The promise -- and peril -- in Atlanta editor's words

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's managing editor, Bert Roughton Jr., told Poynter last week: I can’t have people stuck on beats that may or may not have audiences all the time.

In that simple sentence lies the complicated tale of the current state of the news industry, at once fraught with promise and peril.

Roughton said those words in the context of trying to, as he put it, "smartly" manage what has been one of the more decimated staffs, having gone from about 500 people to about 180 in a bit more than a decade.

The AJC was one of the first to go "digital first," in 2007 moving its spot news online and creating a system designed to separate content creation from production.

Now, among other things, there will be 10 topic teams. There is a lot to like here:

• Each team will include "audience specialists" that had been in a separate digital department.
• Those specialists will help journalists still a bit tentative about this digital thing discover new tools and other ways to tell stories. That, in 2014, there still is nervousness in the newsroom about digital is worth taking a minute alone to ponder. (From Poynter: Roughton told me some traditional reporters are “still a little nervous about this whole Internet thing.” So having a digital specialist “in the family,” so to speak, gives reporters intimidated about digital a go-to person for help. “The truth is, I think most reporters are dying to be good at this,” Roughton said.)
• There will be broader attention to audience research (trying to pay attention to your audience is always a good thing)
• Based on that, and with echoes of Clayton Christensen's model that people don't buy products as such but hire "jobs to be done," Roughton promises a lot of deeper thinking about what to cover and how to do it. (From his memo as quoted by Poynter: Each topic team must develop a guiding statement of what they cover based on audience metrics, research and judgment. Instead of a collection of beats, each team will have a coherent theme against which to work. The topic statements should evolve as audience demands and circumstances change. For example; instead of covering a bunch of individual companies, the Economy team might focus around a topic such as “Metro Atlanta’s recovery from the Great Recession and how that is reshaping the economy for our audiences.”

But this highlights the stresses on the modern news organization because some of the truly important "beats" don't have audiences to start. In many cases, our job as journalists is to create those audiences for things that otherwise might go unnoticed but turn out to be hugely important.

The idea of  breaking away from the "beat" that produces isolated, incremental coverage is not new. Gil Thelen, as editor of The State in Columbia, S.C., for instance, was one of those pioneering coverage "circles" in the 1990s. There are several other examples, such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that was studied in depth (here's the PDF link if you can, through your library, get to the full study, which is paywalled) and Minneapolis (again, the full paywalled PDF).

But the stakes have been raised in the current digital age and business climate.

Some of those beats with low or no audience are critical to actually discovering those stories that have the elusive audience we seek. I already see around the country stories about significant lawsuits or court decisions days or weeks late on news organization sites. (As any "traditional" reporter will tell you, the reason you checked those filings regularly was because they were the quickest way to discover an area's underbelly, reveal its interlocking connections, and turn up some darn good stories.)

Yes, it's good to get out of the press release processing business when it comes to covering local companies, but the contacts made by a follow-up call and short story from one of those can often lead to sources for better stories and a much better understanding of the background needed to cover such organizations.

The turn-of-the-screw stories from City Hall definitely need to be a thing of the past, but if we are left to rely on agendas and other handouts, even if we deeply report "advancers" and the like, then what? I spent a fine summer trailing Andrea Mitchell around Philadelphia City Hall during the Rizzo administration as she ran the beat. There was a lot of incremental work there, but like a mosaic, when you stepped back it created a larger, more significant picture.

And we know how most State House bureaus have been gutted as more power is being shifted to the states and when people's lives arguably are more affected, on balance, by what happens at the State House than in Congress or City Hall. Covering state government effectively is a contact sport, bar none.

I wish I had the answer to a question that has gnawed at me for years, back to the "circles" days: How do we balance the journalism of relevance, for lack of a better term (we'd hope it's all relevant, right?), with the journalism needed to discover those sometimes disparate threads that require the kind of institutional knowledge and sometimes mind-numbing amassing of detail that allow you to realize the thread is there and not just fuzz?

No newsroom has ever been able to do it all, of course, and many stayed too long exclusively in the bricks-and-mortar beats mode. Digital tools can make some of this transformation a bit easier, but they can be gamed by those producing the info fed into them (yes, regular personal contacts can be gamed too, but it's harder when they have to look you in the eyes).

We are gaining, I think, some smarter journalism. But it will take journalists, especially newsroom leaders, of strong constitution and unusual enlightenment to try to keep things balanced. We also are losing something in this process.

Fifty years ago this month, three civil rights workers were killed. Less than a year earlier, four girls were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. In 1965, the world watched as civil rights marchers were beaten in Selma, Ala.

Thanks to Eugene Patterson, the AJC had one of the outstanding records among Southern papers of that time. But it was 15 years earlier when much of journalism really needed to be paying close attention.

If it were today, would the civil rights beat at that critical time -- before things exploded -- really have the "audience"?

New definitions of quality in a digital age

I missed these in the past couple of weeks on Paid Content.

Ben Elowitz knocks down traditional measures of quality in the first post and proposes some new ones in the second.

From his second post, commenting on traditional measures:
Here’s the problem: They simply aren’t enough to win audiences, drive financial success, or, for that matter, ensure viability. The demise of institutions like Newsweek proves that—and shows that publishers that don’t move beyond these anachronistic measures of success will perish.

I agree with Elowitz to the point of saying quality measures have been expanded in an age when there is digital abundance, and anyone who does not think long and hard about what he is saying is not understanding what is happening.

But I don't think it's quite the zero-sum game his posts might suggest. I don't think the "old" measures are "anachronistic," just too narrow. I think there still is value in "correctness" and "craftsmanship." "Objectivity" is a straw man - we never have been objective. Fairness, however, still has its place, if nothing else but for civility.

"Credential," I agree, does not count much among users in an age of transactional credibility. But Elowitz does not deal with the reality that it still carries quite a bit of sway on the other end of the pole -- news gathering. That makes for an interesting set of questions that need more research.

'Unpublishing' - the growing challenge for editors/publishers

I just came across some work by Kathy English, reader's representative for the Toronto Star, in which she looks at the growing number of requests for news organizations to "unpublish" information in their digital archives and on their Web sites.

English did her paper, "The longtail of news,"(PDF) for the AP Managing Editors. It should be required reading for every journalist, but especially every editor. (Here also is an earlier article from English on "Why the Star does not 'unpublish.' ")

It follows up on work that I, Larry Timbs and Will Atkinson did in 2007 in what we think was the first academic study of newspapers' "digital attics." It was presented at the annual Huck Boyd conference, and you can find our paper in the winter 2007 edition of Grassroots Editor.(PDF)

English finds much the same thing we did - there is widespread opposition against unpublishing. But requests seem to be growing. At the time we did our research, more than a quarter of those at community papers and more than half of those at larger papers said they had had requests to remove material from the archives. (Our research was based on responses from 63 editors at Southern Newspaper Association member papers. The response rate was disappointing, but given English's conclusion that this is a growing problem -- enough so that the APME commissioned her study -- I would hope future studies would see greater response.)

English's nine-question survey does not appear to ask directly how often the respondents (110 editors responded nationwide) have had to deal with such requests or the frequency. However, she cites one Gatehouse executive who says that while five years ago such requests were rare, now he deals with them almost daily. (On the other end, a Chicago Sun-Times editor says he rarely deals with such requests.)

She finds more than three-quarters of those who responded would consider unpublishing in some circumstances. That indicates a bit of a softening from the 95 percent who supported the statement in our study that changes should not be made unless there is clear error. But both studies still find strong opposition to unpublishing overall.

It is still disappointing to find in English's study that barely half of the news organizations she surveyed had some kind of policy for dealing with such requests. Our study found policies at about a third -- but this issue is too important, and growing, for any organization not to have considered what to do. Our paper, more than English's, goes into some detail on the legal horizon (and a principle, quickly disappearing, called "practical obscurity" - more in a 2008 NY Times article), and it is not at all certain that the legal system won't weigh in on such things. (A higher court later overturned the order to remove the stories from the Kansas City Star Web site, but we are likely to see more such cases.)

What our study does that English's doesn't is pose four scenarios to the editors and measure their reactions. I think you would find the results interesting.

The problem, of course, is not confined to the U.S. See this U.K. editor's ruminations from earlier this year and readers' responses  [2011: This link is now dead]. And in 2007, the same year as our study, one professor told the New York Times that archives perhaps should be programmed to eventually "forget" some information, much as people do. Brad Dennison, the Gatehouse executive interviewed by English, haswas, according to her paper, decided that instituting a pilot project at some papers in which most police blotter items would disappear from Gatehouse archives six months after their first publication (though he knows they may well live on in other cached parts of the Web).

English points out that police blotter reports posted online pose the potential for increasing problems. I can tell you from personal experience as founder of Hartsville Today, a community news site affiliated with the local twice-weekly paper, that such discussions have been a hot-button issue. (Unfortunately, a system crash late last year wiped out all the previous threads, but I think I may post something on the site asking for updated thoughts.) The thing that seems to infuriate people is that news organizations are willing to publish blotter items but then seldom follow up on the outcome to produce a complete record. (And, even if they do, they seldom use the ability to digitally link the stories.)

I think English has some good recommendations in her best practices section. That includes having a clear policy and making it known to the public. I especially like her recommendation that unpublish decisions should be made by consensus. As she notes, this provides a way for editors and publishers to deflect requests from powerful people and institutions. I can think of nothing worse than, if a news organization does unpublish, it gets a reputation of toadying to the powerful and ignoring the powerless.

About 50 non-journalists also answered English's survey, and she says most supported the resistance to "unpublish." I think it may be time to do some more extensive research in this area -- and then repeat it periodically. I have a feeling this is not going to be a static subject.

Also worth looking at:
This Jan. 5 article on Walletpop from Jason Cochran about newspaper archives in general being in jeopardy -- and with it major chunks of community history -- as the industry contracts.

Another exhibit of not getting it

No, this is not another rant about a newsroom not getting the 'Net - although that's part of it. It's about a newsroom not getting it, period. And as news staffs continue to get cut, as they have at The State, you begin to wonder if anyone really is minding the store.

The case for the prosecution:

• On Monday, the paper ran a nice advance story on PBS' "The History Detectives" having come to Columbia at the request of a history buff who thought the historical marker noting the bridge that Union Gen. William T. Sherman used to reach Columbia was out of place. The bridge is long gone, of course, but there appear to be remnants in the Broad River.
• The story strongly hinted the history buff was right, but noted, "Everyone involved has been sworn to secrecy until the episode is shown." Fair enough.
• Episode airs Monday night. History buff is proved correct.
• Does The State update its story or do a follow-up story? Dare you to find one. Do a search on The State's Web site and you come up with a link that reads 'History Detectives' to Columbia Man: 'You were correct." Go ahead - click on that link. You will be almost instantly redirected back to the original, un-updated story! Hello? Anyone home?

Forget the intertubes. Forget that it's 2009. This is simply about getting it as journalists, period.

Having put the advance story in a prominent position one day, no city editor in his or her right mind in years past would not have done at least a short follow-up. But you won't find one in the paper. (And you've already gotten online whiplash if you clicked on that link.)

Sure, the paper put up a nice link to the video story on its Web site. I'd give kudos, but that should be routine these days. But what about folks who don't want to sit through 15 minutes of video, who have busy lives but who were left wondering from Monday's paper and may just want to know quickly "Did they ever prove it?"

Instead, this paper has gone from essentially owning the story and setting itself up to be "the answerer of questions," thus helping its follow-up audience, time on site and all that stuff, to potentially being major clueless irritant. (Not to mention there was additional info to be reported from Monday's show - that the history buff apparently has in process an application to move the marker. This involves Civil War history, folks, and such things are not taken lightly in these parts.)

I've seen this play out more and more. And it's not just papers. There was the recent disappearing act by TVs when it came to the early stages of the L.A. fires.

Let's hope "not getting it," a bad-enough ailment in the digital realm, doesn't turn out to be the creeping crud.