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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’ »

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.

Google Mapplets

Ok, work with me here: you go to Google Maps and you see “FooNews.com” listed. *click* and you add the last 7 days of stories and photos.

And garage sale ads… ooh ooh and classified ads… no wait! Upsold ads!

Now THAT would just so rock!

I was thinking that you’d have to give writers and photogs GPS units, but no, Google can do geocoding. All I’d need are addresses. You get addresses with your stories, right?!?

I’m gonna float this to the various online folken I work with and see how far it goes.

For those that are more journo than geek “!=” means “does not not equal.”

Does your newsroom have a multimedia guy? Odds are it does. What does that person do? I betcha it’s just video, huh. I’d also bet that his (or her) overall web skills are… um… we’ll go with developing.

You know, there are other media than just video. There’s text of course and there are photos naturally. There’s also audio, video and animations and all sorts of interactive web thingies.

There’s also HTML. Remember good ol’ HTML? Remember hyperlinks? Ever look up something on Wikipedia only to find that 45 minutes and 37 links later you’re reading about Cargo Cults or something? (c’mon, you know you have). Why aren’t our online news stories more like that?

I envision a simple lookup table, could be an SQL database somewhere or even a basic XML file. Then during some story processing step when the mayor’s name “Roy Stoner” is detected (perhaps only once per story) then is can be linked to a page on the guy. As a bonus, if the page is local (it doesn’t have to be) that would be your ad impression as well.

Picture this: Have a story on a structure fire? *click* The building’s history *click* The cities history *click* Other fire stories in a 5 mile radius (requires geocoding. you geocode your stories, right?) *click* Fire Engine 31 info *click* Other stories involving Engine 31 *click* Fluffy, Engine 31’s three legged dog.

But we don’t do that because we’re too busy doing just one multimedia.

So I did something I don’t normally do this morning. I read the paper. Now, technically speaking I always read the paper, several in fact. I peruse the RSS feeds from a couple of area papers and occasionally I find a story of interest, but this morning I read the paper paper.

You see yesterday the “news” coming out of Virginia Tech was a mess. One shooter, no two. One shooter was killed, no wait he was captured. One dead, no 20 dead, no 30. One headline I saw was creative: “20 to 30 dead”. My Dad, a rocket scientist, would always explain to me the difference between “accuracy” and “precision”. Well, at least “20 to 30 dead” is accurate.

TV was worse. Bad helicopter video and talking heads who spent most of the day trying to fill airtime with news and information they didn’t have. I couldn’t get Don Henley out of my head. At least we didn’t have Dan Rather decimating classic journalism quotes.

Now, I could have spent all day reading news sites and endlessly refreshing web pages for up-to-the-minute speculation (because that’s what it was at that point, speculation) or I could go on with my day and tomorrow, over my doughnut and Mtn. Dew breakfast (hey, the name is Journo-geek ok?), I could read it all, clearly and concisely, in the paper.

So I did.

You see some guy in some national office did spend all day reading news sites and probably calling contacts and probably collated reports from field reporters and he (or she) put together a 120″ story that ran over the wires to my paper. It was long but full of (hopefully) verified facts. It was a far cry from the guesswork reporting of the day before.

Now I’m informed. I have a better idea what happened. That’s how it’s supposed to work.

We on the web pride ourselves on being able to get the news out fast, just like TV. But sometimes the news requires some thought, some time to see how the pieces all fit, in short some journalism.