@statesman: 760 followers
@nytimesworld: 756 followers

And if you're still not clear on this whole Twitter thing, here's a 2:25 long video explaining Twitter in Plain English, courtesy the nice people at Common Craft :

and if you still would like more, here's the Wikipedia entry on Twitter.
What do you think — should newspapers bother setting up Twitter feeds for their breaking news?
Bill

Is it time to buy newspapers? Or say bye bye?

It's either a very, very good time to buy newspaper stock - or time to put us out of our misery. The Washington Post fell into the red this past quarter for the first time in like, what? 30 something years? A one-time charge of $87 million to pay for layoffs is getting the blame, but newspaper sales were down 13 per cent, print ad revenue was down 22 per cent and even without counting the layoff costs, earnings per share dropped sharply from over $8 to under $6. Across the US the credit crunch, the flight of advertising dollars and the general fear that things will get worse — much worse —  before they get better, have all dealt a body blow to the newspaper biz:

The market capitalization of the Journal Register Company, publisher of the New Haven Register and hundreds of smaller papers, fell below $1 million last week, down more than 99 percent since the start of 2007. In the same period, GateHouse Media, another publisher of hundreds of small papers, has dropped almost 98 percent, to a market value under $26 million. The Sun-Times Media Group is down 91 percent, to less than $34 million.

Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying - NYTimes.com

Now, it's probably important to note that share price is reflecting people's opinions, not necessarily earning potentials, but still... Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Stephen King's latest fiction released as a daily video series for cell phones

Maybe the march to mobile is finally picking up steam.
Last month saw the wildly successful Apple iPhone 3G launch (1 million sold in one weekend - alhtough the activations were a technical nightmare) and perhaps more significantly, the opening of their "Aps" store (an iTunes for mobile applications).
And now author Stephen King is releasing his latest bit of fiction via a 30 day series of short videos streamed to cell phones.

Drawn by award-wining comic book artist Alex Maleev, and colored by famed comic book colorist José Villarrubia, the episodes were adapted by Marc Guggenheim, co-creator of the ABC-TV series “Eli Stone” with creative oversight from Stephen King.

Nishero.com: Stephen King's "N." - An original video series
The series began back on July 28th and a new episode is released each weekday until August 29th.Blocks of five episodes will be released on iTunes each Monday, selling for $0.99 but you can get all the episodes for $3.99.
There's a certain irony in this - Stephen King's second last novel Cell was a post-apocolyptic horror story that pitted zomibe-like cell phone users against the few brave souls who'd never signed up.
As always, North America lags the rest of the wired world when it comes to mobile devices. I'm not sure if it's our often punative data rates, our continued love affair with our POTS (plain old telephone service, i.e. landlines) or what, but most of the real innovation is happening elsewhere. Take cell phone novels for instance. When I first heard about these short (usually romance) novels composed and read on cellphones  I thought  they were  an odd little niche. 
Wrong.
According to a New York Times story from earlier this year, they're hugely popular.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists...

In my own industry the vast majority of newspaper's have yet to develop mobile versions of their web sites, leaving the mobile news delivery service to AP and an increasing number of outsiders who are developing smart little aggregators that push content out to people's smart phones. Bill

Blogged with the Flock Browser

My four step plan on becoming a digital journalist - boiled down to a 90 sec video

Last month I was invited to speak at the Mags University, an annual conference for Canadian Magazines, to offer a Digital Survival Guide for Editors. I blogged about it including posting my presentation slides and appropritate links back in June.
After the session one of my hosts, Stan Sutter, a journalist with, among other things, a long history at Marketing Magazine, approached me and asked if I'd sit (stand, actually) for a video interview for his own blog.

He used a simple Cannon (I think) point and shoot, urged me to be brief and to-the-point, asked me couple of questions and we were done. I finally caught up with the results, which I share with you below.