The Evolving Newsroom

The question of whether or not newspapers are being bold enough in their efforts to adapt to the new publishing environment is one that comes up a lot.

I don't see evidence of particularly bold thinking in New Zealand yet, although to be fair papers here have a bit more leeway than their overseas counterparts given this is a less competitive market with relatively low broadband uptake (limiting, for the time being, the dominance of the web in a number of regions, especially rural).

This special report from Editor&Publisher looks at how US newspapers are adapting (regional as well as metro) and canvasses opinion on whether they're going far enough.

It's a nice wrap of the current market and hits on a few interesting points. Of particular interest to me was that while some newspapers are publising slimmer editions on slow days, others are cutting out slow days altogether. I've pulled out a few paragraphs below.

I once read a prediction, where I can't remember, that over time a lot of newspapers would evolve into weekly publications with daily news published on their websites. This has long struck me as a likely scenario. Is this the beginning of that process?

Tim McGuire, [a change expert and the Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications,] says his advice for newspapers now is to radically rethink what the newspaper looks like day to day.

Monday's paper might be just 16 pages, covering more sports than news. Tuesday, another loser for most dailies, might even drop sports. The Sunday paper would be almost unchanged, the product for mass distribution not only of ad inserts but as a "convener" of the whole community to have a conversation. And to get everybody in the door, he suggests dramatically lowering the price of that fat Sunday paper.

Some newspapers are already going the route of shrinkage. The San Jose Mercury News, for instance, is in the process of downsizing its Monday and Tuesday editions. "We are looking at trying to tighten up stories and see how we can convey more information in less space," says Editor/Vice President David J. Butler.

The Salt Lake Tribune, another MediaNews Group Inc. paper, is also greeting the beginning of the workweek with smaller papers, something Editor Nancy Conway says is a positive step: "The key is not to have fewer stories; the vision is to make them smaller."

The time could be ripe for fulfilling a longtime fantasy of some publishers — eliminating dog days like Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday. It's fueled by the obvious fact that in the U.S., at least, newspapers generally lose money during the week and coin it on Fridays and Sundays, says INMA's executive director Earl Wilkinson: "I know of newspapers that for 20 years have had blueprints for killing days of the week."

In recent weeks, two small GateHouse Media Inc.-owned dailies in Illinois actually implemented those plans. Tony Scott, publisher of the Daily Review Atlas in Monmouth, Ill., told readers that the paper had been thinking about eliminating Mondays for at least two years, and were finally pushed to do it by newsprint costs that soared 45% year-over-year and rising gas prices. Its sibling Kewanee (Ill.) Star Courier also dropped Mondays.

In Wisconsin, the Forum Communications-owned Daily Telegram in Superior went even further, announcing in July that come September, it was dropping four of its six publishing days while shifting daily reporting to its Web site. In making the decision to switch to a twice-weekly, paid-circ model, Publisher Ken Browall says all options were open for the 5,500-circ evening daily — from turning tabloid to going to free distribution.

INMA's Wilkinson is skeptical that larger-circulation newspapers will actually pull the trigger on the idea of eliminating Mondays. But Alan Jacobson, president and CEO of Brass Tacks Design, thinks it could become as widespread an industry practice as narrowing web widths.

"Staffing a newsroom seven days a week has been tough," he says. Newspapers, Jacobson figures, will drop a day following the same logic many papers are using in lopping off feature sections for low-circ days. "Reporters spend a lot of time on those feature stories," he says. "You eliminate that section, and you just bought yourself three days of reporting time — if you still have that reporter."

More from the web-to-print syndication files. Breakingviews.com, a financial analysis website set up by former FT journalism Hugo Dixon, has done a deal to supply branded content to both Telegraph Media Group and the New York Times.

This is a Guardian report on the deal:

The long-term deal struck by TMG will allow the group to publish analysis on financial events on Telegraph.co.uk and in the print edition of the Daily Telegraph, augmenting its existing business coverage.

Breakingviews.com's deal with the NYT will lead allows it to carry a branded opinion column that will appear in all weekday editions of the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune from September 23. These columns will also appear online at NYTimes.com/business and IHT.com.

"The breakingviews.com column is a perfect complement to both our leading news coverage of finance and business and our roster of award-winning columnists," said the New York Times business editor, Lawrence Ingrassia.

The move by TMG to carry analysis from the financial analysis website follows the departure of four journalists over the summer, and the arrival of a new media editor, on the integrated business desk. This integrated operation oversees the production of business news across Telegraph.co.uk, the Daily Telegraph and its sister Sunday paper.

"At such a difficult, but fascinating time in global markets, the Telegraph newspaper and online readers will be able to benefit from breakingviews.com's insights," said the TMG editor-in-chief, Will Lewis.

Breakingviews founder Hugo Dixon spent 13 years at the Financial Times, during the last five of which he headed its Lex business column, before setting up the website in 1999.

The financial analysis website has syndication deals with other leading newspapers including Le Monde in France, Spain's El Pais and Italy's La Stampa.

More from Mastering Multimedia (loving this blog at the moment), this time top tips on making better audio slide shows.

• I shoot the photographs for my slideshow like I shoot a video sequence–by taking wide, medium and lots of tight shots. This gives my shows visual variety and allows me to cover my audio by opening with a wide shot, then transitioning to a tight shot of the same scene.
• It’s best to open your show with a bit of natural sound rather than with a subject talking. The ramp up into your story is important. If you don’t pull the viewer in fast they will bolt. Natural sound eases the viewer into your story without jolting them with dialogue.
• Stop having the subjects introduce themselves. Really, stop it! The biggest cliché in audio slideshows is the “Hi, my name is…” intro. Instead, use a lower thirds title.
• Use passionate subjects for the narrative of your story. If your subject has a boring monotone voice, then maybe you should write and voice some narrative bridges yourself to help move the story along.
• Like video, try to match up photos to what the narrator is talking about. The same goes for the natural sound. When you do this, your story will really start to crackle.
• Get yourself a decent flash card recorder. The cheap one makes your show sound amateurish. You use a $3000.00 digital camera to shoot the pictures. A $200.00 recorder is a small price to pay for decent sound quality.
• When you record an interview, make sure to do it in a quiet spot. Then add your natural sounds (at a reduced level) under the narrative to give it sound depth.
• Record a minute of room tone wherever you are taking photographs. Use it to cover the sound gaps between or under the narration.
• Never, I mean NEVER have dead air sound gaps in your audio narrative. Cross-fade your audio between clips or add room tone to prevent this at all costs.
• Your final audio edit should be as smooth as butter. Nothing should take you out of the moment.
• Make sure your show is paced correctly. Too fast and you make the viewer mad, too slow and you bore them visually.
• Use music for a reason, and not because you need to make a boring show more interesting. Don’t use music to manipulate emotion. If it is not in the narrative or photos, don’t force it with music.
• Finally, create what I call a nat/narrative weave with your audio edits. Start your show with natural sound, and then weave your narration and ambient sound in and out.

More at Mastering Multimedia.

From the Mastering Multimedia blog, in a post about the quality versus quantity debate, comes a list of 10 questions to ask yourself about how you're using video on your news website.

It's an instructive list, I think, and the post's worth a read too.

• What is the overall vision for video in your newsroom?
• Why are you doing video in the first place?
• Is quality video valuable to your viewers?
• Has video gained traction on your website over time? If not, why?
• Has your paper invested in training that empowers your video producers to be able to tell and edit a story effectively?
• Do you have (need) a web-savvy management structure in place to filter out bad video ideas and is an advocate for video based storytelling?
• If you are producing lots of video, do you have a website that showcases this valued web-only content?
• Can viewers find your videos quickly if they land on story page and not of the home page?
• Can lower levels of video quality be acceptable if they meet a high news value bar?
• Should small papers with dwindling resources really be adding poorly produced video to their already bleak shovelware websites?
  

For the nostalgics among you, here's a cracker of an educational video from the days when women worked on the social pages, typesetters ruled, sub-editors wore visors and syndicated copy was mimeographed.

Not at all surprised to read tonight that ReadWriteWeb has done a deal with the New York Times to provide syndicated technology stories.

It's a terrific achievement for ReadWriteWeb, showing it's well and truly come of age as an authoritative source of technology news. And it's a smart move by the New York Times to accept it can't be all things to all technology readers and join forces with another supplier.

The deal follows a similar one a couple of months ago between the Washington Post and Techcrunch.

This is how ReadWriteWeb announced it:

The New York Times announced today that it will syndicate ReadWriteWeb content, as part of a re-designed Technology section on its website. Over the coming weeks you will see ReadWriteWeb content incorporated into the Technology section front.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

This is also further vindication that blogs are increasingly being accepted as mainstream news and analysis providers. Indeed the NYT is beefing up its own tech blog, Bits - it's being "more prominently displayed, highlighting its role as the main spot to find breaking tech news and analysis on NYTimes.com."

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Congratulations all round.

More from Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2008. This time a few words of note from journalist Dan Gillmor on how we decide who to trust as we become swamped with information from an increasing number of diverse sources:

“From a journalistic perspective: Blogging and other conversational media are entering a new phase when it comes to community information needs — they're growing up.

"Traditional media are using these tools to do better journalism, and are beginning to engage their audiences in the journalism.

"Entrepreneurial journalists are finding profitable niches. Advertisers are starting to grasp the value of the conversations, and so on.

"The big issues remain, including the crucial one of trust. Here, too, we're seeing progress.

"The best blogs are as trustworthy as any traditional media, if not more. The worst, often offering fact-challenged commentary, are reprehensible and irresponsible.

"But audiences are learning, perhaps too slowly, that modern media require a more activist approach.

"We need to be skeptical of everything, but not equally skeptical of everything. We need to use judgement, to get more information — and to go outside our personal comfort zones.”

Dan Gillmor
Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
Kauffman Professor of Digital Media Entrepreneurship
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Arizona State University
startupmedia.org

ReadWriteWeb posts about Technorati's latest breakdown of the blogosphere and disagrees that the figures show blogging has become mainstream.

Here are the figures from Technorati:

And here's how ReadWriteWeb sees them:

Of those 133 million blogs that Technorati has indexed - guess how many of them have been posted to in the last 7 days? 1.1% of them, or 1.5 million total.

Just for context, 1.6 million people in the US have defaulted on their mortgages last year. In 2005 there were 1.6 million people around the world who could speak Esperanto. 1.6 million people went to the Minnesota State Fair last year.

Is blogging mainstream? Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair or speak Esperanto.... Trying to blog (as 130 million+ people have in the past 6 years) may be somewhat mainstream, but actually blogging does not seem to be so yet.

ReadWriteWeb goes on to say that:

Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred. Writing full length blog posts even as regularly as once a week is hard, though.

Too right. It takes considerable time and effort, which can be hard to sustain.

We expect that microblogging may become more popular than blogging, if it hasn't already! From updating your status message on Facebook or MySpace, to posting 140 word updates on lunch or politics on Twitter to offering truncated public religious testimonials on a site like Gospelr (Twitter for Christians) - there are a whole lot of people already microblogging, if you will.

I agree, as do a number of the notables who commented on the Technorati research. Here's Michael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch:

Microblogging platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed are the fast food equivalent of the blogging world, and continue to gain popularity because they let people update multiple times per day with 140 characters or less on what they are doing, how they're feeling, etc. Not only is microblogging a terrific method of self expression, the value of the raw data that's created is enormously important. The Twitter messages I read during the two presidential conventions gave me a good idea on how people reacted to the various speeches. It's not statistically relevant, but pollsters will be watching that data more and more closely over time.”

And here's New York-based venture capitalist, Fred Wilson (who has invested in the two microblogging sites he mentions):

“Blogging is getting easier and easier and some day, we'll all have blogs of one sort or another. Most won't look like my blog, maybe more like mytumblog or my twitter feed, but even more likely they'll look like something else.”

“Earlier this year I wrote on my blog [http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/06/my-vision-for-s.html], ‘Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.’ That's where we are headed and blogging is a big part of that.”

There's some really interesting nuggets in the Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Well worth dipping into.

It strikes me as timely to ponder this, from British essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson:

What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

While we're on it, here's a couple more...

Without credible communication, and a lot of it, employee hearts and minds are never captured.
John Kotter (author of Leading Change)

I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I'm going to learn, I must do it by listening.
Larry King

*Quotes from The Book of Political & Business One-Liners.

I've been meaning to point to this for a while. It's a post from Justin Williams, workflow guru and assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group in the UK.

He talks about the decline of the role of sub-editors, or rather an evolutionary blurring of the lines between what a sub, a news editor, commissioning editor and web editor does.

"If I was a reporter now and an old hand sidled up to me and suggested that I might like to retrain as a sub, I’d run a mile. And as for joining one of the nationals’ subbing schemes for graduate trainees … fugeddaboutit."

And he makes some recommendations for how working and would-be sub-editors can start updating their skill sets. Here's a few....

1. Accept that your job is not a long-term or even a medium-term proposition. You’ll find that acceptance of reality is an enormously liberating thing.
2. If subs start being co-opted onto the newsdesk to work with the editors, hassle and cajole whoever does your rotas to be given the same chance. If this is happening, it won’t be an experiment, merely the start of a process which will see the two roles - news editor and sub - become one and the same.
3. Learn to use your company’s content management system (CMS). Do this in your own time if you’re not offered formal training. Come in a couple of hours early for a week. It’s a blast.
4. Learn about search engine optimisation (SEO). Become an expert on it. Constantly check the most popular section on Google News to see what’s playing well. Use Wordtracker to find the most-searched-for terms and tell the reporters and the desk when they’re getting it wrong.
5. Sign up to Digg, Reddit and six or seven of the other aggregators and start seeding your website’s content. Build networks of friends on the aggregators. Make sure you seed plenty of other stufff, too - you’ll find that other seeders will ignore you if you only propagate one site’s content.

This is worth a read. It gives a good insight into current thinking at the Telegraph, one of the more pioneering media groups in the area of web-first publishing and newsroom integration, and raises plenty of grounds for discussion.