The Evolving Newsroom

I'm heading up north for a couple of weeks to hang out at the beach. There's not much in the way of internet access so there won't be many blog posts.

See you in February.

I posted the other day about Radio NZ adding news feeds on Twitter, which I think is a great move. There are quite a few US and UK news feeds available, but as far as I'm aware RNZ is the only New Zealand news organisation providing feeds to the Twitterati. So well done them.

But they deserve a mention for more than that. I noted a couple of kinks in the service and decided to email them my thoughts using the contact email they provide on the website. Their webmaster replied with a friendly, detailed email two days later (it was a weekend after all.) Spot on. Now there's someone who understands customer service and the value of community.

Community, like it or not, is the future. Digital citizens are not happy just looking at your news website and using your services in a static way. They want to be able to engage. To tell you what they think of your service, to make suggestions (which are sometimes very good), to talk to each other about news stories (and your service). If you don't give them the chance to engage, they'll give up on you eventually and go somewhere else. These ideas are well articulated in a couple of books I've read recently, if you're interested: The Cluetrain Manifesto and Wikinomics. The Wisdom of Crowds also comes highly recommended.

The kinks I mentioned in my previous post were that you seem to get the same stories repeated across the day, which gets a bit tiresome and clogs up your Twitterbox.

RNZ explained that the stories are only repeated when there has been an update, although the headline may not have been rewritten. They plan on improving the system to amend this, and another issue related to linking back to stories from Twitter, but there's a bit of work involved:

"The current publishing software was designed to meet our needs when we built the site 3 years ago. But the software interface between our newsroom system and the website CMS was written in-house (in Perl), so we can easily change the way it works to create a 'publish stories once' news feed. There are some other non-trivial changes we'd have to make within the CMS to accommodate this and also ensure that urls to updated stories remained the same over the life of a story."

Glad to know there's a will and a way. Other news organisations should take a leaf out of RNZ's book: engaging with your audience works. I had a quibble, RNZ made it possible for me to get in touch with them, I did, they explained the situation, I'm happy with the explanation and remain a happy customer. Simple, really.

Found a great range of video guides on RSS, wikis, social networking and other Web2.0 tools in plain English. They're by Lee LeFever of Common Craft.

Try one... (this explains wikis)

Roy Greenslade does a piece on research that confirms what we already know: fewer people are buying newspapers. But it also shows that fewer people are consuming news full stop.

Yes, a lot of people turning off the TV and ditching the paper are going online. But an awful lot are just getting on with their lives without being too bothered about catching a daily news package. The headlines are enough.

This is something I want to come back to a lot this year. I think it's the elephant in the conference room: People aren't interested in news. Is there anything we can do about that? Is it because of too much information so people are switching off, because people are tired of beatups and headlines that fail to deliver in the story below, too much personality and fluff and repetition and flashiness? Or is it something more than that?

In the same vein as Roy's blog post is this heartfelt piece in the Washington Post by veteran reporter David Simon.

He asks: "Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium - isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?"

Good question.

British regional paper The Lancashire Evening Post has added monthly surveys on hot issues like local environmentalism and trasnport to boost reader engagement on its website.

The Post told journalism.co.uk that the monthly 40-question surveys get a much stronger response than the daily poll. The survey results are published online and in print and used in features and editorials.

Simon Jenkins, a former Times editor, told The Lords Communications Committee that blogs were like 'bar room chats' and couldn't be taken as seriously as newspaper columns, reports journalism.co.uk.

A blogger himself, he said he found the flexibility of writing a blog stimulating but wouldn't want blogs to replace 'old-fashioned' newspaper columns.

As far as I'm aware, no one is currently considering doing so.

Andrew Neil, meanwhile, raises an interesting view: "The rise of blogging and opinion outside of the mainstream has caused newspapers a problem, because quite often these blogs are more interesting than the editorials in the newspapers."

This is fun. Telegraph.co.uk has come up with an interactive political map of Britain.

Essentially it's a dot-map of Britain, with each dot representing an electorate (as defined by the new boundaries that became effective in June 2007). Click on the dot and you see the candidates for that electorate, voter turnout and data on health, crime and education.

Interested in three or four particular electorates? Stick a pin in them and you can track them more easily. Want to know what would happen if 4% of swing voters in a Tory-vs-Labour race opted for the Tories? Use the Swingometer to find out. Want to see Labour's 20 most vulnerable seats, the Lib Dem's top 25 target seats or the electorates created under the new boundaries? Hit the predefined searches and there they are.

The map took a short while to load for me (no surprise, really, given download speeds etc) and a couple of times it came up blank after I'd clicked through and was trying to come back. But I like it and I expect many tcuk users will too.

Rupert Murdoch says the part-paywall will remain at the WSJ. "The really specialized (material) giving the greatest insights, that will still be a subscription service," he said at Davos. Link: Reuters

Following on from my earlier post about hyperlocal newspapers: Outside.in has linked up with the Washington Post.