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A (long) while back I spouted off in a comment on a post about newspaper staffing on JI:

In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.

Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.

In short, they become liabilities.

I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.

Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.

It was an off-the-cuff comment made shortly after arguing some academic point or other with a friend who, while a talented and dedicated print journalist, wasn’t much of a web user, and so didn’t see my point at all (of course my delivery could not have been at fault ;)).

Now that I’ve had the time to think more about it… I like it even more.

Editor’s note: The actual quote was “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The full presentation is available here: http://sites.google.com/site/io/the-worlds-information-in-context

“Our mission is to make information available and make it useful.” — Michael T. Jones, Chief Technology Advocate, Google

When Michael Jones uttered that line at the recent Google I/O conference, I about fell over. Waitaminute, I thought, isn’t that the roll of the newspaper? I mean, if Google’s mission is to make information available and make it useful, how is that any different from the traditional newspaper mission?

Continue reading ‘Making information available and useful online and why newspapers aren’t very good at it.’ »

I had a recent discussion with a non-twitter-addicted friend recently over how best to get news alerts out onto “mobile devices” (i.e.: text messaging). He advocated using a particular vendor to send out SMS text messages (for a small fee) and thought Twitter was “just a fad” (oh now where have I heard that before). I, of course, advocated Twitter.

Continue reading ‘To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question’ »

You know what? Absolutely no one I know outside of work uses text messaging or instant messaging of any kind. No really. And it’s only been recently that someone I know outside of work has started to use Flickr.

No one I know personally blogs either. At least not on any measurable scale (yeah, I see ya, bro). So I’m not even gonna try to explain the idea of “microbloging” so forget sites like Twitter or Britekite.

Even the youngins — those fresh out of college — when I search for them on Facebook I get nuthin’. Weren’t colleges where Facebook got its start?!?

Understand that these are not Luddites locked away in some mountain cabins somewhere, these are smart folks from all walks of life, at varying ages, and pretty much all of ‘em own computers. Heck they even send email on occasion. Some actually work in technology fields!

In fact, judging by my circle of long time friends — not to mention my extended family — all that web2.0 hype is pretty much a freakin’ myth. Is it?

I don’t think so. I think sometimes we in the field sometimes do lose perspective (I certainly know I do) and think that everyone is taking their Flickr KML feed and making cool Google maps out of them or using Reuter’s Spotlight and embedding news in their iPhones or something , but in reality, only a very, very few or our readers/viewers/users even know what an RSS feed is.

But then we return to relevance…

There’s a lot of talk in the “media blogosphere” about what business models newspapers will have to come up with to stay alive much longer into the 21st century, and while no doubt a sound business model is important (duh), something I’ve been mulling over in my head seems to me to be of equal or near-equal importance and that is relevance.

Continue reading ‘Relevance’ »

Hello, my name is Marc and I’m a Twitter addict…

Ok, maybe it’s not that bad (really, I can quit anytime I want…) but I am fascinated by it. So much so that after a brief chat one day with @base10 (the @ sign is a Twitter thing) I decided to implement a simple script to update Twitter based on updates to an RSS feed (I swear I’d never heard of TwitterFeed at that point). The idea being that given a “breaking news” RSS feed, I could automatically scan it every so often and send news updates to Twitter.

Using code from my traffic stuff as a base this was a snap to set up. Then came adding support for multiple RSS feeds with multiple Twitter accounts (think “newspaper chain”) and then came support for ATOM feeds in addition to RSS.

What’s been more interesting (to me) is how the different newspapers I’ve set this up for have used it.

The first site to take advantage of Twitter (using my code) was The Fresno Bee. They track their “Updates” section’s RSS feed, so you get just that: news updates. This was pretty much the intended use. Later they added Twitter support to their BeeHive blog.

Next up The Modesto Bee decided to track their “Local News” section so while you get local news updates throughout the day (good), you also get a burst first thing in the morning of their local news print headlines (not so good). Several newspapers do this, regurgitating their daily headlines onto Twitter, and I’m not really a fan of this because to me Twitter is about immediacy, not yesterday’s news.

That said, Modesto was the first site (as far as I know) to update Twitter manually with some breaking traffic updates.

The most recent addition, the Merced Sun-Star did something slick. They created a special channel within their web CMS just for Twitter. This channel creates it’s own RSS feed and therefore becomes a way to update Twitter directly from their CMS. This is very cool, because it allows them to be selective if they so desire. Now they just have to work on that icon.

So yes, we tweet.

If you follow me on twitter you may have caught a momentary vent yesterday that I think could be explained:

"We need to rethink our workflow" ARE YOU LISTENING? Of course not, you don't Twiiter[sic], do you.

You see I had just got out of a demo of some “next gen” print publishing software that promised to have better support for the web (and since the vendor’s current offering has ZERO support for the web, I suppose anything would be “better”). To be fair, the software really did look like it’s on the right track, treating news content in a media agnostic way, but I strongly suspected some marketing droid had convinced upper management that this new version was a silver bullet that would magically save a gaggle of FTEs on the web side of the house, and therefore we must buy it.

I didn’t ;). I maintained that we could accomplish most of what was being offered on the screen by “rethinking our current workflow” and taking advantage of the software (and developers) we already have in-house. I think it’s called “doing more with less,” but I digress.

“Rethink our workflow? I don’t know what that means,” the crusty old editor said.

I realized that that moment that for all this guy’s knowledge and skill in the newsroom, he didn’t recognize that our current workflow of pulling web content out of the print publishing system after it’s been formatted for the page is fundamentally flawed. 90% of the code to “export” this content for the web deals with “de-printing” it and where do you think 90% of the bugs occur? I’ve talked about this before.

By “rethinking our workflow” I mean nothing less than “exploding” the notion that we’re a news paper and really becoming that news organization we talk about being and, just like in the fancy demo, treating our content — be it text, photos, video or smellovision — in a media agnostic way. Publish to a database, not a paper. Stop writing news stories in a pagination system. Submit content for general editing and then release it to the print and web editors. Let the print editors “printify” their print products (edit for length, add pull quotes and deck heds, suggest headlines) and let the web editors “webify” theirs (package multimedia, links, tags, web heds).

But… what if the web site doesn’t have the same pull quotes?!? What if the headlines differ?!? OMG What if we italicize something in print and the web doesn’t?!?

I’m sorry but who the hell cares? I’d challenge questions like that with, “where’s our video in the paper?” or “I clicked on the teaser box to see the story and poked a hole in the paper, was that supposed to happen?” In this brave new world we need to take way better advantage of the media we’ve elected to support and right now we’re not. We can’t do it as long as we’re funneling one through the other.

We need to rethink our workflow.

While I think that Howard Owens’ heart is in the right place with his idea that Journalists should become wired, we have to realize that this is no replacement for staffers with real web experience.

Its great that you want to pick up a digital camera to “play” and learn. It’s great that you want to glean some understanding of the other “silos” in your newsroom. This is important and necessary to stay (or, more accurately, become) competitive, but to do so without the guidance of a cadre of experienced web staffers — those with at least a decade of web content creation, design or development — is not going to do you any good.

In fact it will probably hurt you.

All this “…buy a small digital camera and…” stuff seems to me to dismiss “web journalism” as trivial (”something you can just pick up”) and technically, I suppose, it is. Of course, so is writing, right? After all we all learned how to write in elementary school, didn’t we? My 3rd grader writes pretty well, so should your newspaper start hiring 3rd graders? (think of the expense savings!)

Well, if all your newspaper is doing is hoping that their existing staffers pick up this “web stuff” by some kind of osmosis without any real experience on staff, then they may as well start hiring 3rd graders, because that’s all they’ll be getting. And it’ll show.

This last Sunday (the 23rd), some neighbors down the street awoke at 2:00 am to their house on fire. I’m happy to say they all survived, but that’s not what this post is about. It’s about how this story was handled by the Sacramento Bee’s web site, sacbee.com.

The story is here.

2:00 am on Sunday is well after press time but the Bee did post a “breaking news” update to its web site at 9:25 am on Monday. Yeah, that’s right, on Monday. For those counting that’s over 24 freakin’ hours later. That ain’t “breaking” news folks.

Whatever, lets just go with it. I first saw the story in my RSS feed reader on Monday morning (hey, it was less than a half a mile from my house so I guess I missed it too) and clicked on it. While it was a good story, the very first question I had was “where did this happen?” I looked for a map on the page but there was no map to be found. How could you have a story today with a story like that and not have a map? Maps have become web journalism 101. The story was apparently updated 4 times that day and yet no map.

Then I wondered, where were the photos? Ok, you missed the 2:00 am alarm, no problem there, I’ve done that. But where was the photo of the burned out house with the people going through it? Cliché you say? Well so are stories about house fires before Christmas.

No map, no photos. It was a good story but it was over 24 hours old. To me it was a missed opportunity to actually put breaking news online and really use the web to help tell the story.

Then they made it worse.

The print version came through with the “firefighter’s gifts” angle in the next day’s paper (now two days on). It was essentially the same story but with a different hed. Owing to a quirk in the Bee’s workflow the print version superseded the “breaking news” web version rendering those links as 404s. Had there been user comments (I don’t know if there were) or any other webification, that would have been lost too. Ouch.

Still no map, still no photos. And what was a good story the day before hadn’t really been updated so now it was closer to mediocre. “Yeah,” a reader would be tempted to say, “I read about all that yesterday, so what else is new?” Funny thing about the web, users expect stories to update.

I want newspapers to succeed, I really do. But you can’t say you embrace the web and pledge yourself to “hyper-local” reporting and then phone in your stories like this. You have to make the stories work on the web and this means adding whatever the web can support to help tell the story. In this case it meant maps, photos, updating the story as you learn more and not killing links to the story because it appeared in print two days later.

It was a missed opportunity.

Back in 1930-something early radio folks like Walter Cronkite figured out very quickly that reading the newspaper on the radio didn’t work. Radio was an audio medium and newspapers were not.

Yesterday I sat through a demo from a company who had a really slick product that put your newspaper’s PDFs online and they had all this cool navigation and searching and whatnot. It looked just like the newspaper and you even flipped pages all Kindle, er, newspaper like.

From a technology perspective it was impressive. From a strategic perspective it was a joke. It was the 2007 version of reading the newspaper on the radio.

The web is not a print medium folks. Yes the web has a printed media aspect, but there’s so much more to it. There’s other, non-print media (”multimedia”) and there’s, you know, “linking”. The physical paper has none of that, PDF or no. There’s certainly no mechanism in the physical paper for microformats or anything like that.

That this product even made inroads — and it did because they supposedly report to ABC for circulation numbers — tells me that we’re still thinking like newspaper people… in 1935.