• News apps challenge longstanding perceptions of who owns technology within a media company.
• Regardless of who is placed in what department, developers and journalists must be able to collaborate so they can create new tools.
• News organizations will have to emphasize project management and product development if they hope to compete with digitally-native information companies.
• News organizations must truly support risk-taking in order to see its rewards.

Excellent state of the field analysis. All challenges to solve.

Sunday evening, I created a Github repository for two reasons: to see how my code is evolving and to track step by step how I’m putting this data together. After all, journalism must be reproducible.

Now that it’s closer to deadline, I want to open the floor. What data points would you like to see established about The Locals? As of right now, I know that the LEV (Local East Village) produced 100 blog posts in November 2010 from 29 authors and 19 community contributors. The FGCH (Fort Greene-Clinton Hill) produced 105 blog posts in November 2010 from 23 authors and 23 community contributors. The rest of the questions I’ve established are in my research notes.

P.S. Another part of the experiment is to see how well Git works as a versioned authoring tool.

Twitter became popular before it had a mission. What this means is that its employees and investors will forever be trapped in boardrooms having these inane cyclical discussions about its identity. Twitter will either perpetually be simple insofar as its millions of users will have to hack the service to reflect their own values or it will roll the dice on a focus, put the site through chronic redesigns, and risk a mass user exodus. Either way its top talent will likely get frustrated and leave the company. Its top users will drift to something else then jump.

I generally try not to get sucked into the discussion about Twitter, its values, what it’s useful for, etc. and Cody finally articulated why: it’s a tool with unique characteristics that has been bootstrapped into many different uses. Those that I can identify are ease of use over SMS, 140 character limitation for messages, asynchronous user relationships, and “push”-esque notification system. It’s just a matter of time before other tools appear with potentially the same characteristics but are designed to solve the communication needs of a better defined community.

Then I read the editorial.

The argument is that people in the newsroom are concerned about the manner in which a new Publisher, Steve Smith, has been chosen for the paper. According to the article, the “editors felt that the Emerald cannot afford the salary Smith proposed, [...] were extremely concerned that allowing Smith to work as an adjunct instructor at the journalism school while serving as publisher was an obvious conflict of interest, for multiple reasons, [and] were also concerned that Smith would be at the Emerald for only one year and if things didn’t go how he planned, if the Emerald actually ended up losing money, he would not be held accountable.”

Ryan Knutson’s comment on Steve’s initial post, though, really says it the best (emphasis mine):

And while I disagree with some of the fumbling steps taken by the board, I would only expect a strike of the staff to occur if the board tried to appoint J-School dean Tim Gleason, Dave Frohnmayer or any other administrator or permanent faculty member, but not a champion of integrity in journalism and ODE alumnus like Steve Smith. To assume Steve, who has worked in the newspaper business for decades, would suddenly drop all respect for the ethics of watchdog journalism and prevent the Emerald from criticizing the UO just because he might also teach journalism students in the classroom is naive.

[...]

When I was on the board during fall term of this year, I pushed strongly to try and involve Steve into our operations, knowing that his experience and his integrity would be a tremendous asset to the Emerald as it tries to find itself in these changing times.

In short, the Daily Emerald reached out to Steve because they thought he would be the right person to turn the news organization around. The discussion shouldn’t be about the editorial integrity of the student newsroom, but rather how the Emerald is going to completely reinvent itself. I had the opportunity to sit in on a Society of Professional Journalists session with Steve this past fall, and also had several conversations with Ryan about the paper and the future of news. I believe Steve’s own explanation of the situation, instead of the sensationalism that this has grown to be (it has now been covered in the Eugene Weekly, the Oregonian, the Chronicle of Higher Education, College Media Matters, and other publications).

Granted, I fully sympathize with the newsroom staff and their concerns that their voices weren’t being heard. I had to try and fight through the same institutional inertia this fall.

This is a critical juncture for the Daily Emerald, however, both as a newspaper and a news organization. The real dilemma isn’t the potential conflict of interest between the Publisher and editorial content of the paper, but rather how to bring the organization from the red into the black. In fact, there was argument made that the Publisher could indirectly control the voice of the paper by dictating how many pages were to be printed. To my knowledge, you just don’t have this problem if you have a website (or Twitter, or a blog, or anything digital for that matter). With declining revenues from print, what they really need is strong leadership to right the ship and figure out how to effectively “innovate” and monetize online.

I’m not entirely sure that the organization has the capacity to pull an IBM. Only time will tell.