By Matt Neznanski

There’s a lot of hope for newspapers in capturing some of the emerging (exploding?) mobile market in the coming months and years as phones get smarter and people begin to rely on them more and more for information.

But despite the best of intentions, most small newsrooms aren’t prepared to go mobile and no amount of technology is going to get them there. The biggest impediment is the single-deadline mindset of publications that still cling mightily to shovelware posted after print pages are sent to press. It hasn’t ever fit the Web and it’s even more glaring in a mobile world.

Shoveling content to the Web in the middle of the night is, sadly, still the norm for lots of newsrooms. My organization is still one of them even though we’ve made a major effort to train everyone in the newsroom to post their own work and keep hounding everyone about it.

For us, the biggest reasons that shovelware has such a grip include:

• perception that posting to the Web is yet another duty tacked onto an already overworked staff
• resentment about the Web stealing circulation from print, so the online effort is half-assed at best
• fear of technology and content editors that enable the technologically challenged to remain that way

Aside from institutional inertia, I also think there’s a lack of understanding in how different the experience of news is online and in print.
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By Jake Batsell

When a high-profile trial hits town, today’s Web readers expect real-time coverage. But what does that mean for the courts reporter who also has to absorb, interpret and report the fine points of the case?

Last week in my Digital Journalism class, I led a Columbia University case study examining the Bakersfield Californian’s Web coverage of a quintuple-murder trial in 2007. The young reporter was under pressure from her editors to blog from the courtroom as often as every 10 minutes. Errors sneaked into the copy, and the blog updates mostly amounted to a blow-by-blow transcript.

In their written reactions to the case, many of my students were alarmed that the Californian allowed the reporter to directly publish her blog posts with no editing. And the students were skeptical that any reporter could file so many real-time updates without hurting the quality of the main stories for the newspaper and Web.

“As a journalist, and frequent news reader, I would rather have accurate and thoughtful information every few hours, rather than irrelevant, thoughtless information every ten minutes,” one student wrote.

Another student observed: “It seems brash to require such short publication in such an important case. No matter how good a journalist [the reporter] is, mistakes will always be made especially without the oversight of an editor.”

“Balancing the blog and daily posts to the blog as well as the news column on the trial is a lot to focus on all at once,” another student added.

So, is it possible for one human being to accurately cover a big trial in real time on the Web, while simultaneously crafting a front-page story?
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I want to thank everyone for the great feedback following yesterday’s doubleheader of webinar and live chat at Poynter (and Howard and Ellyn for inviting me). There were too many questions to answer and many of them focused on local implications and opportunities regarding social media. So following up on the discussion, let me offer a couple of tips that we didn’t find time to work in.

Want to power search Twitter and find local users or what people are saying about local issues? Try Topsy, which Techcrunch says is more powerful than Twitter’s own search engine.

Want to mine the social graph and figure out who the real power brokers are on your beat? If they’re on Twitter, you can use HiveMind, Follower Wonk and Twiangulate to track them down, according to this ReadWriteWeb post: Meet The First Miners of the New Social Graph.

And from Lifehacker, a recommendation for a Chrome extension called Twitter Reactions that will show you the most recent tweets about a web page you’re visiting (or have published).

If you have other recommendations for finding people or relevant conversations through social media, please offer them in the comments.

By Matt Neznanski

Newsroom activists have to do a lot of arm-waving and hand-holding to get reporters to try new ways to tell stories.

Sure, newsroom culture and fear have sunk many a well-intentioned multimedia package and most organizations still make online fight for a place at the assignment desk. But sometimes the big hurdle in getting the raw materials for Web journalism is to get the right tools in the right hands at the right time.

Here’s a story: Recently, I was part of a planning session for a big series we’re planning that will include a lot data analysis, some history, plenty of opportunity for interactivity and feedback, mashups, multimedia; the works. We spun out lots of cool ideas and some plans to make sure our technical staff can build and support the things we talked about.

After the meeting, the reporter came to me and said, “There’s a lot of cool stuff here. What do you need from me?” I had to pause a bit, but realized that I needed everything from him: links to data sources, video, audio, locations for geotags and images.

In order to get the best of everything, to make it spontaneous and sustainable, he’d have to collect things as he went. Which meant he’d have to do a lot of his reporting outside the notebook.

Of course, that means a lot of training around the technology and active support to change the reporter’s natural instinct to grab a notebook or two, two pens and a pencil when heading out the door.

Now he needs those note-taking items plus an audio recorder, a point-and-shoot and a video camera. That’s just a barebones list, according to some accounts of what a mobile journalist needs to pack on assignment.

In small newsrooms like the one I work in, there’s a tendency for the most tech-obsessed to take charge of the gear (since there’s only so much to go around), which lets the rest of the staff avoid the inevitable need to get familiar with the new tools of the trade.

So here’s a call to Web editors, content managers and multimedia shooters: put the camera in the hands of the least technical person in the newsroom. You’ve set the example, now stop enabling your colleagues by doing it for them.

Doing so will probably set off another round of little earthquakes in the newsroom, but we’re used to that by now and it’ll pay off in the long run. And start collecting examples of all the great new stories you’ll be telling to prove to the boss that the pain was worth it.

Matt Neznanski is a city hall and business reporter for the Corvallis Gazette-Times. You can read more about – and from – Matt on his site.

By Rick Martin

Starting a website and convincing users to participate can be difficult. People can only visit a handful of websites in their daily browsing, so if your website isn’t one of them why not allow them to contribute from the places that they prefer to go? That could be their own blog, or it might be Twitter, YouTube or Delicious — allowing users to contribute local content from these platforms makes it easier on them as contributors to your platform.

If you’re building a local site with Drupal, you’re bestowed with great power to aggregate this kind of content. But keep in mind that such power also comes with great responsibility (as my late Uncle Ben once told me). It’s always best when users submit this content voluntarily, rather than if you as a site admin just go out and scrape it.

There’s almost no end to the content that you could aggregate (see my previous post on that), so please do so wisely. Aggregating can add value to a site if used properly, but it can also be annoying as all heck if misused. I’m not much in favor of aggregating full blog posts unless the writer of that post has explicitly given permission. Read on if you’d like to hear my brilliant plan of attack for that problem.
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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Pierce Presley, self-proclaimed “Emperor of the Pierce Presley Web Empire,” and a newspaper guy frantically trying to learn new media skills. You can follow him on Twitter at @piercepresley.

By Pierce Presley

I’m in the final semester of my masters program, and I’m working on a capstone professional project that will create a website to give traditionally trained journalists new media skills, so forgive me if I get a little “meta” on you and talk about journalism training. Derek Willis talked in a relatively recent blog post about the future of training offered by Investigative Reporters and Editors, a great organization that he and I recommend journalists join even if their job description doesn’t mention “investigate.” He relates how many people paid their own way to the IRE Conference last year—a sign of how much members value the organization surely, but worrisome because that’s a well that’ll run dry rather quickly—plus how antiquated the several arms of IRE’s training output are, and suggests using video, screencasts, podcasts, YouTube and even the nascent Google Wave as successors. (I think he misses a rather obvious way to update the tipsheet method of spreading knowledge: wikis.)

And while I agree that we should bring to bear any and all of these technologies when they are appropriate to the knowledge being shared, there’s another boat that IRE, the Society of Professional Journalists, and probably most other journalism organizations are missing: virtual conferences.

Anybody who’s been anywhere near the planning and preparation end of a conference knows they’re hell to put on. Between lining up the venue, corralling the speakers, finding food and drink, etc. ad naseum, these things are a testament to the dedication of those who put them on. And all that is for naught if people can’t afford either the time or the money to attend.

But what if there was free or low-cost ways to beam speakers to far-flung attendees, complete with audio, video, PowerPoint and document sharing, and record a copy of the presentation for those who couldn’t “attend” in person? Wouldn’t it be worth the time and the effort to learn the new tech, to find people to present in this new way and to make good journalism training available online?

There is, and of course it would. I’ve attended webinars held by the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and they have been excellent (I learned a lot of useful things, even if I’m not entirely sold on being a business journalist nor a journalistic entrepreneur). Setting up a dozen or two of these wouldn’t be 12 or 24 times harder than doing just the one, and the payoff would be immense.

The thing is, journalism organizations and schools need to start working on this now. Because the longer they wait to offer good, modern content, the more journalists are going to turn away from them and their overpriced, under-rewarding meetings in meatspace. And that will likely mean erosion of the membership rolls, too. That those who can attend will have a definite new-media feather in their cap for the resume (and so will the presenters and organizers) is just a bonus.

IRE, SPJ, everybody trying to teach journalists how to do their job better: start now. Don’t let yourself or anyone tell you that you or the technology aren’t ready yet. As Seth Godin said in Tribes, the enemy of progress isn’t “no.” It’s “not yet.”

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist based in London. You can read more from Adam on his blog, adamwestbrook.wordpress.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AdamWestbrook.

By Adam Westbrook

Why doesn’t the average consumer pay for news online? We know all the obvious answers: the fact news is free elsewhere; the fact journalists don’t ‘own’ information anymore; and the fact we’re just not prepared to get our credit cards out for micropayments just yet.

But over the last few months I’ve come to a different conclusion: I don’t think we’re happy to pay for news on websites … because it doesn’t look very good.

Think about it: no matter what the story, subject, country, language or website a news story on a web page follows a visual formula. Usually a thin (400-700 pixel wide) central column with two or three thinner columns either side; a headline in big bold letters; the rest of the text in size 10 or 12; the odd sub heading if you’re lucky; and video or photographs squeezed inside the narrow column.

It’s almost always black text on a white background, the images are no more than 200×200 pixels.

When you think about it, it’s quite amazing that after more than five years of web 2.0, when the power of the webpage has grown dramatically,that news organisations are piping out web stories as if it was 1999.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Rick Martin, a Tokyo-based freelance writer. Read more from Rick at www.1rick.com/blog and follow him on Twitter at @1rick.

I’m not a programmer. But these days I’m starting to see how some programming skills can really make a big difference to my productivity as a writer. As I pretty much live inside my RSS readers, I find myself bouncing around between different websites copying and pasting feed links far more than I should. For example, if I want to create RSS feeds for the keyword ‘obama’, I don’t want to have to go to Google News, Yahoo News, Delicious, Flickr, Bing, Youtube and all those other services to retrieve those feeds. Try as I might, I couldn’t find any web service that would produce feeds for a given search term across multiple social media services and news sites.

This was a problem.

Solution: I decided to try to program such a tool on my own. Again I’m not a programmer, but I started with ‘Hello World’ and just researched other snippets of PHP code that I thought would do the job. I’d like to walk you through the process because if you’re new to programming this is a good way to get your feet wet.

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Editor’s Note: Today’s guest writer is Hilary Fosdal, who is the Interactive Content Manager for Barrington Broadcasting in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. You can read her blog at http://hilaryfosdal.com and follow her @hilaryfosdal.

By Hilary Fosdal

Many people are still trying to figure out what to do with Google Wave technology. Not the folks at the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye. Every weekday at 10:30am CST, the RedEye blog dedicates 30 minutes to a live public Wave on trendy news topics.

On December 28, 2009 the topic of the Daily Wave was RedEye’s Pop Person of the Year, Lady Gaga. Scott Kleinberg (aka Scottkleinberg72@googlewave.com) posted a public wave message at 9:51 a.m. that included the topic of discussion and a link to the RedEye’s story ‘Oh My Gaga’ as well as a link back to the RedEye’s ‘The runners-up’ .

The Chicago RedEye Twitter account (@redeyechicago), administered by Scott, also encourages readers to enter the online discussion by sending out a tweet or two announcing the Daily Wave topic.

Scott sets a conversational tone at the outset of this particular Daily Wave by writing “Sorry for my slowness – I’m eating a cookie.” Google Wave participants begin entering the wave and discussing Lady Gaga even before the clock officially hits the half hour, but no one seems to mind.
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Editor’s note: Matt Neznanski (right) is today’s guest writer. You can read more about – and from – Matt on his site.

By Matt Neznanski

How many reporter’s meetings have you attended where every suggestion to use new technology or different ways to tell stories is met with resistance based on gut feelings about what readers want?

If you’re honest, a lot. Most, even.

That kind of decision-making isn’t very effective and can stifle new ideas since it’s hard to argue with common sense and long-held newsroom ideas about what people want or need from their local news.

But while newspapers have always had to resort to best guesses using subscription or single-copy sales numbers (or make decisions based on the squeaky wheels in the letters to the editor), online readers make their presence known by being counted and tracked whenever they land on your site.

So why not make data a bigger part of news meetings to base decisions on what we see readers actually doing?

Most news organizations don’t do much with available data. Sure, we track page views, bounce rates, time on site and pages per visit numbers, mostly as a tool to sell advertising. But those numbers don’t always tell a tale that newsrooms can use. A few tweaks to Web data reports, however, could help return a lot better data and inform more effective online news coverage.

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