Monthly Archives: October 2007

I haven’t had time to follow the news of the fires in my native Southern California as closely as I would like, but it’s a major story.

On the time scale, I need to rush through this post, so just some random things.

First, I found this list of structures destroyed on SignOnSanDiego.com and wondered why it wasn’t a map. So in about five minutes, I made one: San Diego Fires Map.

Tools used: A Google Spreadsheet; This batch geocoder; This map generation wizard. These tools are pretty much self-explanatory.

My friends at SignOnSanDiego.com, LATimes.com and VenturaCountyStar.com are all doing a great job. Each site has their strengths. I’m particularly impressed with the 10K + views some of Ventura’s videos have received.

I was going to comment on why the newspaper sites weren’t blowing out their home page to fire-only coverage, like CBS 8 in SanDiego did, but within the past 15 minutes, SOSD has done just that.

For ongoing coverage of the media coverage, check out Lost Remote. Continue reading →

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Yesterday at the closing panel of the Online News Association conference, Anil Dash and Josh Cohn of Google talked about the newspaper industry’s failure to embrace change.

Anil made this astute observation, “Journalism is the culture of infallibility.”

Josh said, “The fear of failure can stall innovation.”

Recently, the online-news e-mail discussion list sprang back to vibrancy after years of near dormancy. Some of us made the public observation that, “wow, there hasn’t been this much activity on online-news in nearly a decade.”

And this prompted the question, “so what have we accomplished in the last ten years.”

It’s easy to conclude, not much.

Sure, there are newspaper companies out there who have tried many interesting things, and some ideas have helped grow both audience and revenue.

But there are two areas of concern. On one hand, those innovations remain relatively isolated instead of widespread, and second, it’s still legitimate to ask, “Where’s the break-through?”

Even the most innovative newspaper companies can’t point to a product or project that is such a huge success it would be stupid for other newspapers not to try it.

As I’ve said before, game-changing ideas may not be required. We can do a lot with a little, but I can also look back at a decade or so of insider experience and see how entrepreneurial thinking is often resisted by otherwise forward-looking people.

There are online leaders who think every project requires a business plan, or a clear path to revenue or some other guarantee of success.

But true innovation doesn’t require a “can’t miss” plan.

Most ideas fail. Entrepreneurs know this, and realize that the true path to success is often strewn with mistakes big and small, many changes in direction and few missed opportunities.

On the other hand, even if you’re the most entrepreneurial person running an online operation, if there isn’t an understanding of innovation at all levels of the organization, it’s very hard to propose ideas that are unproven or have no obvious return on investment.

Seat-of-the-pants ideas lack gravitas and therefore rarely get prioritized or funded, even if the necessary expenditure is $100 and a day’s worth of staff time.

Too many “let’s try this” ideas get strangled by the minutia of metrics and measurements.

There’s a tendency to see the forest and not the trees in strategic planning sessions. We’re so busy concentrating on thinking big, that we miss the small-ball opportunities. And even if the idea has the potential to produce a home run, we fail to take the big swing because we think the circumstances aren’t perfectly aligned.

I’ve been guilty of this myself.

Somehow, we need to get around the culture of infallibility and find ways to move faster and do more.

If true innovation means a willingness to risk failure, then we’ll produce more mistakes than successes, which means if we want to guarantee the survival of this industry, we better get busy. We need big ideas. We need small ideas. We need to try all we can, then change, discard or embrace them as required. Continue reading →

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In an e-mail to Poynter’s Online-News list, Philip Meyer alerts us this post on objectivity in journalism.

Meyer makes the valid points:

• In the pre-digital age, information was scarce, so reporters were fact gathers and objectivity was based on “getting both sides.” This is an attempt to make objectivity a result, not a process.
• Today, information is abundant and easy to get, so what we need are subject matter experts who can distill information and provide an informed, objective analysis of the facts. This is a methodology, like science.

Meyer:

In the age of the Internet, mere transmission no longer adds value to information. The way to add value to the surplus of data is to process it to help the reader select it and make sense of it. That requires interpretation, and interpretation requires objectivity in the scientific sense. I call this objectivity of method as opposed to the he-said/she-said objectivity of result. In other words, journalists should act more like scientists: collect information, look for patterns, construct a theory, and then provide an objective test of the theory. Objectivity in this sense means asking a question of the data in a way that will protect you from being fooled by the answer.

Journalism, like science, is tentative in its conclusions. It should be as transparent as science, leaving a paper trail of data that other investigators can retrace and arrive at the same or better conclusions.

To me, it’s clear that journalism needs to evolve rapidly into a profession that values subject matter expertise over generalization. The real value a journalist can deliver to a reader is being fully immersed in the subjects he or she writes about, and that isn’t something the average beat reporter really does. If you’re a crime reporter, for example, you should really be an expert in police practices and procedures and relevant law, theory and application. If you cover city hall, you should know everything there is to know about municipal governance. And rather than cozy up to sources to get stories, possess the expertise to get behind the story so that sources diss you at their own peril (general beat reporters tend to overly rely on getting along with sources, which tends to warp their ability to remain detached from the subject matter). Continue reading →

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