The Evolving Newsroom

Nice piece of advice from Howard Owens about being a mobile video journalist (MoJo):

"The classic image of a MoJo is a reporter sitting in his car, filing a story. Certainly, you must spend time doing that, but the less time you spend actually driving that car, the better. You need to be out and about, on foot, with people.

"Your job isn’t to find scandal or hard-hitting news. Your job is to unlock the life of your town in a way that print journalism hasn’t done consistently for generations.

"It’s all about people."

Howard Owens talks about video taxonomy and what makes good video on online news sites: "raw is good; heavy editing is a waste of time". He's posted while reading Glut, Mastering Information Through the Ages, which I haven't read yet but have on standby for when I go to the beach for two weeks at the end of the month (smile). Here's an excerpt:

"Story video may have its time and place, but unlike some, I don’t believe that is the sum and whole of what online video can or should be.

"The point of quick-production, reporter-shot video should be to illustrate in a way that words alone cannot. Raw is good. Heavy editing is a waste of time. Context is a distraction. The point is not to capture the whole story. It is to illustrate a story."

I hadn't read Howard before but found him through Shane Richmond, the Telegraph's Communities Editor (and thoroughly smart guy), and like him because a/ he writes about interesting things and b/ he thinks George Jones's version of He Stopped Loving Her Today is the best country song of all time, which makes him okay in my book. I'm not sure it is the best, but it can't be far off, and I agree completely that no one could do it as well as George.

For those who like a bit of sport, Jack Shafer over at Slate is looking for some help spotting signs of the Murdochification of the Wall Street Journal.

Jack Shafer's written a nice post about liqour in the newsroom. The post was in response to the editor of the Cincinnati Post asking staff not to bring in booze on their last day - the afternoon paper has shut down after 126 years. It's a nice read with some smart observations about how journalists see themselves:

"Journalists identify with larger-than-life personalities, because that's how they see themselves. Deny the journalist his self-image as a rule-bending individualist and you might as well replace him with a typist.

"Wise editors know when and how to encourage newsroom insubordination, as opposed to squelching it, because they appreciate Bob Woodward's aphorism, 'All good work is done in defiance of management.' By giving the newsroom the opportunity to stand up to him, the wise editor instructs his reporters in the advanced techniques of standing up to CEOs and politicians. The wise editor understands that quality journalism requires a bad attitude, foul words, a brawl, and sometimes a drink afterward."

In the midst of it comes a surprising reference to US journalists having to undergo drug tests. He points to this blog post about it by LA Times staffer Matt Welch. That's certainly never been required of me, in the UK, NZ, Ireland or Vietnam. How about you?

Interested to know, too, what an assistant editorial page editor does (it's Matt's title).

Apologies to new subscribers. I forgot to update my feed chicklet when I moved recently. All fixed now. Please check your feed is for Evolving Newsroom. Thanks.

Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul E Steiger has wound up with a page one wrap of changes in the newspaper business over the past few decades. It's well worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

"In some ways, what's happening to the newspaper industry is a return to its past. Less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.

As a kid reporter in California in the '60s, I heard tales from newsmen and photographers about how, just a few years earlier, they had sat in cars, engines running and radios tuned to police bands, trying to get an edge in covering the next murder. The national and international news would be handled by the wire services. Lurid local photographs on page one were what sold newspapers in that era.

"A certain fast-and-loose, devil-may-care attitude often prevailed. I remember walking past a photographer's open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He'd perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans' cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame."

The 'Are newspapers cutting their own throats by not charging for their product online?' debate grinds on. Inside most media companies the battle lines are drawn: on one side are those in favour of charging for premium services - 'we're mad to give away this great content we've made' - and on the other are those against - 'if we charge, our audience will go somewhere else'.

The Wall Street Journal, recently taken over by Rupert Murdoch, is the highest profile example of a newspaper that used to charge, and had enviable subscriber numbers, but decided to abandon it in favour of ramping up readership and selling more ads on the back of that.

Times blogger Justin Fox posts this week about the pointlessness of arguing about it. "News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along," he says, in response to a 'we're mad to give it away' post from LA Times business columnist David Lazarus.

"It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads. And unlike, say, a song - which was free on the radio but worth spending money on to be able to play again and again whenever you wanted to hear it - a day-old newspaper was usually less than worthless."

While some point to younger generations not being willing to pay for online content, Justin shows that's not the case. They buy music online happily enough, and pay for games. They just don't want to pay for news.

And neither do I. Why would I? There's no shortage of news online. If I can't read the story on one site I can read it on countless others. If I reach a paywall, I give up and go somewhere else. And don't get me started on those US sites which require you to register, albeit for free, but then don't accept your postcode because it's not local. So much for globalisation.

The point is, unless you organise a giant, worldwide news cartel to set a global price (not going to happen), you can't charge for news online. Archives, maybe, but not daily news.

Trouble is, increasingly people don't want to pay for a newspaper either. Not even the people who wail about how important quality journalism is to the health of a country. Seriously, next time someone bemoans how outsourcing/globalisation/greedy management are eroding journalistic values, ask them how often they buy the paper. Nine times out of ten, in my experience, they'll say they don't buy it at all, or they buy it once a twice a week. Not quite enough, then, to keep 'quality journalism' afloat.

So, if they're not buying the paper, and people under 35 aren't buying the paper, who is?

The Miami Herald is outsourcing some advertising production work and website moderation to India. The project is starting with copywriting and design for a weekly community supplement. The move follows a similar step by the Sacramento Bee, another McClatchy title.

Robin Hamman, a BBC journalist and blogger, posts about using Twitter as a way to get your finger on the pulse of a breaking news story.

You can search Twitter for key words, such as Bhutto, to see what people are saying about the story. Not only will you get a sense of what sentiment is around, but also in some cases first-hand accounts of events and plenty of links to news stories around the world.

Robin recommends using a tool from David Sterry called Tweet Scan. It's simple, but effective. Just type in a keyword and hit Search. If you register you can also subscribe to keywords so you get updates via email or RSS.

Steve Outing offers some advice for reporters - use Facebook and consider having two profiles, one for personal and one for professional.

That way you can carry on sharing pointless-but-clever videos with your friends without risking offending your contacts. And you can set up industry links on your professional site that would likely leave your friends cold.

Meanwhile, Facebook is slowly gaining ground in NZ, where Bebo reigns supreme (Hitwise has some figures on that) but losing its wow factor in a couple of other quarters.

Silicon Alley Insider points to a skeptical Wallstrip take on Facebook with the comment: "This strikes a chord with us: After you get past the novelty stage, what are employed grown-ups supposed to do at the site?"

Then there's Bobbie Johnson who blogged on the Guardian about Facebook Whales - people with more than 1,000 friends on Facebook - being insecure. No kidding.

A mini backlash in the making? Who knows.