Tag Archives: Reinventing Journalism

Ten things journalists can do to reinvent journalism, the new list

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For no particular reason, I found myself looking at Google Analytics and decided to open the calendar all the way back to 2007.

I discovered that the most popular post I’ve written in that time (and probably since I started blogging in 2002) is “Ten Things Journalists Can Do to Reinvent Journalism,” published Feb. 16, 2008. It’s been viewed more than 40,000 times.  If I go back month-by-month since 2008, it is consistently among the top 10 posts for each month.

So, I just re-read it, and I found, not surprising, given nearly four more years of experience, I don’t agree with everything it says.

The first two points could be summed up as “don’t treat journalism as an ego feed.” Setting aside for a moment that I’m the last one who should lecture anybody on ego, that overall point is something I still agree with.  The reader needs to come before your own journalistic pride.  The point I would dispute is the importance of being first with a story. I used to think readers didn’t care about who is first with a story. Since starting The Batavian, I’ve learned that readers very much pay attention to consistently is first with stories and they award points to news organizations that get the scoops.  When I was a print reporter, no readers ever seemed to care about such matters, but for online news, it’s a critical bonus.

There are some points, of course, I still agree with, and there are items that I would state differently, which leads to  a new list of “Ten Things Journalists Can Do to Reinvent Journalism.”

  1. Start your own online news site. You’re not going to make dent in the universe working for a newspaper company, or any chain news organization. Get out now. Pursue your own passion and your own dream, stick to it, and you will accomplish something that matters.
  2. Connect to the community you serve, whether it’s geographic or focused around an interest. Be passionate about that community and do your best to meet all of its informational needs. Make sure your site is indisputably essential to the community you serve. Readers trust news organizations that look out for their interests.  Be that kind of news organization.
  3. Cover the big and the small. Focus on people, not government actions and process (though, obviously, this can’t be ignored).  A continuous stream of news will include stories about dead deer, city council hi jinx, cows in the roadway, misappropriation of funds, great-grandma’s 100th birthday, etc. Focus on people more than politics.
  4. Be a real person. Your byline matters. You will be a more trusted source if people have some sense of who you are. You don’t need to open up every aspect of your life to public disclosure, but sharing selective details helps people connect with you and makes them more interested in what you report.
  5. Publish what you know when you know it and let stories unfold incrementally. This also brings your readers into the process, adding information, providing new tips, correcting errors.
  6. Be absolutely ethical in how you handle information.  Be as truthful and accurate as humanly possible. Part of the new information ethics, however, is also about correcting others errors where you find them.  Don’t let misinformation spread, because it spreads too quickly these days.
  7. Be transparent. Be transparent about who you are and what you believe. Be transparent about your news process. Truth is transparent. Always be truthful.
  8. Forget old-school objectivity. For readers to connect with you, they need to see your passion. Let readers in on what you care about.  It’s impossible to report and write a truly objective story anyway, so be transparent about your point of view.
  9. Give the readers what they want. Feedback is very important. Seek it out and pay attention to it and provide the kind of coverage readers seem to enjoy.
  10. Don’t give the readers what they want. Sometimes, you need to give them a little castor oil along with the candy and ice cream. At the end of the day, you’re not truly carrying about the community if you’re not also providing the kind of truthful coverage that might make some people uncomfortable.

The tale of two stories, one engaging, one not

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Which of these stories would you rather read?

After Fleeing Psychiatric Unit, Ex-Officer Is Killed in a Gunfight With Police

Carrying two handguns and a Bible, a retired city police officer was killed in a gunfight early Tuesday on a residential street in Staten Island by former colleagues who returned his fire, the authorities said.

When the shooting ended, the officer, Jason Aiello, 36, was slumped at the wheel of a cousin’s truck on the street in front of his home in the Rosebank neighborhood, with his wife, Rachel, sitting next to him, officials said. His three young children were in another family car across the street.

Or:

Unhinged ex-sergeant holding bible and gun is slain by cops in front of family

Suspected of setting up his best friend for a mob hit, a retired NYPD sergeant armed with a gun and a Bible went berserk Tuesday before cops killed him in front of his wife and kids.

The death of Jason Aiello in a blizzard of two dozen bullets capped a dramatic chain of events that began with a “crazed” visit to FBI headquarters and ended with his escape from a Staten Island psych ward.

The 36-year-old father of three apparently suffered an epic mental meltdown in which he spouted Scripture, tried to abduct his pajama-clad kids and then fired on police, authorities said. He fired eight shots; cops fired 19.

Both stories are factual an unbiased. One is just much easier and engaging to read. The first is the New York Times, the second, the Daily News. While the Daily News posted a decline in the latest Fas-Fax, it had been a steady climber prior to that. The Times has been on a down hill slide for some time.

Not all of the readership loss of newspapers can be blamed on the Internet (especially considering that the declines started before there was a commercial Web). Isn’t it fair to ask that some of the problem might be the journalism itself?

Doug Fisher covers similar territory this morning.

Ventura reporter’s letter tells the story better than traditional print writing

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The Ventura County Star‘s Scott Hadly is reporting from Iraq.  I haven’t been following his coverage, but I met none of it matches the intimacy and immediacy of this letter he wrote to a fellow reporter.

In one short letter, I got a better idea of what’s going on in Iraq from 1,000 New York Times stories.

This is how you write for the modern reader.  Journalists need to learn the lesson.

I’m not saying profanity is required, but if you’re writing about something like what Scott went through and some profanity doesn’t at least cross your mind, then you’re probably not putting enough of yourself into the story.

FWIW: I don’t know Scott. He joined the staff after I left Ventura.

The NYT’s blogging story reaches for sensation where there isn’t any

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Yesterday, I thought about doing a piece on the NYT’s link-bait story on the stresses of blogging, but I thought … “I’m busy today. Why bother?” I knew bloggers would be all over it, and of course they are.

But just now, I read the following quote on Romenesko and it gets me fired up anew. My take on the story is that it demonstrates clearly where big-time Journalism has gone astray, and the quote from Larry Dignan confirms it:

I had doubts about the premise. Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders?

Here’s the thing — the Times could have had a very interesting story about big-name bloggers, and aspiring big-time bloggers, and what some of them go through to achieve and maintain success. The Times could have done that with no sensationalism, no heart attacks, no news peg. The story could have just been interesting and informative. That’s news, too.

Instead, the Times tries desperately to pin two deaths to blogging, but then knowing it has over-reached, still tries to weasel out of it.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

That’s not serious journalism. That’s weasel-word journalism. When you have to write a paragraph apologizing for the angle you’re taking on the story, there is something ethically wrong with your approach to the story.

The poorly chosen angle reminds me of NYT’s botched McCain coverage a few weeks back.

It’s shoddy journalism like this that drives people away from newspapers and reminds them of why they distrust us, why they hate us.

Here and now, I’m nominating Matt Richtel and his editors for a Dart.

Schonfeld on making the switch from print journalism to blogging

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I point to TechCrunch all the time — both in this blog and in my public presentations — as an example of a journalistic blog.

It is a blog that breaks news, real news, important news. It is also a blog that is full of opinion. It is also a blog that is winning in the marketplace of readers and revenue.

TechCrunch represents both the present and the future of online journalism, of a reinvented journalism.

Today, Erick Schonfeld, a respected and serious journalist who joined TechCrunch six months ago after his previous employer, the magazine Business 2.0, went out of business, blogs about blogging for TechCrunch.

Working at TechCrunch is a completely different experience. For one thing, I no longer write long-form, narrative journalism. There is not much time for story-telling (except for weekend posts like this one). It is mostly breaking news, reporting facts and providing analysis. At TechCrunch, I am completely focused on blogging, 24/7. With a few exceptions, no single post is very difficult to write (unlike an in-depth magazine article that can require 50 interviews and weeks of travel, for instance). But taken as a whole, blogging is actually harder. That is because the blogging never stops. Just ask my wife and kids, who now mock me by repeating back my new mantra: “I’m almost done, just one more post.”

TechCrunch succeeds because its bloggers do very good journalism — gathering lots of stories, getting them online quickly (if not first), and because its bloggers know what the hell they’re talking about, their commentary is respected.

There is always something else to write about, and not enough time to cover it. But we live or die by how fast we can post after a story breaks, if we can’t break it ourselves. We hardly have time to proofread our posts, as anyone who’s come across one of the frequent typos in TechCrunch knows. Luckily, our readers love to point out our mistakes in comments. They are our copy editors and fact checkers. (We love you guys). Our philosophy is that it is better to get 70 percent of a story up fast and get the basic facts right than to wait another hour (or a day) to get the remaining 30 percent. We can always update the post or do another one as new information comes in. More often than not, putting up partial information is what leads us to the truth—a source contacts us with more details or adds them directly into comments.

Every traditional journalist who reads this post just cringed. I expect angry comments. But this is why traditional journalism is failing — declining readership, declining revenue, declining trust — and blogs are succeeding.

Here’s something from Mindy McAdams:

What some newsrooms (e.g., The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have done is turn the workflow around — in a way that makes sense when the number of subscribers to the print product is decreasing and the number of online visitors is increasing: Make “Web first” the rule, in all cases. Produce for online, write for online, shoot for online, design for online.

If you’re going to produce for online first, start by thinking and acting like a blogger. If you don’t know how to do that, start following TechCrunch. You’ll learn.

Newspapers and the Big Band era: A historical comparison

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As newspapers struggle through a recession at a time of media tumult, Stowe Boyd writes:

The Big Band era is coming to an end, and while some oldsters are going to keep on listening to Count Basie and Duke Ellington, most of us are moving on to rock and roll. Many of the players will find new gigs, experiment with new musical forms, but some won’t. Some will retire, open bars, or find something else to do. Zell and Tierney may have to take their losses and find something else to invest in. David Carr may have to start blogging for the Huffington Post, or run for office.

His comparison with the death of the Big Band era is more apt than he states.

You could say Big Bands were killed by rock and roll, but that would really miss the point (and be at least a decade off the mark). Big Bands were killed as much as anything by hubris, greed and technological efficiency, not to mention changes in society’s musical taste and needs.

The musicians strike of the 1940s opened the door to smaller combos filled with non-union musicians. Not only where these combos more nimble, they were playing new kinds of music (such as country and rhythm and blues), driven by better technology for amplifying their music. By the time the strike ended in 1944, the new musical forms had not yet gained in popular demand, but the trajectory was set. Hank Williams would break through in 1947. Louis Jordan dominated R&B charts from the early 1940s through the end of the decade, setting the stage for the birth of Rock and Roll.

Of course, the oldsters who clung to the golden era of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman saw no value in hick or race music. To them, it was all a fad whose time would pass. These wild sounds weren’t polished or sophisticated. This wasn’t quality music. The public would return to its senses and soon demand those big band sounds again. Sort of sounds like journalists attitudes toward bloggers, doesn’t it? (Interestingly, Goodman made a fine switch to small combo music, and he recorded some of the first jazz to feature lead guitar, employing the pioneer Charlie Christian).

Note that music didn’t die with the Big Bands, nor did it really diminish in quality. It fact, some of the greatest music of human history was created in the second half of the 20th Century. The music that came after was, to the discerning ear, no better nor worse than the stuff gathering dust on scratchy 78s. It was just different.

The same will be said of journalism fifty years hence.

For old-time sake, here’s Big Band music at its best: Goodman’s band playing the Louis Prima-penned, “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

UPDATE: Ur, um, is this video really “Sing, Sing, Sing”?  Nobody’s called me on it, but upon reflection — the “Sing, Sing, Sing” melody is not any part of this performance.  What it does have is elements of “Christopher Columbus,”  which was incorporated into Goodman’s version of “Sing, Sing, Sing.”  But “Sing, Sing, Sing” was eight (studio version) to 12 minutes long (the famous “Live at Carnegie Hall” performance, which is without a doubt the single greatest achievement of recorded music history.  At least, I say so.  More here.

(Boyd link via Jack Lail)

There is no transition for newspapers, just constant, never ending change

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Long, thoughtful, thought-provoking piece from Zac Echola. It’s a must read for any journalist with any doubt that the game has changed radically and forever. This isn’t a “transition period” for newspapers. It’s a whole new game.

See, I’m kind of tired of people talking about how newspapers are going through a “transition.” As in, “we just need to get through this transition.”

Transitions have beginnings, middles and ends. Transitions eventually stop and you get a chance to take a breath and say, “cool, we survived.”

This is no transition, because the changing will never stop. This is no transition because this is a radically different world from the one of mass-produced packages dumped on people’s door steps. The fact that there is still news on paper may be a mere echo of history.

It’s hard to believe news on paper will ever die. It’s also hard to believe news on paper will survive.

We just don’t know, but even if print survives, it will only survive because people in our news organizations become adapt at adjusting to constant change.

The print business, if it survives, will never stop feeling the increased pressure of competition, changing lifestyles and evolving audience expectations.

Print revenue is not likely to ever grow again. Digital revenue, at least, has no known ceiling.

If we expect print to survive, then we need to keep those products going while adjusting to change. But we also need to make digital a higher priority, because that’s the once chance we have to grow revenue and save, if not create, jobs.
Part of that adjustment is recognizing that digital media is fundamentally and radically different from packaged goods media. It calls for a different kind of journalism, and a different mindset from journalists.

Here’s the hard part: For as long as it survives, your print product is largely fine. It could maybe use a nip and tuck, but the people who continue to get the print product like what you do and don’t want you to change.

Online, that’s a whole different story. You’ve got to be different, and radically so. You need to write differently, file your copy at different times, make sure to provide appropriate links, include some video or extra photos, make a map or two, respond to reader comments (correcting, amplifying or scolding), participate in blogs related to your coverage area, and you simply must be smarter and better informed about what you cover if you want to retain the respect of your readers.

The hard part is, you must do all this and keep your more traditional print product going in an era of diminishing resources.

I don’t have an easy answer, except “just do it.” It’s really up to each individual to figure out how to reconfigure his or her job to meet the demands of both the print and the online audience. The responsibility for change doesn’t rest solely in the publisher’s office. It’s also the responsibility of every reporter, editor and clerk.

I think it can be done. I see people doing it everyday. My concern is not enough journalists are even trying.

The main point is — stop calling it a transition. If there was a transition, the inflection point passed four or five years ago. We can’t keep calling it a transition hoping someday soon all this turbulance will end. It won’t. The fundamentals of the media business are altered radically and forever.

Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond shovelware

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There’s an old saying in computers — I first heard when I was in the Air Force 26 years ago — “crap in, crap out.”

In other words, if you feed a computer gibberish, that’s all you’re going to get back.

Until artificial intelligence really becomes something, CICO will be true.

The same could be said of blogging.

Blogging is only as good as you make it.

There’s a lot of bad bloggers out there. There are bloggers who don’t really have anything to say, but say it anyway. There are bloggers who are more noise than substance, and some how manage to get more attention than they deserve. And there are bloggers who are just plain dumb.

Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.

Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.

Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.

Crap in, crap out. You only get out of blogging what you put into Word Press, Blogger or Moveable Type.

Naive as it might be, I haven’t given up hope. I believe journalists can become good bloggers.
Learning to blog really takes turning one simple switch in your head: This isn’t print journalism.

It isn’t the journalism of your cranky old city editor or your sainted j-school prof. Neither of those old farts would approve of blogging in any form, even though blogging is now part of the legitimate media mix.

A lot of people like to say, “a blog is just a tool.” By that, they mean blogging software is just technology for a web-centric content management system.

While there’s some truth to that, the statement also sells blogging short. Blogging is much more than that.

Blogging is a mindset. It’s a way of approaching media communications that is different from traditional media.

Traditional media is really mass media. In mass media, the voice of the reporter is authoritative. It’s one voice speaking to many people, so there isn’t much room for nuance or alternative view points. In fact, you better make sure both the left and the right, the creationist and the evolutionists, the global warmers and the SUV drivers, get heard. You better make sure you get the story right and balanced and present it in a way that says, “this is definitive,” even if it’s not.

That’s why objectivity has been such a strong touch point for journalists over the past hundred years or so. Generally, especially in print, you get one chance to get it right, and your communicating with a blob of an audience, so you better check out whether your mother loves you.

On the web, audiences are more fragmented. People are using personal devices to communicate.

That means, what works best is the conversational voice, a personal point of view, and a mindset that says, “I’m sharing,” rather than, “I’m reporting.”

So-called objectivity is great for print, not so much online. Some snarkiness and observational prose is appropriate online in a way that is not necessarily so in print. In part, because online, our audience can talk back. We want to encourage that.

That’s not to say in print, or even online, there isn’t a place for shoe-leather reporting and traditional modes of storytelling. There is still a place for all the things the blustering managing editors value, because it is still important. It’s important for society and for civic engagement. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do journalism these days.

Too many publishers, or more to the point, the editors and reporters they employ, still see online as just another place to shovel the same journalism they’re doing in print or in broadcast.

Online is different, and blogging is the key that unlocks the kingdom of how online is different. If you can get blogging, you can get online.

It would help newspapers.com tremendously if more reporters and editors would not only start blogging, but learn to do it well.

It’s a fact, blogs help grow audience. Blogs, however, can also help us produce online products that are different from our print product, giving consumers more choices and maybe, just maybe, a reason to make a habit of both print and online.

I say, it’s worth a try, cause the way we’re doing things right now ain’t working out so well.

In case it’s not obvious: There are lots of different kinds of blogging. This post might be an example essay blogging (if I were to be that pompous about it). There’s also link blogging, and commentary blogging, and news blogging. The kind of blogging a journalist might do depends on the situation, the purpose and the goals. The purpose of this post is merely to say — get over your objections to blogging and start exploring how you can use it in your newsroom to grow readership.

For a related post, see Ryan Sholin’s list of example blogs. (And yes, it’s no coincidence the Ryan and I — we work together — are posting nearly simultaneously along such parallel lines. GateHouse Media readers, are you paying attention?)

Some related links from me and elsewhere:

Journalists should pay attention to successful blogs to understand web journalism

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Michael Arrington started TechCrunch in June, 2005. It’s now the second most popular blog in the world. According to Compete.com, it is read by at least 900,ooo people per month, but that wouldn’t include the reported 500,000 RSS feed subscribers.

As TechCrunch has risen, Business 2.0 has gone out of business, while CNet and Ziff-Davis have hit financial hard times.

Arrington, when asked about blogs taking page views away from traditional news media, had this to say on Charlie Rose the other night:

It’s a very raw, very quick form of journalism. It’s not editing, it’s not balanced, it’s opinionated. A lot of people really want that.

I read TechCrunch everyday. The blog, now a group blog, breaks a lot of tech news. But every news worthy item contains what some might call opinion. I call it informed insight. Arrington and his team know what the hell they’re talking about and I value and trust their point of view.

TechCrunch has become popular because it is credible. It’s credible to its readers because over time they’ve learned that TechCrunch gets right more than it gets wrong, and it’s never proven itself untruthful, and when they’ve made mistakes, they’ve corrected them quickly. TechCrunch readers don’t look for fair and balanced. They look for relevance and understanding.

Before TechCrunch became a go-to blog for tech news, it had no brand. Arrington, who was pretty much an unknown outside of small circle of Silicon Valley insiders before starting the blog, made it credible; he made it a brand.

The next time some journalist talks about how important their newspaper brand is, think about TechCrunch, which demonstrates that brand isn’t about what you’ve done over the past 100 years — it’s about what you’re doing today.

While talking about journalism and blogging, I need to quote this Romenesko post, because it’s lingered in my mind for several days:

Many bloggers see Josh Marshall‘s Polk Award as vindication of their enterprise, writes Noam Cohen — “that anyone can assume the mantle of reporting on the pressing issues affecting the nation and the world, with the imprimatur of a mainstream media outlet or not.” Marshall says of bloggers: “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”

Many times I’ve written about the need for journalists to blog because I think journalists need to get away from — at least online — from just repurposing what they do in print into the new kind of web journalism.

Web journalism is more raw, more conversational and makes immediacy and relevance more important than crafting the perfect, complete package.

Previously: Video can’t win on production quality alone (because of Chris Anderson’s quote about relevance vs. quality).

Zogby poll also suggests journalism needs to be reinvented

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I’ve written quite a bit recently about the need to reinvent journalism. Not everybody believes its necessary. I still say, we should listen to our readers more and less to other journalists and our sources.

Here’s more fuel to the fire:

Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news, a new We Media/Zogby Interactive poll shows.

The survey also found that while most Americans (70%) think journalism is important to the quality of life in their communities, two thirds (64%) are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in their communities.

The Zogby survey also said newspaper readership (by that, I think they mean the print edition) is down significantly. While there may be some truth in that, it’s important to remember the poll is skewed because it was strictly an online survey. That doesn’t change, of coure, that a large percentage of Americans are dissatisfied with the way journalists today practice journalism.

Previously: