But they need to move faster. 

Still, the findings of a recent Bivings Group report analyzing the web sites from the top 100 U.S. newspapers (by ABC ranking) are encouraging. Among the highlights:

• 58% of newspaper sites now accept some form of user generated content, although it’s mostly just photos. Only 15 percent accept text, showing that the distrust of the audience by mainstream newspapers continues.

• 76% of newspaper sites display “most popular” lists of content, including most visited and most emailed stories, compared to 51% in 2007 and 33% in 2006.

• 75% now allow comments on articles, compared to 33% in 2007. That’s a significant jump, but is about four years late.

• Just 11% of newspapers now require registration to view content, compared to 29% in 2007. This is definitely heading in the right direction.

• All newspapers feature some form of contextual advertising and 43% accept interstitial ads. I’m skeptical that interstitials are a long-term, scalable solution, but it shows willingness to experiment.

Despite the positive figures, the report’s summary delivers a sobering analysis:

Speaking generally, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and aggressively experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.

Can you say “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?” That’s what this feels like despite the fact that the iceberg is in sight.

With the Detroit shock playing out on Twitter and various blogs, one question I haven’t seen is whether college journalism programs should still concentrate on print journalism. And further, should there still be a college newspaper?

Since cutting the delivery days for a metro newspaper is a cost-reducing move that many other newspapers will likely follow in 2009, the focus of a newspaper’s journalism will be primarily digital. And this time, it won’t just be talk.

So, if you are training tomorrow’s journalists, why bother with your own print edition? While I haven’t seen a formal content analysis, my impression is that college newspapers have evolved about as much as their grown-up siblings (not much). Given the amount of time and energy it takes to put out a printed publication on a regular basis, journalism programs could benefit by focusing their students’ energies toward innovations in online journalism, instead of putting a paper out.

As Mark Potts suggested, this burning of the boats in Detroit is the only strategy for true transformation.

The Detroit move is radical, to be sure. It may or may not be enough to save the papers there, as Mutter further examines today. But it simply reflects reality. And if it does drive readers from print to online, then that’s a good thing, because online is where the future is. The sooner the newspaper industry truly understands that–and begins paying truly serious attention to promoting online and working hard to find innovative sources of revenue online–the sooner the transition to the inevitable future will take place. Sorry, print junkies. That’s just reality. Clinging to an obsolete notion of the printed newspaper’s role in information delivery is fantasy.

For college newspapers, it would be a lot less risky financially than a mainstream daily. The risk would be primarily in readership when students can’t take the crossword puzzle to class. But forcing the students journalists to compete for their classmates’ time and attention in the digital ecosystem (vs. Facebook, etc.) would be better preparation for the fragmented professional world they will find themselves in anyway.

I asked the Latin American journalists who I’m working with on a distance-learning course whether journalists should be allowed to write with opinion on their blogs, even if the blog is hosted by their employing news organization. More than three dozen responded and almost all said yes.

It’s a matter of testing long-held conventions that are not holding up so well in the new digital ecosystem. And I applaud them for seeing this. As Patrick Thornton recently observed, it’s going to take some “radical thinking” for mainstream news organizations to survive and evolve.

For me, it comes down to intellectual honesty and transparency - as long as your journalism is solid. If the facts you report are accurate and the view you present is fair, then adding your analysis of the situation will only help the reader.

Of course, I feel this practice should be adopted in all media, not just blogs. Objective journalism, in many cases, is too clinical and sterile. It has become a case of he-said, she-said when most readers want to know “well, who’s right?”

I started teaching a distance learning course through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas this week. There are 70 students participating from Brazil, Argentina and many other places in Latin America.

The students are passionate about journalism and hungry to learn how to make the most of this new digital landscape. It’s interesting to see how much innovation and evolution is occurring at media organizations in other parts of the world and, judging by the students’ initial posts to our discussion forums, some Latin American news organizations are blazing some new trails.

The great change

Michel Queiroz is a 21-year-old reporter of a portal site and a former television reporter (FGF TV). He described a participatory content tool developed by his current site, www.OPOVO.com.br, that allows users to participate in polls, promotions and send photos with complaints via mobile phone. So he understands that collaboration is a fundamental tenet of Journalism 2.0.

“In the future, we’re going to expand the user participation at the content production, either by cell phone or computer,” Queiroz wrote in his forum post. “I believe that the great change at the journalistic routine is to create and promote the user collaboration. This is the Web 2.0. The receiver is also a transmitter of information.”

Becoming a natural process

Melissa Becker is a newspaper reporter in Porto Alegre, south of Brazil. She says the digital age has ushered in positive changes for her news organization, Zero Hora; as the tools are getting more familiar, the journalists are able to explore better ways to use technology.

“Newspaper’s reporters get used now to take pictures with a mobile and send the images from the news local to website’s staff post it some minutes later,” Becker wrote in her forum post. “Our story published on paper could be better, more complete with exclusive online contents. Readers’ texts posted in our blog get more readers when published in our weekly supplement. We are working at the contents online that could ‘link’ to the daily paper and vice-versa, and it’s becoming a natural process.”

Becker thinks change came a little late when compared to the U.S. or Europe but once they arrived in the form of a new web site, “it changed our way to work faster than I’ve imagined.” And while she feels it’s becoming a natural process, she writes that “everybody here is still learning this different journalism.”

A revolution

Alejandro Torres is an editor at eluniversal.com.mx in Mexico City who is learning this different journalism by doing it. He receives photos by phone from his reporters, who carry mobile phones to record video and take pictures. “After typing their stories, they go to TV department to edit and produce videos,” Torres wrote in his forum post. “Before all that, all reporters publish breaking news.

“Ufff!!! I am describing a complete different world. And the major changes have occurred in the last five or six years, but the last three years have been a revolution for many of us.”

Don’t forget to pray

Silvana Santiago, a reporter at www.lanacion.com.ar in Buenos Aires, believes the change is just starting. She remembers experiments as recent as a couple of years ago, like one that invited readers to send photographs of their neighborhood problems, that have become common practice (like the ability to comment on news stories). But, she notes, the road for this new technology is not always smooth.

“Even in the ‘mobile era,’ there’s a need to be ‘plugged in,’ because if you have to cover something live outside the newsroom it is still difficult to do it carrying the laptop, the cell phone, the camera, the passwords, and all the digital paraphernalia,” Santiago wrote in her post. “Not to mention the praying that starts from the very moment you leave the newspaper: ‘Let the Internet access work, let the Internet access work…’”

I predict I will learn as much - if not more - from the students as they will from me over the next four weeks.

The future is now.

I start my new “career” in earnest today, having said my farewell to The News Tribune on Friday. It was the best job I’ve ever had, working with the best people I’ve ever worked with. So the decision to leave was not an easy one.

I am indebted to the people of The News Tribune for the opportunities that I have before me now. Their willingness to innovate and experiment has provided me with the experiences that I am now invited to share with others in the industry at conferences and workshops. They encouraged me to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to the operation, which in turn led to an entrepreneurial spirit driving me into this new phase of my professional life.

Newsrooms will continue to innovate. But I feel that innovation on the business model should be more closely integrated to the content strategy than a traditional newspaper organization can allow. So I’m bold enough to think that I can help more from the outside than I can from the inside. In effect, I’m placing a personal bet that developing new ideas for news and information that are tied to the business model is the best way to move the needle for local publishers.

It’s risky, for sure. But risk is inherent in entrepreneurship and transforming the business of local news and information won’t happen without a healthy dose of it.

Continue Reading »

Cluetrain told us that markets are conversations. Now Seth Godin tells us those conversations need leaders, that people want to become part of the “tribe.”

How does this apply to journalism?

Practicing “news as a conversation instead of a lecture” was the first step. The next step is to lead the conversation.

In Godin’s new book, he makes several key points that apply directly, in my view, to news organizations.

1. For the first time ever, everyone in an organization - not just the boss - is expected to lead.
2. The very structure of today’s workplace means that it’s easier than ever to change things and that individuals have more leverage than ever before.
3. The marketplaceis rewarding organizations and individuals who change things and create remarkable products and services.
4. Most of all, there is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.

There are plenty of examples how leading tribes can be good journalism.

John Cook and Todd Bishop created a tribe and are now attempting to move it. Mike Sando created a tribe of Seahawks football fans and the momentum has carried on even after he left The News Tribune for ESPN.com. The niche sites that news organizations have launched that focus on moms, dads, pets or cars are attempts to lead selected tribes. Bakersfield has been out front creating tribes with projects like Bakotopia. And the Beatblogging movement started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net is all about the mixing of journalism and leading a tribe.

Goding writes “leadership isn’t difficult, but you’ve been trained for years to avoid it.” This is painfully true in the command-and-control structure of most newsrooms. The staffers in the best position to lead the tribe (reporters and photographers) feel the least empowered.

It doesn’t have to be that way. With a more entrepreneurial mindset, everyone in a news organization can lead at least one tribe (inside or outside the company).

A focus on creating “remarkable products and services” will allow journalism - and news companies - to evolve in the digital age.

I’m at Western Washington University this week as a visiting professor, speaking to a number of classes in the communications school on the concepts of Journalism 2.0. The core message I’m trying to deliver: tomorrow’s journalism will be whatever you make it.

Sure, jobs at traditional news organizations are disappearing. But opportunities to influence, inform and interact with an audience are exploding.

But you need skills. Digital skills. So I am encouraging students to start a blog on Wordpress, experiment with Twitter, and think about starting a social network on Ning.

If you’re applying for a job, experience with these new tools (and many others) will separate you from the pack of resumes that list Myspace and Facebook as their cheif digital accomplishments.

And if you can’t find a good job to apply for, you’ll have a better understanding of the digital marketplace and, therefore, be closer to new ideas of how to serve an audience with information.

Start your own site? Why not? If you don’t want to fly solo, then look for new opportunities. The cost of entry couldn’t be lower. And that’s another reason why there’s never been a better time to be in journalism.

Recently I was part of a strategic content planning session for a traditional newsroom. Given that the newspaper had recently been through a couple rounds of buyouts and layoffs, like most newspapers, I figured there would be some serious reinvention occurring in this brainstorming meeting.

Boy, was I wrong.

The editors, reporters and visual journalists went about outlining the priorities of their current product. Then they discussed which could be grouped together and which were more important. But there was no new thinking.

I suggested that one of the priorities should be content that is “marketable.” This caused some confusion. Since news is an advertising-supported operation (both in print and online) I didn’t think this would be such a foreign concept. Several times I was asked to clarify. Since I don’t think I made my point clear enough, I’m going to take another stab:

Content that is marketable means that the target audience is desirable to advertisers, either because of its size or quality (or, in the case of a site like Techcrunch, both). Local news operations are struggling to find the right balance between quality and quantity.

According to this N.Y. Times piece, and based on anecdotal feedback I’ve heard from site directors, scores of page views across a local news web site aren’t necessarily a good thing. Local news sites are organized based on the print sectioning that was invented because of press configurations (local, sports, business, lifestyle) and has been around for decades. Advertisers can’t put their finger on the demographic they might reach with this format. It’s not nearly targeted enough in today’s digital world.

So smart news operations have launched niche sites for moms, dads, pets, shopping, home and garden and, more traditionally, arts and entertainment. And if not topical, then hyperlocal. These are markets. You can picture an ad rep explaining to a prospective advertiser who they will reach when placing an ad in one of those sections.

Meanwhile, in this strategic planning session, the priorities discussed included “people stories,” “sense of place,” “talker of the day,” and “authority/personality.” Those are fine attributes of great newspaper journalism. But the sad reality is that great journalism is not the same thing as great journalism business.

Also discussed were the cornerstones of breaking news and accountability. These are a news operation’s loss leaders; they don’t form a specific market either. But they can draw a transient audience with their “click candy” characteristics and bring in new visitors who are then introduced to the rest of the content lineup that hopefully attracts a more loyal following.

A newspaper doing what it’s always done, but better, is not a recipe for reinvention. Nor is it a healthy business model. Just look at the newspaper readership data since 1970. It’s time to get away from the mass, generalized, one-size-fits-all approach that made sense in the era of limited publishing capabilities (see Vin Crosbie’s excellent essays for more).

News operations need markets, their own markets, to monetize and fund the future. Most have the tools at their disposal. It’s simply a matter of strategic planning.

Previously I suggested that most local news organizations are not nearly local enough, especially considering the ample opportunity provided by the web.

So is that opportunity lost? Not yet, but it’s pretty easy to see how it could be.

LostRemote shows us how hyperlocal blogs are building audience and building a sustainable business in Seattle. And makes a key point that I’ve been echoing recently: thousands of out-of-work newspaper journalists could change the game.

Successful local start-up news sites are usually staffed with experience in journalism and online media. Now that thousands more newspaper journalists don’t have a day job, it figures that a number of them will sign up for a Wordpress account and look to fill a niche in their community for local news and information. (Or maybe they will use Newsgarden?)

It’s disappointing to think that, 10-12 years after they launched local news web sites, many newspapers could still lose first-mover advantage (especially if you think of Internet years like dog years).

The idea that they will get beat by their former staffers makes the irony that much more rich.

What’s it like to run training sessions at a newspaper that has been through layoffs and buyouts and is currently on the block?

I found out this week at the Union-Tribune in San Diego leading three sessions for an APME NewsTrain workshop. Great people, intriguing ideas and interesting conversations. But the economic crisis infecting the news industry was an inescapable subtext.

One moment stood out: a full elevator can’t help but listen as one Union-Tribune employee greets another and then says “I’m leaving - taking the buyout.” The reply comes: “I’m so sad because I thought we were becoming friends” as she departs one floor below the rest of the workshop attendees.

Alright - who’s ready to talk about ethics in the digital age?

After a collective deep breath, we carried on. Because what else can we do?

Ryan Pitts led off the workshop with a 55 mph drive-by of interesting web technologies and concepts. I call it the shiny new object list. Ryan was nice enough to share that list and you can find it here.

My sessions were more about discussion and less about demonstration (presentation slides here). Here are some links with the points I tried to make with each:

Continue Reading »