Where have you been?

While I don't think I ever had any regular readers, it occurs to me that continuing to keep this blog is the only way I'll ever get any. Should someone stumble on this industry blog, they aren't likely to stay long if the last post is a year old. And it is.

Today I'll simply update what has happened in the past year in my journalism career and then I'll make a wholehearted attempt to be a regular blogger on the topic. Some may argue that the market has been cornered, but I think it will help keep me fresh in ideas.

After graduating college and joining the reporting team at The Register Guard as an intern with the Snowden program through the University of Oregon, I was fortunate enough to land a position with a small regional newspaper, Herald and News, located in sunny Klamath Falls.

At the H&N, I write about city government and agriculture primarily. I have carved myself a niche within environmental issues reporting and housing, two topic areas that both lacked a dedicated reporter and are vitally important to knowing what exactly is going on in this area. I feel that environmental issues and agriculture in the region go hand-in-hand, and are a natural fit. Housing interests me as I am one of those who would like to become a first-time homebuyer with all the advantages that possibly could bring.

Also, housing often drives a community's economy, and here is no different. Having experienced a short-lived boom in housing, there are many half-built subdivisions that lost steam and left behind a eerie grouping of roads and power lines leading to perhaps a single house, or two. Their neighbors have addresses, just no homes or mailboxes.

At the H&N I've been given tons of freedom to pursue the stories I want to do, am completely trusted to write about what's important in the city's government decisions and dealings and am encouraged to shoot videos whenever I wish, or take my own photographs. That last part is necessary because the newspaper employs just one photographer, and he works just two days out of the five in my work week.



I'm pleased here, although the job market afterward looks mighty tough. I'm glad to not be looking right now. Furloughs, an industry standard, have reduced my salary by more than $1,000, and for a starting reporter, that hurts. A lot. But I am gaining experience and hopefully will be granted the entertainment blog I proposed several months ago. I can't help but make connections in the community when I am out because I anticipate getting it someday.

I'll get back to the discussion of the journalism industry in the next post, and I won't wait an entire year to make it.

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.