Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Month: November 2009

Recommended links: Freemium models, ideas and more

Oh, Rupert

News Corp’s Murdoch says he’ll hide his content from Google very soon. I’ll believe it when I see it. And if he does do it, how long will it take for regret to set in?

Pay Models

Alan Mutter points to the indicators and recent comments from newspaper execs that all point to a continuation of free news online at most outlets. A few places are going freemium, most notably the Star Tribune, who is mimicking the success of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel with a premium sports service. The discussion in the comments is good too.

More on “freemium” content at the SF Chronicle and BusinessWeek.

Social Media

STATS: Has Twitter Flatlined Just Short of Mainstream? – For a long time, Twitter was gorwing exponentially, as was Facebook. But then Twitter evened out and Facebook just kept going. What happened?

Facebook Ads Now Let You Target Friends of Your Fans – Want to advertise to the friends of the people who are already fans of your company on Facebook? Now you can, thanks to the “friends of connections” targeting feature that was just rolled out by the social networking site.

How Twitter is Changing the Face of Media – Nothing new here, but it is a nice little overview of how far the news industry has come in using Twitter. Mashable also has a shoutout for social media’s effects on local news.
Mashable has 5 Impressive Real-Life Google Wave Use Cases for those who still aren’t sure what to do with those invites.

Speaking of Wave experiments, RedEye has ventured onto Wave. As much as I applaud experimentation with news technology, I really have to question RedEye on this approach. It’s like advertising that you’re having a party, but only a few of your readers will actually be able to go. They seem to forget Wave’s still in preview mode and not everyone has an invite.

People read newspapers, but news execs misunderstand their loyalty

First, the good news. A new Scarborough  study finds that most Americans still read newspapers in some format. It found that 74% of American adults either read a print newspaper or visit a newspaper Web site at least once a week. That’s pretty good reach, which is nice, but it might not really matter. If advertisers don’t think that’s good enough – or if newspaper shareholders continue to remain unimpressed, readership doesn’t mean much at all in terms of survival.

Of course, we as an industry keep digging our own graves by prematurely declaring the death of journalism in columns and blogs every week. We really need to learn a lesson or two about message management.

Now the bad news. The people we as an industry rely on to make important business decisions (including keeping some of us employed) don’t have a clue how precarious our presence in the marketplace is without loyalty from readers.

A survey from the American Press Institute indicates a big disconnect between news executives and readers when it comes to judging the importance of the local print newspaper – and of those papers’ presence online.

One particularly appalling bit of info: 75% news execs think switching off their websites will drive people back to print newspapers instead of other websites. Readers, of course, say they’d simply go to another local news website, national news site or TV/radio. The execs seem to think this is still the boom era for newspapers and they still have a monopoly.

These people are deciding the future of my industry. God help us.

Don’t make promises about UGC you can’t keep

It may be old news to media law nerds like me, but the ongoing case of Barnes v. Yahoo has revealed a potential minefield of legal trouble for media websites of all sizes in something as simple as a broken promise.

Dont make promises!

Don't make promises!

As most every media person knows, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants immunity from liability to service providers (including media sites) for user-generated content, even if it is defamatory. The Barnes case re-asserted that protection, but it also revealed a possible loophole in that immunity that can occur if you promise to remove content – and don’t follow through.

The case, in short:

It started with a bad breakup. Cecilia Barnes’ ex-boyfriend put personal info and lewd photos of her in a Yahoo profile soliciting for sex. She tried to contact Yahoo to get the defamatory profile removed and eventually got through to a person who said they’d take care of it. They didn’t.

And it was there that the loophole appeared. Aside from the issue of defamation in relation to the content of the profile, Barnes’ suit has a claim for breach of contract from Yahoo for not taking down the profile as promised.

While U.S. contract law typically requires evidence of a contract, there’s a judicial doctrine known as “promissory estoppel” that makes a promise like that at Yahoo a contract.

[promissory estoppel] allows courts to find an enforceable contract absent consideration where a claimant can prove the following: 1) a promise was made, 2) the promisor, as a reasonable person, should have foreseen that the promise would induce the conduct of the type which occurred, and 3) the claimant actually relied on the promise resulting in a substantial change in his or her position.

So, that broken promise, essentially, is the contract that was broken – and thus, a whole other Pandora’s box is opened.

The lesson for you? If you have comments or other kinds of user-submitted content on your website or blog and someone calls to complain about something in that content, whatever you do – don’t make any promises to remove it if you don’t want legal responsibility for it.

I know from experience on these kind of calls that you want to say you’ll take care of it right away, but don’t. Say you’ll look into it. Tell everyone in your newsroom to say the same.

And finally, for the love of God, don’t put up profiles of your ex-girlfriends on Yahoo – prank calls are far less problematic.

A new media how-to roundup

Every now and again I try to pass along tips on how journalists at any point in their career can add to their skill set. Here’s some great tips and how-tos I’ve found lately you might find helpful if you want to break into media – or break out.

  • Taking the plunge and starting your own blog or news website? OJR has a great checklist to help you get off on the right foot. Whether you’re a college student or a mid-career journalist looking to get your name out there in a new way, this should really help you figure out your plan. And, if you use WordPress to host your blog or site (I recommend it), here’s a friendly DIY guide to WordPress troubleshooting from our friends at the OJB.
  • If you’re looking for a new online storytelling or crowd-sourcing technique, try using a lifestream or eventstream to tell a story in a narrative form using tools like Tumblr or Posterous. Using a stream, you can combine blog posts, tweets, images and other sorts of updates around a subject from several different people to flow into a single “stream” in chronological order. It’s sort of like a Friendfeed that tells a story. Try it out.
  • Or if you want to get really experimental, try the “mapped” writing model for online news. This technique isn’t so much a narrative as a “choose your own adventure”  for long-form news. It involves an overall summary (or nut graf, if you will) followed by a series of “threads” that don’t need to be read in a particular order. I learned about this model back in online journalism class back in j-school – and I never thought it would come into use. Whaddya know.
  • Data fiends, multimedia producers and Flash fanatics can get great ideas for unique and innovative maps from 10,000 Words. Data visualization is a big deal for online media, buy now the key is making those maps simpler, prettier and fun. (Note: The images on the post are blown out, but it’s a solid list of examples). If you’re just a wannabe data fiend, the blog also has tips for finding and visualizing data. Very cool.
  • User-generated content doesn’t have to mean “amateur” content. The Knight Digital Media Center offers up some great tips for training citizen journalists that could make submitted news a valuable information asset for your site (and it helps the community too). Remember, not everyone had to sit through several credit hours’ worth of copy editing class – so just be patient.
  • Reporters, in particular, should consider expanding their social media brand by setting up a YouTube account. Those cats at Old Media, New Tricks have great how-to advice for branding yourself on YouTube. Yes, it can be more than just funny cat videos.
  • Take it from me, it’s tough to manage comments on your blog or news site, let alone learning to love them and use them to your advantage. I think a lot of the opinion in this piece is a bit pie-in-the-sky (because I’ve been there), but they offer good tips, nonetheless, for understanding online communities and managing commenters.
  • If you haven’t been using Twitter lists yet, here’s Mashable’s primer on what they are and how they work.
  • This is more for organizations rather than individuals, but Social Media Today has tips for making employees into effective Social Media Ambassadors. Hint: It goes beyond just getting everyone on Twitter and calling it a day.

Links roundup: Media law news, paid content and crazy ideas

Media Law News

Geanne Rosenberg, writing for the Nieman Lab, jumps into the Federal Shield conversation, asserting that student journalists should also get the protections of their professional counterparts. If you read this blog, you know I’m a big proponent for citizen journalists, bloggers and other “non-professionals” to get this protection, so kudos to her for recognizing the rights of students as well.

The Nieman Lab has an overview of a longer paper from Marion Fremont-Smith at Harvard law about the non-profit model for funding news. There are a lot of questions out there as to whether or not tax law might need to be changed to allow for a current for-profit news org to become non-profit. Fremont-Smith’s paper argues there should be no new guidelines or legislation needed to make this happen.

A very interesting case is going on right now where TV personality Glenn Beck is essentially trying to use domain name laws to out an online critic (and it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere). While it goes against the reason behind the law, it certainly is a creative way to circumvent other media law to take down those who oppose your point of view.

Who’s charging for content – or not

For those keeping score….

Crazy ideas worth hearing

Robert Niles has a provocative idea – evaluate whether or not your site really needs to be in Google News, Crazy? Maybe, but check it out. There’s some potentially mind-blowing food for thought about why news sites and blogs may not want to be involved with Google News – and it isn’t about that silly  “freeloading” nonsense. He argues that search engine page views aren’t “quality” views and they might be leading to more spam.

Or, if you really hate Google and you’re Rupert Murdoch, you’ll insist the search engine is stealing your stuff against your will. Google finally had enough of the News Corp. owner, saying that if he really doesn’t want Google indexing his sites, he can be removed. Of course, this blogger thinks Murdoch knew that already.

Newspaper-sponsored blog networks! Catch the wave! While it certainly isn’t the first such blog network (ahem), the Guardian is hiring bloggers to cover local news.

And seriously, it’s been said before and said again, this time by Paid Content: When is someone going to buy Breaking News Online ? They’re the best there is at breaking news online – and yet, they are still independent.

And a word or two about the Twitter

Social Media Today has a great bit of coverage about Twitter lately i just had to share.

For one, there’s a much-needed reality check on Twitter’s trending topics from the folks at Social Media Today, more importantly, do those topics really reflect what people are actually talking about or what is really going on in the world?

They also take a refreshing look at Twitter lists from the “quality over quantity” perspective. In other words, it isn’t a popularity contest to get listed a lot, especially wen there are a lot of lists.

And get ready to take down your “English only” Twitter search filter. Soon enough, we’ll be able to translate tweets with no problem.

Making enterprise journalism “web reader” friendly

If there’s one thing Gawker knows, it’s how to hook in online audiences. If you aren’t a regular reader, you may not have noticed something nifty they do with long stories. In addition to publishing a longer narrative story about the ‘balloon boy’ stunt recently, they also published a bulleted “Cliffs Notes” version of the story for the scanning reader.

The Nieman Lab took a favorable look at the practice, and I can’t help but agree it’s something we should be taking a lesson on.

Newspaper and magazine reporters who want online audiences to appreciate the fruits of their labor poured into lengthy watchdog pieces and enterprise journalism should consider writing a shorter, bulleted synopsis version to run online, with a link to the full-length piece.

I know, you’d love it if your prize-worthy story were appreciated by all readers, but you and I know that just isn’t going to happen. If you write a “web friendly” version, those facts you gathered, at least, can get some traction, even if your prose has been trimmed out.

Getting to know our friends in the blogosphere

Have you read the 2009 Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report yet? It’s got some great demographics about bloggers that online news orgs would be good to know, as a lot of them are voracious news consumers.

The report was compiled based on a survey of 2,828 bloggers, blog provider statistics and interviews with many key bloggers.

Fun facts from the study:

  • Bloggers are generally more affluent than the average person
  • The blogosphere continues to be dominated by male, affluent and educated bloggers
  • Most bloggers are “hobbyists” and are driven by personal fulfilment rather than financial gain.
  • The survey found that contrary to popular belief, many bloggers have had professional media experience, with 35% of all respondents having worked in traditional media as a writer, reporter, producer, or on-air personality, and 27% continue to do so.
  • While bloggers read other blogs they do not consider them a substitute for other news sources and the majority do not consider online media more important than traditional media.
  • 31% don’t think newspapers will survive the next ten years.

Your plan to save journalism is not at all helpful

I need a t-shirt that says: I asked the editor of the WaPo for a plan to save journalism and all I got was this book report on stuff I already knew.

I’ve been emailed “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” about a dozen times over the past few weeks. It’s a report from Len Downie and Michael Schudson that reviews, in painstaking detail, everything that has happened to journalism in the last 20 years and allegedly offers a plan to fix things.

I’ll save you the trouble of reading this tome (if you want) and tell you it doesn’t offer much at all. These were obviously the wrong guys to ask to change the business. The best idea they have? Asking private foundations and the government for help in funding news. (Newsflash: That isn’t new.)

What you should do, though is check out this rebuttal from the OJR and this one from Alan Mutter.

Of course, Slate also takes a contrarian view and argues that newspapers aren’t doing as badly as you think. They take an excellent analysis of the recent circulation numbers with a forehead smack thrown in for good measure. It isn’t just newspapers underperforming, it’s the economy, stupid.

4 potential uses for Google Wave in news

Lots of journalism’s resident tech geeks and big thinkers have been talking up the potential of Google Wave to “transform journalism”. I’m not going to go so far as to say that, but it does have a lot of features that make it an ideal candidate for fixing problems a lot of newsrooms face thanks to limitations in current technology.

Here are four general ways newsrooms may chose to implement Google Wave. Assuredly, they have countless wavelets.

1. It’s a newsroom budgeting solution

The problem: Anyone who’s had to share a newsroom budget in Word/Google Docs/Excel/etc. knows the struggle of shared document updating and access. Wave takes Google Docs to the next level – and makes it a lot easier for several parties to edit the same document in real time. No more “This document is currently in use, you will enter read-only mode”.

In Google Wave, you can edit the type submitted by anyone else. You can add comments to any part of the type and spin off conversations/collaborations from the budget to, say, talk about a specific long-term project. You can copy and past whole sections of a wave (the entire “document”) or a wavelet (a spun-off conversation within the document) to new waves, making it easier to carry a daily budget to the next day.

If a newsroom had daily, weekly, monthly and longer term budgets in Google Wave, we might not even need to have several meetings a day just so know where we are on today’s budget.

Here’s a potential walk-through:

Editors all add their reporters’ budget lines into a semi-private daily budget wave. The Managing Editor has questions about a particular budget line that she adds as a wavelet to that potion of the text. A back-and-forth with the reporter and their editor ensues there.

Photo Editor goes though the daily budget and adds notation as to which stories have art by creating news blips (individual comments) or starting new wavelets (conversations) within the daily budget as to why certain assignments weren’t shot, when art should get in, etc. She can also add the actual photos or videos into the budget for a page designer/web producer to grab later.

In other words, it’s your daily budget meetings, digitized. What a time saver!

2. It’s a reporting collaboration tool

The problem: Working on a project with another reporter or editor is never ideal. There’s always a mess of emails, attached Word files for notes and meetings, meetings, meetings. In the end, it’s difficult for the research and writing of two reporters to fully integrate  in a way that doesn’t look like two people were thrown together on a story.

Because of it’s real-time nature and media sharing capabilities, Wave is an ideal place for a newsroom project team to work. The reporters could not only share all of their notes, recorded conversations and research in this shared space, they could also co-write the story (or sections of the story) in a Wiki-ized wave.

The reporters can offer one another notes on each and every section of the article as they piece it together, rewrite or edit sections according to new info and insert new pieces in the middle of the old ones to help the story take shape. As one gets a quote that would fit well int the story, they can insert it as a wavelet, with the audio of the interview included if they’d want.

Reporters could, like this enterprising chap, conduct interviews with sources via Wave, either as a chat or video conference. that way, they could each ask questions (even if they aren’t in the same place) and involve many sources in the same conversation if needed.

All the while, an editor can see the progress every step of the way and make comments and edits on every portion of the story, even if a reporter is currently editing. Collaborators from video, graphics and photo can also chime in at various points, showing the latest photo of the source quoted (for instance) or asking questions relating to their part of the project.

And all along the way, the staff may chose to open up the research or even the article in progress to the public to get feedback, gather more information or just be transparent (this has potential most of all in public service journalism and investigations). Say you want to open your notes and data up to the story sources via a wave – they can rebut one another and add more info of their own that can be used in the final story.


3. It’s a community conversation tool

The problem: You want to get conversation going about a particular topic, but your existing commenting and message board tools limit the ability to communicate with useful commenters, while allowing the conversation to be taken off-track from the original topic.

The branching nature of Google Wave makes it great for getting lots of feedback and opinions. After initially putting the topical wave out there, the creator can take the conversation in many directions. He/she can communicate with all of the waves participants or speak individually wit users within the wave (say, to get more information).

If a participant wants to go off-topi (and they will), they can create a new wavelet in the overall wave and run with it.And the best part? Google Wave is attached to your email address and, thus, your Google identity. It’s a lot closer to transparent commenting than most systems have now.

The Austin American-Statesman has been experimenting with a daily news wave, with varying degrees of success. While Social Media Editor Robert Quigley has a lot of great ideas for how to use wave, he’s still limited by the fact that even in Austin, not everyone has an invite – and if they do, not many know how to use the technology yet.

4. It’s a public Wiki or crowdsourced story

The problem: You want to involve the public in an upcoming project, but the “tell us” box with your email address in the paper or on your blog just isn’t getting much response. If it gets any, it’s in separate email conversations with several people that can’t communicate effectively with one another.

As a spin-off of the to preview ideas – why not let the public do the heavy lifting? Sure, you might not want them to write your health care coverage, but why not give them a shot at editing and writing community resources, opinion articles and reports from news events.

Say you want to publish a guide to every neighborhood in your coverage area. Post up what you have in a wave and invite the public to edit and add facts, places, photos and more. They live there – so why not let them contribute?

Or, put your paper’s work up regarding a local event, a public crime, a landmark, etc. and let outside participants add their views at every point, edit in or out details they may have observed first-hand.

This technology may also go a step further to allow readers to arrange page design from a wave. Crazy? Maybe, but it’s one of many great ideas from the LA Times’ tech blog.

Great ideas

I mentioned these above, but you have to be sure you check out these posts that have great takes on the four ideas above.

  • Riding Google Wave’s Potential – Robert Quigley (of the Statesman), has a lot of hopes for Google Wave’s potential to transform community journalism via collaboration.

Google Wave has potential for journalism – but that’s all it is right now

First of all, I’m not going to explain Google Wave, lots of others have already done that. But I’m here to say it’s worth a look as a potential new tool for journalists.

It’s a combination of the features associated with a Wiki, email, message board and chat room with options to add interactive features like maps, polls, videos and images. So what does that mean for journalists? Potentially a lot.

Depending on how Google Wave develops before it formally rolls out to the public, it could become a solution to many technology problems facing newsrooms (and tons of other businesses) today. It has the potential to become an invaluable tool for internal and external communication and collaboration.

But right now, that is just potential. I’m not going to be tell you there are no downsides – there are plenty.

1. Right now, Wave isn’t public. You have to have been invited to experience it as it is still in “preview” mode.

2. So far, Wave has a high learning curve. When you finally get in, it isn’t immediately obvious what it is used for, what the buttons do or how to even get started. And even though instructional videos and manuals exist, not many people are willing to jump through that many hopes just to use a new web program.

3. In preview, at least, Wave is buggy as all get out. The much-ballyhooed “playback” feature rarely works. It is incredibly slow to load and navigate. Because every character you type is public in a Wave, it seems to slow everything way down. For instance, I just watched a sentence I typed go in character by character, over a two-minute time span (yikes).

4. It isn’t easy to teach. If you, like me, have taught very basic web applications to reluctant  digital immigrants with upsetting results, you dread the idea of teaching this to your newsroom. I have nightmares just thinking about it.

But all of these cons I noted are about Google Wave right now. They’re still working on it – and I have high hopes it’s going to improve dramatically before it goes fully public. If it doesn’t, it’s going to be chalked up as a failed experiment and forgotten.

I have a lot of ideas I’ve either dreamed up or found on the Interwebs about ways journalists can use Google Wave I’ll be posting soon. For now, here are some resources you might find helpful if you’re trying to figure out what Google Wave is.

  • The manual: The Complete Guide to Google Wave is a wonderful, simple guide to the tool. If you don’t get all the ins and outs of the Wave (who does?) and you don’t want to sit through the whole video explainer, try this. Check out the Meet Google Wave section for some great suggested uses.
  • More: Where else would you got to learn more about Wave’s potential than Mashable? Scan over their coverage for good ideas.

And, if you’d like an invite to Google Wave and don’t have one, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Watch this space

Yes, it’s been quiet around these parts.

I’ve been temporarily sidelined by local elections and pneumonia, neither of which I can seem to put behind me even though they should be done by now.

I have lots in store, though, so don’t wander off. Fun stuff to come on Google Wave, the role of a social media editor in today’s newsrooms and lots and lots of links.

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