Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: hyperlocal

Women in Journalism: Be not afraid, for we are taking over

If you’ve ever read this blog, you know that I am anything but a downer about the future of media – in fact, I’m bonafide psyched about it. It is because of this that I ended up giving something of a pep talk/call to arms to the Pennsylvania Women’s Press Association at the Pennsylvania Press Conference this past Saturday.

I haven’t really done any extemporaneous speaking since I was last required to as part of a college honors class, but I had a lot of fun doing it and I wanted to share it here with you. Obviously, these are the prepared remarks and I deviated a little bit in real-time (h/t to Steve Buttry for giving me the idea to post it here).

It’s great to look out at this crowd and see so many women working in this business – and who seem to know what fashion was like in the 1930s.

Admittedly I haven’t been in the business as long as some of you, but journalism in the past 10 years has felt like dog years to many of us – we’re all aging seven years with every one that passes. Everything keeps changing so fast. As soon as you learn one newsroom system or social media tool or pick up the latest lingo, another has come along to take its place.

When I first graduated from college, newsrooms were already cutting back instead of hiring. For me at least, this prompted an immediate career change. Instead of being a reporter as I’d always wanted, I decided to work on the web. There were tons of jobs out there for people who knew basic html, had journalism skills and were willing to adapt.

And thank God I did, I have no idea what I’d have been doing otherwise. (Between you and me, I really wasn’t a very good reporter anyway – mostly because I hate using phones)

I recently attended a reunion for those who worked at Kent State University’s student newspaper. Of those who attended school with me, I’d estimate less than 10% are still working as journalists. Some never even started. Many have been laid off in recent years, myself included.

It was at this reunion that one of my friends, one of those former journalists, took me aside. He’d heard I’ve been teaching journalism students at Georgetown University.

He says to me, “How can you give these kids hope? There’s nothing out here for them. There aren’t enough jobs for all of us that are already journalists.”

There is some truth in there. Enrollment in journalism schools continues to rise even as more traditional journalism jobs are disappearing.

But he is wrong. Journalism isn’t dying, it’s just changing. There’s a lot of reason to hope – not just for the kids still in school, but for the rest of us too. It IS a terrifying time to be a journalist, but it is also a very exciting time to be a journalist.

While the past few years have seen cuts in traditional newsrooms, there have been new ones starting up. We have new local and hyperlocal news sites and new investigative teams at the likes of ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

We also have data geniuses and programming geniuses — all of these people we may not have recognized as journalists in years past — but they are out there working to reimagine journalism for the future. They’re making new tools to make our jobs easier – creating new ways to tell stories and, yes, make money.

Aside from all of that, this is an exciting time to be a woman in journalism.

Women are filling journalism schools faster than men. We have more women in our newsrooms than ever before – with hopefully more to rise in the ranks in the nest few years. Hell, we have a woman leading the New York Times, for crying out loud!

We also have many women among those striking out on their own to cover news the way they want.

Take Arianna Huffington. Whatever you may think of her, you have to admit she’s very smart.

In The Huffington Post, she created a booming media business that is changing the way we do journalism on the web. They found a formula that makes good journalism possible. It isn’t always elegant, but it works:

Cute cats + celebrities/ weird news = $ for reporters

And this investment in reporting paid off. The HuffPost won its first Pulitzer this year.

On a much smaller scale, there are other women making a successful go of it on their own.

Women like Tracy Record, who way back in 2005 — which is ancient history in internet years — started a personal blog about her neighborhood in West Seattle. In late 2007, Tracy quit her job as a TV news producer to work full-time for West Seattle Blog while her husband sold ads.

West Seattle Blog grew into a hyperlocal powerhouse that inspired other journalists to strike out on their own.

Tracy isn’t exactly cracking open Watergate, but she provides news that clearly matters to those who live there. With the aid of reader tips and paid freelancers, WSB covers local crime, traffic, business development – and even lost pets.

By mid-2008, the site made enough to support Tracy’s family, making it Seattle’s first self-sustaining online local news site.

All of this certainly wasn’t easy. Tracy and her family worked up to 20 hours a day for years to keep the site updated and filled with ads. She didn’t take a vacation until August 2009, when she could pay people to keep an eye on things back home.

But she did it by training her journalism skills on something she truly cared about – and it showed to her readers. Her engagement in the community – in person and online – drove readers to trust her to know what’s happening. It’s kind of old fashioned, if you think about it.

Back on this side of the country, we have Laura Amico, who runs the site Homicide Watch in Washington, D.C.

When Laura moved to DC with her husband, Chris, there wasn’t exactly a plethora of reporting jobs available. A crime reporter by trade, she was disappointed in the lack of local crime coverage. So she decided to change that.

In the fall of 2010, she launched Homicide Watch, a blog dedicated to covering every homicide in Washington D.C. — from crime to conviction. Laura sought to put a face and a story to many victims whose deaths went largely unrecorded by local media.

Using source documents, social networking and original reporting, Homicide Watch has become one of the nation’s most exhaustive resources on violent crime.

Probably more importantly, Laura’s work the family members and friends of crime victims a place to share their grief.

This spring, the site drew record page views of 20,000 page views a day.

If Laura were working within a larger news organization, she might not have gotten the resources or the time to run a project this big. By doing it on her own, with the aid of donations, grants and other sources, she was able to tackle this project her way.

And all this hard work has paid off, Laura will soon be heading to Harvard, where she was awarded a Neiman Fellowship for journalism.

These women are just two of the many out there doing news their own way – outside the traditional system. Now I’m not here to tell you that you all need to go out and start new websites or invent some new journalism tool (though it’d be cool if some of you did). What I’m saying is that so long as there are people with the will and the know-how, there will be journalism. And so long as we have women willing to step up and, if need be, go it alone – we’ll have female journalists running the newsrooms of the future.

So what can you do to help?

1. Push for more women to take on leadership roles in your newsroom. Support your female coworkers and competitors – because their successes are yours, too.

2. Speak up in news meetings, even if you aren’t an editor. Push to get your ideas heard both inside the newsroom and out in your community.

3. Don’t take no for an answer. On a panel aimed at female freelancers earlier this week in New York, a news website editor said he found male freelancers much more likely to follow up on a rejected story pitch with more pitches. Female freelancers, he said, he rarely heard from again. Don’t stand for that. You guys aren’t quitters.

4. Get out of your comfort zone and stay competitive. Do some freelancing outside of your beat area – maybe in something you wish you knew more about. Learn some basic programming. Start a blog, even if it is just to experiment.

5. Promote your expertise on social media. As women, we hesitate to sing our own praises – when we should be shouting from the rooftops to bring attention to the work we’re doing. We can’t afford to stay too quiet, lest all of those men on Twitter overpower us.

6. And finally, if you’re a veteran journalist, become a mentor to a young woman. Point her toward data journalism or beats in business and government — areas still dominated by men. Help her career develop – and you can probably learn quite a bit from one another.

If we support one another’s big thoughts and downplay our fears. If we occasionally dare to go out on a limb – maybe it won’t be such big news the next time a woman takes over a major media organization.

Recommended reading: Investigative social media, new ideas and tools

Sorry it’s been so long, but it’s been crazy busy as TBD’s preparing for the holidays and other events. This’ll be a quick one, just a few links I’ve been reading of late. Have a happy Thanksgiving, folks.

Social media roundup

  • How Investigative Journalism Is Prospering in the Age of Social Media – Great ideas from several resources gathered by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable on how to use social media in investigative reporting and newsroom projects. Includes tips on Crowdmap, Storify, Twitter crowdsourcing, data searches and more. A great post to pass on to the social media haters in your newsroom.
  • RockMelt: The User Manual– If you don’t know about Rockmelt or want to know more on how to use the new social browser, here’s a great guide from the NY Times.
  • 6 innovative uses of Tumblr by newsrooms – The big media companies are only now getting into Tumblr, but there’s a lot of possibilities out there for it.
  • Engaging Facebook fans with clever, conversational updates – Great ideas from Web Up the Newsroom for writing interesting status updates on a media outlet’s Facebook page to drive traffic to content and drive discussion online.
  • In this disturbing bit from FishbowlDC, a Washington Post editor says “crediting the original source of a scoop isn’t “a requirement or even important” because “all news originates from somewhere” and “unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work.” Hm.
  • How News Organizations Are Generating Revenue From Social Media – Another great Mashable rundown of the top ways online media is generating revenue using social media and more to hit new audiences.

On the TBD Front

Recommended reading: Industry trends and survival skills

Industry News and Ideas

  • Is there a flaw in the proposed federal shield law? This scathing rebuttal to an overwhelming support of a Federal Shield Law has definitely caused me some pause. For every organization that needs a shield law to protect sources that deserve it, others can exploit it to push through a salacious story that isn’t true. A much-needed “other side” to the discussion.
  • Reflections of a Newsosaur posits: How long can print newspapers last? Alan Mutter takes a look at the Pew study of newspaper reader demographics to extrapolate just how long the print readership might last. He says the population of print newspaper readers will drop by nearly a third within 15 years and probably be less than half the size it is today by the time 2040 rolls around. Aside from that, how long can newspapers afford to print for that shrinking audience? (He touches on that in part 2, which is linked.)
  • Former journalist Charles Pelton says media outlets are not properly leveraging their talented experts on staff into moneymaking opportunities for fear of ethical impropriety. I agree that his ideas, if handled properly, would not create issues and could create new revenue streams. His analysis is missing a very critical element: He obviously hasn’t worked at a media outlet in the age of mass layoffs. Many papers, in particular, have gotten rid of their on-staff experts and whoever is still left behind are so over worked already they could never take on this extra workload. Let’s mail this back ten years, eh?
  • Michelle McLellan at the Knight Digital Media Center is compiling a listing of online-only local news sites, from the corporate hyperlocal networks to independent local sites and blogs. She’s missing quite a few places, but watch this space to see what else pops up.

Surviving

  • The Austin Statesman’s social media editor shares advice on creating fast, easy niche products from existing content. What’s your interest area? Your beat, your section or your newspaper doesn’t have to be the end-all, be-all for what interest your readers – but you can be the trusted aggregator for niche news if you want to be.
  • The OJR’s Robert Niles always has great tips for the reporter looking to build a life outside a newsroom. Here he talks about building a better online presence by shifting your focus from writing stories to creating assets.  This means serving as your own archive and brand manager, building a source base and connecting with readers outside your day-to-day reporting.

Do we miss the point of “hyperlocal”?

I think every medium and metro-sized newspaper has had this conversation in the past few years:

Editor #1: People aren’t going to our website to read state and national stories. It’s all the fault of that darn CNN and such.

Editor #2: Well, maybe so, but we’ve still got Community X.  They don’t do news there.

Editor #1: Maybe we’ll build a whole website just based on news from Community X! It’ll be awesome! Yeah, we’ll get, what do they call it?

Editor #2: Hyperlocal.

Editor #1: Right.

And so the hyperlocal news sites were born across the country. Some featured original reporting by staff, others were built on the work of citizen journalists. Some have already failed as others have taken on a life of their own.

When the Washington Post – the giant of the newspaper web world – decided to create a “hyperlocal” site based on Loudon County, Va., it was a big deal. Of course, their idea of hyperlocal was a group of loosely-connected communities instead of the communities themselves – but they’re the WaPo, if they want to call it hyperlocal, they can. Two years later, the  WaPo announces its closure of LoudounExtra. Sure, the post says, they’ll still COVER the area, but it won’t have its own website anymore.

About a year ago, the Wall Street Journal saw this coming, charging that the WaPo didn’t understand what it meant to be hyperlocal in the first place. I’m inclined to agree. What I see from a lot of big news outlets is a page collecting their stories on the area and little more – that isn’t hyperlocal coverage – it’s a hyperlocal aggregate feed.

What makes a good hyperlocal site isn’t just collecting a bunch of stuff about that area and throwing it up on a web page – it’s about understanding the community on a ground level. It helps to live there, but merely getting out there and getting to know people is a start. From what the WSJ post said, the staff at LoudonExtra wasn’t very invested in the area:

To penetrate those communities requires a more dedicated effort than the LoudounExtra.com team was putting forth. [The manager of the project] acknowledged he spent too much time talking to other newspaper publishers about the hyperlocal strategy and too little time introducing his team and the site to Loudoun County.

Whether that is ultimately why the site didn’t get enough traction to remain independent is a leap I won’t take – but it certainly would make sense. The WaPo, while it does serve a local audience in addition to its wide national base, may not be the experts at knowing what’s going on in Middleburg, Va. Who does? People on the ground in Middleburg, that’s who.

The best local-local writers are invested at a micro level. For instance, Mission Local, a neighborhood news site created through a hyperlocal news project out of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Their site has news important to those living in the area – stories of all sorts, a police blotter, maps. If you check out their About page, you see that the publication is based in the Mission District and many of the writers are residents there.

Another great example, the West Seattle Blog, is a husband-and-wife team focused on a very specific part of a larger city in which they live. I had the opportunity to meet them and hear about their operation when I was a fellow at the Knight Digital Media Center in March. They both have backgrounds in journalism and took that expertise to cover their own neighborhood. As a result – they regularly publish what’s going on before their local metro.

Their crime page keeps a running tally from scanners and crime reports from residents. They have community-level announcements that come in from submissions. In addition to their own writing and reporting, they also have a selection of news and opinion from other bloggers in their area. All in all, they have a lot of content – all local (or hyperlocal!).

Even if there isn’t a person physically on the ground in the neighborhood, it takes knowing what people want to see from their area and how specific they may want it to be. “Drilled down” news can be done at a larger level – and it has value, if this week’s purchase of  “microlocal” network EveryBlock by MSNBC is any indication.

As Paid Content  said about the sale, EveryBlock had more value than LoudonExtra simply because of its focus on microcosms of communities – not just clumping a whole county together and calling it a community. The Dupont Circle page in EveryBlock is a great example. It has crime report maps, police calls, blog posts and more from a very specific area – pretty useful stuff if you live there – and most of it available from public information.

So the moral of the story is – don’t judge the future of “hyperlocal” news from the WaPo’s failed experiment. There’s gold in them there hills – but we have to actually work at making it accessible and useful.

* Eds Note: For the sake of disclosure, my current paper has a couple incarnations of these products. Cincinnati.Com has more than 100 community-level aggregate sites, including a few with their own discussion forums (and all featuring some pretty nifty maps if you ever want to check them out).

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén & Hosted by Pressable