Study, study, study

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to add another posting, but I've been working my way through the Associated Press' "A New Model for News." This in-depth ethnographic case study offers up observations about how young people in some American cities and two cities abroad consume, gather and disseminate their news.

The study questions what kinds of news young people are attracted to, it asks them why and tries to analyze how they obtain it. The analysis of the findings is the most intriguing. The AP finds that young people are often dissatisfied with the news they obtain because it lacks context, but are experiencing "news fatigue" because they are constantly overwhelmed with snippets that lack back stories or indications of what may happen in the future as a result.



The study concludes there must be multiple entry points to a story that includes follow-up stories, back stories and generally all the information that young readers are looking for, but missing. Information from the study suggests there are a multitude of ways consumers enter into news: through friends, headline links in e-mail, television reporting, radio and many, many others. News providers, the AP says, need to find more appealing ways to lead people into content and then offer up as many ways as possible for those readers to continue to access information about that story.

The AP is increasingly moving toward a "what is happening" approach to news rather than a "what has happened" approach. It is focusing more on in-depth entertainment and sports stories because they appeal to young people. It is aggregating news for access using mobile phones/PDAs, because that's often where young people are getting their information.



The AP is communicating with its audience, exploring new forms of storytelling and trying to capture America through its own perspective.

I bet they think the rest of us should do the same.

Where online consumers once surfed and bookmarked news sites, users now wonder why a logical trail through the news can’t simply unfold, link by link, across a multitude of sources. Significant human cooperation, on a very large scale, would have to occur to ensure that outcome across the worldwide Internet.

Being the information resource

The Oregonian has launched new features to its Web site. One thing I stumbled across was its police scanner. Yep, the Oregonian now offers its Web users access to streaming police scanner as well as codes to decipher what the emergency responders are saying.

This is just another innovation from the Oregonian site that provides public information in many ways. You can go there for Oregon and Washington's Department of Transportation traffic cams (and see just how bad it is out there before deciding to use the freeway.)

They've hooked up with Portland's favorite weatherman, Todd Sweeny to do a daily video forecast. They've teamed with Twitter so you can get updates on the go on your PDA or cell phone.

They are offering 24/7 coverage of Portland and its surrounding communities. Pretty much all their content and a whole lot more is available through the Web site.

Come visit me on my home page

In this video, the discussion of news media and how it must adapt and change gives some good ideas about how to get more users to a Web site. A few weeks ago I was sent on an assignment to learn about invasive weeds. We took this quiz about invasive species, both plant and animal, and one question was about a Midwestern invader, the Asian Carp. The real threat of the carp is that boat motors bother them and they jump out of the water and hit people (besides gobbling up every bit of food on the food chain and starving out native species). I thought it was a joke question.

So I go on YouTube to see a video of these creatures, and sure enough there are plenty. The first one to pop up? From the Des Moines Register. It was crude, didn't have much to it really, it essentially just showed a bunch of fish jumping and I moved on to another video to hear people discuss them and their habits. But the point is, that video wasn't on the newspaper's home site. It was out there, advertising the newspaper, on a very popular and well visited site, mingling with the people.



What a great idea. When I want to see video of something I never think to check the local paper's site first, I look on YouTube. The chances that the video I am looking for is there are much greater than those of the newspaper's Web site alone.

Oh, and I don't think there's anything about this particular video that I couldn't do. It's just a couple of cuts and splices along with a few labels for the people's names.

Steve Smith laments the passing of an era

In his blog "News is a Conversation" on the Spokesman-Review Web site, Steve Smith, editor of the SR, writes of the lost days of the "newspaperman."

Even as he has fought to keep ahead of the curve and maintain relevance in a fast advancing world, Smith recalls the dirty, smoke-filled past of the newspaper with relish and longing. He must have been in such a melancholy mood.

Before starting my internship, Smith, an alum from my college paper took several leaders of the Oregon Daily Emerald to dinner to discuss the industry, the future and the past. Many of the stories he told during that dinner surface in this blog post. Perhaps it's best that newspapermen and women are no longer drunks and that newsrooms are no longer the chaotic messes of ashtrays and finger-staining ink they used to be.

I guess I didn't grow up in that era, and I don't long for those crusty old editors who hardly seem human. Hell, I've met plenty a crusty editor I was glad I didn't work for, they refuse to move into the neat and tidy future.

Not to say that newspapering is either neat or tidy. It's messy, especially when you find out about something other people would prefer you don't know about. It's not easy; if it were, then everyone would do it, and do it well. Gone are the brash jokes, sure, but also gone are the sexist comments. A woman can be just as tough as man when it comes to digging out a story.

Perhaps Smith is right that the daily newspaper as we have know it will become something for the elites rather than the regular Joes. That's the fight we must keep trying to win, if you ask me. How does the daily newspaper remain important to it's citizens? Ah, the oft asked and discussed question, the answer to which is elusive and unpredictable.

Smith offers us no bright spot, no sage wisdom to grasp. He instead says democracy will find another stage. The fourth estate will be lost to some other realm. What then will the schools teach us our purpose is?