Quick reads for the holiday - and a dustup over legal ads

A few things worth reading today:

• Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner tells Ad Age that magazines are a bit insane if they think they can duplicate online what they can in print. His particular target is tablets and what he calls "sheer insanity." Give it "decades" before there's a successful migration, two generations at least, he says. I'm not so sure he isn't stretching that time line a bit. I give it a decade if - a big if - we get a more robust mobile broadband system. I think a huge shakeout/shakeup in the telecommunications sector is brewing. It may involve government involvement, and it will be cast as a matter of economic security.
• A reminder of how bad things have been in some places - a report that half of San Francisco Bay area journalism jobs have been lost in the past decade. (Of course, the economics student in me asks were there too many to begin with.)
• Twitter has moved the lists and favorites off the home page. That has Shea Bennett wondering if Twitter plans to do away with them. I hope not. I need all the organization I can get my hands on. Bennett thinks it's because mostly only "power users" were using them. I'm hardly one of those, but aren't power users the ones most likely to pay for the service? So why bury a tool they use? Here's a suggestion: Instead of dictating my layout, give me an option to move these to the home page, if I want.

As for the legal ads

Newspapers, fearful yet another revenue source will melt away to online, have been fighting a rear-guard action to keep the right to publish -- and charge generously for -- legal ads, those arcane, legalese things buried in the paper that, if you really read them, could be a source of decent story leads (not to mention a heaping dose of voyeurism over who's getting sued, kicked out of their place, going bankrupt, etc.)

A Pennsylvania Patch opinion writer throws down the gauntlet over legal ads (we'll run 'em for free to attract audiences) in response to yet another newspaper column trying to block a possible shift of the ads online by the Keystone State's legislature. (Another recent newspaper meme: Link rot could make such online ads useless.)

As to that last point first: So how many of us have been to our - supposedly on paper? - newspaper morgues lately to look at some old, yellowed legal ad? (Uh huh, thought so.) In fact, try finding that morgue at your local oracle's offices. It's all been digitized, folks. And have you ever checked out the link rot on newspaper sites, what with paywalls and archives and all that? (Gimme a break.)

As to newspaper editor Stan Huskey's first set of points, which pretty much parallel the industry line:

• News flash. Not everyone has a computer. Nope, and lots of people don't read newspapers, either. It's standard rhetorical bluster to cite a figure for newspapers - actually to imply a figure for newspapers by saying more people read them than watched the Super Bowl (111 million) - and leave out any comparisons with online (where, unlike newspapers, you can precisely track how many people look at the ads).
• Public notices cost municipalities very little money, and in a lot of cases, nothing at all. Well, not quite true. Huskey has a point that some ad costs are baked in to what the government charges people like developers. But the Patch commentator has posted PDFs of his local county's ledger (provided through an open-records request), that shows it paid  $200,000 for such ads last year. Who pays for all those ads from "voter services" for instance?
• And do we really want to take jobs out of the private sector and put them in the public sector? Isn’t government big enough as it is? Putting aside the tea party-type argument about big government for a second (guess you'll be willing to give up any tax breaks on paper, ink, etc., Mr. Huskey?), the nub of this whole conflict is in the first sentence. Huskey elaborates on it later: Let’s peel away yet another layer of the onion in an attempt to find out why our state legislature would continue to present bills that would harm the newspaper industry.
  

  And, technically, another layer of the onion would be the jobs that would be lost if legal notices were taken out of newspaper.
  
  So, why would some state legislators feel the need to harm, perhaps retaliate against, newspapers?
  
  Could it be because we hold them accountable?

Uh, yes, it probably is. And one of the reasons the industry is vulnerable on this is because journalists are largely inconsequential to politicians unless they think the journalist has the suasion of public opinion/outrage behind him or her. The newspaper biz - actually, the journalism biz in general - has lost a lot of that in the past decade, the result of numerous scandals, consolidations that made clear to the public that in most cases this is a business first and a public service second, etc. Nothing wrong with its being a business, but it makes trading on the "public service" argument just a teensy-weensy bit harder.

This isn't going to make me a lot of friends among the press associations I know and love, but they and their members have got to stop trying to play this card game with half a deck of truth.

Yes, there are good public service arguments to be made - and there are good counter-arguments on the digital side. Personally, I think the ads should be in both places because it's a multimedia world. Digital gives me easy access and the ability to search. Papers give me portability and a sense of semi-permanence.

But the real issue is money. Publishers don't want to give up what is as close to an annuity in this business as you can get. You don't have to go out and sell these things - the law mandates that the governments bring them to you - and because of the legally enforced stranglehold, you can charge a decent dollar.

Go ahead, frame it as a "save good journalism" and good journalism jobs argument, but acknowledge it for what it is - you need the money to help prop up a troubled business.

Just don't try to show half a hand and bluff the public. In the game of public opinion, the stakes are high. Eventually, they'll discover it (I think they're actually pretty cognizant of the truth so far), and you'll be labeled a cheater. That's a PR hole you don't want to be trying to dig out of.

Shirley, get me rewrite

Ah, what was old is new again.

That's my first reaction after reading Jeff Jarvis' typically provocative post suggesting it is time (again) to rethink the basic form of the story after the New York Times' Brian Stetler posted a long Tumblr account of his time tweeting in Joplin, Mo., after much of the city was leveled by one of the deadliest tornadoes ever. Stetler ruminated: "Looking back, I think my best reporting was on Twitter."

And it remained my reaction after reading Matt Ingram's rejoinder, "No, Twitter Is Not a Replacement for Journalism."

For those of us old enough to remember rewrite desks, and especially those of us who worked in the wire service, the reaction is sort of, "Uh, yeah?"

If you listen closely to what Jarvis is saying, I think it's simply that for the first draft of news, especially breaking news, the default position no longer has to be what I have referred to at Newsplex and in "Principles of Convergent Journalism" as a "river of text"--the standard inverted pyramid, get it all together in a nice 500-word package, story.

So what's new? The standard operating procedure for a wire service reporter wasn't to wait around to assemble 400 words. It was to pick up the phone and dictate a lede and maybe a second paragraph. That went out on the wire. Then you dictated another few sentences. Etc. Or sometimes just facts. Someone on the desk fixed your breathless prose and sent it out, then assembled the pieces, maybe threw in some background, etc. And then you did it all over again through the day (or night), sometimes moving information out in pieces, sometimes topping the existing story, sometimes writing it through.

One of the jokes of a wire-service reporter is that my name is on some of the best copy I've never written.

OK, we were still producing "rivers" then, but only because there was a delay in publishing.

Fast forward. Now we tweet. The chunks are smaller, but they still are chunks. The potential array of media bursting forth is also wider. The assembly is done with things like Storify that can pull together all sorts of threads into a sort of coherent narrative.

And for the initial wave, that may well be all we need. Take a look at Recovery Alabama, a map-powered site designed to crowdsource the needs after tornadoes raked that state. In many ways, that was a story in and of itself, more comprehensive and powerful, no river of text needed.

In fact, too much of what we call "story" in the news biz isn't story at all. It's a factoid exposition that tries to impose structure on often unstructured events.


But Ingram is right, too. Ultimately, we are wired for "stories." After we've confirmed bin Laden is dead, and the initial Twitter rush has slacked and the hormones dial back, we start looking for meaning, and meaning in our psychology often means some kind of story - and in news that means journalism. Now, whether it's a river of text story or some new experiential form, we're all waiting around to find out. But that will be journalism, too, because journalism is not so much about the initial news but about making sense of it all in whatever way that works.

Which is why we also spend inordinate time about whether "ordinary" people thrust by time and place into performing newsgathering acts are doing journalism. They're doing newsgathering, folks. It's a subset of journalism, but not really the main show.

Don't get me wrong. Someone's got to cover disasters and city council meetings -- assuming you don't consider that redundant. Where it transcends newsgathering is when the journalist in the room goes beyond reporting mere facts to start giving us insight and understanding. (Yes, the nonjournalist specialist can do that, too. Let's just say the journalist is more prone to do it, or try to, across a wider range of subjects. You want to get into cit-j further? You're buying the beer.)

Even Stetler updated his post to say this:

I’ve thought about this comment a little bit more. I believe it’s true that “my best reporting was on Twitter,” but only up until a certain point on Monday, probably around 11 p.m. local time. After that point, with a more stable Internet connection, I was able to file complete stories for NYTimes.com, not just chunks of copy.

I've said for some time, including to some news organizations I consult with, that I'll believe they have gotten it when I wake up on July Fourth and (barring the world blowing up) see at the top of my local news organization's website a big, honkin' interactive map that lets me click on the various marked parades, fairs, celebrations and find out details on each one. Because, after all, isn't that the story for most of your users/readers for the first 10 hours or so of the day? (It would be even cooler if they blew out the front page of the paper, too. Not interactive, but still ...)

Then later in the day, as the narrative starts to unfold, I want that journalism - the poignant or funny photo, maybe the video, the telling moment that can be fashioned only by a good journalist telling a good story.

We need to think about new story forms as Jarvis suggests. We need to always remember the journalism as Ingram notes. What we can't do is stay stuck in the past. So what's the problem?

Now, Shirley, get me rewrite.

From the Division of Bad Ledes: The Bin Laden file

Actually, we're not going to discuss leads on Osama bin Laden stories here today. We're going to discuss when he should be left out of the discussion.

This one, sent in by an alert student, comes from a recent edition of the Myrtle Beach Sun News. Oh, those wacky, clever folks on the sports desk:

Perhaps Osama bin Laden should have tried hiding in the Myrtle Beach High's soccer goal, because no one has been able to find the back of the Seahawks' net in weeks.

Myrtle Beach scored a 3-0 victory over visiting Bluffton in Thursday night's second round of the Boys' Class AAA playoffs. ...

Note to the copy desk: Topical is good. Current is good. Forcing it is not good. Trivializing things and bad taste are especially not good.

Next time, take a deep breath and step back from the lede. Take a jog around the desk once or twice. Clear your head. Then come back and have another look.

Ledes are like headines. You probably should reject the first one that comes into your mind because many others will have thought about it, making it not so clever after all. Second, if you have to reach far afield (or a-goal, in this case) to make the connection, that's a red flag for sure.

The temptation to "bin Laden" everything is great - he was killed and there seems to be great joy among the land. Let those words and images speak for themselves and keep the references in that context or on the late-night comedy hours. Otherwise, keep these where the Jimmy Hoffa ledes should also be kept - buried.

Hyperlocal: Grumpy in West Seattle

West Seattle Blog's Tracy Record takes after Patch and other cookie-cutter local sites like Datasphere (a favorite of Gannett, Fisher Communications. Landmark and Hubbard, among others) and, I assume, upstart Main Street Connect (whose founder, Carll Tucker, got roundly smacked down in the comments on that article for calling things like West Seattle Blog "hobby" sites).

Record's interview with Street Fight opens with this:

There’s something of a body of us who have achieved some measure of success; we’re actually in the black. We don’t have jobs on the side — this is our business and it does sustain us and family, and some employees, depending on who you’re talking to.

And continually there are these glowing pieces about one of these mass corporate sites, your Patches or your Dataspheres, it just goes on and on completely uncritically as if they’ve already achieved both unanimous acclaim and love in their communities. And they’re allowed to get by with no traffic figures.
And so we get a little grumpy about that.

 And goes on from there.

As Baristanet's Debra Galant set up the argument about a month ago in another Street Fight interview, it's the Wal-Marts of hyperlocal versus, well, the hyperlocals.

There promises to be lots more fun in this space as the locals face off against the "big boxes." What's next? Do the West Seattle Blogs and the Baristanets band together in sort of a hyperlocal IGA or ACE? (Just kidding.) But it really does set up some fascinating dynamics and questions, including the very definition of hyperlocal (is it hyperlocal just beause you say it is, or does there need to be some kind of blood test?). Fun all around.

Mississippi broadcasting job description only a lawyer or bureaucrat could love

Attention job-seekers: Mississippi Public Broadcasting is looking for a news director - at least we here at CSJ central think that's what it is after reading this posting.

We admit we were aided by the helpful inclusion of "news director" in parentheses in the subject line - but then that does raise the question of if you have to put explanatory material in your subject line, what's it telling you?

It's telling you that sometimes the bureaucrat-speak just gets out of hand. The ad contains bon mots like this:

Special Experience:  Employment must have been in an administrative, professional capacity in an area of work related to the functional responsibility of the bureau in which the position exists.  In those bureaus where registered specialists provide the primary source of functional and technical knowledge for planning and accomplishing the mission of the bureau, the incumbent must also be registered and experienced in that profession.

Translation: If you haven't had a hand in running a news operation, no need to apply.

Don Norman: Why tablet and smartphone interfaces suck

OK, Norman didn't put it quite like that. The actual title of his article is Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability.

Don't let it throw you. As you'd expect from a usability expert, the article is highly readable. And it details why too many touch-screen interfaces suck: Buttons that don't exactly do what you think they might (or do more than you expect, like the back button that, hit once too often, takes you out of the application), mystery gestures that work in some cases but not others, ignorance of conventions such as what check boxes are supposed to do versus radio buttons, etc.

This isn't arcana. It's important stuff to think about as we enter the mobile era. Some of us are involved in design directly (not me, of course, but some of us here), while others of us have to (or at least should be) thinking about these things as we fashion content to interact with these systems.

Norman is one of the highly regarded usability researchers (partner of Jakob Nielsen).


In fact, I'd recommend taking a look at his whole jnd.org site. Some fascinating stuff about design and human-computer interaction, which I believe is too important to be left to the engineers. With the "printing press" effectively pushed to the desktop in many cases, journalists now have a dog in this hunt.

From the social media dept. - how to get fired without really trying

These two posts by 10,000 Words summarizing eight cases of journalists being fired for their social media pronouncements this year might be well-employed in classroom discussions on how it's best to walk away for a minute or two before hitting the publish button:

http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/8-journalists-who-were-fired-for-tweeting-part-1_b4136

http://www.mediabistro.com/10000words/8-journalists-who-were-fired-for-tweeting-part-2_b4202

And while we're in the "hold that thought before you push the button" mode, All Facebook says about two dozen social media firing cases are in the courts. Social media, the new lawyer's full-employment tool.

Assistant VP communications job University of South Carolina

We are hiring:

The University of South Carolina seeks applicants for Assistant Vice President and Director of News and Internal Communications. This is a newly created position responsible for serving as the university’s official spokesperson, elevating its level of national media visibility and developing an internal communications strategy. We seek a person who is a skilled writer and story-teller and is capable of building communities of interest. That person will report to the university’s Vice President for Communications. Applicants should have at least ten years’ experience including media relations strategy, online technologies and social media best practices in advancing an institution’s reach and reputation. A bachelor’s degree in journalism, communications, public relations, new media or related field is required; master’s is preferred.

Apply online at http://uscjobs.sc.edu (search by requisition #003499). The cover letter, explaining interest and qualifications, and questions may be addressed to Dean Charles Bierbauer, AVP Search Chair. Include resume, at least three references, three writing samples and URL for an online site managed by the applicant that demonstrates ability to effectively use Web and social media.

Minorities and women are encouraged to apply. USC is an EOE.

Media Culture, part deux - Filloux's take

It must be media culture day on the blogging calendar, and I missed it.

Earlier, I noted with some minor skepticism INMA's discovery that news/media organization culture is probably more important than trying to bolt on a strategy or, worse, trying to dictate a culture from the top.

In another aspect of this multifaceted gem of an issue, Frederic Filloux, in his Monday Note, does a good job of laying out why media and tech have such trouble just getting along. 

(I'm a little snarkier than he - I think a lot of it is the studied disdain, or at least suspicion, that media - and especially journalists - have projected for anyone who seems "smart." It's the old street wise, fedora-wearing idealized image of the "Journalist" outsmarting the more schooled - if not necessarily erudite - business and political classes.)

Filloux (whose post grows out of his presentation at the INMA World Congress - so not so coincidental after all) has some observations to chew on from those on both sides of the aisle:

“You guys, are geared to compete rather than collaborate. You’re not getting that collaboration is the new name for the game”. “Even among yourselves, you are unable to cooperate on key industrial issues, shooting yourselves in the foot as a result”. “Your internal organizations are still plagued by a culture of silos. The winners will be the ones  who break silos”.

Tech executives also underline they see media companies as co-managed with unions – the consequence being a wage system that discourages rewarding valuable individuals. Media companies are also viewed as having a tech-averse culture. “Media don’t understand that their business has become engineering-intensive. Their investment in technology is grossly insufficient”.

Symmetrically, I collected adjectives summing up media people’s perception of the tech world. “Arrogant, condescending”: true, old media people always have the feeling of being looked down upon by the guys in chinos. “Nerdy, left-brained”: well, it goes along with the flip-flops and the hoodie… “Wealthy”, (I’ll come to that later). “Alien to the notion of value for content”: also true; and that might be the most difficult obstacle to a reconciliation. ...

The only identical critic, evenly spread on both sides, concerns bureaucracy: medias point at intricate technostructures staffed with legions of people working on the same subject; tech people mock news media needing six weeks to sign the innocuous non-disclosure agreement covering a routine project.

That sounds like a prescription for Kumbaya, eh?

Yet, as Filloux notes, tech companies need media. Despite all the predictions that a big tech company could buy a media company or two and be done with it, it largely has not happened - because the cultures are different, and producing software and hardware is not the same vein of creativity as producing a hit publication or show.

Likewise, as he observes: Medias have a lot to learn from tech companies. The way they conduct projects, their relentless drive for innovation, their bold imagination, coupled with a systematic and agile “Test & Learn” approach…  For the news industry, drawing inspiration from such a culture is a matter o[f] survival.

Filloux argues for "rapprochement" between the two. Perhaps we should look for detente first. After all, the first, hesitant cross-cultural exchanges eventually became the things that helped thaw the Cold War.

Google announces chromebook

(In recovering some earlier posts that had not been published, this one inexplicably moved to the top. It is an older post of about a week ago.)
 
Google has just announced the chromebook - not so much a computer as a cloud portal in a laptop box running Chrome.

Its big selling points:

• Almost instant startup
• No real internal programs
• Everything on the cloud
• Automatic background updates

From Google's promo site: Thanks to the power of HTML5, many apps keep working even in those rare moments when you're not connected.

Color me cautious right now - if only because in a few weeks I am headed to a place - for more than a "rare moment" - where I will NOT have high speed access (yes, such places do still exist, even here in the good old U-S-of-A). It's another decade, I think, before we get affordable, ubiquitous high speed access.

Yet, I can definitely see a place for this on, say, a college campus, where usage and access are concentrated. Can we see a day where these become standard issue to students?

Put this in a tablet, and I might like it even better.

And a fourth English thing

This replaces an earlier post that did not publish with the parenthetical material at the end.

While we're at it (see earlier pose on three things about English), here is Mark Liberman on Language Log about the distinction between comprised and composed and the guidance not to use "comprised of" (maintained in the AP Stylebook, though a new edition is due out any day, so we'll see what changes abound).


Not surprisingly, he pretty much traces "comprised of" back several hundred years and suggests this is one best left for dead.


(An earlier post to which he refers also drives a stake through that shibboleth that you can't begin a sentence with "and" or "but.")

Three things on English you should read

 This replaces an earlier blog post that for some reason did not get published with the Gerald Grow material at the end.

Three successive blog posts by John McIntyre, "resident drudge" (formal title "night content production manager" - gotta love corp-speak) at the Baltimore Sun and longtime friend through the American Copy Editors Society.



First is his "I almost give up" monologue on trying to teach lay vs. lie. Indeed, this one, by the end of the decade, will probably be in the dead-distinction bin.



Second is his excellent essay that again tackles the gulf between descriptivists and prescriptivists, built around his reading of Robert Lane Greene's You Are What You Speak.* Makes me want to get the book and tell the rest of the world to go away while I devour it.

Mr. Greene would have you think of language not a box, with sharp borders and clearly defined “correct” rules inside, but as a cloud, fluid, shifting, and unavoidably messy. Rather like reality.

In my case, abandoning hard-shell prescriptivism has been liberating. No longer responsible for regulating other people’s speech and signage, I can be a snob about things that don’t really matter much (bourbon and martinis) while employing prescriptivism where it is legitimate, in editing. Editors uphold the (admittedly arbitrary) standards of their publications, making judgments on the basis of subject, context, and audience rather than an inflexible set of Rules, and respecting the variety and originality of the language.

Finally, there is his excellent commentary on that long decried subject - teaching of high school English - built on a Salon article by Kim Brooks, Death to high school English.

I have no particular advice to give to high school English teachers, who are trapped. Save this. If you do give advice on grammar and usage, stop giving bad advice and promulgating zombie rules. If you have a student who shows promise, don’t steer her toward Strunk and White; recommend Joseph Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.

If you are a student, ill-served by a defective education and ambitious to become an accomplished writer, I do have some advice.

Item: You are going to have to do this on your own. Even if you were lucky enough to have a few good teachers, you must make yourself a writer.

Item: Start reading, and stop reading crap. Identify prose stylists whose clarity and effectiveness you admire. Examine them closely. Try to imitate their diction, their syntax, their cadences, their metaphors. John McPhee’s books may impress, and the other New Yorker writers are worth attention. But find the writers who speak to you, in newspapers, magazine, books, and online.

Item: Get yourself informed about language. You need to understand the tools in your toolbox. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and other manuals will help you to achieve greater precision.

Item: Write, and revise. Writing is a craft you learn by doing the work. When you have a first draft, put it aside. Come back to it a few hours later, or better, the next day. Manage your embarrassment at how shoddy it is and get to work at tightening it, sharpening the focus, selecting more effective words.

Item: Get advice. Find an outlet other than your private journal. Blog if you have to. Better still, get paid for it. Seek responses from your readers. Find someone whose taste and judgment you trust, and ask him or her to be frank about your work. Your mother may want to frame your every scribble, but you need someone who will tell you what you need to hear to keep you from making an ass of yourself in public.

Item: Settle in for the long term. The headline on this post is one of my favorite lines from Chaucer, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The life so short, the craft so long to learn. So get at it.

There is not much more to be said, but I  also recommend an earlier article (2006 - PDF) by Gerald Grow that has an excellent review of the various forces at work in teaching English and grammar and the tug of war that this poses for journalism teachers:

By contrast, journalism in any given year is dominated by the prescriptive grammar that governs practitioners at that time — embodied in stylebooks and specific reference works. To journalism teachers, it is fine for students to develop a broad, relativistic understanding of the changing nature of

language, and for English teachers to teach this. But our students also have to master the standard grammar of the time — however arbitrary some of it may be — and many things about grammar are arbitrary.

Eyetrack videos - iPad vs newspaper

French consulting firm Miratech has released some eyetrack videos measuring how someone reads the iPad vs. a newspaper.

Among its conclusions is that people concentrate more on print stories and have better recall.

Keep in mind, however, that these things tend to be era-specific. Tablets, etc., are still rather new formats. As their ergonomics and visual grammar are "learned," results are likely to shift as we've seen with some studies on linking.

INMA's Wilkinson: Culture trumps strategy

Earl Wilkinson, head of the International Newsmedia (formerly Newspaper) Marketing Association, professes surprise at the theme coming out of the INMA World Congresss - that changing newsroom culture trumps strategy.

Or, to put it another way, all the paywalls in the world and all the gimmicks and marketing strategies don't mean scratch if your organization continues to project the kind of thinking about deadlines, story forms, priorities, incentives, etc., that had become standard in newsrooms for about 45 years (I say 45 because, really, it was from the 1960s on that we began having that strange confluence of factors that produced halcyon days for newsrooms until the bottom fell out in this decade).

I like Wilkinson. I've chatted him up at j-prof conventions, and he was the main force behind trying to get AEJMC to produce more research relevant to newsrooms (though whether news managers ever read what was there already and was pretty damning was always open to question).

But forgive me if I suggest that INMA and its members are coming a little late to the party. Research on newsroom sociology and culture has for decades, and certainly in the past decade, pointed out the corrosive effect of existing culture and the tremendous challenges - but also urgency - needed to change it.

Here are Wilkinson's take-aways:

1. Separate the business model from culture in print vs. digital discussions. Or, as he puts it: The emerging consensus from New York was that a digital business model can't replace a print business model. Instead, the digital model must be additive to the print model — if for no other reason than the inclusion of print is part of a publisher's USP vs. media competitors. I suspect he'll get his share of blowback on that - that it still elevates the declining print model to the detriment of digital. But in the context he puts it - that it is a way to differentiate a full-service media organization - it can make some sense.
2. Encourage speed, place small bets, be willing to fail (fast). How long have those watching the evolution of digital been saying this? At least since 2006 and API's "Newspaper Next" project. So far the results have been, shall we say, less than stunning. I'll believe it when I really see a newsroom culture that allows failure. In fact, if there is one defining point for me, it is that. But that raises all sorts of questions. For instance, can there be journalism fail as part of that? If so, to what extent will it be tolerated? It seems to me that's the tough nut. Is it desirable or even possible to have a split organizational personality: Well, yes, you can fail on the "business" side in the name of taking chances. But on the journalism side, nope. It's that fear of failure that makes news organizations still even reluctant to handle corrections with the comprehensiveness and alacrity that digital allows. It still pervades many newsrooms, and, like a poison gas, it seeps through all layers of the organization.
3. Transparency will change your mindset. Let's just say Wilkinson's concern with transparency is not quite the same as others writing in the same space.  His seems to be a marketing perspective. The [Financial Times] paywall allowed for a transparency in viewing its audience and segmenting its readers based on their engagement — in turn, driving its audience and advertising strategy in ways once thought unimaginable. INMA is hearing this repeatedly from publishers who are implementing paywalls. While the user data is overwhelming, there are mind-bending lessons that are emerging from people willing to pay for digital content — distinctly different lessons than from people only willing to view your content if it's free. Let me put it this way: people willing to pay for digital content are not reading what you are producing. Your differentiators online are different from your differentiators in print which are different from your differentiators on the mobile.
4. Relentlessly focus on differentiators. Changing the corporate culture to focus on strategic differentiators and cut away non-differentiators was another recurring conference theme. Actually, as coldly marketing as that sounds, I rather think it's something important journalists need to think about - how is what I am doing different from the others and how does it bring utility to users/readers? It's utility that sells in digital, rarely content alone.

All in all, if this means executives are coming around to the idea that you can't a) dictate culture (or strategy, for that matter) from the top down and b) you can't just bolt new ideas onto existing newsroom cultures, then progress is being made.

From the usage trenches: "banned together" and two things from Yagoda

In a story about S.C. wineries in my local paper today was this passage:

Winery owners say they are hopeful state lawmakers will scrap the 50 percent S.C.-fruit law so they can bring in more out-of-state wine grape juice and make the pinot noirs, Rieslings and other wines that more consumers want to drink.

Similar bills have been introduced in the past, only to die on the vine. This time, however, the state’s wineries have banned together and formed an association. They also have worked with those in the alcohol industry who fought past bills. Those opponents, primarily retailers who did not want to compete with wineries selling their own wine, do not oppose this year’s bill.

“There would be just a few more bottles of wine — South Carolina wine — on the shelves,” said Larry Boyleston, assistant commissioner at the state Agriculture Commission. “We’re not talking about a big increase in competition.”

"Have banned together"? Let's try "have banded together." (Is it needed at all? Saying they formed an association would cover it, wouldn't it?)

These kinds of usage illiteracies show up more and more in the paper these days, and while it's tempting to blame it on copy desk cutbacks and more editing done at a North Carolina hub, this sort of thing doesn't take any local knowledge to avoid. It does take some local knowledge, however, to know that South Carolina has an Agriculture Department, not a "commission," although the department is headed by the "agriculture commissioner" (no one said we made this stuff easy to follow down here, but that's what professional journalists get paid for, right). In fact, in a show of editing, why not shorten it entirely to said Larry Boyleston, assistant state agriculture commissioner?

---

Speaking of language and usage, I might recommend two provocative columns by Ben Yagoda in Slate.
- In the most recent, he takes on punctuation and quotation marks and suggests maybe the British, who put much of their punctuation outside the quotes, are more "logical."
- In an earlier one, he addresses whether and when we should go with the flow and accept newer usages for things like disinterested.

Hyperlocal: Two things to read

I've recently been following Street Fight magazine - an online publication focusing on hyperlocal that I find has a bit of a fresher take than many of the older sites I follow on such things. I'd recommend the daily RSS or email subscription.

Two things today caught my eye:

1) An interview with Carll Tucker, who has founded yet another regional/national hyperlocal effort, Main Street Connect. Tucker is at times condescending toward some of the pioneer sites started by individuals or small groups (like Westport Now and West Seattle Blog) - and he's adequately called out for it in the comments. But it's worth reading his take on things, if nothing else than for a different slant on CPMs (who needs 'em) and overall for approaching ad sales (parts of the annual visibility package do veer into advertorial, and from the example given I can't tell how much the lines are blurred with regular editorial). Tucker also reinforces the point that if you are going to do hyperlocal, you'd better have folks living in the community. And his formula for how many editorial employees per population is worth thinking about.

2) Rick Robinson has provoked some sharp comments with his Five Elements of a Successful Hyperlocal Site. The one that seems to have poked the bear the most is his suggestion that there's more value to owning the follow-up to a news story than in breaking it. Perhaps he inelegantly phrased it a bit, but I have to generally agree. Breaking news is great and sites should strive to do that, yes (people who know me will tell you, get me out in the field and I'm one of the most competitive SOBs you'll meet-not always my best quality {grin}). But from experience, it was the stories I truly owned by being first on what happened next that always got the best play and response. (My philosophy was always, OK, you beat me. Now, I'm going to own you.) So I think Robinson makes a good point, especially in this social media era, that winning the spot battle is one thing, but winning the conversation is where the long-term value is.

Three things on English you should read

Three successive blog posts by John McIntyre, "resident drudge" (formal title "night content production manager" - gotta love corp-speak) at the Baltimore Sun and longtime friend through the American Copy Editors Society.

First is his "I almost give up" monologue on trying to teach lay vs. lie. Indeed, this one, by the end of the decade, will probably be in the dead-distinction bin.

Second is his excellent essay that again tackles the gulf between descriptivists and prescriptivists, built around his reading of Robert Lane Greene's You Are What You Speak.* Makes me want to get the book and tell the rest of the world to go away while I devour it.

Mr. Greene would have you think of language not a box, with sharp borders and clearly defined “correct” rules inside, but as a cloud, fluid, shifting, and unavoidably messy. Rather like reality.
In my case, abandoning hard-shell prescriptivism has been liberating. No longer responsible for regulating other people’s speech and signage, I can be a snob about things that don’t really matter much (bourbon and martinis) while employing prescriptivism where it is legitimate, in editing. Editors uphold the (admittedly arbitrary) standards of their publications, making judgments on the basis of subject, context, and audience rather than an inflexible set of Rules, and respecting the variety and originality of the language.

Finally, there is his excellent commentary on that long decried subject - teaching of high school English - built on a Salon article by Kim Brooks, Death to high school English.

I have no particular advice to give to high school English teachers, who are trapped. Save this. If you do give advice on grammar and usage, stop giving bad advice and promulgating zombie rules. If you have a student who shows promise, don’t steer her toward Strunk and White; recommend Joseph Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
If you are a student, ill-served by a defective education and ambitious to become an accomplished writer, I do have some advice.
Item: You are going to have to do this on your own. Even if you were lucky enough to have a few good teachers, you must make yourself a writer.
Item: Start reading, and stop reading crap. Identify prose stylists whose clarity and effectiveness you admire. Examine them closely. Try to imitate their diction, their syntax, their cadences, their metaphors. John McPhee’s books may impress, and the other New Yorker writers are worth attention. But find the writers who speak to you, in newspapers, magazine, books, and online.
Item: Get yourself informed about language. You need to understand the tools in your toolbox. Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, and other manuals will help you to achieve greater precision.
Item: Write, and revise. Writing is a craft you learn by doing the work. When you have a first draft, put it aside. Come back to it a few hours later, or better, the next day. Manage your embarrassment at how shoddy it is and get to work at tightening it, sharpening the focus, selecting more effective words.
Item: Get advice. Find an outlet other than your private journal. Blog if you have to. Better still, get paid for it. Seek responses from your readers. Find someone whose taste and judgment you trust, and ask him or her to be frank about your work. Your mother may want to frame your every scribble, but you need someone who will tell you what you need to hear to keep you from making an ass of yourself in public.
Item: Settle in for the long term. The headline on this post is one of my favorite lines from Chaucer, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” The life so short, the craft so long to learn. So get at it.

There is not much more to be said.

When editing, look at the pictures

One of the vexatious things when editing are corporate and product names (is it McDonalds or McDonald's (apostrophe), Walmart or Wal-Mart (both, actually, depending on what you are referring to, the stores or the corporation)).

Jack Daniel's (Daniels? Daniels'?) has always been a bugbear with me.

But if you have a picture with the corporate logo - especially one you've taken - probably a good thing to look at it. Then you can avoid doing what Columbia's Free Times did this week - spell it two ways, both wrong. (Click on the picture for the larger version where you can read what's on the glass.)

It probably also should be "whiskey," not "whisky," the latter term used generally only with Scotch, while this is bourbon a "Tennessee" sipping whiskey (effectively, a bourbon that has the added feature of being dripped through a charcoal filter ... in the case of Jack Daniel's, its 80% corn takes it slightly out of the classic bourbon category, which under international agreements is supposed to be from 51% to 79% corn. It all gets very complicated.)

Pesky homophones - 'motherload' and 'rites'

Homophone alert! This one has turned up in several places this week regarding the bin Laden story, including the Scotsman and, embarrassingly, in this headline on PC world:

The term is "mother lode." Motherload would appear to be a heavy - well, you can figure it out.

Also seen on several sites (including, unfortunately, on The Lantern of my graduate alma mater, Ohio State): burial rights, such as this from Austrialian Broadcasting.

 
The correct term is burial rites.

Some interesting research on links

In my online wanderings, I came across some interesting research by a University of Maryland prof dealing with the use of links in stories.

Ron Yaros' conclusion is that in complicated explanatory stories, linking to outside sources reduces understanding, but linking within the story to other explanatory elements (such as definitions and illustrations), increases understanding.

In less-complicated stories, the linking so prized by many Web pundits seems to work better.

Will that be controversial among the "do what you do best and link to the rest" folks - of which I am generally a member? I don't know, but it's good to see more work in this area because we really don't have a lot of current research (that I'm aware of) into how people use and perceive links and the various forms they take (some early research suggested sidebar links with little text snippets worked better than in-text links, but that was done at a time when the visual grammar of links was far different and I think is less valid today). We're working on a lot of assumptions that need testing and validation.

Please feel free to point me to other research in this area applicable to journalism. I have a high degree of interest.

FOI: Ignorance means get out of jail free?

Or, actually, never go to jail.

The Holly Springs, S.C., fire commissioners who pretty clearly violated the state's freedom of information law and then were called to account for it in criminal court by a reporter (after the sheriff, prosecutor, etc., wouldn't take the case) were acquitted because they were ignorant.

But apparently not willfully so.

Their plea: We didn't really know about the FOIA law, so we can't be held to have willfully violated the law. The jury agreed.

The reporter, Jay King, is a lot more sanguine about this than I. Yep, these commissioners can't pull that excuse out of the bag anymore, but boy has this opened a hole the size of a truck in the law. Aside from the obvious jokes, ever known a public official who couldn't be willfully ignorant when the occasion called for it?

On the other hand ...

A victory in North Myrtle Beach because a judge told a state representative and the city that, no, just because you might be embarrassed is not a violation of privacy. Thus, a police tape of the legislator's wife threatening a police officer was opened to public scrutiny. As Circuit  Judge Benjamin Culbertson said,  “The public's right to know the activities of a police officer while on duty and the possible reasons for his discharge outweigh any of the defendants' rights to privacy.”

Seems like common sense.

Outsourcing the subs

The ax has fallen on the sub editors (we call 'em copy editors) at Australia's The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

They're being outsourced.

Mic Looby recounts some of the announcement by the bosses at parent company Fairfax, including Paul Ramadge, editor-in-chief of The Age:

Effectively removing in-house quality control would not affect the standard of journalism, Mr Ramadge assured us, because all reporters would be instructed to provide “cleaner copy”.

A reporter interrupted the bitter laughter of his colleagues to say there wasn’t a writer in the room who hadn’t been saved at some point by the keen eye and wise counsel of an in-house sub-editor. Others emphasised the importance of collaboration between those who write the news and those who prepare it for publication. In the heat of deadline, reporters and sub-editors need to be able to work together, face-to-face, they said. The bosses nodded and spoke of shared pain.

I've been a reporter, trying to turn in that cleaner copy, and an editor having to handle it. Bitter laughter indeed. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.

Anyone checked, lately, how many journalism schools don't even require editing anymore - this at a time when editing skills clearly are becoming more necessary for more than just editors?

Neil Holdway, treasurer of the American Copy Editors Society, pulled himself away from writhing in laughter at the "cleaner copy" remark (I'm sure), to file a reaction.

It’s not a bad thing to ask reporters to provide “cleaner copy”; we would hope they would want to do that anyway. In fact, we know quite a few conscientious reporters who take the time to review their own copy before filing it. But writing is a complicated thing and the human brain can do only so much at one time. Look what happened at Fox News upon word that Osama bin Laden had been killed: Their graphic — just a simple line of type — read “Obama bin Laden" ...

 Looby holds out the threat that fewer copy editors will mean more defamation suits. I've concluded, however, that with our changing concepts of privacy, people are giving up on such blunt methods as suing (not to mention the cost and time), and in all but the most egregious cases are shrugging it off. I just don't think the threat is as great, and I think executives, who are paid to at least instinctively, if not overtly, make such risk calculations, think the same thing.

Some new insight into where traffic is coming from

Outbrain, an outfit that provides content recommendation and sponsored links on sites that install their widget, says it's gone through 100 million sessions representing 100 publishers that use its service to see how people are finding content.

Keeping in mind all studies like this are limited and not generalizable, it still offers some insight that can be added to the mix with others:

• Interestingly, across the Outbrain sites, most traffic (67%) is coming from people typing the URL into their browser bar, bookmarks or the publisher's home page.
• Of the remaining third:
• 41% came from search
• 31% came from another content site (linking, Outbrain referrals, etc.)
• A portal (17%)
• Social media (11%), though Outbrain says social media appears to be "gaining" share (not sure how the company concludes that, since this is supposed to be an inaugural study). Social media is not just Twitter and Facebook, but things like Digg, Fark and StumbleUpon.
• Traffic from social media sites has the biggest bounce rate - in other words, they aren't sticking around to see what else you've got to offer.

Some other interesting observations:

• The traffic from social sources is mostly to news, entertainment and lifestyle material, with news getting 42% of the referrals (makes eminent sense to me when you include Digg, etc., which tend to feature lots of news stories)
• Readers going from one content site to another are more engaged (which makes sense, as the report observes, "presumably because they already are in content consumption mode")
• Social media falls way below search and traffic from other content sites when looking at "hyper-engaged" users - those viewing five or more pages per session. Makes sense to me, especially the traffic from other content sites. In other words, if you aren't linking to other sites and getting them to link to you, you still don't really get it.

The top five sources of traffic: By far Google, followed by AOL, Yahoo, Facebook and Drudge.

There's a PDF of the report available too.

Feds release list of excess properties

News tip for Charleston, Aiken areas - lots of stuff to be disposed of in those areas. Much of it is connected the Savannah River Site, U.S. Agriculture Department Vegetable Laboratory and Sumter and Marion national forests.

Total about 1 million square feet.

See state map here (nationwide here). You can also download the dataset in comma-delimited format.

Now that's customer service

One of the downsides of the digital age is that it's easy for your site to get overrun with just a few mentions online or in mainstream media.

Such was the case with Twitalyzer, one of the Twitter analytics services that has sprung up in recent years. A mention in the New York Times, another in the Wall Street Journal and - bam - the servers are overrun.

As founder and CEO Eric Peterson wrote in a post titled "An Apology to Our Customers":

While we are honored by the attention, one really unfortunate thing happened in the midst of all of this … we let our paying customers down. Because of the traffic deluge last week our databases were over-run and could not keep up with processing. Even if that hadn’t happened, it would not have mattered, since our Twitter-given API limit was exceeded for more or less the entire day.

In the end we failed to do the one thing you pay us to do: track your accounts each and every day.

So what will he do?

To make it up to you, our loyal and paying customers, we are happy to do the only reasonable thing: For everyone who was a customer as of Friday, March 25th, we will gladly refund your entire month’s fees for March via Paypal if you would like.

We let you down, and because we let you down we firmly and strongly believe we need to make it up to you. Refunding your money is the least we can do, but hopefully all of you will see this as a small token of our appreciation. We are becoming a great company and a great Twitter analytics brand because of you … and for that we thank you.

If you would like the refund all you have to do is email us and ask, no questions asked.

I suspect this isn't particularly chump change for a company this size. A few more companies, for which it would be a rounding error might take note.

That journalism degree can be pretty handy

Support from Media Post columnist Derek Gordon that in the world of optimizing things for search, journalists have the natural advantage.

Tumblr tutorial

Tumblr, the livestream blogging service, is finally going mainstream among journalists.

Need a good tutorial on it. Check out this one by Mathew Keys. You can download it in various formats too.

Tutorial: Tumblr for Journalists

View more presentations from MatthewKeys

A common sense solution

A lot of ink (or pixels) has been spilled over Facebook's apparently knee-jerk reactions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices that really are bogus.

But, slowly, common sense is beginning to creep into the digital world - in other words, a realization that all things don't work digitally (or free - but paywalls is a discussion for another day).

In this case, I found a quite common sense suggestion in the comment thread to the Tech Dirt discussion:

How stupid do you have to be to accept any sort of legal communication by email? Would you take down a site based on a Post-It Note™ stuck on your door, because they are about as secure as email.

When someone emails our organization with anything containing legaleese, DCMA, Etc, the mail server politely responds "It looks like this email contains material of a legal nature (relating to laws, trademarks, copyrights). Your email has NOT been delivered and is being returned to you because communications of this nature are not appropriate for an insecure medium such as email. If you have a legitimate concern please forward hand-signed documents by courier or registered mail. Thank you. Please be advised that your email WILL NOT be delivered"

If ISPs didn't make it so easy for people to abuse them they would make life much easier for everyone.

Amen.