What does "Big Silicon" mean for journalism and j-schools?

There's been a lot written lately about "robots" (i.e., computers) writing news stories, be it routine earnings report at the AP or routine sports stories. The latest reflection on this, in the N.Y. Times, prompted a colleague to pose the question on a Facebook group: "What does robojournalism mean for j-schools and the people that love them?"

If we cut through the somewhat visceral reactions these stories tend to invoke, what is happening can actually provide the sort of clarity we need to examine the state of affairs by making us truly assess what journalism is versus "news" and what has been the reality of the industrial process in which it has operated.

Here are two responses I posted:

It means we have to stop doing the rote stuff and actually think -- constantly -- about how what we're teaching fits into the constantly developing ecosystem. Unfortunately, that is difficult in institutions that on one hand say they value innovation and change -- when it comes to research -- but value stasis more in the curriculum.

---

One other thought on this. This does not mean the death of journalism. At its heart, journalism will always be a cottage industry -- it relies on one journalist having a relationship with individual sources to extract useful information, detect patterns, supply context and advance knowledge. Much as the financial folks would like it to -- and much to their consternation -- that heart won't change. But that does leave the question of what is "journalism" and what is "news." "News" is largely processing, taking what is in the open already and processing it for presentation over whatever form. That's an industrial process. Every industrial process strives to replace labor with capital. That is what is happening here.

So as we look at the "journalism" landscape, it's good to keep that distinction in mind. No computer is going to duplicate Sy Hersh's work on My Lai, for just one example. Or Jim Risen's on national security.

What it means, however, is that journalism has become a creative business, much like art or acting. And our students have to understand that. Going out and covering a news conference, processing it and putting it on the air, online or in the paper, is a job that will be automated as much as possible. Covering a game and writing rote ledes (such as the second example in the Times' story), will be automated as much as possible.

This also means our students have to understand they will be treated as actors are -- responsible for their own training and continued preparation. (Ever known someone to go to an audition and the director to say: "Hey, we'll hire you. Now let us send you to acting school."?) And they are much more likely to be part of the "gig economy," not salary men (or women).

The clinker in all this for me is that the economics have been that the "news" part of the business has tended to subsidize the journalism part of it. It's also provided a lot of jobs. So as journalism is distilled in the new economic order, will we have the infrastructure (legal, distribution, economic) to support journalism? As other institutions (business, government) get stronger and the Fourth Estate atomizes, is it even possible to develop that kind of infrastructure in an atomized information society? Put another way, would the Pentagon Papers be published today, given the large actual cost and potentially enormous legal and other costs that could have been extracted? For all there is to criticize about them, the large journalism institutions had the reserves -- when they chose to use them. It's a useful litmus question to ask ourselves from time to time.

Jay Bender poses the question well in a different form (larger S.C. papers in the background helping smaller ones) in his oral history for the S.C. Press Association. I also recommend the Tow Center's report on post-industrial journalism.

Winter in S.C.: Snow, earthquake - cue the locusts.

Two winter storms and now an earthquake remind me of 1986 in Dayton, Ohio, when I was AP correspondent there.

For several days a chemical-filled train that had derailed burned in nearby Miamisburg, throwing a cloud of smoke filled with who-knew-what (authorities certainly weren't sure) over the area and leading to one of the largest U.S. evacuations related to a train accident.

I had the job of covering it - more than 72 hours straight. I'd managed to get inside the police lines and to the warehouse about a quarter mile away that they had set up as a command post. The surrounding area had turned into a ghost town.

That same week, in golf, the Women's Open was being played at the NCR Country Club. It was touch and go as they kept a wary eye on the cloud. It was also brutally hot.

And then came monsoons. All in all, a fine week.

So there I was (having finally gotten a few hours' sleep) in the AP cubicle in the old Dayton Daily News building pounding out the requisite Sunday recap/thumbsucker, having just read a lede about the golf tourney in (I think it was) the Boston Globe that went something (as best as I can remember it): "We've had the fire. We've had the flood. Now all we need is the earthquake."

Sure enough, as I'm sitting there, a mag 3 or so temblor hits.

I swore, if I ever met that writer, I would throttle him.

WOWO history

Early in my career, I had the great fortune to work for Group W - the old Westinghouse Broadcasting in Philadelphia and Fort Wayne.

Fort Wayne's WOWO, at 50,000 watts, clear channel was the most fantastic place to work in the mid-1970s. DJs with great pipes and great personalities like Ron Gregory, Chris Roberts, Calvin Richards and Bob Sievers. And a great newsroom with folks like Dugan Fry, Jerry Hoffman, Bill Fisher, Ed Kasuba, Debbie Lowe and Art Salzberg -- and immediate on-air access to the famed Group W network.

Now, Randy Meyer has put together a wonderful tribute site to the old "WOWO 1190." He's done it up right at http://historyofwowo.com. It's got airchecks (the 1973-75 one of Calvin Richards and Ron Gregory (MP3) was the beginning of my stint there - a snippet of one of my newscasts is very near the end - 43 minutes in), some of the great old jingle packages (MP3), photos, etc.

If you really want a taste of what music-news radio in its heyday was like, head on over to the site. I've got to go rooting through the attic to see if I have anything left to send Randy. Anyone else out there with old WOWO mementos, consider contacting him as well.

News icon may close

I remember from my days in New England stopping into the Out of Town News stand in Harvard Square whenever I was up there.

Now comes word the 80-year-old icon may close -- Hudson News says it's just not as profitable as its airport operations (where the company can gouge you for a drink and a crummy snack).

The city (which owns the kiosk) is now looking at alternatives for what should be a killer location. A few months, ago, that probably would have been a Starbucks. But with that company's latest profit plunge, who knows.

Individualized TV? Cringley says look to 2015

For several years I have been telling news people and journalism educators who come to Newsplex that 2009 -- next February to be exact -- marks another tectonic shift in their business. When TV goes fully digital, it opens up potentially hundreds of high-speed digital channels that will turn us into a mobile-computing society.

The iPhone and its progeny are just the beginning, but any news organization without a developing mobile strategy is toast. Among other things, I expect this will flatten or otherwise significantly change the online usage curve we see at news sites where the peak happens during daytime office hours. (An example: You are driving home and suddenly get a craving for shrimp for dinner. You could flip open your mobile device and shop for the best prices and, once you got home, instead of firing up that desktop, flip open the mobile device and find a recipe. News/information organizations will find more pressure to be fast and continuous, even smaller local organizations.)

Now comes "Robert X. Cringley" of PBS's "I, Cringley" to rearrange my thinking even more by suggesting that about six years after the 2009 change, that big LCD screen you just bought will be the next epicenter of change -- and this one could put TV news types under the same kind of stress newspaper folks have been going through.

Simply put, Cringley argues that broadband capacity will grow at an exponential rate for the same basic price of $10 to $30 year: After staying for years at an average 1.5-megabit-per-second download speeds, broadband ISPs are moving to an average of 6 megabits per second in 2007-2008, 24 megabits per second in 2010-2012, and 100 megabits per second in 2014-2016.

At the same time, Cringley argues, U.S. broadcast TV technology has been pegged to the 1080p high-definition standard, and it will be difficult to change that for some time. Given the bandwidth needed to transmit a 1080p signal, combined with ever-lower costs for processors, and on the horizon is the potential for fully individualized TV:

Around 2015 is the time when the cost of sending a separate 1080p video signal to every Internet-connected viewer -- or POTENTIAL VIEWER -- will be the same as using a broadcast model and sending that signal through the air. After 2015 there will be no scaling limits, no processing limits, no decoding limits. And since individual video streams mean individual commercials with a requisite CPM (cost per thousand) bump of up to 10X, commercial television as we know it will die, replaced by consumers choosing from a menu or recommendation engine what they want to see when they want to see it. ...

Commercial stations will repurpose their bandwidth for alternate wireless services, eventually shutting down their digital transmitters completely. And PBS, which can't create a marketplace all by itself, will follow.

A fascinating bit of analysis. Agree or not, it's worth pondering. And it adds another thing to think about as we train broadcast journalists -- such as whether "broadcast" is even worth considering anymore.

Down memory lane

As I was doing some research tonight, I came across this from an article:

Yet many copy editors sense that managers overlook their contributions when promotions open up.

And that's just one of their frustrations. After years of adapting to pagination and surviving staff restructuring, downsizing, redesigns and tacked-on new-media responsibilities, many copy editors in St. Petersburg concluded that the critical copy-editing function demands reappraisal by, and renewed appreciation from, editors and publishers alike. ...

Yet copy editors suffer an "abysmal lack of respect. ... Now to this perennial problem have been added two huge new ones, newsroom downsizing and pagination, a technological revolution that ironically increased the workload on the copy desk while reducing the newspaper's overall payroll."

And then there was this:

The case for elimination of the copy desk is being argued in newsrooms and in trade journals, and the following are some of the sometimes contradictory points that have been made:

Eliminating the copy desk will not eliminate copyediting. Newspapers might as well eliminate copyeditors because copyeditors no longer have time to edit.

Pagination has spelled the end of copyediting as we know it. Newspapers don't need copyeditors because reporters should be able to provide clean copy.

Copyeditors should be shifted to (take your pick) design desks, originating desks or topic teams, because that's where they belong.

OK, so where did I find those?

The first is from the NAA's Presstime of November 1997. (The quote is from Gene Forman, then deputy editor and vice president of the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

The second? John Russial's important academic study and argument "Goodbye copy desks, hello trouble?" from Newspaper Research Journal in spring 1998.

And now we'd probably look back on those as the halcyon days!

Of hyper-local journalism and future journalists

The Carnival of Journalism question for this month is a deceptively simple, yet deviously complex nut. Thanks a bunch to June's host, Andy Dickinson, for posting it (it gives me an excuse to get a Scotch, several, perhaps).

Let's break this in two: 1) is there value to be had in hyper-local journalism, if so what is it and who will do it and 2) what about that journalist of the future, what will he or she be like?

As to the first, I confess, I don't know. I do know -- or at least think pretty strongly -- that any news outlet focused solely on geographic community in the digital age is limiting its growth prospects, if not flirting with suicide. Every geographic community has dozens of sub-communities, many spanning geographic boundaries, and to which the participants may be more closely tied. To ignore those as sources of news (and, as important, revenue) is foolish.

Yet, I still maintain geographic ties and have a need for geographic-based information. I want to know about changes in my trash pickup; I need to know about road closings and similar information; I'm interested in the latest secret land deal the local school district has made for what it portends for growth, my home value and my taxes; I like to hear about the neighbor's children in sports; and I want to know what the county council is doing to my tax rate. Some of that information is hyper-local, but some is, literally, "across the dam" 10 miles away. I need an entity with some sense of geographic community to understand the relative importance of some of those things and bring them to my attention.

The full-service newsroom (some will use the term newspaper, but I prefer not to confound the issue) used to be the agency for that and, as it turns out, not a very good one past a certain size (though I'm not sure exactly what the point is where things start to break down and the newsroom loses its sense of community). Some atomization is occurring. However, I don't see it going as far as some commentators do because.

• I don't think our readers/users/viewers have all that time or desire to click around cyberspace. Some form of aggregation, though not necessarily as we know it now, is likely. It may well be an amalgam of a feed site with a recommendation engine with some original reporting. It certainly will have to have multiple layers of customization.
• News aggregators -- we now call them newspapers and broadcasters -- serve a legal/social function as well. As I've written before, they centralize liability, a critical socio-legal function in modern and post-modern society. Eventually, the legal system may evolve (warning, fellow carnivalistas, that may be next month's question when I play host), but currently it is set up to work on the idea of consolidated liability (read, deep pockets).
  
• In return, the aggregator provides the journalists who belong to it a legal umbrella.
  This is not insignificant. We really have not started plumbing the depths to which the legal system may expose individual digital journalists. (I wonder how many fellow carnival members carry professional liability/defamation insurance.) Just the discussions over AP's broadside at the Drudge Retort should begin to suggest the ramifications.
• The aggregator also provides legal muscle. We may develop some specialized investigative reporting operations, but the very nature of those is likely to be on a regional, national or international scale. But who is willing to go to court to challenge the local school board when it tries to hide its actions by funneling them through its law firm? Yes, perhaps we'll see the development of some kind of foundation support and nonprofit action groups, but by and large it takes some concentration of economic resources to be able to mount an effective legal challenge.

We have found through Hartsville Today, and my colleagues at Missouri have noted something similar through their efforts, that all the rhetoric about how all this would open up democracy and a horde of folks would start scrutinizing the school board, well, it just generally ain't so. Oh, yes, we get many good "stories" on HVTD, important ones, ones the newspaper wouldn't necessarily get to. But one thing you definitely see missing is that "dedicated" hyper-local journalist spending hours sitting through city council or the school board or sifting through the records and asking the really challenging questions. That's big-J "journalism," and in the hundreds of conversations I've had in relation to HVTD and other sites, people still generally expect "us" to do it (even using the term "journalism" to distinguish it from what they see themselves doing).

So, where am I going with this? Well:

1. I think hyper-local journalism has value and is an integral part of our future, but
1. It will be uneven across communities
2. It requires evangelists to make it work well
3. It is never a "build it and they will come" proposition
   
2. In most cases it will benefit from some kind of aggregation and other related services
3. It will have to recognize geographic as well as social and ethnographic communities
4. Realizing any value from it will require aggregating small streams of revenue into larger pools. This is not to say it must be done for revenue, for there will be dedicated individuals for whom it will be a calling. They may be of independent means, find foundation funding or scrape out just enough revenue to cover their marginal costs.
5. Any full-service newsroom that does not 1) start figuring out what its community's communities are, 2) learn to tap into those communities and 3) set up its digital assets so that members of those communities are valuable parts of the journalism (be it contributing, ranking, whatever) should start setting up plans to close.

In all this, I rather like Dave Lee's thoughts on a NewsHub. I don't think he's gotten to it all, yet, because the legal and economic realities (psychological ones, too, I can tell you having been an AP news editor and having had to deal with sharing issues) are vastly more complicated. I also think Wendy Withers has hit on one of the verities -- The problem with digital reporting on the web is newspapers still don’t know what’s going to work. And, when they try to come up with ways to involve readers in the process, they don’t go out of their way to really understand their readers; they look to see what others are doing and then emulate it. Even worse, some newsrooms still think of their readers as “those cute little readers who have to be saved by their base desire to read stories about puppies and celebrities.”

She's also spot on in noting that digital stories require more: If you’re going to stick to local stories, make sure they’re local stories people want to read. Keep sports coverage, but the old “get in, get out, get a couple of quotes and pictures” style of reporting isn’t going to cut it any more. This is true with all stories. One of the biggest problems with modern journalism is stories are stripped away until there are no compelling elements. Find them. Write them. Add your own style and flair, because the old school journalism we’ve been told to stick by is failing.

A Jack Lail has some excellent thoughts on how to make local sites work.

Now, as for No. 2 -- that future journalist. That's actually the easy one. That good journalist in 2013 is going to be a lot like the good journalist of today and a lot like the good journalist of 1913. Journalism itself changes little. It remains one of the true cottage industries, one-on-one piecework, my relationship to my source, my desire to find out things and to tell you about them, and maybe a little outrage or desire to change the world mixed in. (The "my" is the universal "my" -- rest assured I am not saying I am a good journalist.)

We seem to have forgotten that in this modern age. Yes, it may take a village to put out a newspaper or a Web site (though, as shown time and time again as tools improve, that is less and less so). But that comes after the journalism. Never confuse presentation with journalism.

I fear we have done that - and in the process confounded our young journalists, too. I run a small survey in my classes and once again this year, "finding stuff out and telling people about it" was one of the last reasons any of my students chose journalism, even though it should be one of the first. "I like to write," "I'm good with people," "I like the excitement" and similar things all get the bulk of the votes. But all the writing, being good with people and getting excited doesn't mean squat if you don't have the information in your notebook - digital or otherwise.

Yes, our new-age reporter will have to learn how to use various digital assets (many of which probably don't exist yet), and he or she will certainly need a different mindset, one that recognizes the journalist as just one node in much larger intersecting communities. (But then again, didn't we have to learn to use the telegraph, and phones, and faxes, etc.) But I also think that great journalists of 2013 will look back and read the work of Ida Tarbell or Lincoln Steffens and smile a little. They'll recognize a lot of what they are doing in the future in what great journalists have done in the past.

From the mouths of students (Carnival of Journalism)

We're into another carnival of journalism weekend (Bryan Murley hosting this round), which (along with a rather vigorous recent faculty meeting dealing the same issues of j-education and its future) set me off thinking about some of the recent posts on blogs created by journalism classes around the country.

I love reading these for the insight -- sometimes delightful and sometimes dreadfully scary -- they give about the students we teach. There has been a good discussion going at one of our class-related blogs, River City Times, in reaction to Jay Rosen's statement that was part of a thought-provoking post at Mark Glaser's Mediashift about helping journalism students learn entrepreneurship.

"It seems to me that for a great many journalists, the old model will continue. That is, there will still be jobs with Big Media companies that do not really require the journalist to think entrepreneurially but simply to “do the job.” The economic survival of the franchise will continue to be someone else’s concern, primarily. However, this will be a smaller percentage of the total and those journalists will have less exciting work.

What’s different today is not that every journalist has to be an entrepreneur or think about striking out on her own; to say that would be hype, an overreaction and inaccurate. Rather, it’s that some of the best opportunities lie in that direction. And for young people there is less of a need to wait for your shot at glory and high achievement. So for those who are extremely talented, ambitious and focused on succeeding in journalism, you “have” to be entrepreneurial in the sense that you would be foolish not to think that way."

What follows are all heartfelt, serious responses. None should be open to ridicule, but some should give us pause (I've highlighted the first few words of each so that you can read the whole thing, if you want. I've commented on a few of them):

• But the bigger issue here, I think, is that upcoming journalists need to change their expectations about where they are going to work. Everyone wants to work for the big papers or news outlets, but the reality is that there are only a few positions in those kind of places, especially for young journalists. We, the newcomers to this business need to recognize that we should expect to work for a small, probably very specialized news organization.
• However, working for a newspaper, for an editor, is an experience that cannot be taught in a classroom, despite what some professors may think. Deadlines in school are not taken seriously, and most editors do not hand back corrections; they publish your content the way they want to. I wish I could have my own blog and write the stories I choose, but, let’s be realistic here, who would read it? ... The problem with writing a successful blog (meaning you could live off of its profits) is that it takes time and experience, something most students would admit to not having. ... [With Google ads] Google pays the blogger every time a user clicks a link. In order to make a sustainable amount of money, though, a blog or website must have upwards of 200-300 pages at a minimum.
  
• [I wonder if we are giving students an adequate grasp of niche media, what their place in it might be, and the idea of starting early to build audience and credibility. A dose of Chris Anderson's long tail would help, too, as would clarifying some of the misconceptions that a blog must have 200+ "pages" to be successful. I assume the student means posts, and as we know, it is fairly easy to get to that level just by doing a handful a week. And all it takes is one solid post to draw traffic and links. I fear many students still do not have a good idea of Web dynamics. The use of URLs in some posts without turning them into live links is more evidence of that.]
• I think the entrepreneurial state of mind that captivates many young journalists is taking away from their focus on the common good. Instead, we get "rock star" journalists like Anderson Cooper whose names are bigger draws than their headlines. Instead, we get the junkyard dog (not watchdog) media that buys into McCarthy's proposal that big stories are on page A1 and retractions are on page B7. Entrepreneurship invites -- no -- requires self-promotion, which can only get in the way of truth, a journalist's preferred ideal. If Rosen is right, the best way to prepare students for such an environment is to create and foster ambitious student media. ...
• [I couldn't agree more with that last sentence. (The poster also goes on -- "Require some sort of practical experience for graduation, such as an internship or freelancing, student media experience or a senior semester-type program."), but the first part concerns me. Some of the most respected journalists over the decades have been entrepreneurs: I.F. Stone comes to mind. Jack Anderson. Even Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, though they had jobs with McClure's Magazine and later formed American Magazine,were largely entrepreneurs in the sense of going her own way, breaking new journalistic ground and advancing the craft (while making some money at it). They might take umbrage at the idea that entrepreneurship "can only get in the way of truth." I'm reading among these posts what I think are views shaped by a conflating of entertainment (which really is code for TV) and journalism. Maybe that's not all bad if the public evaluates us that way, but it gives me pause if journalism students are having trouble distinguishing.]
• Colleges need to not just encourage us to be tech savvy but should require us to be so. ... It’s not enough these days to just be good at your job. You have to be good in everything if not at least have a hand in all aspects of the newsroom. With the Internet at our disposal, we have limitless options almost to be as creative as we want. It should be the schools’ job to show us how to do that.
• But as every field is more and more segmented and specialized, I think journalism students also need to learn specific knowledge in a particular field where they want to report in the future. ... Having said that, I think J-school needs to provide more flexible curriculum in which journalism students can more freely choose courses according to their career path.
• [Boy, doesn't that summarize the conundrum almost every j-school faculty faces these days? Be flexibly specialized. Hmmmm....]

Anyhow, just a sampling. What surprised me was the amount of what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "hardness" in many of the posts. Make people "sink or swim"; force people to take internships or work on campus media; make us take the tech courses we need.

What I'm hearing -- and not just here but on other student blogs I read -- is that they are as confused as most j-schools and newsrooms are right now. But they are expecting us to lead them. Are we ready? Do they need to embrace the idea of becoming more educational entrepreneurs? What do you see here? What do you think?

Video feeds from AEJMC convention

C-Span is offering some video feeds well worth watching from the annual journalism and mass communications professors' confab (conveniently in Washington) this year during the first full week of August. Most of the panels from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication run 90 minutes. There also is Bill Moyers' keynote speech.

• Wednesday footage: Panels on intellectual property and commercial speech, telecommunications policy and modern newsgathering.
• Thursday footage: Panels on the future of the news industry and the history of television news, and Bill Moyers' keynote speech.
• Friday footage: Panels on newspaper ownership changes and on coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings.
  

One thing you won't find, of course, is video of the panel on coverage of the Supreme Court. (It's listed under Thursday's session, but click on it and all you get is "closed to cameras by sponsor.") C-Span was asked to leave after a New York Times reporter said she couldn't be as candid with TV cameras on. That kicked up quite a fuss. (A bit more on that from the AEJMC forum: original post, follow-up)

Proof the Times is different from the rest of us

Or at least that in midtown Manhattan they seem to use different calendars than the rest of the world.

Friend and reader Gary Karr passes along this Timesean correction (which I have not seen in Regret the Error):

An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by “Feb. 30.” The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol “— 30 —” typed at the bottom of the reporter’s article and combined it with the last word, “February.” It is actually a notation that journalists have used through the years to denote the end of an article. Although many no longer use it or even know what it means, some journalists continue to debate its origin. A popular theory is that it was a sign-off code developed by telegraph operators. Another tale is that reporters began signing their articles with “30” to demand a living wage of $30 per week. Most dictionaries still include the symbol in the definition of thirty, noting that it means “conclusion” or “end of a news story.

Of course, as Karr writes: "Left unsaid: NYT hires editors who think Feb. 30 could exist."

But at least you get a nice journalism history lesson as a result.