Nice taxonomy of online video

As with many things digital, we continue struggling to define new terms and concepts that really encapsulate the full experience.

So it is with online video. For some time, we've uneasily brought over TV terminology, but that was really designed for a one-way, not-quite-so-intimate, limited options environment. Online gives us many more possibilities, so the conversation has been augmented by the "three tiers" suggested by Chet Rhodes of washingtonpost.com.

Now, Peg Achterman has given us another, and I think very good way, to frame the thinking. She compares it to being at a concert. Do you have a "balcony" view, one in the middle of the orchestra or something in-between?

I don't know that the terminology is going to catch on -- after all, VOSOT, SOT, and other conjugations of that strange tongue called "newsspeak" came about partly because of the need for economy of phrase. But Achterman has given us a strong mental framework in which to consider things.

AP Style Updates

Various other AP style updates in recent weeks:

• hard line (n.) but the adjective form is hyphenated: hard-line. Also, hard-liner.
• Capitalize "The" in The Conference Board. (I always find these pretentious, just like The Associated Press and The Ohio State University - you'll find many shops that won't follow it.)
• flu-like is hyphenated. (Not sure why this was an issue; it seems logical. But, whatever.)
• headscarf and headscarves are one word. This is one desks have had to deal with as copy flows in from the Middle East.
  

AP Style Update - Walmart/Wal-Mart

AP has now gone ahead and bifurcated the style on Wal-Mart:

• It's a Walmart store (trade name)
• But Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (corporate name)
  

Why are newspapers so dumb about selling reprints?

I have long urged journalists to start getting into a retail mentality. It's not a wholesale biz anymore.*

And one of the things you know, if you've worked in retail, is the power of the impulse purchase and the value of it because people tend to spend more for something they've decided they just have to have. So why, then, do so many newspapers make it tough to instantly buy reprints on their sites, especially photos?

When it comes to stories, some get it right, like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, which have reprint permission links next to most stories. But many others, including such biggies as the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune, are AWOL on this.

And when it comes to photos - the ultimate impulse purchase - too many newspapers make it too hard, if they have a "buy this" button at all.

Stories
Even when they get it "right," too many media companies still get it wrong. For instance, say you saw a nice story in the Times or Journal about cousin Bobby and wanted a plaque of it. Click on the reprint link next to the story and you get this screen that suggests you need a logon and a lawyer.



OK, take a chance and hit that "make a selection" drop down box. There's an entry for a plaque. (At least I can get that at the Times. The Journal, which uses the same rights service, doesn't even give me that option. Guess a few pennies from the hoi polloi just aren't worth it, huh?)

Bring up the NYT plaque link, and this is what you get - a flaming application! So much for impulse purchase.


All I wanted was to spend maybe $15, $20 on a nice plaque. Instead, I have to fill out an application (don't even know what the price might be) that gets forwarded to someplace else and ... no, I don't think so.

At McClatchy papers I get this screen showing me all these products I can buy with this reprint -- plaques, e-prints, counter cards, posters. And I get to the bottom and there's another flaming "quote" form. OK, I can see this if I wanted to buy several hundred reprints or wanted to license the content for a book or something. That involves lots of complicated rights and legal language. But to buy a simple plaque or get a simple single-copy reprint, you can't quote me a price and let me make an order? I have to, in effect, apply?

Photos
Photos are the ultimate impulse purchase. So how easy is it to do? Not very.

For instance, while the Times, the Journal and McClatchy papers have all those nice reprint links for stories, you'd be hard-pressed to find a photo link under the photo. Oh sure, lots of execs will tell you they'd love to sell you a photo - if you click here and here and here and here. When was the last time a store sold you anything you had to walk to the back and root around to get unless you were bound and determined to have it? Simple fact of retail: If you want to sell red dresses, you put the dresses in the window and near the door. You make it easy for people.

There are some weird permutations on this out there, too. For instance, at the Greenville News, a Gannett paper, you won't find a "buy this" link under the photo next to the story.

But if you're smart enough to go to the photo galleries (which aren't really galleries at all) and click on one, you'll find a "reprint" button after every photo. Of course, there were five or six back-to-school "galleries," and each "gallery" was actually a slide show, requiring me to click individually through picture after picture after picture (72 in the first gallery). After about 35 clicks, some of which were barely incremental shots of the same kids getting off a bus, you can imagine I gave up. Never did find the cute kid up there. Had he been mine, I would have been annoyed at best, which of course is what you want to do to your impulse purchasers.

(Note: Photo gallery does not equal photo trash bucket; three shots of the same thing from the same angle, etc., unless you're talking a sports play or an emergency, isn't photography. It's holding down the shutter button and then dumping whatever comes up onto online. And putting them all sequentially, instead of a true gallery where I as a reader can weave my own path, says lots about understanding the customer.)

At the Seattle Times, it's similar - no "buy this" in the caption, but click to enlarge the photo and voila - a reprint link. Only when I went to buy this:
I was redirected to this:

I never could find that photo, though there were several other nice images. But I didn't want them. I had that impulse, you see ...

Kudos to Greenville for one thing, however. When I did click through to buy a photo, it automatically transferred that photo's information over to the form and instantly showed me prices.

Thus, I was excited when I saw Greenville's rival, the Herald Journal of Spartanburg, had a "buy photo" link under its photos.

Alas, when I click through, none of the info follows and I find myself again presented with a set of galleries to root through.

So some suggestions:

7 things every news site should do to sell reprints

1. Make sure there is a clear "buy photo" link under every caption for a staff photo and a "buy reprint" (not just "reprint"-make clear money changes hands) with every local story.
2. Figure out how to work into your workflow a process where a watermark goes on every one of those photos, so the right-clickers are further encouraged to hit the "buy" link. (You can scoff and say 72 dpi, or even less in some cases, is fuzzy and can't be enlarged, etc. But in these days of ever-smaller screens, it might be "good enough" without some further marking. Besides, you keep saying you want some idea where your content is going, right?)
   
3. When your customer - yes, customer - clicks on the buy button, make sure he or she is not assaulted by legal-looking forms and language. You are simply not that important, whether you are the New York Times or the Daily Tattler.
   
4. Instead, figure out what your most popular product is and provide that and a price right up front.
5. Of course, provide other options and try to upsell. But the best way to do that is pile impulse on impluse, and that means getting details out there so I can buy it now.
   
6. Make it easy to buy and easy to pay.
7. Look for other things you can handle the same way.
   

One final thought: Why not hook up with a trophy shop or two in town to do those plaques. And if you're using a vendor, why not encourage such an arrangement in larger areas outside yours? Think of the flowers by wire model. If I can go pick up the plaque within a day or two at my local shop, instead of having to wait for it by package, I think better of you. In the process, maybe you solidify a business relationship with that shop.

Just a thought, and I can see lots of complications with that idea, but that one thing is a small thing. More important, I'll believe news managers are actually getting it when I see them make it much easier to buy stuff off their sites.

*Well, some may scoff. This isn't a store and journalism isn't retail and this just hits the slippery slope and ....
Oh come on. Get off it. None of this impinges the journalism, but it does maybe let you make an extra few bucks off it. That won't save the republic, but these days, every bit helps. It also might just get us thinking more about that person we purport to care about and serve - the reader, user, viewser -- in short, the customer. Why, let this get out of hand and we might even start writing stories more with those folks in mind. But let's not get wild and crazy.

Careering through our changing language

Saw this in the NY Post today, and as many of us head back into the classroom for a new year, thought it was good as a starting point for a riff on our changing language:

So much for Sam Zell, newspaperman.

The developer, who arranged a controversial $11.7 billion employee buyout of newspaper giant Tribune only to see the company careen into bankruptcy a year later, is on the verge of giving up his claims to buy a huge stake in the company and, according to a source familiar with the matter, is ready to walk away from the company.

How many of you would have changed "careen" to "career"? I probably would have (though, I suppose, the case could also be made that "careen" was used in the sense of "tip" here -- but why not just say that), but reflecting on that on some other commentary led me to send this e-mail around our j-school today:

All:

As we look at redoing curriculum, etc., there are likely to be calls for some kind of testing/screening students for their "language skills." But you should read the following and consider the "distinctions that are dissolving."
http://johnemcintyre.blogspot.com/2009/07/making-distinctions.html

I suspect a few of these might come up on a test or screening. I know many will make more than a few of us grind our teeth. Yet a check of my references shows that, as John points out, most are in transition (check out careen/career in your dictionary, for instance, or in most modern usage guides). McIntyre, until recently head of copy desks at the Baltimore Sun, is one of the most astute observers of the language out there. (Just two years earlier, for instance, he was firmly in the "career" camp.) http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2007/11/snap_decision.html)

This is why you will often find me dissenting when such tests, screening, etc. come up. Too often we confuse grammar with usage and style.

Language has always changed. What has happened, of course, is that in this digital age the pace has careered/careened almost out of control. I suspect we might have a little teaching envy for the math and science profs who can always walk into an intro classroom knowing 2+2=4 (until Wikipedia, of course, challenges that {grin}).

We could do worse than each of us taking a "reality check" survey of the state of usage at the beginning of each term and asking where it is truly worth planting and defending the flag and where the skirmish is lost and it is time to move on. It is not unusual these days on some points for me to have to consult five or six reference books to fix usage. I'd also recommend that anyone who feels deeply about this order a copy of Garner's latest Modern American Usage, just out this summer. Garner is probably the premier authority on American English at this point, and what he says may surprise you.

MSNBC buys EveryBlock

Today is a day a lot of news orgs and j-schools need to pay attention to.

MSNBC has bought EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news/data site started by Adrian Holovaty and initially funded by Knight.

Too many news orgs still don't get it when it comes to this kind of geo-local data (yet it is the foundation on which most mobile opportunities for newsrooms will exist). And j-schools are generally even further behind because of curriculum, funding and expertise constraints.

MSNBC's acquisition may be the thing that finally stops the "is it journalism" debate.

What will save newspapers

Just to lighten up a spirited discussion over at the Online News list about chasing certain anatomical parts for profit, David Cohn (most recently known for Spot.us) has posted this YouTube video on how newspapers can survive.

I like it - a lot.

Warning, may be NSFO - deals with those same body parts.

The SEC's new media (and new-media) rules

I had not heard or read much about the SEC's new media rules (Update: see revised rules and comment at the end of this) until I saw a little squib on the newspaper video group pointing to this short story from Birmingham via AP via Biloxi (ain't the Web great?).

Ah, leave it to college and professional sports (there's a difference?) to put the hammer down and nicely spotlight some really persnickety issues and realities that are staring a lot of TV and newspaper sports departments in the face.

According to the AP, "It only allows TV stations to show highlights for 72 hours after a game ends. The policy also prohibits the media from posting video from practices and news conferences online." And reporters have to sign the contract - or no look-see.

So let's see, at a time when newsrooms seemingly everywhere are rushing to create destination sites for various teams' fans, and when video is a major part of those efforts - the SEC just said, in essence, "screw you."

The SEC is open in what it wants -- to drive traffic to SEC and affiliate sites. And it has every right to be as draconian as it can get away with.*

Spare the anguished freedom of the press cries. So far, at least, the law seems to generally side with the idea that when teams or other groups form private associations, they get wide latitude to control the goods, even if the games, concerts, etc., are on public property or use other public facilities -- and even when government is spending questionable amounts of money providing traffic control and security.

So if we are to believe the memes that the Web is becoming more and more telegenic, and the SEC intends to strangle the video baby for all but its own and affiliated sites, what does that tell us?

• Well, first, of course, it opens the debate on priorities. Is pro (and that includes most major college) sports really worth covering in a time of shrinking resources? Or should we put the resources into those sports (or other) areas that,for many reporters are not especially glamorous but are truly woven into the community's fabric (high school, rec leagues, club leagues, non-traditional sports). Yes, yes. I know lots of places do lots of good things with high schools, for instance (though take a look around -- that generally applies only to the "major" sports), but this is still a baseline question that needs discussion. Oh, you'll never answer it to everyone's satisfaction, but it gives an excuse to quaff a few beers to get lubricated for some of the tougher stuff ahead.
• Should we launch an all-out assault on the legality of private or quasi-private associations being able to use public facilities but restrict access? OK, if they can, should we seek to require that they effectively "rent" the facility and pay the cost of all government-funded support services?
• So if you can't use video, can you use stills and audio? (You'll probably be busted on that, too, if the sponsoring organization decides you're sucking traffic from its site.)
• Which leaves us with what? The intrepid scribe (a general term for all reporters, please)? But where does that leave the scribes. All due respect, but much of sports reporting, like the staged events it leads up to, is staged itself. The obligatory and lightly revealing after-game or midweek news conferences, the after-practice sessions, the precleared meetings with players.
  
• Look, I did it from time to time for AP. No, I don't claim to be a veteran sports reporter, but I did it enough and supervised others who had to do it that I know the trenches. Yes, there is good stuff being done out there, but even more so on sports (and lord knows, it can get bad on the "government" side too) we tend to suck the teat of the hand that feeds us (no letters, please; I meant to write it that way).

So the intrepid sports editor facing that nest of fanlings he or she desperately wants to attract away from the more established fan sites (ones that tend to have gotten the idea of online social communities early) is left with what? Reporting? OMG.

Because now, no matter how good your reporter is, in fact the better she is, the more she's likely to piss off someone in the home office. Go find a DVD of "The Paper," for instance, and watch how Penn State's sports department ostracizes a reporter who takes it on her own initiative to actually go get a story instead of waiting to have it handed to her or have it "cleared." ("We don't do things that way" (not an exact quote, but close) is the pompous pronouncement she says she got from the SID's sports information director's office.)

So, at a time when staffs have been cut sharply -- even in sports -- and now that you don't have the eye candy, do you leave your staffing as is and hope he, she or they come up with the occasional nugget and can outwrite the hell out of the competition? (The Don Quixote approach.)

Do you assign another staffer as the sacrificial lamb, throwing caution (and deference to the SID) to the wind and use that person to go track the stories and those players and coaches down outside their protective cocoons? The reporter doing this is likely to have limited shelf life before he or she is effectively cut off, so you'll probably have to rotate people through -- and of course, there's always the chance the offended parties could cut your whole organization off.

In short, in an era when there is all this talk about pay for content, we have here a budding petri dish in which to examine this idea of value. How do you react and what really is your value proposition when your main source politely tells you to get lost and take your tinsel with you? Oh, and when what's left is being done in decent measure by many of your competitors?

Sports, and the legal ability to take control of the event-related news, just highlights these challenges in an online world. Don't get too smug, Mr. or Ms. City Hall or Statehouse reporter. Yeah, the pols can't throw you out or keep you from recording. But they can ignore you, and they increasingly are with blogs, Facebook, digital governance initiatives, etc. But we're the only ones who can go beyond that surface feed of the City Council meeting and make it make sense, put it in some context, you say? OK, do it, but just like on the sports beat, too often we remain tightly tied to the hands that feed us. (Go tally up sometime the amount coming from press releases, government reports, police blotters, etc.)

"But no one loves us anymore, and they should, because we do this vital public service," goes the cry. Reality check -- most of them, and that includes the public, never loved us. They tolerated us because we were the only or one of the few games in town. But now, in the digital age, when everyone is a publisher and getting that eye candy and finding that other "unique" content is more important than ever, your suppliers are cutting you off. How will you respond?

Leave it to sports - and the SEC, it's greed on full display - to nicely frame things.

---
*The AP reports that SEC spokesman Charles Bloom "said changes could be made to the 72-hour window, the ban of online video and the definition of an event that currently includes practices and news conferences. He said the league had received complaints from 35-40 news outlets."

UPDATE: The Greenville News' take on all this. Legislators are dismayed. Discussion at the GamecockCentral site.

Further: Came across this wonderful speech by the editor-in-chief at Reuters basically telling the Olympic folks in June that it's a new-media world for them and their rights deals, too. The SEC might want to pass this around HQ.

The Tampa Trib also weighs in with thoughts that fans with their multimedia cell phones might be the biggest threat. Prediction on my part: Before long we will see "leave your cell phone at the door" policies attempted. That should be fun.

The Tuscaloosa News had one of the first stories and has a PDF (6 Mb) of the draft policy.

Here is the SEC's revised policy (PDF). One of its main points appears to be allowing media outlets to have a video player fed from the SEC.
Some other points:

• The new policy defines an "event" only as a game, instead of including practices and news conferences, as the original did.
• No longer restricts access to full-time employees (recognizing that many operations use stringers, freelancers, etc.)
• Media must use the broadcast feed for video, if one is provided. Clips from that feed, limited to three minutes can be used up to seven days, instead of the previous 72 hours. There is no time restriction on video the media outlet shoots itself. The video also can be used for one online simulcast.
  
• However, here's the kicker: None of the simulcasts may be archived. And the video can be used only for "television" newscasts. Everyone else - papers, fan sites, etc., has to make a separate agreement with the SEC for Internet use, using that player mentioned above. That goes for any digital device. The feed is free, but let's just say I'm uneasy when any one entity controls everything. What about that disputed call for which the broadcast feed might have been out of position, but the TV station's (or these days, newspaper's) videographer had the perfect view? I suppose the outlet could sell the video to the SEC, but it still loses control.
• Here's the odd wording of the day: "Still photographs of the Event (including Bearer Generated Photographs) may be posted on the internet only in connection with and as part of regular print news coverage, including internet print news coverage." Ineternet print news coverage? What the heck is that?
• There's also wording that makes clear local news shops can distribute photos to "accredited media agencies" - a big plus for the AP and other services.

The revised policy does not include the ticket wording that may cause heartburn for many cell phone-equipped fans. I assume that's proceeding as it was in the original. On the Buzz Manager blog, Associate Commissioner for Media Relations Charles Bloom says that when it comes to social media, video is the primary thing the conference will crack down on -- that it doesn't intend to hinder Twitter, Facebook entries or photos. (Thanks Bryan Murley for the outpoint.)

Newspaper incoherence

David Sullivan, a copy editor at the Philly Inky, member of ACES' board and generally good and deep-thinking guy does not blog often these days, but when it does, he usually nails it, as he has in this on newspaper incoherence.
http://davisullblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/incoherence.html

Twitter stream for journalists

If you just have to keep up with a slice of the journalistic Twitter world, try muckrack.com.

AP to withhold some content from member sites?

The Nieman Lab, citing a confidential AP document, says the wire service is considering plans to hold back some content from member Web sites, instead directing users back to the AP's own site.

That would be an interesting turn of events and finally give flesh to the oft-voiced complaint from members these days that AP has become a competitor as well as a supplier. It would also mark a transition from wire service toward syndicate.

Having said that, I think there's a lot for publishers to think about in the AP's plan - namely that the wire service is struggling toward a definition of what truly is premium content. Too many publishers still think that just because it's "local" that it's worth lots of money.

I detect in the document, however, more of an orientation still toward WWMT (what would members think) about such content, not necessarily what would readers/users think. I'm not totally sold that an infographic is going to be seen by most people as primo content. (And, it should be noted, the document as revealed by Nieman so far does not say AP would put that behind a pay wall.) But then again, on the Web, it doesn't take many, and as I've said before, this is about aggregating rivulets, not necessarily even streams anymore, of revenue.

One of those commenting on the Nieman site brings up a good point -- if AP has links in its stories that link back to that "unique" content on its Web site, and if clicks flow to the AP that way, and if AP then sells ads against that, will it split the revenue with the referring sites?

Someone please buy the copy desk a map

I'm not sure why The (Columbia, S.C.) State has such trouble with where the property is that was at one time going to be the new state farmers market, until that deal fell apart.

In a recent story, the paper blared in a headline that a deal had been reached "on Bluff Road land." Only the land is not on Bluff Road as explained later in the story - it's on Pineview Road. (While Bluff Road is nearby, you'd be hard-pressed to find a story referring to it as the "Bluff Road site.") Perhaps the confusion is because the current market is on Bluff Road near the state fairgrounds, several miles away from the Pineview Road site (see below). But the deal to sell that site to the University of South Carolina has long since been made.
Then in a story this past week, the same reporter writes, and the desk lets through, that the land (now called "the Shop Road park" because it is at Shop and Pineview roads) is "nearly five miles northwest of the S.C. State Fairgrounds."



No, the fairgrounds are five miles northwest of the land, but the land is east-southeast of downtown (which is where the fairgrounds are). See this Google map, which is oriented north to start with.

Neither item has been corrected, that I have seen.

I fear this is just more evidence of the evisceration of editing.

AEJMC09: Sports sharing net planned. AP killer?

Is this a potential AP killer?

The news to come out of today's J-lab lunch at the j-profs convention in Boston is that 50 of the nation's largest papers are working on a sports content sharing site similar to what Ohio's newspapers have set up with OHNO.

Cleveland Plain Dealer Editor Susan Goldberg served up the nugget while she, Miami Herald Exec Ed Anders Gyllenhaal and Rex Smith, editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, talked about ways they're cooperating with former competitors and working around the wire service.

Among the papers she mentioned are looking at it are Denver, Atlanta, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Pete Times and one of the Pittsburgh papers. AP's cost -- about $1 mil a year for her paper -- remains stuck in the craw of many editors, even though the wire service has lowered its rates given the economic times and the rising competition from some of its own (very unhappy) members. Goldberg says that's a lot of money that could go to save some local news jobs.

She didn't provide a lot of other details, but said the agreements are awaiting legal review - everyone wants libel protection if someone files some bad copy.

Gyllenhaal says a key challenge is to figure out how to balance the two C's -- coordinate and compete. He says arts groups used to multiple critical voices (one assumes they figure their odds are better to get a good review) are the most vocal when things get shared. (The Herald shares with Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. It also has combined Florida Statehouse operations with St . Pete to create a six-person bureau that he says now allows for the papers to do some joint enterprise.)

Some of his other key points:

• Pace much faster
• Herald looking at possible 24-hour Web/TV news.
• Hopes to begin partnerships with community groups, small media and unemployed journalists (nervous laughter from him and crowd, realizing those might well be people the Herald has let go). It already is partnering with Miami University and Florida International on the student-staffed South Florida News Service. "We're not going to do it with the staffs of 400 or 500 that could cover anything. ... But there are ways to do it if we're smart."
• He seconds the sentiments of Goldberg that the content sharing has pressured AP. "AP has become much more accommodative."

Smith said his paper, the New York Daily News, the Buffalo News and two New Jersey papers, the Star-Ledger in Newark and the Bergen Record (which also covers New Jersey's northeast counties across from New York City) have set up a sharing system. (Syracuse and New York Newsday also were involved, but decided not to follow through.)

• He was surprised at the N.J. papers' involvement, but it turned out they'd been talking about combining forces in Trenton. (They've done so to create a joint state capital bureau with 18 people.)
• We probably can't replace content with networks like this, but we can augment.
• Sports also will be important. He says a key issue will be staff buy-in. Some are unhappy they won't be able to get stringer fees, as some apparently do now, for their work that appears in papers other than their own.
• He seconds Gyllenhaal that it's "really had an impact on the AP."
• The sharing really showed its worth during the recent Buffalo plane crash. But there still remain questions, such as whether and when the stories move online and if the sharing takes away some views.
• Not everyone will be invited. "We will enter into a content-sharing agreement with the Daily News, but not with the New York Post. There is a difference." And while a small Adirondack paper can provide outdoor coverage, he wondered whether the larger papers can trust a 15,000-circulation daily.

A few other things:

• Smith says the sharing can work for investigative stories. The Hearst papers have a project coming out this weekend on medical mistakes that has been reported and edited coast to coast.
• Under questioning from a member of a Boston-based alternative news site about whether freelancers will have to sign onerous contracts, Gyllenhaal said: These partnerships are not the best for the writers involved, but neither is losing a third of your staff."
• None of this is going to save journalism; it's only a small piece, he said.

Goldberg, asked if the Plain Dealer and similar papers might go without AP someday, said "it's possible." There's a basic disconnect, she said: "I want them to cover the really boring meeting at the Statehouse so my people don't have to." But, she said, AP wants to do bigger projects and enterprise "that I have neither the desire nor the room to publish."

(Such sharing is showing up other states, too. For instance, the S.C. Press Association has created its own news exchange site and even hired an editorial cartoonist for it.)

AP killer? No, probably not yet. But if viable sports sharing takes hold, it will be a very big potential chunk out of AP's revenue stream. AP may say otherwise, but I can tell you from experience, both working in AP and since then working with papers, that the sports copy is the one reason that always gets cited for keeping the wire as they grumble about writing the check. If the papers can produce copy quickly (no guarantees there) and back it up with a substantial photo offering, it could be a real shin-kicker for the wire service.

A little "techy conceit"?

David Sullivan, in one of his usual thoughtful posts, riffs off of Steve Yelvington's recent "Fatal Assumptions" post.

But also note that Yelvington does make a difference between "digital people" and "print people." It's not simply the difference between "old-fashioned people" and "modern people" who are all "journalist people." There are digital people in journalism just the same as there are radio people and TV people and magazine people and newspaper people, just the same as there are investigative reporters and graphic artists and photographers and copy editors and producers. And chances are, after the dust settles, there still will be, even if the newspapers are delivered to a printer in your house or are read on a Kindle with links, and you watch TV programs on your computer screen. Or even if newspapers are delivered by being thrown from cars and people watch TV on televisions.

The idea that all of us were simply meant to evolve from a retrograde print level to a higher digital level is -- a techy conceit, which kicked the confidence out of print people by the commingling of "Web page" with "Internet" when the Internet is really just an incredibly good delivery system and a Web page is just something it can deliver, and is probably an intermediate form. It is just my belief, but new technology usually creates more specialization, not less; and at some future point the idea that one reporter can do a print story and a video story and a blog and a tweet, all of which can be handled by the same editor, will probably be broken apart in some manner. The quality will be insufficient in all media. But that will require news providers to accept that each will occupy a smaller place in the cosmos, and newspapers still don't want to accept that, still want to be the Universal Source.

Read the rest. As usual, it's worth it to stimulate your thinking.

AEJMC09: A dissenting voice

Steve Fox at the University of Massachusetts (and previously of the Washington Post's digital operations) gives voice to what I (and some others, based on my conversations) have been thinking this week -- still too much antagonism between parts of AEJMC and new media.

It's been apparent in some quarters at the future of editing/editing profs' functions this week.

Fox is off base, however, with this snark:

This is my first time at AEJMC, so I’m not sure what I expected. I just didn’t expect this. But as one friend pointed out last night, AEJ has a newspaper division.

That division (disclosure: of which I am a member) has struggled with that name for more than a year. Its members realize it is an artifact of a different age, but what should we call it when it is hemmed in by the turfs of many other divisions? (I also now head the Community Journalism Interest Group, and we are struggling with our definition, too. One thing I'm trying to do is get people to recognize that "community" is far more than a geocentric concept.)

All suggestions welcome, and I hope Fox takes a close look at AEJMC -- including its internal politics and structure -- and provides more than a "wake-up call." (It's not just at AEJMC.)

However, he is on base with this:

I went to one session on narrative, but it was solely focused on the written form. No mention of video or audio slideshows.

I'm going to be writing more on this - how we are too tied to "story" and "writing," terms that confound. I've touched on it, but it deserves a fuller exposition.

Update: Alfred Hermida also weighs in from afar.

AEJMC09: Editors' Breakfast

Catching up a bit. ...

Thursday morning was the annual editing profs' breakfast at the big j-profs meeting in Boston. Some useful thoughts came from Josh Benton, director if the Nieman Journalism Lab, and David Beard, editor of Boston.com (and a former fellow APer), in no particular order:

I learned a wonderful new word - the "photocracy," courtesy of Beard. He was commenting on how editors are still needed in the online world, but perhaps in different ways. The context was that the Boston.com staff might get a lot of photos from an event, and it's the staff that has to figure out a narrative, not always what the Globe's "photocracy" favors. Someone needs to read behind all those captions and see the big picture ...

From Benton on future of editing: Many new ventures online are sole person not necessarily hewing to style. Large orgs like Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo have more editors than writers/reporters. But those editors see themselves as curators/aggregators. Some key features he sees of new editing jobs.

• A key feature of new jobs will be coaxing journalistic-quality work out of non-journalists. Actually, he says, that's always been an important skill on community papers, if you think about it.
• Solid headline writing with a good understanding of search engine optimization.
• Curation, much like the old wire editor who combined various stories into one comprehensive report - the ability to ingest large amounts of information and find the nuggets.
• Not so important: AP style, which tends to promote sameness, and the ability to shape multiple voices into one kind of house style.

Benton says it will be a tough sell, but there are going to be cases where the the path from reporter to audience does not pass through the copy desk. There will be multiple paths, not necessarily through a corporate or editorial filter.

Beard's key features are:

• An open mind
• Ability to reprioritize on a dime
• The ability to be what he calls an "early steward/process maker" who can help build best practices in this new era that incorporate the best of what we have been doing

The question arose from the audience, of course, "Does quality no longer matter?" Benton's response (after noting he was once a reporter who "had copy editors as friends") is that it is no longer valid to say there is just one metric for quality - what copy desks do to stories. If a copy desk is focused on filtering out a voice and creating a corporate style, no, he said.

Benton said many reporters write differently when they know it will be read by editors than when they know it's going direct to readers. "I learned more from blogging because I had to pay attention to readers," he said.

(Note: Some folks walked out at this point, angered upset by his comments.)

A few other random notes:

• Beard said it actually was a bit scary during the first few years of Boston.com not to have a copy desk when "we have 40, 50, 60 issues a day" compared with the three or four of the paper (this is where he made his "photocracy" comment)
• Benton says the future business model is likely to be both content creation and curation. Even in the glory days of papers, only part of the content was local, he said. Large parts were "curated," if you think of the wire editor's job as picking the best from multiple sources and melding that into a coherent, comprehensive report.
  

That old numeracy bugaboo

We just keep stumbling over this one.

Look at this headline about Google's archives from the International Newsmedia Marketing Association's weekly news summary:


Now, look at the story it links back to:


It's worth repeating: "Quadruple" does not mean 400 percent growth. It means 300 percent growth. Put another way, while something may be four times as large (or 400 percent of what it was) it is three times (or 300 percent) larger.

AEJMC09: Surprise (not) Comm graduates face tough year

Read 'em and weep:

The figures aren't due to be released at the AEJMC conference for 10 more minutes, but details of the annual survey of mass comm grads is out on Journalism.org.

A few highlights:

• lowest employment level for grads in 23 years of survey.
• 40% unable to find full-time jobs in field
• Benefits down, salaries stagnant
• “By almost all indications, the 2008 graduates of the nation’s journalism and mass communications programs found themselves in a disastrous job market.”
• Even Web employment down.
• Lower levels of job satisfaction, higher levels of regret over career choice.

No great surprises.

AEJMC09: Covering Poverty

A session I am at is dealing with help for rural journalists covering their communities.

One interesting project is at the University of Georgia. Faculty member John Greenman says surveys show editors in persistently poor counties value the poor less. Poverty also is not mentioned when asked to name five factors that contributed to sense of place.

UGA has put together a site to help: http://www.grady.uga.edu/poverty/

The site is still being built, but it's worth a look. Greenman says UGA eventually hopes to move it over to a journalism training site, like NewsU.

At a later session, I learned of another resource, http://onpoverty.org/ at Washington and Lee University. That site also is being rebuilt.

Gawker ripped me off - a thought

A friend sent me Ira Shapira's angst-filled article from the Washington Post today in which he talks about first feeling giddy about having his article excerpted by Gawker, and then feeling angry.

An excerpt:

Even if I owe Nolan [the Gawker excerpter] for a significant uptick in traffic, are those extra eyeballs helping The Post's bottom line?

More readers are better than fewer, of course. But those referring links -- while essential to our current business model -- aren't doing much, ultimately, to stop our potential slide into layoffs and further contraction. Worse, some media experts believe that Gawker and its ilk, with their relatively low overhead, might be depressing online ad revenue across the board. That makes it harder for news-gathering operations to recoup their expenses.

My response, with a few additional thoughts:

Well, yes, I think Gawker went too far. Liberally cutting and pasting isn't coloring within the lines. If you want to summarize it in your own words, and with prominent credit, OK.

And if those referring links "are essential to our current business model," then you can't have it both ways. I'd like to see Shapira propose an alternative model (he really doesn't; though he does reference the recent debate about restricting linking, that's not an alternative business model).

But Shapira fails to broach the other point -- the fact that close to 10,000 people viewed it on Gawker instead of reading his 1,500-word tome ought to raise the question of why the WaPo doesn't have its own Gawker-type site excerpting its material. Maybe consumers are telling us something, namely that a lot of them don't want to read a river of text on something like Shapira's story on a millennial generation consultant because they have other things to do with their lives. Gawker et al. wouldn't survive if they didn't meet a need.

The publishing industry seems to think it is going to force people to do its bidding. No longer. They are like water and will seek their own level. Very little of what we do is so essential to running their lives that they could not survive with only a digest.

If your business model is hanging by the slim legal thread of the "hot news" doctrine, you have deep, deep problems that go far beyond "free riders."