The Evolving Newsroom

Two examples of ways to present data in a new, palatable and engaging way online.













This is from Dow Jones Insight Election Pulse blog and illustrates domestic issues coverage across mainstream and social media in relation to the remaining US primary candidates. Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link.

It's a quick visual snapshot of who's connected to coverage of which issues. "Biggest one to note: Health care remains big for the Democrats (24% of all mentions) and small for the GOP (9%). The economy is No. 1 for everyone."














This is from the New York Times and shows box office receipts for movie releases since 1986. The image lets you click once for a small pop-up with more information and click again to read articles about the movie. The graphic itself shows weekly revenue plus how long it ran in cinemas.

The folks who told us 67% of Americans are unhappy with the quality of journalism these days may not have come up with any concrete suggestions for how to make them happy again, but Jeff Jarvis has one: invite your readers to collaborate with you.

Here are a few of his suggestions:

* Put large amounts of data or documents online and ask the public to help find the stories there. The Dallas Morning News did this with the just-released JFK documents. The Ft. Myers News Press did it with a FOIA on a botched hurricane-relief effort. The Sunlight Foundation has us exposing earmarks in spending bills.

* Ask the public to help gather data points around a story. The quickly classical example of this was Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show asking listeners to find out the prices of milk, lettuce, and beer to find out who is being gouged where (which then enables the journalists to ask why — put their price maps against maps of income and race in New York and stories emerge). This should work particularly well on a local level: Ask people to tell you the price they pay for drugs and doctors and map that. Ask them to tell you just how late or dirty their trains are. And on and on. If you get enough data, you can pay attention to the center of the bell curve; the outliers are either mistakes are damned good stories.

* Get the public to help file no end of FOIAs to birddog government. Create a FOIA repository where you can help train them how to do it and record the responses (that bit’s a great idea from Tom Loosemore in the UK) and collect what’s learned.

There are more suggestions along similar lines. Plus this last one: To get started, I’d hire a collaboration editor charged with getting such projects going all around the newsroom.

I like that. Anyone looking for a collaboration editor?

More for the doom and gloom file. A survey by Zogby International shows that almost half of Americans get their news online and 67% are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism:

"For the second year in a row we have documented a crisis in American journalism that is far more serious than the industry's business challenges - or maybe a consequence of them," said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS, which organised the We Media Forum and Festival hosted by the University of Miami School of Communication - where the survey results got an airing.

"Americans recognize the value of journalism for their communities, and they are unsatisfied with what they see. While the U.S. news industry sheds expenses and frets about its future, Americans are dismayed by its present. Meanwhile, we see clearly the generational shift of digital natives from traditional to online news - so the challenge for traditional news companies is complex.

"They need to invest in new products and services - and they have. But they've also got to invest in quality, influence and impact. They need to invest in journalism that makes a difference in people's lives. That's a moral and leadership challenge - and a business opportunity for whoever can meet it."

Hmm, the report's a little short on suggestions on how to make journalism better but there are some interesting figures in there and Silicon Alley Insider's summary is worth a look.

Nytimes.com and the Financial Times have both picked up traffic to their sites since dropping their paywalls but there hasn't been a corresponding rise in ad revenue, according to Silicon Alley Insider. A couple of interesting comments on the SAI piece.

A couple of lines of advice about getting video to work on news sites from US photojournalist Colin Mulvaney, as found on Newsgang.

1. Fix the players. Too may newspaper websites have crappy video players that take too long to load, don’t work with all browsers, have no full screen mode, don’t allow you to embed code or share with social media sites. Video need to be tagged so search engines can find them.

4. If people can’t find your video, then it’s not worth the time or effort to produce. Some videos or slideshows take off and become viral months or years after they are produced. Why? Because they are findable in an archive. Too many newspapers post a video for a day or two and then it drops off the radar.

5. Invest in a decent content management system. Too many websites, like mine, have been cobbled together with legacy code that doesn’t allow you to use Web 2.0 tools to enhance media distribution.

6. Propagate your video. It doesn’t have to live just on the “multimedia page.” Embed it in your newspaper’s blogs, stories and home page. Upload it to You Tube, iTunes.

7. Invest in technology that will speed up the editing process. There’s a whole new generation of video cameras coming out that are tapeless and allow you to cut the capture time by 90 percent.

8. Train, train and train some more. Multimedia quality won’t improve if producers don’t know how to do it better.

There's more in there. Also worth a look is his video blog about life in Spokane on SpokesmanReview.com.

I want two things in the morning, at the same time - a newspaper and a coffee. I can't imagine I'm unusual in that. But trying to find the two together is harder than you'd think.

Take this morning. I drove into town round the waterfront. There's a guy outside Hammerheads who sells coffee there, but no newspapers as far as I can gather so I didn't stop.

Instead I pushed on and parked my car in the Civic carpark. I walked to the nearest coffee shop on Queen Street. Coffee, but no paper. I looked in at another three coffee shops in the same block. Same deal: coffee, but no newspaper.

And not a newspaper honesty box in sight nor a cheerful chap selling them on the corner.

I had to go out of my way to buy a paper. Why?

And this in times of falling circulation. By all means newspapers should focus energy on expanding their product range to include the web where so many of their readers are migrating, but let's not forget the basics - if you can't find a paper you can't buy it.

This is worth a look if you're a news-hungry Twitter fan. It's a list of news organisations posting updates to Twitter. Thanks to the compiler, Carlos Granier-Phelps.

A guest post on ReadWriteWeb from Muhammad Saleem takes a look at the need for a more useful online metric. It notes that using page views is flawed, partly because high incoming traffic amounts to little when there's an equally high exit rate and little engagement.

"Furthermore, the rise of new web technologies such as AJAX which don't require page reloads to refresh elements or modules in a page, or video embeds (such as from YouTube) that allow you to watch a video and then browse related videos without ever refreshing the page, are making page views a mostly inaccurate measure and rendering it largely irrelevant."

Some suggested alternatives include attention-based metrics - which calculate the total time spent on a site or interacting with a page (or element on a page in the case of Facebook applications) as a percentage of total time that people spend online. Another is Yahoo's Buzz, which relies on popularity indicators such as comments, ratings from users, number of times something is shared and clicks on ads.

"The problem it seems, arises because there is a disconnect between the advertising industry and the publishing industry. The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you're generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks).

"While it is true that the page view as a metric is on it's way out, this isn't going to happen unless a new metric comes from within the advertising industry, which, with over $20 billion at stake, has the most to gain from a more accurate way of determining where to spend their money."

A week or so ago I mentioned angryjournalist.com, a site designed for journalists to vent about all that irks them. To this casual observer the limited choice of adjectives on display is disappointing but the site's clearly hitting the spot - more than 1200 comments had been left at time of writing.

But now there's a new development - happyjournalist.com, where journalists can write about what they like about their jobs. Ah, now that's journalism for you, always striving for fairness and balance. Happyjournalist.com is brand new, so last I looked there were just four comments.

Interestingly, while angryjournalist.com allows anonymous comments, happyjournalists.com requires a name. I wonder how many journalists will be game to publicly declare their happiness? (I dare you).

Also of note, happyjournalist.com was created by Joe Murphy, a programmer with some reporting experience who works with the online team at the Denver Post. Another great reason to bring programmers to the conference table - they're positive about the possibilities.

There are a few nice notes in this post about online video strategies from Liz Foreman, a former TV manager who jumped to a Gannett newspaper site, WCPO.com in Cincinnati.

For a start, Liz sees newspapers as being more serious about online than TV:

"My boss’ mantra: ‘Write for online, update for print’ permeates the newspaper newsroom but the online thinking also extends into other departments for a very good reason - online is a serious money-making component of the business. Although many TV stations are getting more excited about the web, their websites just aren’t bringing in the bucks like newspaper sites are (I know, there are exceptions,) and consequently they just aren’t as serious about it."

She notes that while video is gaining popularity with online news sites few have a coherent strategy for it:

"As a result, newspapers need folks not only to shoot and edit video but also to help the staff understand what types of video will work online and how to monetize their video efforts."

She summarises her job as being an ambassador for video:

"Reminding staff that we 'do' video, suggesting video ideas during the story planning process and politely saying certain ideas won’t make good videos, motivating newsroom staffers to shoot video and disseminating video statistics so that people can observe traffic growth.

"Based on my experience, the job is akin to my early days of running a TV news website - you must be a good salesperson, good at collaborating with other departments and religious about communicating what works and doesn’t work."

She offers some good pointers for anyone moving into a video management job, and let's hope a few such jobs will be created in New Zealand soon.