The Evolving Newsroom

The prospect of (some) journalists becoming community managers over time continues to appeal to and intrigue me.

By that I mean journalists opening up the news gathering, reporting and analysis process to readers, allowing communities to develop around areas of interest - enabling people with expertise and views to contribute material for news stories on, say, how health is administered in the Waikato, or pest management in the Waitakere ranges. The journalist becomes a community manager as well as news gatherer and news writer.

Building communities, however, doesn't necessarily come easy. There are plenty of examples of companies that have started intranets which failed to inspire users; wikis introduced into classrooms that never got used. iYomu, a New Zealand based social network, failed to gain traction despite considerable resources. This StartUp article looks at iYomu's demise and at what makes another local example, Geekzone, successful.

So what of news communities? I like keeping an eye on the beat bloggers, a group of US journalists experimenting with using blogs and other social web2.0 tools to develop their beats, to see what they're learning along the way.

And I've just read a useful passage in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. In a chapter looking at wikis, and particularly at why Wikipedia works as well as it does, he says that people have to care about the content to want to edit it.

Wikis provide ways for groups to work together, and to defend the output of that work [against vandals], but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes. When they are not, creating a wiki can be an exercise in futility, if not an outright disaster.

One notable example was the Los Angeles Times 'Wikitorial' effot, in which the content of the paper's editorial pages was made available to the public. The Times announced the experiment in a bid to drive users there, and drive them they did.

A group of passionate and committed users quickly arrived and set about destroying the experiment, vandalising the posted editorials with off-topic content and porn. The Wikitorial had been up for less than forty-eight hours when a Times staffer was told to simply pull the plug.

The problem the Times suffered from was simple: no one cared enough about the contents of the Wikitorial to defend it, much less improve it.

An editorial is meant to be a timely utterance of a single opinionated voice - the opposite of the characteristics that make for good wiki content.

A wiki augments community rather than replacing it; a wiki will suffer form the Tragedy of the Commons, as the Wikitorial did, as individuals use it as an attention-getting platform, and there is no community to defend it.

There's a community development workshop running at Webstock in Wellington next February which I've signed up for - not because I'm managing a community or am likely to in the immediate future, but because it's hard to see how I can go on being involved in news and journalism education without understanding more about how successful communities work. I'm looking forward to it.

LA Times editor James O'Shea has left the paper citing differences with the publisher over how to take the company forward. He "told senior editors that he opposed the constant drumbeat of cuts in response to falling advertising revenue." His departure comes a month after the paper was bought by real estate magnate Sam Zell.

Here's the LA Times story about it, in which O'Shea is said to be leaving. And here's
CNN's version of the story, in which O'Shea was fired. Here's what O'Shea told staff in a farewell speech:

"In discussions about the current and future budgets, it became clear that Publisher David Hiller and I didn’t share a common vision for the future of the Los Angeles Times. In fact, we were far apart. So David decided he wanted a new editor. As I’ve said on numerous occasions over the past 14 months, I intended to stay here and lead this newspaper to the greatness it deserves. But David decided he wanted to terminate my employment and get another editor. I wish the new editor the best."

He ended his speech with this: "When this industry stops relying so much on cuts and starts investing in journalism, it will prosper because it will be serving the best interests of our readers. That’s when we will prosper."

You can read his speech here and the publisher's memo to staff here.

Six months ago O'Shea brought in a few changes at the LA Times aimed at making the paper more transparent and engaged with its readers, and taking steps towards integrating web and print. It was under him that the Times launched its Readers' Representative blog and Editors' blogs, and started routinely including reporters' email addresses with their stories and encouraging more direct contact between readers and reporters. He also set about bringing web and print operations closer together in areas like motoring and business.

The changes were announced in an internal memo, which did the rounds online last July, along with directives on writing shorter stories (except where a good, long read was truly warranted) and a focus on 'projects' - bigger, collaborative, good-old-fashioned-journalism-type stories that he saw as essential to the paper's continuing success.

The LA Times has launched a Readers' Representative blog which responds to readers' questions about how it covers stories and why - both on a general level and on specific stories.

Essentially, letters and emails which would previously have been responded to individually and privately by reporters and other staff are now publicly answered on the blog where other readers can see the issues and comment on them.

It's not a huge leap forward in redefining the reader-publisher relationship - the paper still defines the conversation because it chooses what gets posted in the blog - but it's a start.

Issues posted so far include how the paper chooses its cartoons, why it publishes the addresses of homes where historic crimes occurred "to the detriment of the current residents of those homes" and why the food critic buys and eats $250 restaurant pizzas when they are out of most people's reach and not "things we might actually want to try".

I can't see much sign of readers diving in to comment but it's early days and you have to know the blog is there because, while it's listed on the Blogs page, it's not currently signposted from elsewhere, or at least not from the homepage.

The blog is anchored by the paper's Reader's Representative, Jamie Gold, and features "Q&A - readers'
questions and staffers' answers on how The Times covers stories; Ask a Staffer - a chance to get the story behind the story from reporters, photographers and editors; Whatever Happened To - where readers can ask for updates on past stories; and Grammar Critiques."

The latter will be a godsend for those dedicated readers who take it upon themselves to keep newspapers on the straight and narrow over split infinitives and acronym usage.

There's an annoying glitch where the click-through from the abstract dumps you at the bottom of the story page instead of the top, which will no doubt get ironed out.

But overall the page is user friendly, has some good links to staff lists, ombudsmen and FAQs on things like ethics, accuracy and how page one stories are chosen, and will likely prove useful for motivated readers who want to know more about how the paper works and who to get in touch with.