Tag Archives: newspapers

More ideas for “unsucking” commenting

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A post on Xark! today discusses why newspaper website comments suck and what might be done to “unsuck” them. The synthesis of why they suck is that newspapers don’t allocate enough time or staff resources to participating in the conversation and, when they do, newspapers take the wrong approach to community management. In short, there is generally a lot of room for improvement.

Upgrading newsroom culture is one part of it, I believe, but the right tools have to be in place first so that participants in this new culture shift doesn’t run into barriers of frustration. I think strides can be made on both the frontend and backend of a news organization website. As a part of the user experience, comments shouldn’t require user registration but rather should be able to “sign in” with Facebook Connect or OpenID, or leave a comment with an email address to be verified once. If someone wants to add information to the discussion anonymously, I think that should be a submission form separate from the comment thread. The web is a global commons where news organizations should be facilitating intelligent conversations.

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On giants

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“See, the big guys have, and this has always been the case, when you have an existing business, whether you’re the record industry, the television business, or the movie industry, and you don’t want to cannibalize it so you stay away, or the New York Times [even], from these new distribution media because you go, ‘oh gosh, you know it’s going to cannibalize our TV viewing,’ that is an opening for everybody who doesn’t have all that existing relationships.” – Leo Laporte, TWiT 193 (at about 14 minutes)

If you’re an industry behemoth, it’s all about nimbly finding the balance between old and new. If you’re a startup, then it’s all about identifying and capitalizing on these weaknesses.

Interview with Cornelius Swart of the Portland Media Lab

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Cornelius Swart, Publisher of the Portland Sentinel, talks about the takeaways from this morning’s journalism sessions at BarCamp Portland, introduces the ideas behind the Portland Media Lab, and presents one reason why he’s optimistic for the future of news and journalism in Portland. Learning about the Portland Media Lab on Thursday personally made my day. The skeleton of what Cornelius is proposing seems very similar to the type of community empowerment work Jackie Hai and Richard Caesar are doing with the Amherst Wire, and I can very easily see the Portland Media Lab becoming an incubator for the type of journalism Portland needs.

BarCamp Portland and the future of news

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There’s talk on the town about adding a journalism session to BarCamp Portland. This should be a time to brainstorm and collaborate on the future of news in the Portland-area, instead of just being a space for journalists and bloggers to come together and try and resolve their issues. Let’s have an idea-generating session on what the journalism needs of Portland are, how we’ll be able to fill those news from the grassroots if/when The Oregonian implodes because of their terrible CMS, and then, in turn, how we’ll be able to monetize that. This is something where perspectives from both camps, the journalists and the bloggers, would offer value to the conversation.

To provide fodder for this discussion, listen to the most recent installment of Dave Winer and Jay Rosen’s Rebooting the News. One of the ideas that I think will “save journalism” is the digital assignment desk Jay starts talking about near the end. His part of the idea is this: a tool to map out all of the particulars that might need to be reported on in the coverage of any given issue. Once the editorial team has this laid out, they can then decide what resources they want to apply and where.

I’d like to take this two steps further.

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Using AP fees wisely

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A thought from a meeting yesterday with John Lowe and an idea I had a week ago: what would happen if newspapers withdrew their subscriptions from the Associated Press, which cost too much and offer little value online when you can link instead, and used all or part of those savings to start an incubator fund for local news startups?

Such a fund would offer a extraordinary advantage over printing day-old national news that people can get instantly online.

The innovation required for newspapers to reinvent themselves isn’t generally coming from within. There are institutional and cultural reasons for this. For instance, a friend who took an early retirement from The Oregonian said that his group of friends who wanted to discuss how to change the newspaper had to do so off company time. They brainstormed ideas over pizza and beer that were rarely implemented once they got back into the office. Google has the 20% rule. This is a significant difference in workplace, but a seed fund for news startups would promote the type of creativity and tenacity needed to survive in this new environment that corporate culture typically squashes.

Newspapers could benefit in a couple of ways. One, the contract with the startup might structured in such a way as to guarantee content to the newspaper’s print product at mutually agreeable rates. Two, if the startup pulled something particularly innovative, the newspaper could just buy the company. This is what Google does because it knows that disruptive thinking has a lower barrier to implementation on the ‘net.

All sorts of ideas for the AP

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Since firing a shot across Google’s bow on Monday, the Associated Press has received all sorts of heat. Most of that heat has come in the form of snarky criticism, but there are a surprising number of diamonds in the rough. Dave Winer:

No one, and I mean no one, has the site that everyone goes to to find out What’s New Now. It’s weird that AP singularly has the best resources to create such a site, and get way out in front of the Internet industry, including Google. Esp if they partnered with some of their competitors like AFP and NYTCO or Bloomberg. Then it all comes down to UI. Have a look at Twitter or FriendFeed and you’ll get some ideas right off. River Of News. That, my dear friends at AP (no sarcasm) is where you should be pouring your energy, not trying to take back what you think Google took from you. That happened a long time ago, and the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube.

To be honest, though, I’m not sure they have the leadership to execute. That’s the biggest hurdle to innovation in this “newspaper crisis.”

BOINC for journalism

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The University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication brought Marty Baron, Editor of the Boston Globe, to Eugene today to give the 33rd Ruhl Lecture. My overall opinion is that, although it was fun to be physically present at one of these #thedeathofnewspapers presentations, he didn’t cover anything particularly new or groundbreaking. It began with a pretty backward-looking, pessimistic tone, and then continued into something that lead Bryan Murley to ask whether it was an “informercial for The Globe.” In fact, I think the entire perspective of the audience could’ve been shifted if, instead of calling the lecture “The Incredible Shrinking Newsroom,” it were called “The Amazing Growth of the News Ecosystem.” We need more conversation about what the future can look like. But I digress.

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Vetting advertisers

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Yesterday, I off-handedly had an idea that could be a business model for news organizations: vetting advertisers. Under the assumption that an organization practicing journalism builds its credibility though truthfulness, transparency, and accuracy, there exists the possibility that they could then monetize that credibility by taking product claims through the ringer. Not selling out, per se, but rather by selling time and attention. Companies would pay you because they want to be associated with your authority; in order to get this authority, however, they’d have to surpass a set of open source criteria. We shouldn’t be taking the human touch out of advertising because then, every so often, you get something like this:

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at the bottom of an article about bottled water and greenwash advertising. In my opinion, Lighter Footstep is now sending two contradictory messages: bottled water is killing our environment, and that I should pay a premium to have bottled water shipped from the South Pacific. This juxtaposition is broken because the misleading advertising has the opportunity to negate the value of the journalism.

Later: Dave Winer speculates on a “Digg for ads” which falls under this same idea of vetting advertisements (although crowdsourcing this time).

News Innovation in Portland: Interview with Steve Woodward on journalism, InfoLiberator, and OpenMicroBlogging

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News Innovation in Portland: Interview with Steve Woodward from Daniel Bachhuber on Vimeo.

I sat down with Steve Woodward this evening (@oregoniansteve on Twitter) at Bailey’s Taproom in Portland to discuss a whole myriad of topics, including the supposed “death of journalism,” how and why the internet is disrupting other industries, and why now is a great time to be alive. In the interview I did at the end of our conversation, I ask him what he thinks journalism is and about the project he’s currently working on, a mashup between InfoLiberator and OpenMicroBlogging. Their goal is to build a “Costco for data,” aggregating local information from a number of sources and then feeding it to you based on keywords, location, and other meta criteria. Watch all of the way though for a coincidental appearance by a drunk, and how he too applies to the project Steve is working on. I’ll work for better audio next time.

Of the many significant takeaways from the conversation, I’d like to record one: we are so done with the “newspapers are dying” conversation.

This video is the first in what I hope to be a series of interviews, discussions, and arguments with various people I find interesting. I’m posting them to Vimeo right now, but might be switching/cross-posting to Blip.tv if I can convince it to upload my content. Blip is pretty cool, in my opinion, because it offers an instant video podcast but Vimeo has better HD. It’s definitely a first-world dilemma.

Reframing the conversation

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There were two excellent posts published this weekend on the future of the news industry. They emphasize long-term scenario vision, and technological empowerment. The first, Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable“, I caught from a Twitter link sharing storm Friday evening. Although there were a number of money quotes, his perspective on disruptive technology as revolution stuck with me (emphasis mine):

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

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