Content Part III

At work last night, I came across a story that got me thinking: a national story about Earth Hour. We’d covered Earth Hour like crazy in the week leading up to it and it was a given it would have to go in the paper.

In Canada goes dark for Earth Hour, the reporter quoted from the official Earth Hour Facebook site, a blogger in Ottawa, a blogger in Halifax, a person who attended an Earth Hour event in Toronto, an Ontario electricity spokesperson, the Earth Hour website, a Canadian Tire store’s website, an online activity list for a school in Alberta and a woman named Evelyn.

So of nine sources quoted in the story (an impressive number on the surface), two were from apparent interviews and seven were from online research.

My opinion on this is just my own opinion — other editors and reporters obviously feel differently — but to me, this is bad reporting, for two reasons.

1. It’s lazy. Instead of doing the legwork and setting up interviews, the reporter surfs the Internet. Quoting from blogs and websites and Facebook pages sometimes has its place, but to build an article mainly around that is lazy. Interviews are two-way streets, with follow-up questions and interaction, and are a much better way to collect information.
2. It’s dangerous. If we as journalists are just quoting from websites and blogs, what in the world do we have to offer that websites and blogs don’t offer? Why don’t we just make a bunch of links for our readers and abandon ship?

(A note: the version that ran in our paper, with a photo from Ottawa, was shortened, partly for space reasons.)

Now, the Internet is no doubt an amazing tool for journalists (I find it so hard to imagine/remember what it was like when I didn’t have a Google query at my fingertips for any question). It provides so many more tools for finding sources and researching issues. But should it become a substitution for interview-based reporting?

My answer to that is no. A vehement no. And it goes back to the argument I made in the Content Content Content post: The most valuable thing news organizations have to offer is the original reporting, the information you can’t get anywhere else.

Maybe you could make the argument that news organizations could provide a role in writing stories based on Internet research because the reporter is still doing the valuable job of spending the time browsing the sites and condensing the information down to a 500-word story. But it is still just a regurgitation of information that is already out there and in my opinion, our time should be better spent bringing new information to the table.

Content (part II)

Further to yesterday’s post:

Beatblogging.org also wrote about Gazette Communication yesterday and today posted a Q&A with Steve Buttry. He talks about how he doesn’t know if the revenue side is undergoing the same radical transformation as the content production side. He also gives a bit more information about what the (former) reporters will be doing: “We are separating our content operation entirely from our product operation. Our reporters will be blogging, but they are going to be multitasking entrepreneurial journalists.”

And it’s going fast. April 6 is the target date for the transformation. There will be a lot of news organizations watching.

Content content content

In a post at the Knight Digital Media Centre (also posted at the Newspaper Project), Steve Buttry writes about how News businesses must think about content, not just products, to ensure their survival.

The most valuable thing news organizations have to offer hasn’t changed, even though all the bells and whistles have. The most valuable thing they offer is the original reporting, the information you can’t get anywhere else. On top of that comes the commentary and analysis, but you can’t have that without the out-on-the-ground reporting.

Some organizations that are making the belated push to go online are focusing more on all the gadgets and nifty features they can now use, and taking resources away from the newsroom to do this. They’re focusing on trying to make the Internet fit into their organizational structure instead of adapting the structure to the web.

The way Buttry and Gazette Communications are going about it is smarter. He quotes Mark Briggs quoting Tom Peters quoting Visa founder Dee Hock (that’s a lot of quoting!): “The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” The quote continues (just Buttry quoting Briggs quoting Peters here): “Every enterprise (and every individual) needs a formal … Forgetting Strategy. We must be as forceful and systematic about identifying and then dumping yesterday’s baggage as we are about acquiring new baggage.”

Then Buttry describes his forgetting strategy:

So I spelled out the forgetting strategy for our staff, listing some time-honored terms and concepts in any newsroom (starting with the word “newsroom”): reporters, editors, photographers, columnists, deadlines, story lengths, space, gatekeeper, story selection … This had to start with me forgetting and forgoing my title of editor.

Buttry chooses the term “conductor” instead. And goes on to explain how the news will be gathered and disemminated, through “stories, yes, but also bulletins, updates, tweets, liveblogs, photographs, videos, multimedia, graphics, source documents, databases, links and whatever other form is appropriate.”

This is the way news organizations have to start to think.

J-source

The Canadian Journalism Project (J-source.ca) is a handy place for news specific to our dear northern country.

It’s generally a more optimistic place to go, which contributed to me being a bit cynical when I saw this post: Good News in Bad Times. I thought, they must really be stretching to talk about good news these days.

But they’re not. The post goes through the Canadian-specific “upsides” to the generally bad news out there.

• Commercial radio: revenues steady through 2008
• Magazines: mass circulation publications might be suffering, but some targeting magazines are actually booming
• Newspapers: community weeklies still doing well; many dailies still profitable (but tied to the sinking albatross of their debt-laden parent companies)
• Television: specialty channels doing well
• Canwest’s woes: going into bankruptcy and splitting the company could be good for journalism — “If bankruptcy eliminated a whack of long-term debt from Canwest properties, the newspapers and television stations would be making money.”

Today’s news (and it’s featured on J-source too) is the CBC bloodbath (800 layoffs). Not unexpected news. But not good news.

From print to screen

At The Guardian, Roy Greenslade writes about how news organizations and journalists have to get with the program.

This thought of his is a worry to me, too.

I have long argued that we will eventually move from print to screen. What worries me, however, is that the transformation is being threatened by the immediate economic crisis. I fear that the death of print products will lead to the demise of the related online platforms too.

A corollory to that: As print products panic in the face of this economic crisis, they’re throwing resources at the Internet, but still without a PLAN on how to do it successfully and profitably. Doing it haphazardly will only hurt them in the long run.

Newspaper Death Watch

I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked from my first project: Sharing the websites I like to visit regularly. So here’s another instalment.

Newspaper Death Watch is what it says it is — a chronicle of newspapers dead and dying. It just celebrated its second birthday yesterday (March 23) but it’s been a jam-packed two years.

For anyone interested in a chronicle of the woes of the newspaper industry (focused on the U.S.), this site has already done a lot of your research for you. Generally there’s one long post Monday-Friday but when there’s news breaking on the closure of a paper, there will usually be a post on Newspaper Death Watch. Plus there’s the ever-so-encouraging Layoff Log. And R.I.P. bar.

Occasionally, Canada’s problems get a nod. It’s important to pay attention to what’s going on the States, though, because I think they’re a step ahead on the imploding-newspaper scale. For a lot of papers down there, it’s too late. But for others (like my own) it’s not too late yet and if there’s lessons to be learned, we should be learning them. More on that later.

A media mea culpa

It will be very interesting, in a few years, when some academic goes back and does an in-depth study on what the media was reporting, and when, about the financial crisis.

It’s obvious that mainstream media didn’t see the crisis coming. Toronto Star business reporter David Olive published his own mea culpa yesterday (March 22) and we’ve all watched Jon Stewart rake Jim Cramer over the coals (right?).

So mainstream missed the boat. What about the blogosphere and its myriad voices? Bloggers and online-only news sites are supposed to provide a new diversity to reporting. Did they? I’m pretty sure they did, but the real quesiton is, how many people managed to save their savings because they were following a blogger or reporter who got things right (or who reported on an analyst or expert who got things right) before the rest of us caught on.

The power of online video

Videos related to this blog are now over on the sidebar, thanks to vodpod!

I added two videos to start with. One of them is a straightforward talk given by Jay Rosen about the difference between old media and new media. He makes the point that it used to be a top-down distribution system and now it’s an intertwined, interactive system.

The other video is a news clip about the becoming-legendary confrontation between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week (March 12). I couldn’t actually link to the video on The Comedy Network site, but that’s where you should go to watch the whole thing, if you haven’t already.

It’s a wonderful, wonderful look at great interviewing skill. And an excellent commentary on the news media’s hand in the whole financial mess we got ourselves into. Why weren’t we asking those tough questions a year ago?

Watching the interview made me think about one of the pitfalls journalism has fallen into over the last few decades  — too often we take what people tell us at face value (like Jim Cramer says he did, but now realizes he was lied to, to his face, by people he trusted). I think this trend has been exacerbated by the deep cuts in many newsrooms, where reporters may not have the time to do the digging they need to do in order to be able ask the hard questions. There is also a huge, institutional loss of memory happening right now, as even more cuts are made and buyouts offered. Not that those issues are excuses for Jim Cramer. It was his job to be looking into the information he was getting and he had the resources to do it. He just didn’t. And there are many, many others like him.

The full-length interview is a must-watch for any journalist. Just watch it. Here’s the link again to The Comedy Network site.

On revolution

The tag line of this blog, “On the revolution in communication,” (up at the top there) came from the essay a lot of people have been talking about: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky, posted online a week ago (March 13). When I read it, it stuck in my brain.

What stuck the most was the analogy he makes between the time around 1500, when the printing press got rolling, and now, when the Internet is really picking up steam. The printing press threw a lot of people for a loop — particularly institutions such as the church. And while society was adapting to the printing press, people had no way of knowing all the ways it would end up changing their lives.

Before he gets to that, he talks a bit about how newspapers first reacted to the Internet:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”

This worked for awhile (simply re-printing newspapers in an electronic form and trying to charge for it, before giving up and making it all available for free). But now we’re facing the reality that mass media organizations don’t have a monopoly on the news (my assertion, not his). And this is because the printing press, which is so expensive to set up and which limits competition, is becoming obsolete. Shirky argues that the model whereby advertisers had to go through the newspaper to reach a large number of people — and thus subsidized the journalists at the newspaper — is no longer working.

And thus makes his point:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

My thoughts

Now, I don’t think society is at the point where we don’t need newspapers. Yet.

There are still too many people who aren’t at home on the Internet, who can’t imagine not getting their newspaper. And in places like Saskatoon, I believe they — and the advertisers who want to reach them — will sustain the business model for some time to come. But this is a generational thing and is changing every day. Many of the people under 30 who I know consume the bulk of their information AND entertainment on the Internet. This isn’t a secret.

But what that means is we have some time, here and in other places (but not everywhere, unfortunately), to make the transition, to find something new that sustains the practice of journalism outside of the newspaper (and radio and TV).

Many media organizations and journalists have been loathe to do this, in a serious manner, because we realize we will be giving up our control. We will no longer be the gatekeepers we once were. I believe the future of journalism will be in embracing a new role: instead of top-down content providers, media organizations and/or journalists must become facilitators. The face of news on the Internet is much more social. News organizations have to work to put themselves at the centres of the communities that are springing up online, and this means creating more effective ways to communicate with the readers.

Instead of being gatekeepers, we have to be gateways.

The thing is, we don’t know yet how to construct/facilitate those gateways, in a way that will support the practice of journalism. Shirky argues that amidst all the experimentation going on out there, some models will emerge that will work. Right now, we don’t know what they’ll be.

Buzz Machine

Buzz Machine is a blog I’ve only recently started following, but its writer, Jeff Jarvis, had a post this morning that caught my interest: What’s a Medium? In it, the journalism prof talks about how his school, CUNY (City University of New York) isn’t making students choose a track to concentrate on anymore (print/radio/broadcast), because you have to be able to do them all now. The sentence that caught my attention, though, was this one:

Or a student who comes in with good skills in those electronic media may choose to strengthen skills in what we used to call print (we’re not sure what to call it now so we’re calling that core). [emphasis added]

If this doesn’t point to how desperately print publications (ie/ newspapers) have to change the way they do journalism, I don’t know what does. The newspaper journalists who survive this change in our profession are going to be the ones who can do everything: take photos and audio and video and be able to present them in a meaningful, useful way online. I think a lot of print journalists are wary of this, scared of it maybe. But again, I think it’s exciting. It presents so many more ways we can tell a story. Yes, it’s more work. And requires training that some organizations don’t have the budgets for right now, which is incredibly, incredibly sad.

But it’s true that the “print” aspect, the writing and everything that goes into that process, will remain at the core.