Student journalism, statehouse reporting and community news

A couple of interesting things today from the University of Vermont's Center for Community News for faculty involved in running or developing community news projects and especially  those trying to fill the loss of statehouse reporting.

Statehouse reporting report

The decline in statehouse reporting across the US has been well- documented. It's also been documented how damaging this is to public knowledge since it can be argued that what hapoens at state legislatures has far more impact on people than what happens in Congress or at City Hall.

University journalism journalism programs have in some cases stepped in to fill the gap. The University of Vermont's Center for Community News now counts about 20 such programs.

The center has put out a report taking a deep look at such programs. It's worth downloading.

https://www.uvm.edu/sites/default/files/Center-for-Community-News/pdfs/Final_Statehouse_Report_HK_3.31.2023.pdf

Resources for faculty

There are a couple of interesting community journalism conferences this month https://www.uvm.edu/ccn/events

One focuses on university-sponsored news operations covering statehouses Sept. 28-30 at Missouri.

The other (Sept. 8 online) is aimed at improving the faculty resources page put out by the Center for Community News. You can find the page here. 

 https://www.uvm.edu/ccn/faculty-resources

Corey Hutchins on journalism

Nice video interview with Corey Hutchins, political writer for the Free Times in Columbia and S.C. Press Association weekly journalist of the year.

Done by the University of S.C. SPJ Chapter.

The volume's a little low at the beginning. It gets a bit louder later.

(If you are easily offended, close your eyes briefly at 17:17)

A salute to MyMissourian

Clyde Bentley, a friend and professor at Missouri who was the guiding force behind one of the earliest citizen-journalism sites, MyMissourian, announced this week that the site was shutting down. Its content will be folded into the regular Missourian's From Readers section.

It's worth taking a moment not to mourn the passing, but to celebrate all it has represented and all the changes that have have come along in eight years so that, for the most part, we really don't debate anymore whether readers should have an extensive place at the journalism table - both as consumers and as producers of information.

True, there are still those moments of agonizing, but they are becoming rarer as everything from the Patches of the world to the Oakland Locals to the West Seattle Blogs to your city's and town's traditional media sites to about every place in between is taking advantage of people's ability to effortlessly share information.

As one of the original J-lab grantees, we followed not too far behind MyMissiourian with Hartsville Today, an experiment to see whether smaller papers could take advantage of community contributions at a time when most of the attention was focused on major metro areas. It was to be a two-way experiment, giving a twice-weekly a chance to also reach its community more often and strengthen its readership ties.

That site limps along, primarily because of a few dedicated people at the Messenger, as Media General gropes its way to wherever it will end up being. But we also learned a lot and wrote the first "cookbook" (PDF) for starting and running such a site.

But it was Bentley and his graduate students who led the way, not only probing many of the intricacies and, in those days, new and tough questions, but also producing valuable research from the effort.

So while MyMissourian will be another nameplate in history, it won't be forgotten, along with sites like Oh My News (which, unfortunately, has become a cesspool of malware on its English URL) and Northwest Voice, when we look back and assess this turbulent era. For that, we should all say thanks.

Still agonizing over letting readers in

A blog post today by the editor of the Island Packet serving Hilton Head Island, S.C., and environs shows how journalists still agonize over letting their readers "in" to the newspaper pages (or, more really, the websites).

Editor Jeff Kidd has posted 12 questions to help us determine how much 'citizen journalism' you want at islandpacket.com, beaufortgazette.com.

Some are interesting, again illustrating the neurosis we have about this:

• If clearly labeled user-submitted content was inaccurate, would it diminish your regard for staff-produced stories, photos and other content? 
• If clearly labeled user-submitted content was obscene or in poor taste, would it diminish your regard for staff-produced stories, photos and other content? 

 Kidd precedes the questions (most of the rest are about what things people read on the website and how they access it) with these observations, beginning with the thesis that the papers (the doublet includes the Beaufort Gazette) already are hyperlocal because of their focus on the local community and that they already allow "citizen journalism" through things like user photo galleries, community calendars and school lunch menus.

He goes on:

But there's no doubt the terms take on new meaning in an online age, particularly one coming to be marked by ability to both produce and consume news from smartphones and other mobile devices. This creates the possibility of unfiltered publications from the field, though most traditional-media outlets have not gone that far. We still submit to the model for in-print publication, where space is limited, one thing is published to the exclusion of something else, and thus choices are made about what goes in and what doesn't. Even the most gently edited submissions at the Packet and Gazette are reworked or reformatted so that it is distilled to its essence.

Website operations, on the other hand, largely remove the space constraint (though there is still much utility in winnowing away extraneous verbiage and information.) It also greatly reduces the turn-around time for publication. In fact, if we were so inclined, we could publish a a photo of little Jimmy's 11th birthday party as quickly as it takes little Jimmy's mommy to hit send on her smartphone's touch screen.

Of course, at this point we don't actually publish reader-submitted information instantaneously, either, and for good reason — newsworthiness and veracity are the coins of our realm. Allowing anyone to slap anything they want on our site with no approval — let alone verification — presents potential problems. After all, it takes little imagination to think of what could go wrong if a frat boy with an iPhone can immediately post a photo from impromptu wet T-shirt contest that erupted at the kegger. We want more community news, but we also want to remain a publication suitable for family reading.

Nonetheless, we doubtlessly will creep closer toward faster turnaround and yet more opportunities for folks like you to send in news of your everyday lives.

My problem: This doesn't sound to me like a publication that particularly wants "citizen journalism," but one that can get increasing amounts of content on the cheap  -- just making it easier for your readers to shovel more content on your site because there may be ways to increasingly take the human factor out of screening it.

Here's the thing: Those readers are joyfully passing you by with their (humdrum) "everyday lives" and their mobile phones and tablets, passing you by to the point where you become less relative, not more.

If you really care about hyperlocal journalism, then you realize digital is about not only content but community. And online, community is far different from how journalists, even those at smaller operations like this, have tended to define it. It is not us handling "The News" and, oh, by the way, we'll let you have a little place at the side of the table.

True community would actually mean doing more "screening" -- in other words, getting more staff involved. Only it's not "screening," but curating and engaging -- inviting your readers in as co-contributors to the process, not just as some kind of cheap content creators.

When we see newsrooms get that, we'll know they're ready for the 21st century.

A different way to look at new community newspapers study

A new study from the Reynolds Institute and the National Newspaper Association is being framed as "readers in areas served by community newspapers continue to prefer the community newspaper as their sources of local news and advertising."


From the release:

The survey, in its sixth year, shows consistent trends.  

Readers prefer the printed copy to the online version, with 48 percent saying they never read the local news online. 

They prefer to receive advertising through the newspaper (51%) instead of on the Internet (11%). And only about a quarter of respondents said they had found local news through a mobile device in the past 30 days. Slightly more (38%) said they had received local shopping information by mobile device.  

They also have a strong preference for government accountability through newspaper public notice, with 80 percent saying the government should be required to publish notices in the newspaper.

Let me suggest a slightly different interpretation. If a quarter of your market said it was using a device to access your product -- in this case mobile -- would that be an "only" to you or a cause for management to start thinking strategically in that area?

If more than a third said they received local shopping information on a platform -- mobile -- and the suggestion was that perhaps not all of them are going to your site, would that be a cause for concern? Or are you willing to write off more than a third of your audience - a segment likely to grow? (Unfortunately, the release talks about a "trend," but provides no trend data or a link to the time series raw data files. You should also read the footnote to the study carefully because the methodology has changed a bit.)


Yes, it's clear community papers continue to have an important place in the media mix of consumers, but I don't think it's all unicorns and rainbows as the release might suggest with this quote:

"The survey shows a majority of respondents believe that the newspaper does a better job of providing background and depth on stories essential to citizens,” Anfinson said. “Further, the newspaper is more useful to them personally than any other news source. It not only highlights the strong bond between local communities and their newspapers, but demonstrates that people do value good journalism."

If I'm running a business, I'm not willing to give up a quarter or a third of my market, yet I've sat in many a meeting in recent years where community publishers defiantly act as though digital is the enemy or, if they have digital assets, seem largely clueless about them. Bad move.


(Also published on the Community Journalism Interest Group blog.)

On this Thanksgiving, a tale of journalistic sharing

It comes from Nieman Lab, which recounts how a rural Kentucky paper reached out to the Huffington Post to reprint a HuffPo story on a coal miner fighting for safer working conditions.

Perhaps what's surprising about this is that it would be seen at all as unusual in 2011 and the age of distributed journalism.

Don't be a journalism turkey - have a happy Thanksgiving!

Will print be dead by 2020?

Russell Viers contends much of print will be dead by 2020 - and he's making the argument aimed at community papers, not the big metros. Interesting debate at his blog with Kevin Slimp and others. Worth considering the graphs.

Networked neighborhoods study

Out of London, an interesting set of documents forms a study of online network neighborhood news sites, how people use them and the impact on those who do use them.

You'll find them at networkedneighbourhoods.com.

I've only gotten to the summary (PDF), but the general thrust is this: "The research shows that they serve to enhance the sense of belonging, democratic influence, neighbourliness and involvement in their area. Participants claim more positive attitudes towards public agencies where representatives of those agencies are engaging online."

Among other things:

• 42% of those surveyed said they met someone in their neighborhood online
• 75% said participation on the sites made it more likely people would pull together to improve their neighborhoods
• 69% felt a greater sense of belonging
• From a quarter to about two-thirds (depending on the site) said people make negative remarks online, but three-quarters said they are quickly countered.

In other words, these are the sorts of things traditional community media once did and, where they continue to exist, often still do. I have not come across details yet on what community media might have pre-existed in these areas, the attitudes of those surveyed toward any existing media and their community-building roles, or any effect such sites might have had on those relationships.

But this looks to be useful reading and a block on which to build further research.

The Awl shows boutique sites still might work

In an era all about scale, it's nice to read the N.Y. Times piece by David Carr about The Awl, a boutique site that isn't trying to be a vertical - just literate.

It gives me hope for some of the other sites out there (even this one - grin - though there are no ads here by design).

Speaking of this one - my apologies for not posting lately, but as lead instructor in our senior semester this year, my energies of necessity have been focused on getting copy cleared and publication (digital and dead-tree, in that order) done. Just when you think you're on top of it. ...

But check out http://www.datelinecarolina.org, which is under reconstruction and will look radically different in a few weeks, or our Facebook page.

J-lab/New Voices: Thoughts from the front lines

As mentioned in previous post, am at a New Voices meeting in D.C. where we are reviewing five years of experience with these funded local/citizen journalism/community news sites.

Ours, Hartsville Today, was one of the original 2005 grantees, and, after a recent crash that wiped it out, is slowly being reborn.

Some things that struck me from the first session:

• People often think these sites are, as one speaker put it, "a real newspaper and expected us to send reporters." It takes a lot of education to get around this. For our part, after talking to people in the community before launch, they clearly told us we were the "J"ournalists. They didn't want to be, but they felt they had a role in filling in the cracks and extending the local twice-weekly's coverage. That's why we have tended to use the term "community storytellers."
• It's critical to figure out who your audience is (so "old" media, isn't it?).
• "Just keep going" if you are convinced you are providing a service.
• People love the police blotter. Tracking shows they read items on it three or four times (Susie Pedner, NewCastleNow).
• Save as much money as you can to pay writers (in our grant we built that in as an expense)
• Use things like Spot.us to extend your ability to fund writers (especially with Spot.us now expanding) - Susan Mernit, Oakland Local.
• "Facebook is the AOL of Today" - Mernit. Lots of people hang out here and Oakland Local gets lots of referrals this way. (Note: I agree with her. I think I've mentioned here that I now get more comments on this blog's feed fed into FB than I do on the blog itself.)

Mary Lou Fulton, the force behind one of the original local news sites, Northwest Voice (now Bakersfield Voice) and now with The California Endowment, says more foundations are looking at funding media and the key is aligning with their areas of interest.

Several people talked about how to engage community - send out postcards, use business cards, make sure your contributors know their stuff is being read. (We found the business cards and a couple of relatively inexpensive banners - total about $150 - made at a local print shop were useful.)

And from Clodah Rule, Cambridge Community TV: You can train people to use the technology, but you can't train them how to be invested in the community. So find those invested and work with them. Amen - exactly what we found with HVTD.

J-lab/New Voices: Best line of the day

Am at a J-lab, New Voices gathering in Washington today. All the New Voices community news and similar projects funded over the past five years. Fantastic group. Great ideas.

Best line so far is from a survey Great Lakes Echo did:
Which Great Lakes invasive species is your former significant other?

Why we do what we do

I thought I'd share my latest Common Sense Journalism column, the other part of the CSJ megaplex. Happy holidays !

Why we do what we do

by Doug Fisher

I opened the paper the other day and suddenly felt like singing the line from “American Pie”: “Bad news on the doorstep. I couldn’t take one more step.”

There was a pumpkin shortage for Thanksgiving. Fearful of child molesters in its volunteer ranks, the post office had stopped answering children’s letters to Santa from North Pole, Alaska.

And of course there was the constant drumbeat of stories about how the news business is struggling.

What next? No Santa Claus?

Then came the student, arm outstretched, cell phone in hand, screen pointed at me.

“Look,” he commanded.

Only there was a big grin on his face. And on the screen was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while – a picture of a 3-inch hump of asphalt painted yellow and stretching across a street. A speed hump.

Before you question my aesthetics, or my sanity, let me explain.

Each semester, students in my public affairs reporting class must generate some of their stories from a town or neighborhood. The student was one of three assigned to Washington Park, a subdivision about a mile from the University of South Carolina stadium. It’s mostly minority owned, largely surrounded by light industry and hemmed in by busy roads on either side. Lately it is being squeezed by new apartment developments catering to students.

In short, it’s the sort of place – and people ­– easily overlooked. You know them; you almost surely have them in your town or city.

The students were a bit apprehensive, and the residents a bit suspicious, so it was slow going at first. Even so, it didn’t take long before the young journalists got the scent.

The railroad that owned the property on which the community’s eponymous park sat had sold the land to another student housing developer. Efforts to find land for a new park were not going well. Little to nothing had been written about it.

Some residents were concerned about what they suspected were numerous sex offenders living nearby. State officials were touting their online sex offender database, but most of those in the neighborhood didn’t have computers or, if they did, online access.

And then there was the traffic. Residents said the once-quiet main street through the neighborhood had become a drag strip as drivers from those new apartment complexes cut through from one main road to another. They were concerned for the safety of their children and grandchildren, knowing that before long the park would be gone.

Neighborhood leaders said they had asked the county without success for two years to install speed humps.

So one of the students began asking questions.

And suddenly here was a speed hump.

It’s on a side street, not the main street, which still leaves some of the neighbors wondering what the county was thinking. Our young journalist is asking more questions.

So far, the county says it was a change in the way it pays for such projects, not the questions, that led to hump’s installation. The residents now think, a bit mistakenly, the student journalists can work wonders.

They might not say it this way, but what they really understand is the power of journalism. And our young journalists now understand that simply by asking questions and seeking answers, they can produce real change in the lives of people who otherwise might be overlooked.

And most of all, in this season of doubt about journalism, they understand a little better why we do what we do.

A hump of asphalt wrapped in bright yellow paint. Not what I expected to get for Christmas, but it turns out it’s going to be a good holiday season after all.

Convergnce Conference: Michigan as ground zero

Dennis Jeffers, Carol McGinnis, Lori Brost, Sean Baker, Central Michigan

Wide variations, but one commonality – online, radio sites are a dead zone.

Why Michigan? Diverse media. Among worst economies in the nation, so media having to take more drastic steps.

Urban Dailies – canaries I the coal mine? Jeffers thinks so to some extent.
Gannett went to the Thursday/Friday/Sunday home delivery; seven-day e-edition; 24/7 Web site model.
Both (Newhouse) Made Ann Arbor Web only, is following the Gannett model in places like Flint and Saginaw, and is restructuring others.
• The focus has shifted to product, not delivery
• Trying to change people's behavior.
• There is some evidenced of cultural shift in newsrooms, living rooms, ad agency board rooms. In Detroit News newsroom definite evidence, matter of necessity.
But he sees this more as a stopgap model. E-edition is shunned by younger readers. So it keeps your older readers but does not attract new ones.

Uses/gratifications theory may be among the more useful of the theoretical models.

McGinnis looked at community papers. Generally have been defined by geography but more are being defined by community of interest.

Wide range of sites, from some that do almost nothing to full-featured sites. Only one Michigan county does not have a community paper. Ad revenue down 28.8 percent for larger papers and 18.7 percent for community papers. Michigan Press Association found recently that 54 percent questions read weekly papers and 58 percent read daily papers.

This leads in to Brose, who looked at online only sites. Many are new and there is no definitive list.
Lots of sites springing up in Michigan.

Ann Arbor is drawing the most interest
• Loved or hated
• A "river of news"
• Trying to be responsive to reader suggestions and complaints

• Used to have active discussions for past month or two, but users said they just wanted past couple of weeks. Changed.
• New, usable online calendar
  
• Working on hierarchy of stories
• Bloggers fill in the cracks, especially with things like parenting tips, etc.
  

Contrast with Ann Arbor Chronicle
Started by former Ann Arbor news writer about a year ago. More traditional news site. Little citizen journalism. Now reportedly self-supporting.

She is pretty sure we can say sites like this are the future of local journalism in Michigan.

(UPDATE: Adds broadcast sites)

Baker looked at 75 broadcast online sites across the state, limited to first news page. Used agenda setting and framing.

(Doug note: I think this research was important because it comes when, with newspaper cutbacks and now with talk of paywalls, TV and other news sites may be where the public increasingly turns for news.) Baker found wide variations, even in the same market.

Detroit: One station has a site that is well-constructed and indexed. Lots of RSS, text-based newsletters and interactives. Content has more local focus. Some new video. But two stations much less.

Grand Rapids: All stations very interactive. Lots of invitations to become part of the community. One has "publish yourself" tools, with blogging, photo galleries, etc.
Flint area- abysmal.

Radio: Sites have little local at all. Link to national news sources common. Seem to be more promotional vehicles than news sites.

New microformat markup for news

Worth paying attention to ...

The AP, Media Standards Trust and some others are pushing for a new microformat markup scheme for online news sites stories that would provide a fair bit of new information about each item.

This would include more precise dating and location information, what republication rights are associated with the story, and a "statement of news principles" under which it was published (though the slideshow example on the Media Trust site (eighth slide in) seems pretty lame, such as "it isn't plagiarised," "the quotes aren't made up" and "there is no direct conflict of interest" - gee, ya think so?).

Part of the point of all this is that Google is now supporting the microformats in its search results.

Media Trust has a full site dedicated to this at Value Added News, complete with an example of how it can operate in copy (hint, lots of "span" tags). The hNews specification is built off hAtom, which itself is built off the Atom version of newsfeeds.

(Which then raises a question in my mind - since many news orgs use RSS and not Atom, is there a problem here? Help me out, folks. This is beyond my technical expertise.)

Things are still in development. But the question to me is how do you implement this in smaller newsrooms? Are their editorial systems up to this? Certainly, staffs are going to need a quick way to input only the minimal amount of such information, with as much as possible machine generated. This may be fine for big organizations like AP and Media Trust, but I'd like to see more discussion about how it might be implemented in community news organizations -- and that needs to be in the kind of nontechnical language that harried managers and editors in those organizations can digest quickly.

Carinival: My thoughts for 2009

Sorry to have been away for a while, but grading for three lab courses is, well, a bear. (However, do have a look at what some of my students have done. Modest but promising for our pre-capstone course, I think.)

For this month's Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked us to tackle "positive new media predictions for 2009." Hey, I'm game. After all, that's part of what we do in the ivy halls, right, make predictions that are worth what you (don't) pay for them. (We also have a tendency to come up on a battlefield where everyone is dead or dying and utter such bon mots as "There's been a war," but pointing out the painfully obvious is just part of what we do.)

I have pointedly not looked at my fellow carnivalers' predictions, so you may see some duplication here. Rest assured, groupthink is as much at work in the blogland as it is in the MSM. And I don't guarantee you will find all of these positive.

1. We will begin to see an evolution in mobile that roughly approximates Moore's law. We've been saying this in one way or another at Newsplex for eight years or so, but it's only in the past year or so that people have really been listening. Restated a bit, it's that once TV converts to digital, the power and capability of that thing on your hip you now call a cell phone or iPhone or Blackberry will roughly double every 18 months. We are about to enter the age of mobile, always-on computing that's been predicted for years. Consider: Your local TV station becomes a big mother Wi-Fi antenna (it's not going to use all its bandwidth to send you pretty pictures). The cell phone system is the uplink (since upside data transfer is much smaller). People swear by (and occasionally at) their iPhones. You ain't seen nuthin' yet.
2. As a result, media without a clear mobile strategy will be left (even more) behind. Forget the 10 a.m.-4 p.m. spike in your online traffic. Some of it may still be there, but with powerful computing available at the flick of a "cell-phone" cover, the demands for information bits will extend over a much longer range. And that's going to pose continuing challenges for operations that by their very cultural and corporate DNA are tied to a few deadlines. Oh sure, you can talk information center to me all you want, but I have yet to see an operation that really has that in its bone marrow except for the wire service. And your mobile strategy is going to have to be more than just throwing up a feed of links and headlines.
1. E-paper will be more about extending the capabilities of these mobile devices than creating some Kindle on steroids. A bit of detritus still floats to the surface occasionally predicting that newsreaders are coming over the hill just like the cavalry. Yeah, yeah. Wake me when the revolution's over. I kind of like the electronic edition of my local paper, looking like the paper and all that. But you know what, I only like it for a pedagogical reason - it provides a nice current boundary for my students when it comes to those dreaded current affairs tests (wouldn't be fair, after all, to throw the entire Web open to them and say "guess what I'm going to ask.") The newspaper and its layout are wonderful studies in semiotics, but they are also of an era of limits. Somehow these e-papers never seem to find a way to let you really go explore the Web. Maybe they will, but I'm not sure they scale down as well as we might think to a portable screen.
2. Battery technology will continue to be one of the limits, but significant advances will be made in portable power. (OK, maybe not till 2010 or 2011, but it is coming.) But that's another predictions list ...
3. Community papers, which have been a tad smug in their outlook, will suddenly discover they'd better pay attention to digital, especially mobile. Look, your audience isn't getting any younger. And take a look at the youngsters in your market area. What's that hanging off their belts or in their pockets or purses? Hint: It's not your paper.
1. Same goes for college papers, which are community papers by just another name.
2. In a weird way, those community papers that have invested little or nothing in a Web site, but develop a good mobile strategy, might have an advantage. Web sites in their own way are becoming legacy media. We put so much into them, yet, if I am right and mobile is ascending, people will come to them less and less. Update: See John Duncan's well-explained take on the second-mover advantage.
   
4. One of the real problems will be the pricing system we have created for digital communications. Take all your communications bills and total them. How much are you spending a month? I mean all of it - phone, papers, Internet, cable, papers, magazines, online subscriptions (including anything for storage, etc.). Add it all up. You could probably make the monthly payments on a small car with it. Much has been written about how far behind the rest of the world the U.S. is when it comes to broadband speed and pricing. I've seen only one report on this - a Louisville group that said about a year ago that high telecommunications costs were contributing to housing foreclosures. But I'm betting it's not isolated. In 2009, I think we will see higher speeds, but not lower prices. In the mobile space, digital plans will still be too expensive. Some things, like "white space" devices will help, but that will be 2010 at the earliest.
   
5. If you're digital in any form you'd better have the kahunas to link to other folks, including your competition. This is soooo 2002, but let's repeat it: It's called the "web" for a reason. It's nice to see more places getting this message, but many still don't.
6. Out of all that laid-off brainpower will come some really smart sites/products/stories/multimedia, etc. A lot of smart people have been shown the exit door from newsrooms and media operations. And despite how it sometimes can come across when listening to the echo chamber of the digiterati, not all are luddites or curmudgeons or whiners and piners.
1. Someone will begin figuring out how to do "smart" aggregation in a digital age. In other words, something other than just the pure mechanical Google News or the human-assisted Digg or Newsvine. If a thousand (news) flowers bloom from my main prediction here, someone is going to have to help the Dougs of this world find and navigate the really good stuff. (I'm running into serious info overload these days, and I spend a whole lot more time working at it than my neighbors, for instance.) Smart aggregation combines the best of the mechanical with the public assist with the professional augmentation -- including original product, some of which may build on what the other two systems do -- that can produce smart, useful info packages. Yeah, "news you can use," but in a much different way from how the TV types have sliced and diced it. (Feel free in the comments to tell me how your site already is the latest and greatest, but I've looked at a lot of them and haven't seen it yet.)
2. Some media house is going to just blow it up and refashion itself into a social media site. (Actually, someone probably has, but I don't know about it. Toss something in the comments if you do.) I find myself more and more intrigued by how Facebook (and to some extend Linked-in) serves as an aggregator and wire service, as well as a meeting place and a sort of online 411. (I've used it, for instance, to track down contacts to get copies of academic papers or to substitute for e-mail when I needed to reach someone and had forgotten to put them in my address book.) In other words, it's become an information utility. But isn't that what the modern media house wants to be in its community? So ...
   
7. Publishers and editors will learn that online is a dynamic medium requiring constant tending and attention to what your users are telling you. Unlike that behemoth, multimillion-dollar press, it is not a turnkey system that you make everything else fit to. Ok, nah. But there's always hope.
8. Publishers will blow up the sales bullpen as much as they are blowing up the newsroom. I think this is actually the large untold story of why MSM continues to struggle like large lizards caught in a tar pit. That pit is the old-line sales mentality still prevalent at too many media - the one that grew from becoming largely order takers. I still hear a steady stream of stories about compensation structures that favor print and sales people woefully ill-equipped with the tools needed to sell online. That includes having the capability "back at the office" to produce innovative solutions quickly and flexibly (see No. 6)). Paul Conley talks a bit about this in the context of B2B publications.
   
1. The successful ones will be those that see ad agencies as their competition. Sorry, but this is business and the gloves are off. The Internet destroys middlemen, and ad agencies are middlemen. A well-structured media house will have many if not most of the same capabilities itself. Now, much of a media company can be seen as a middleman, too. But if it's a matter of survival, those convivial relations have got to go. See, that ad agency can now be a publisher too .... 'Nuf said?
2. There will be growing realization that even if you aggregate an audience, online it is not a mass audience. It's a bunch of little revenue streams. From this will come more innovation into targeted advertising instead of banners, which are an artifact of a mass mentality. (See also No. 7: If you combine the idea of flexibility and attention to audience with the idea that an audience is no longer a mass, this might become easier to understand.)
9. The Detroit newspapers' cutback on delivery experiment will falter, as did the Tampa Trib's earlier foray into a single-section paper. In Detroit, the News will be the one that comes up short without a Sunday edition, unless it is going to turn one of the other editions into a faux-Sunday. We'll see how it works out, but I think this is going to come across to many readers as being partly pregnant -- you can't be partly a newspaper. Now, this is different than, say, doing the Web all week and then putting out a kick-ass, magazine-like Sunday edition or a TMC that takes the best of the Web and wraps up the week with some probing, trenchant analysis. That's a different strategy with a different product. But what I've read so far comes across as "we'll sorta be a paper two or three days a week." If the paper does not significantly change and you force your audience to the Web, it's not likely to come back.
10. Journalism schools will become increasingly irrelevant - and important. Heck of an oxymoronic thought, huh? Bear with me. It's no longer just enough to be a whiz with a pad and pencil, a gift of gab, a good ear, and a turn of phrase. For many journalists, the future is going to be -- them. Not a job with some large, established company, but treating themselves as a brand. Or maybe with a small startup where you still are, essentially, a freelancer. It's no longer enough to know a little about a lot. You're going to have to know the business and the technology, how to make a buck, and how to harness it all to your advantage.
    
1. Journalism schools that can figure out how to package all this and stay relevant in an an ever-changing society will become more important. But there will be fewer of them. Academe is no different than newspapers in that it is under intense financial pressure. Just like newspapers, much of academe doesn't "make" anything. It advances knowledge, and for that, just like newspapers and broadcasters, it relies on third-party funding. In business we call them advertisers. In academe we call them the state, the feds and foundations handing out grants. With dwindling state support, the feds focusing more on the hard sciences, and foundation endowments taking a hit -- well, you do the math. Journalism, by its nature, needs a low faculty-teacher ratio to be taught well. It also needs, these days, the ability to create and reshape courses and curricula to stay ahead of, not just respond to, this tidal wave of change. But such things do not come quickly in the academy. Given the financial pressures, as well as those of prestige and the inexorable push toward Ph.D.s and funded research, what dean or provost in his or her right mind would not be looking at the relevance of j-schools to the future of the academy?
   
2. An increasing number of journalism schools will be j-schools in name only, and we'll start seeing this shift speed up in the economic malaise of 2009. It may say "journalism" on the building, but increasingly behind the doors will be "communications" schools. If you're going for that NSF or NIH grant, you don't put "journalism" down as one of the components. You put down "risk communications" or "science communications," "public relations" or "visual communications." Journalism - the process of finding out what is happening, why it is happening and what it means to people's lives -- doesn't get much funding. Never has. Blame the industry largely for that -- R & D have never been big in the publishers' offices. But communications schools allow for larger classes, more prestigious research, etc. In many ways, the broader perspective is a good thing in a multichannel, multimedia, always-on world. But journalism tends to get marginalized in the process. And I am remain amazed, as 2009 dawns, at the number of schools that still have "mass" communications in their name, even as the world around them atomizes.

Want a few more predictions, see Folio's list, Paul Conley's and those by Businessweek's Jon Fine. You probably can find a dozen more without much trouble.

May you all have happy holidays and a healthy and happy New Year.

Community journlism hero dies

As noted on the COMJIG blog, one of the heroes of community journalism is dead. Tom Gish published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky.

He and his wife were among the first to take on strip-mining interests and famously changed the paper's motto from "A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday" to "'It Screams."

When they were firebombed out of their office, they kept publishing from their porch and changed the motto to "It Still Screams."

More papers might take note ...

(More from the Courier-Journal and the N.Y. Times.)

The Batavian

When I was at AEJMC in Chicago at the beginning of August, Howard Owens, the digital strategist for Gatehouse, handed me a card with "the batavian.com" on it.

"Been meaning to tell you about this. We're getting ready to unveil it," he said in that stealthy way that intrigues without giving too many answers. I stuck the card in my pocket. The semester began and the usually routine of classes, and it wasn't until this weekend that I got to look at it.

Most interesting. And my timing seems to be fortuitous, because Owens is out this morning with the "unveiling." (The site actually launched in May.)

Scott Karp has a full post today; he's been in on it for several months And there was more a few days ago from The Fighting 29th a blog in the area.

What Gatehouse is doing is experimenting with the idea of creating a community news site without having a newsPAPER and built around the core idea that community contributions to the site are just as valuable as those of the "professional" journalists. With lower initial and operating costs (without being tied to "big iron"). the chances of success are improved. I'm not going to spend time getting into all the ins and outs of the site -- read Karp or read Owens' post on the site about its philosophy.

I want to talk about a bigger-picture meaning for a moment: What this means for smaller newsPAPERs.

I have said for years now that smaller community newspapers, even if their finances have been pretty good till now, are in as much danger as their big-city counterparts. The world is going digital. Period. Whether you are in South Succotash or South L.A., those 15- to 35-year-olds are increasingly carrying iPhones and similar devices. They are used to maneuvering digitally. It does not matter if you are the "most trusted source for local news" in your three square miles of this Earth.

A recent study here at the University of South Carolina found the state of community newspaper sites to be abysmal (sorry I can't link, but this is the academic publishing business, folks, which sometimes makes newspapers look like screaming centers of innovation - the paper, I hope, should be available in a few weeks at the AEJMC site on AllAcademic.com. Search for Mitchell, K., Collins, E., & Saunders, A. (2008). Finding it, storing it, discussing it: A
content analysis of weekly newspaper Web sites).

The Daily News, Batavia's local paper, would be the poster child. A Web site that has nothing on it but how to subscribe and how to buy ads. And a link if you want to buy some of its old stories from the archive. (One might playfully criticize Owens for picking a too-easy target.)

The point of all this is that it is too easy for competitors to come in, as Gatehouse has done in Batavia, and undercut you, especially by building ties to the growing digital community in your area (and if you think it isn't growing, then what's that farmer in his tractor doing with his iPhone while he plows). And it is remarkably easy to reverse print from the digital content.

Such sites grow community. We have see it in Hartsville with Hartsville Today, a vibrant online community that was done in conjunction with the newspaper but that has taken on a life of its own.

Even my friend and director of the S.C. Press Association, Bill Rogers, a sometimes curmudgeon about "bloggers," realizes some realities here. He's experimenting with creating a template of a site that smaller papers can use to more easily post to the Web. He and I may disagree on how to do it -- he's using Dreamweaver templates, so 2005, when he should be looking into the myriad online tools already available through Wordpress, Drupal and such (because they all are much more compatible with using widgets to greatly expand the power of a site). But the core idea is the same -- no one, not even the tiniest paper in the tiniest town, can afford to ignore the Internet and the opportunities it gives to broaden and deepen community and your ties to it.

To do otherwise merely invites another Batavian to suddenly appear on your digital doorstep. (Tim Windsor even has coined a name for it -- To "Batavian," "to snatch a market away from the snoozing competition with an online-only play.")

Raleigh Chronicle changing ownership

The Raleigh Chronicle, the upstart online newspaper that saw itself challenging the Raleigh News and Observer, says today's edition was the last.

Well, sort of.

According to today's story, the online paper has been bought out by the Raleigh Downtowner, which is owned by Chronicle founder Randall Gregg's brother. "The terms of the deal were not released, but Gregg said the sale amount was "nominal" and was basically just to cover some expenses, since the buyer is another newspaper that is also owned by a member of the Gregg family."

As much as anything, it sounds as if the Chronicle faced the chronic problem many online sites are finding -- the difficulty of getting local advertisers to come over to the digital medium: Despite the challenges of gathering news, Gregg said that the hardest part of running the Chronicle was the business side -- selling advertising online.

"I think many newspapers are having a hard time of transitioning local advertisers from print advertising to the web and I don't know of any newspaper that has come up with a 100% workable solution for that yet," said Gregg. "However, the readership is certainly strong online and teaming up with the Raleigh Downtowner which has had a big success in print advertising sales will definitely help provide a solution for that issue."

As a newspaper, it was an interesting experiment, uneven at times, but with about 100,00 visitors in a recent month, according to what Gregg said in today's editions. Why uneven? It's illustrated in a story, also today, about how some post offices in Raleigh are demanding a local ID in apparently creating their own rules for renting a post office box. But the paper never talks to anyone beyond a counter clerk to find out what's up.

One also might wonder how much of the Downtowner's influence went into the innuendo-laced piece about Raleigh's restriction on downtown news boxes.

Still, the Chronicle has been an interesting experiment in seeing whether an alternative online news publication can survive and perhaps thrive in an urban area. I'll wait to see whether the "under new ownership" sign changes any of that.

Some interesting sessions coming in Chicago

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications convention is in Chicago from Aug. 6-9 this year, and this is an invitation -- and a challenge -- to all professionals in the area to make time to drop by some of the sessions.

I've written here and in other forums before how too few journalists pay attention to the research being done about their business (and then they are surprised when the sky falls in, even though it's been predicted for a decade). And we in academe -- even those of us who spent decades in the business -- need to have more conversations with the pros to keep us honest.

Sure, there are going to be the papers and panels that will make you roll your eyes; you don't have to go to those. There are probably 100 or so sessions. But consider taking a look at anything the broadcast or newspaper divisions, or the community journalism or civic/citizen journalism interest groups are involved in. (There are a bunch of other divisions you might find something interesting in, also.)

Take a look at what the COMJIG (that's what we call the Community Journalism Interest Group) program will have:


Wednesday, Aug. 6:

• A session on anonymity in the news
• A session on publications centering on Chicago's gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community
• A major session on "The Transformation of Print Journalism"
  

Thursday, Aug. 7

• A session on how to deal with offensive postings in the comments area. (I'm tentatively on that panel.)

Friday, Aug. 8

• "Case studies of courage in community journalism" featuring several of the community editors telling their stories.
• How to incorporate digital media into teaching civic journalism

To my friends at ACES, I issue a special challenge to come if you live in the area. Copy editing is going through tough times now. It's worth dropping in to learn more about what the researchers see happening in this business.

Rural Journalism

Over at the Community Journalism Interest Group site, Bill Reader has posted a nice summary of last weekend's Summit on Rural Journalism.