Staying on top of your game

Oh boy. No one wants to think that the role they spent their entire career perfecting is just no longer needed. And even if it actually is needed, it's superfluous when reflected in the Bible of budget.



That appears to be the way the copy desk is going. Having lots of skills is being ground into the heads of new graduates. They show up to internships with slow-to-embrace-the-new papers and can't believe they are asked to do so little, when they know how to do so much. At least that's the way I felt after graduating and getting into my reporting internship.

But copy editing. Seriously? Joe Grimm, who writes a daily column for Poynter Institute focused today's submission on skills copy editors should have to stay relevant. I can tell you, my frustration is immense with the level of copy editing that happens some afternoons, so I can't imagine a newsroom without a skilled team of copy editors behind the scenes, saving the day.

Media General made a few headlines when it announced last week it would combine copy editing and page design at three eastern newspapers. This is nothing new, or surprising. We do that here. But one may argue that our copy editing suffers. No one has time to spend looking up every single thing in a story, so easily avoidable mistakes, (such as where a person whose name is all over the Internet, really works) become a regular part of our product.

Grimm suggests copy editors brush up their web skills as they are going to need those a lot more than an AP Stylebook before too long. One such suggestion is to learn search engine optimization. Google has a page devoted to dos and don'ts here.


An old friend of mine started doing this work, and the script he's using is directly from this warning page from Google. Basically, it is making your page easy for search engine bots to locate. For those trying to take advantage, the promise is they can get you on the first page of hits on Google.

I think the concept Grimm is referring to is being aware of the ways in which bots find and catalog items on your Web page. Driving up Internet traffic appears to be the way many newspapers are looking to approach the next stage in profitability and information dissemination. For this, I think our paper needs to establish a more defined way to add tags to stories on the Web site. I noticed it's all over the place and appears that copy editors are simply adding whatever tags occur to them instead of adhering to some sort of formula.



Think I'll inform myself on this topic. I'll let you know what I find out.

Why I have a Twitter account

I joined the social networking site Twitter more than a year ago. I read somewhere that Twitter was going to aggregate the tweets associated with the presidential election, and since we were all working that night, and we have the most pathetic excuse for a television in the newsroom, it made sense to be all places at once.

It worked marvelously. The feed picked up the latest and greatest results, people who were watching all the major news networks, informed me even as they learned, which states were going which way, which stations were calling which races, and all I had to do was sit back and watch.

But then I had no more use for Twitter. My account sat dormant for months, until the newspaper I work for announced it would be going live with a Twitter feed. Now that the paper was stepping into the social networking realm, albeit with the hesitance of a mouse unsure that that cat is truly sleeping, I decided to reenter and give it more effort.

Well, the effort came a bit slowly.

This article in American Journalism Review, "The Distribution Revolution," examines why the news industry is embracing Twitter, especially since its effect is hardly quantifiable.

One reason is we need to be able to get our work out there. You can't rely on Google for anything. Every day, the bots have more and more to search. Our newspaper's daily articles seldom catch the bots attention. In fact, they are searchable for such a short amount of time, the only time the articles really get picked up is when they are redistributed by other, more permanent, Web sites.


Yet, the newspaper I work for has not embraced this fully. The paper's Twitter account has what I would say is an impressive 162 followers, but does not follow anyone. In my opinion, the newspaper's twitter feed should have all the people in the community it can find. How will the paper take advantage of the rumblings of the community if its never listening?

In the American Journalism Review article, Robyn Tomlin, executive editor of the Wilmington Star-News, said the idea of Myreporter.com was birthed from a reader question, "Why is a helicopter flying around my house?"

What a great question. And who better to find the answer than someone whose job it is to find answers. And the night editor did know why and was able disseminate the information.



It makes me think of one Sunday at work. A reader called in and said something similar to me, but it sounded more like, "When are you going to put up on your Web site some information about what's going on? There are helicopters flying over my house dropping water."

I can't be everywhere at all times, and granted, it was fire season and I probably should have checked the fire logs earlier, but the reader tipped me off. Now if the newspaper had followed all the tweets of as many people as possible, would someone have tipped me off even earlier? It's hard to say, but its a mentality worth adopting.

The boss said he wants to go Web first, and wants to give readers a reason to look at our Web site at 6 p.m. instead of the nightly news (which isn't about us anyway.) But yet he's not making the push that could make that happen. Web first means distribution first. Competing means being the one-stop shop for news.

It's an interesting time to be a journalist, and I don't mind taking on more and more. We're getting a new Web site soon, and I, for one, am excited.

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.

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?

And so it begins

In this article from the The Daily Telegram, a Wisconsin paper, reveals it will publish daily news, photos and video on its Web site and reduce it's print edition to two days each week. It intends to remain a paid subscription print edition. Hmm...

Let's start with putting some of the article here since one is required to sign up for a membership (it's free, but a hassle) to see the story:

Following a growing trend in the newspaper industry, The Daily Telegram will refocus its emphasis toward Internet publishing, company executives said today.

The Telegram’s Web page, www.superiortelegram.com, will become the primary source of day-to-day breaking news, said Publisher Ken Browall. It will feature printed news and photos of events as they happen seven days a week, along with audio and video clips.

Online news coverage will be supplemented by a twice-weekly printed version of The Telegram that provides exclusive Superior and Douglas County news and sports features plus a wide variety of community news and columns not offered by other Twin Ports media, Browall said. The twice-weekly Telegram will remain a paid circulation newspaper.

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Internet publishing has grown in popularity as traditional print advertisers have gradually moved to the newer medium. Meanwhile, print advertising revenue has declined nationwide, and newprint costs have grown. This year, the revenue stream has been particularly weak as the struggling economy, poor credit conditions and slow hiring has hurt traditionally strong classified advertising customers in the automobile, real estate and help wanted sectors.

Okay, here's my brilliant idea. Instead of reducing the number of times per week a print edition is produced, newspapers should instead make people buy the print edition in stands and make sure Web content is available to subscribers, first thing, everyday.

For the old fashioned people who wish to receive print papers at their homes, newspapers could charge them a special rate, more than the online edition but less than if you bought it in the stands.

Here is why I think this will work: Newsprint is expensive and limiting. The Internet is cheap and limitless. With more innovative placement of advertising, newspapers can sell ads online, save money on ink and newsprint, still produce the product people are used to getting, still get subscription numbers to use when selling ads, offer similar penetration, attract younger audiences, incorporate more styles of storytelling, and still satisfy the older generation who can't imagine getting their newspaper online. If newspapers are almost exclusively sold in boxes, the paper still has the chance to attract new readers and distribute news to those who aren't regular readers.

Of course, this means that the Web site has to offer cell phone compatible Web sites in addition to the full sites. These sites are much simpler though, and should be easier, not harder, to create.

Bring me the future, NOW!

Business Week decided to give the Kindle a go 'round in a review yesterday. The review gives it overall good marks, although the author complains that he forgot to charge it a few times during his trial run and found himself frustrated because you never have to plug in a newspaper.

Well that's kind of silly, right? You got used to plugging in your phone didn't you?

Arik Hesseldahl writes he also has complaints about the very few, poor quality photos that the Kindle supports. I can see that as a very valid complaint. Photographs often make the difference in how moving a story can be.

A positive Hesseldahl says is that he read more of the papers he received (as well as saving trees and money). I argue, he only received two of the four he used to get so... I do have to ask, how in the world did he get time to read four newspapers in the morning? I could see it being possible on a device like the Kindle, but this guy must have a really long commute. Those are hours you can never get back.

I think more newspapers should write about and consider technology like the Kindle. If newsprint costs so much, only print those papers that people will pick up in stands. Ensure that your loyal readers who want their news delivered to their homes have the chance to save the planet and some money by giving them high tech ways to get the paper.

Here they don't update the Web site sometimes until mid-morning. I think they should do it late at night. I also think the news staff doesn't spend enough time thinking about how they can help the newspaper which gives them sustenance survive and make money.

Ahh! I knew it!

The future of newspapers is in a portable device that can update in real time, as soon as something is published. Each day consumers will read the paper on an electronic device where their newspaper is delivered. I did not know this technology existed, but it does. The roll-up TV will be used for not only watching television, but rumor has it, newspapers are investing in developing this technology for their own use. 

I imagined this several years ago. I have no proof that this was my idea first. In fact, it probably wasn't, but I had an idea that while the paper copy would not be around forever, I have been certain that people would have one permanent item that would deliver their news to them. 

Another news delivery system I just learned about is the Kindle. This is also awesome. Bring the price down some more and this thing might just catch on. Although I hear some are disappointed that it doesn't deliver images in color yet.

Admitting the inevitable

 A recent survey of newspaper editors found that most think newspapers will be free in the future. It seems logical considering that most breaking news is already free, and many people catch their headlines online, which is essentially free - except the initial investment of resources to access the Internet.

While newspapers in the print edition still come at a nominal cost, many people that I've talked to say, "Why would I pay for the paper when I can read it online for free?" And those papers that aren't producing interesting online content, or have Web sites that appear amateur, are certainly not earning themselves readers using online content. And think of how far a story online can travel and compare that to how much exposure it gets in a newspaper with 20,000 circulation.

While many online news consumers want their news as quickly as possible, that does not excuse journalists from fulfilling their primary function of being watchdogs for the public. It is discouraging to see that many editors responded they thought the quality of journalism will decline due to the emphasis on speed. Certainly both aspects of journalism can work together in this changing news environment. I believe that advances in information dissemination will lead to greater news-gathering abilities in less time. This is the perfect union of speed and investigation.

See Yahoo! news story here.