Sure disasters make for good copy and they are a chance for a newspaper to really serve the community — assuming you can print the newspaper and the staff has power at home and can leave their driveways.
Oh – but it does still make good photos as evidenced by my front yard around noon today:
(submitted from the Radisson – with hot water, warm beds and wifi – more pix at Flickr)
I spent the morning at a workshop in Worcester, MA focused on reader comments and the law – and for some reason started thinking about ice cream on the way home.
The session was organized by an informal group of New England media lawyers (shout out to Rob Bertsche and Rick Gagliuso) and the lunch keynote was delivered by Josh Benton of the Neiman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. I joined three other journalists on the morning panel: Jim Bodor of the Telegram & Gazette, Jessica Kosowski of the Sun-Chronicle and David Olson of the Salem News.
We had a great crowd and conversation, none of which had to do with dessert. On the ride back I started wondering if any of us were doing enough online (reader comments aside) to make digital news really different than print.
So try this analogy on for size: For 200 years we have been selling basically the same product – call it vanilla news ice cream. Maybe some papers have been selling vanilla bean or French vanilla. It is still vanilla – albeit fresh and tasty and delivered right to your doorstep every morning.
When newspapers went online we started by offering the only flavor we knew how to make – vanilla. Vanilla online is basically as good as vanilla in print – assuming you really like vanilla. And we bet the farm on people really liking it. Sure, one click away were 10,000 other store fronts selling Youtube and Flickr and Face… I mean chocolate and butter pecan and rocky road. But we were sticking with our sure thing.
The question becomes – vanilla is great but what it only 20% of people want to buy it on a regular basis? What if adding multimedia and comments and text alerts is great but is really just hot fudge on top of the vanilla? Yummy, but still intrinsically the same as the print product.
So, what exactly do newspaper.coms need to do to learn how to make pistachio? And butter pecan swirl. And maybe mint chocolate chip. Is the answer mass customization, user generated content, local business recommendations and reviews, free classifieds, hyper-local databases, cell phone video or social networks? Or are all of those things really just news with sprinkles on top?
Is someone out there already building the next great ‘news’ thing and if so, any chance they are building it for a journalism company?
If you know please leave a message – I will be at Baskin-Robbins.
Technically, no one has quit the AP yet. Their current contract contains a two-year notice period. But, a number of papers have given their notice (7% this year vs 4% last year according to AP) and last month the Spokesman-Review indicated they plan to try and break the two-year clause.
And then late this week AP announced it was cutting rates an additional $9 million in ’09 and eliminating the new two-tiered service structure in favor of giving members access to every text story the wire service produces. They also announced an intent to pursue what may be a complete restructuring of their menu of services and fee schedule.
So – maybe that is good news. In the meantime I have been curious as to how many papers have given their notice. Seven percent would be somewhere around 100 – but below is the best I can figure that have announced publicly. If I am missing any you know of – please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.
Papers that have given AP their 2-year notice:
A list of articles and posts referencing the above cancellations:
Journalists seemingly like nothing better than to ruminate over the decline of our industry. Romanesko is often little but layoff and buyout notices. Fading to Black documents much of the same. It is almost all we talk about – and sure the bad news is true and close to home. A former colleague reminded me of that via a Twitter this week regarding the handful of buyouts we are now in the middle of.
It is a personal tragedy for the people who lose jobs. It is painful and destabilizing for those left behind. It certainly is not the best news for readers. But what does any of it have to do with the decline of journalism?
Nothing.
Maybe not a great example, but the six years I spent at AOL were filled with almost monthly mergers, reorganizations and layoffs – much of the tech industry is the same. And, the comparison stands not because AOL is in decline but because that is what companies in tightly competitive markets do – they fight to compete.
Right now newspapers are adjusting to an awkward reality in which they are not the only information game in town. As a one-time near-monopoly the industry grew staffing, grew profit margins and ignored innovation. Well, payback sucks. Today’s downsizings are nothing more than 30 years of pent-up economic corrections crammed into a 2-year crash course. Emphasis on ‘crash.’
The problem with newspapers right now is not that no one wants news. Rather, it is that fewer people want it once daily in print. That is not a problem with journalism, it is a problem of weaning journalism from an aging delivery platform paid for via an outdated business model.
So, print circulation is down, profits are down and newspapers need a bit of time to regain their equilibrium. This is true not just for income v.s. expenses but also for print v.s. every other distribution platform out there. As an industry that has been around for 400 years, 5 or 10 years of chaos once in a while can’t be completely unexpected.
The question really is, once the current recession passes and papers start filling the occasional job again, what will the titles be for those first few new hires? If we have learned from the pain of this transition we will be hiring people with skills that cross disciplines: multimedia journalists, database editors, interactive designers and the like.
Newspapers are certainly not going to look the same in 5 years. We may even lose a few along the way. But as long as there is a need for news, someone or something that fills the need will take their place. And that ‘something’ will be hiring journalists. In the meantime we need to stop worrying so much about the decline and start worrying more about the recovery.
Every crash has a bottom, but it’s often easy to miss amid all the screaming on the way down.
We had a made-for-TV story come along yesterday. A mother stops at the local Dunkin Donuts with her two kids and 17-year old brother and leaves them in the car. While she is inside the brother gets out and opens the trunk to pull out items he needed for work.
Meanwhile a man walks across the parking lot – gets in the truck and pulls away – with the brother clinging to the back bumper. And it is all caught on security cameras. The story ends well as the truck was recovered a block away – but the scenario is terrifying.
So, we had the video and an interview with the family – both of which we put up Web first Thursday afternoon. The question is – what’s the Web headline going to be?
<insert Jeopardy music here>
Some of the more creative minds in the newsroom suggested (almost) jokingly that we go with a tabloid TV head:
A mother’s worst nightmare!
or
Are Your Kids Safe?
Both of course followed by a tagline – ‘film at 11:00.’
In the other direction – what we ended up using in print today was
A harrowing few minutes for family
That is clear enough and probably engaging in print – with a subhead and photos. But it certainly does not scream ‘Video.’
What is the balance in Web journalism between telling the story and selling the story? Tabloid papers live off the quality of their headlines – is that approach a better fit for online regardless of how you handle it in print? Does pandering to an audience just come more naturally online? Is it pandering? So many question marks?
After a brief discussion I have to say we went the safe middle route:
Security Camera captures car theft with kids in the backseat
The headline has most of the SEO-goodness you would want, plus it gets the idea of ‘we have video’ in there along with the potential peril to the kids – but without going overboard. But, I still wonder if it would not have gotten more traffic yesterday with something like:
Coffee shop stop nightmare for mom, kids – see the video!
What can you justify when you are talking about trying to drive pageviews?
Just finished the blogroll at the bottom of the page. Looks simple, it wasn’t.
I am really bored with static lists of blogs. Tough to tell what is worth clicking on if you are not already familiar with the writers.
So – to put this together – I exported an OPML file out of Flock (same one I use in Google Reader) containing 30 or 40 journalism bloggers. Then – I filtered the whole thing through Yahoo Pipes. This let me narrow each individual blogger to one latest entry each, sort by pub date and generally mix and match the needed fields.
After dropping it back into WP – I now have a dynamically generated blogroll that is ordered by latest post and when you hover over each name – provides the title of their latest post. Clicking takes you to the post, not to their front page.
Not bad for only 4:22 a.m.
So – finally had a day or two to spend working on the site again. Nothing fancy, just a basic WP install with a template I have been hacking around with.
Most fun – I added a blogroll on steroids at the bottom. I am dynamically publishing the names of all the people I follow on the various social sites. The list shows just their names – if you hover you get what ever piece of info they have most recently updated on the respective sites.
Right now I have Friendfeed, Delicious, LinkedIn, Facebook, plus a regular Blogroll I still need to add a number of people to. I would have Twitter in there is their darn API was working tonight.
There are still some CSS tweaks to make, nav items to add and so on – but pretty happy so far.
Ok – settled on a template finally and am working on some tweaks. Not that this site has a ton of traffic at the moment but in case you are dropping by, stay tuned – I hope to have it roughed into shape this week.
Well, despite some success with my Django-based blog, I just do not know enough code to keep it running smoothly. So, for the time being I am moving over to WordPress. Hope to spend some time finding and/or customizing a theme, but this should work for now.
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