RSS? We don't need no stinkin' RSS

I love this photo that Brain Traffic has labeled "RSS in the olden days."

When did we get away from the idea that serving readers was a key job, even if it meant posting the news in the window?

I guess this might also be a metaphor for paywalls.

Help through the tech thicket for journalists

The Hack/Hackers group, which is designed to help journalists connect with and understand the technology running their lives, has a very useful glossary of tech terms.

I suggest reading it - two or three times. You don't have to get all tech-talk about things, but these days you do have to understand what the tech talk is all about.

Another version of the glossary with a little more commentary is on Poynter.

Hack/Hackers was put together by three journalists: Rich Gordon of Northwestern, Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times and former AP correspondent Burt Herman.

Usability of RSS feeds, social networking

It would be worth your while to spend some time with Jakob Nielsen's latest "Alertbox" usability column.

In it he details research done to determine how people interact with corporate postings in feeds and on things like Twitter and Facebook.

Some interesting stuff:

Businesses that post too often crowd out the user's real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.

Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what's appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.

RSS updates were viewed as more trustworthy and as more "official" sources than social messages. Users were also more likely to check RSS feeds at work, whereas they mainly accessed social networks from home.

No great surprise, either, is the observation that users don't go rooting around for postings in the stream they might have missed -- they are content to pretty much stay with what's on the page in front of them.

With "social media" being the hot topic in newsrooms lately, there's a lot to chew on here.

Journalism: Learning from Obama

Adam Tinworth is hosting this month's Carnival of Journalism, with the question on the table: What can the news media learn from the Obama multimedia campaign?

Contributors so far have some excellent points on how to use the lessons to reach audience and to incorporate your audience into your journalism.

But I want to take a little different tack, to suggest that from the reporting side there are some other lessons to be learned, too, the most important of which is that reporting may never be the same.

Not to overstate the case, but the government, in all its forms, has been building a technological capacity far greater than the news media's for at least a decade. Obama's crew, I think, will finally understand how to use that technology to effectively bypass journalists and journalism. (Think of how that much-vaunted e-mail and text-messaging list could be used to effectively blunt the impact of any negative news. Start by simply releasing the news using these channels while the journos are tied up in the news conference.)

The additional potential dark side is that in this age when information is being vaporized into bits and bytes, it's a lot easier to have things get lost in the digital soup.

Journalists, and newsrooms, for all their vaunted video, audio and multimedia technology, remain largely in a paper-and-pencil age when it comes to news development and gathering. In some respects, this may not change -- journalism in many cases ultimately will come down to one journalist's relationship with one source.

But in other respects, it must, if journalists are going to be able to pluck the valuable out of that digital soup.

Why am I concerned? Because as I have gone around making a presentation on how to use new digital tools to stay connected, the response in some newsrooms and at conferences has been tepid at best in many cases and downright hostile in others (along the lines of how am I supposed to do my job with all this, to which I often have wanted to respond, this is going to be your job, dammit). Sure, there are many good examples of digitally savvy journalists -- and several projects designed to help, such as Spot.us, newassignment.net and the controversial proposal by the New York Times and ProPublica for $1 million of Knight money to put thousands of "foundation documents" online. But there also are too many reactions like the above. So some suggestions:

• Learn what crowdsourcing is, how to manage it and how to use it. Understand Twitter and how it is a newsgathering as well as a distribution tool. It will be critical in coming years to have multiple sets of eyeballs -- and brains -- helping you out and tipping you off. Learn how to harness the power. (In other words, see social networks not just as a place to sell your wares, but as a vital place to help find the information you need.)
  
• Have some alacrity with Excel or another spreadsheet program. Know how to extract data from PDFs (a common tactic in some government agencies these days in an attempt to lock up the data so it can't be analyzed). If you are a bit more adventurous, learn how databases are constructed and how to get data out of them.
  
• But more important, know what to ask for. Think digitally, not ink on paper. (That mode of thinking is one of the best lessons journalists can take away from the Obama campaign.)
• Understand what the semantic Web is and why it is important to you. (Hint: If everything is machine readable and linkable then someday you are going to find yourself needing to use these tools to track down information.)
• Learn a bit about mapping and geocoding, not so much to present information but to learn how to get it. Again, much good information is in government files of this type, and even more so will be in the future.
• And, of course, learn how to use RSS feeds and feed readers and similar resources to save yourself time and extend your reach.

Now, all we have to do in journalism schools is figure out how to teach all this.

E&P gets it ... almost

OK, forget the disappearing stories that continually break links and the somewhat stodgy online layout. Editor and Publisher, has been coming around to the digital age. It finally established a good set of RSS feeds a while back, and its printing function has always done what I've said all sites should -- give you the option of printing out the links referenced in the article.

Now, it's finally blogging over at The E&P Pub. Decent stuff, though right now it looks a lot like the reason for having it is to open up a way to have comments that the magazine's legacy online system apparently won't accommodate.

But I went looking for the blog's RSS feed today? Oops ... close again, but I don't see one.

But maybe E&P will move more quickly this time to establish one. Type Pad makes it pretty easy.

Update
As Steve Yelvington notes below, E&P does have them but hasn't made them visible for those of us who use things other than our browsers. So if you need a feed, copy and paste away:
Atom, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0.

About AP

Some of the comments drawn by Alan Mutter's post about AP a few days ago illustrate both a lack of historical perspective while they also underscore how the situation for the AP has changed and how some of its actions have hurt it as a result.

I think it's worth stipulating a few things about AP:

• It's not a news-gathering service, it's a cost-saving service. OK, I'm being deliberately provocative there, but too many forget the AP's history. It was basically formed by a bunch of publishers who decided it was stupid and costly to have multiple correspondents meet the boats to get the news dispatches, so just have one person row out and bring them back. It remains as much a cost-saving operation as a news-gathering one.
• Part of the cost-saving bargain was using its members' stories. AP agreements had a clause (I assume they still do, but I haven't seen one lately) that gives the wire service full use of a member's spot stories that are generated from within a certain radius of that member's home circulation area. The AP generally was not required to credit the stories to the member -- but people forget the members were not required to credit AP on each story either; a notice that you were an AP member in the masthead was sufficient. Thus, for every aggrieved newspaper reporter there is also one at the AP whose byline simply became "The Associated Press." Not that it makes it right - just pointing out.
• The "spot news" clause means probably more than ever that online stuff is, legally at least, fair game. The rub here always has been what is "spot" and what is feature or analysis or investigative. When I was with AP, we generally tried to give members credit more and more in the bodies of stories. We also had "member exchanges" for the more featurized offerings that maintained the members' name and byline. And while it may be legally fair game, practically it's giving the AP and its members indigestion (see more below).
  
• There's no honor among thieves, editors or publishers. If you want to complain about stories being sanitized, look in a mirror. More than once as a news editor, I called member editors to politely complain that they had stripped another member's byline off a story and merely put "Associated Press" or had taken out the other paper's credit in the story. And I remember coming in to the desk in the Ohio bureau at 6 a.m. By 6:15 the suburban papers around Cleveland were on the phone with their "orders" of what they would like picked up from the Plain Dealer. Oh, and please remember to take the PD's name out of it.
• The AP is not your enemy, but it's not your friend either. Labeling the AP the "enemy" is stupid when you look at the historical record of why it was created and how members have shaped it. If you consider it the enemy, then your own paper's chain has probably had some role in that.
• Having said that, the view of the AP as enemy illustrates how things have changed. The AP was not the "enemy"" when the public had no access to its wires except through member newspapers or broadcasters. Now, the AP, which tried early in the days of the Internet to limit access through its members' Web sites, has become a brand of its own. As such, it is morphing into this odd role of provider/competitor. The competitor role is a vestiage of the news cooperative, cost-reduction days. Eventually, that will probably have to be scrapped and the AP will have to become a stand-alone news-gathering service. Otherwise, it would have to build in delays of delivering breaking news that members have on their Web sites, and that would turn it into a eunich.
• Side note: As for the story appearing on the broadcast wires, the sense I get from some comments on Mutter's blog and elsewhere is an old one -- newspaper folk have long complained about the sanitized feed going to broadcasters (even if the source is credited - see above) AP once tried to limit membership. Do a Google search for AP and antitrust to see why it can't.
• Having said that, one must duly note that you now can get AP's news direct from its site, where there are ads, and RSS feeds are available.
  
• AP continues to bring some of this on itself by failing to recognize it needs to build brand identity in j-schools. Some, maybe a lot, of the misunderstanding of what AP is and how it works comes from this. For instance, while it has eased up (relatively), it still makes the wire hard to get for teaching purposes. (I personally know that a major university with one of the leading journalism programs in the U.S. was just turned down in its attempt to get wire access, and this was even after a local paper was wiling to be its "sponsor.") [Disclosure - not us.] This is short-sighted. I'm going to go out on a limb and say AP, unfortunately, has a cadre of reporters and editors in member newsrooms who see it as the enemy partly because they didn't always work with it closely in school, and the AP has done little to market itself and its story at that level. It's still largely the big, mysterious Oz behind the curtain. Maybe it's time for AP to re-examine that.
  

Quick Hits

Random thoughts from a Tuesday morning:

• John McIntyre, who runs the desks at the Baltimore Sun and has taught us on his blog how to tie a tie, fold a pocket handkerchief and make a martini, finds himself the subject of a Christian Science Monitor article on copy editing.
• Bloglines Beta rocks. I especially like the quick view that shows all the feeds in a folder at once.
• Read Tom Grubisich's analysis of local news sites over on Robert Niles' Sensible Talk. Grubisich does a nice job of skewering sites like Topix and OnLocal, which I also don't find all that useful (disclosure, we do pick up the Hartsville Topix feed on HartsvilleToday just because Topix does grab news from the Florence area). Follow the links at the bottom to the other stories on the "Cracking the Local Market" topic. Tom Noonan's is especially noteworthy if for no other reason than he hits on cookie-cutter Web sites, which I think are just death in the local-local market. (The one is almost a month old. It's been sitting in my "to do" pile. Sorry for the delay.)
• Just finished reading the Quill's SPJ national awards issue, and I don't care what people say about "writing to awards." After I get done I always feel inspired, not only to go out and do better journalism but with the reassurance that lots of great journalism is being done. The unfortunate part, to me, is that in today's media cacaphony, too much of it doesn't get the respect it deserves.
  

Steve Outing has opened a can of worms with his open letter to the founder of Craigslist suggesting ways the free classified site and newspapers might cooperate -- the goal being to sustain newspapers until we can figure out what comes next. The responses are fairly predictable, with a big dose of "newspapers have brought it on themselves with their sloth, so let 'em stew." There's a kernel of truth there. The only thing I have to add to the conversation, though, is wondering whether the innovation the industry needed could have taken place simply because of the industry's structure.

Remember, newspapers were largely individual or family owned proprietorships well into the last century. Now, not minimizing the industry's absolute pitiful record of any kind of change, the reality also was that a publication's or small chain's idiosyncrasies were often prized, not just by the owners but, in a kind of tut-tut fashion, by the communities they served. Nowhere was this more evident than in the long, slow grind to establishing the Standard Advertising Unit (see 1981 NYT article abstract and obit of its designer, Frank Savino) and the complaints for decades by national advertisers about how difficult it was to buy across markets.

Fast forward to the digital age. Papers have consolidated into chains -- but don't let that fool you. The majority of papers are still owned by individuals or families. The chains, of course, have never heard of the letters R&D, and for that they should be suitably censured. But the idiosyncrasy factor is still at work; even inside chains, most papers are left to their own devices as long as they pump out the necessary profits. Under those conditions, how much innovation can we really expect? Sharing is a dirty word, and the myriad publishing systems, etc., make it unlikely an innovation could be scaled to the point where it would do the "industry" much good. (Case in point, the Lawrence Journal-World, one of the most innovative newsrooms, but generally not emulated elsewhere.)

None of this is meant as an apology for an industry that positively has sucked at innovation. It's just worth noting, I think, that from their birth, newspapers evolved into an industry almost doomed to failure, and industry structure may have been a significant contributing factor.

If the Internet scares you, try this

For a lot of journalists (and journalism students), the Internet is still a big scary place with things like XML, PHP, AJAX, XHTML and lots of other low-flying abbreviations.

Oh sure, they know how to Google and maybe use some databases online. But lurking out there is "geekdom" -- you know, that mystical land where they can make really cool stuff happen on a Web page and you just know that that's the skills stuff they're going to be looking for and I can't learn all this coding and ...

Slow down, Bunky. As many have said, you won't necessarily have to be a code jockey to be a journalist. But it will be useful to know the sorts of things that can be done and the effort and resources needed to do them.

Into the picture comes Zac Echola, whose blog I have started reading recently and who has some very down-to-earth thoughts on all of this. In catching up on some of his posts, I found two very good ones I'd point you to.

• First is his "Code on deadline (or how I learned to program without actually doing any programming." His point is that there are a ton of free services out there that, when cobbled together, provide much of the same functionality a raw code would.
• Second is the example he posted later, "Simple and free online journalism project to do in 45 minutes"
  in which he shows you how to harness some of these services - Google reader, Feedburner and Twitter -- to land weather alerts on your home page.
  

Now you may never have to put a weather alert on a page or parse a feed and extract -- and then display - another piece for information. You might never need a map with your story. And you probably wouldn't be asked to draw it and save it and get it online, even if it was needed. But wouldn't it be cool to know a quick and dirty way to do it, to know what those "Web" folks are talking about when they discuss some of what they're about to do -- to your story?

And even if you don't have mad programming skills, you still are going to have to be able, in the future, to discuss with others in the newsroom the online possibilities, so it doesn't hurt to know the jargon and a little bit how to do it quick and dirty.

This is what I'm trying to produce -- young reporters and editors who know enough at least to converse intelligently in a multimedia newsroom. Echola shows that it's pretty easy to do in this Web 2.0 world where the operative word is "share."

Study questions RSS' usefulness

A study being hyped by the University of Maryland's International Center for Media and the Public Agenda concludes that RSS feeds from mainstream news sites aren't very useful in keeping up with the news. (RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is that system that can "push" headlines, pictures and even full stories to a "reader" that is Web based or is on your computer):

• This study was constructed to determine which news outlets use RSS well—which outlets give users the range of information that most closely approximates what can be found on the outlets' websites. ..
• Rather than RSS, many users should just stick with Google’s Top Stories
• The problem is that many news outlets don’t want to share…
  

That last is key to the study of RSS feeds from 19 news media outlets. It complains that most news outlets won't share items from the Associated Press or other syndicated material (although it notes that USAToday, ABC and CBS do). It also complains that some don't even include all their staff-generated content. Further:

Another problem the study uncovered is that RSS feeds are all different—there is no single standard of what goes on a news feed. Just because two news outlets both have feeds labeled “International” doesn’t mean that have decided to send the same type or quantity of news through their feeds. And for those consumers who are interested in a particular region or topic—rather than just interested in the top stories of a given day—it is usually necessary to add many feeds to one’s reader. And how to choose which feeds to add is complicated by the fact that some news outlets have less than twenty news feeds in total. Some have well over a hundred feeds to choose from.

The study suggests using Google News is just as efficient because otherwise the user will have to "track the news down website by website."

Hmmmm.... I think the study has one good point - RSS feeds would be a lot more helpful if they did as a standard contain key information such as date and time published, reporter's name, etc. (See the study's chart for a list.) But I think it shoots wide on several marks:

That lack of wire service items in the RSS feeds can easily be remedied. Go to AP and pick up its feeds.

As for the assertion that somehow there are too many choices, I don't see it as a problem. You pick and choose what you'd like to follow as specifically as you would like. In fact, I dislike sites that provide me just two or three aggregated feeds.

I think the study shows a basic misunderstanding of RSS. Most people who use such feeds aren't using them as their only media source. Instead, they are using them as a filter to quickly find interesting things on interesting sites -- and then they go follow those links to those sites.

There also seems to be a bit of an agenda to the study, and you won't find it (at least I didn't) on any of its Web pages. But it was in this message on Poynter's online news list:

Two key findings, according to the study:

1. News coverage of Pakistan reinforced President Bush's message that global terrorism is monolithic.
2. News coverage identified Pakistani women as the "good" Muslims--the "peacemakers" who could be the solution to terrorism at the family, tribal and national level.

The best rebuttal I've seen was by Stephen Downes on the Poynter list. I have not seen him post it anywhere on his site, so let me end by sharing it here:

The study of course looks only at RSS feeds distributed by the major news agencies, thereby missing the whole point of RSS. People who are seriously interested in the news these days no longer rely exclusively on commercial news organizations to deliver them the news. If they were interested in, say, Pakistan, they would search through (say) Technorati http://www.technorati.com/search/pakistan and subscribe to the best feeds (in their estimation) from the 142,000 results (obviously they would not scan all the results, just the hundred or so that constitute today's news from Pakistan). The point of RSS, of course is to allow readers to obtain news from a wide variety of points of view, including personal reports from people who live there. This is not possible if one reads only news RSS feeds, which is why nobody uses RSS that way. The study sets up a straw man.