For Samford Crimson journalists

Some newspapers inflate their circulation numbers based on the idea that you’re going to read your copy and hand it on to another reader. Conversely there’s a downplaying of statistics for online news sites. Amy Gahran picks up where Dan Thornton starts and runs with it:

Thornton suggests that if your newspaper factors shared readership into your print circulation, then to be fair you should also try to estimate how many people encounter your online news without ever logging into your site as a visitor. This includes people who:

• Block cookies
• Use a feed reader or personal home page (like MyYahoo)
• Get news or headlines via social media or news aggregators
• Access mobile or cached versions of your news (which often aren’t estimated adequately)
• Read reposts of news stories elsewhere online

According to Thornton, “There’s a big elephant in the news room. Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?”

Therefore: If you think your online readership (as estimated by direct Web site traffic) only represents only a small percentage of your estimated print circulation — think again. When considering the future of your business, how many people visit your site ultimately may be less relevant than how many people connect with your news content and brand via any online or mobile channel.

There’s a great distributed network of people out there just beyond the individuals reading your stuff. How might they pass it along? Who might you be influencing because of it? From the business perspective the key, as Gahran says, is in recognizing the opportunities in a broader view, and communicating that value effectively to advertisers and other potential partners.

Note: Cross posted from my JMC 352 blog.

Jeff Jarvis, he of the big ideas, is imagining a new marketplace for journalism:

What we’ve just built is a new ecosystem of news that tries to make sure that more news gets covered. It’s collaborative and complementary, as I believe news will be – will have to be – in the future. Yes, one could also say it’s anticompetitive but that’s the last problem for news organizations today (and, again, this is the one idea on news’ future that I share with David Carr).

From a news organization’s perspective, once a consortium/marketplace/ecosystem is opened, up, it requires different skills to manage: finding and knowing talent and helping make it better – organizing, curating, educating. From the community’s perspective, we should hope that all the important stories don’t end up with just one reporter and one perspective (I think editorial ego will take care of that) but instead that more news gets covered.

[...]

The pros need training in new media and new skills (while they still have jobs or as they reinvent themselves on their own) and the community often wants training in the essentials of new media tools and journalistic skills. The South Coast paper has trained more than 600 members of the community in an ambitious eight-week course and it is recruiting more. The Oakland Press is also holding classes. Papers and a university in Minnesota got a state grant to retrain professional journalists. Now add this: Trinity Mirror in the U.K. is hiring high-school kids to work on hyperlocal blogs. See also Robert Niles arguing that in their drive for professionalism, local news organizations (especially TV, I’d say) became disconnected from their communities and should be hiring from those communities.

The role of journalism education and journalism students in their communities will change as journalism changes. There’s a new ecosystem emerging and our roles in it will change as well.

Jarvis is always worth a read.

What Daniel Ucko, editor of The Poly Post, says is relevant to all of us as journalists.

We focus so much effort on the print publication you may (or may not) put your hands on each week, we’re left with little energy or time to spend on the podcasts, videos, slideshows, and interactivity we are slowly incorporating into our Web site.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expect to see continuous updates, like the re-launching of the Web site next quarter, news videos from broadcast journalism students at thepolypost.com/cppvideos, and online coverage of the men’s basketball team all week long as they enter playoffs.

So what are we left with?

While the communication department is not completely behind the times here, the print-centric mindset still dominates and students see online as second-fiddle to what should be the priority if any of us are looking to get hired in a job(less) market that just surpassed 10 percent unemployment in California, and is leaving more than 80,000 without jobs nationally.

Does that even matter?

Most of us need to make it on our own. Journalists can no longer market themselves as simply a reporter: we have to be multimedia journalists, bloggers, designers, photographers, and Twitterers.

There are a lot of compelling dilemmas and opportunities here, none of them unique to The Poly Post or to The Samford Crimson. Towards the end of the column he makes the best point of all, one of adaptability. “There is no direct conclusion here because things will keep changing.”

Be flexible. Learn new skills. Try things. Figure out how to tell the best stories possible with all the tools available to you. That’s how you begin to make yourself a commodity.

College Media Innovation is ramping up for another online content contest:

Multimedia

1. Best audio slideshow – Recognizes excellence in combining photographic images with audio to create an enhanced story. Judges will look for strong visual imagery and strong audio storytelling that integrate well together. Audio must include elements of the story (i.e., not a musical soundtrack to a slideshow).

Submission must include URL for slideshow entry to be judged.

2. Best breaking news video – Recognizes excellence in using short-form video on the web as a storytelling medium video that focuses on a breaking news event, produced by an individual or team.

Submission must include URL for video entry to be judged.

3. Best video package – Recognizes excellence in using longer-form video on the web as a storytelling medium video, produced by an individual or team.

Submission must include URL for video entry to be judged.

4. Best overall multimedia – Recognizes excellence in use of audio, video, hyperlinks and animation in the presentation of web-based stories. Judges will pay special attention to the use of available technology to complement and enhance the story content.

Submission must include URL for site to be judged.

And a whole lot more at the link. Which of these do you see the Crimson competing for?

From the BBC’s Future of Journalism conference, via Paul Bradsaw:

Head of BBC Newsroom Peter Horrocks spent most of his session fielding questions from employees concerned about how their particular corner of the corporation would be affected by multimedia newsrooms. That aside, general themes from his presentation and responses to questions included:

• a need for a broader range of skills, such as information design and software development
• While strong single-platform performers will be encouraged to continue doing well on that platform, everyone else will be encouraged to work across platforms

The same will be important in newsrooms here as well. Don’t forget: even as we talk of a broad skill set the elemental foundation of quality journalism remains just as important.

Paul Bradshaw gives us plenty to think about when it comes to using social media in the practice of our journalism. He finds there is a small amount of extra work, but a worthwhile reward.

As journalists we used to be active in seeking those people out – and we used reliable, often official, channels to do that, meaning we were often too reliant on particular sources. Now sources are increasingly coming to us and the work is in making ourselves visible, accessible and trustworthy; and in filtering and verifying the information they provide.

That’s not ‘more passive’ journalism, it’s getting out of your silos and making contact; it’s moving from being a conduit to a stimulator. It’s moving from a linear production process to a networked one, and too few journalists are doing it.

The feedback, the better angles and the better reporting you can produce will be worth the effort. Doing so will also help you build a better brand for your newsroom and for yourself as a journalist.

The horrors in Mumbai reinforce a few of the things Mindy McAdams preaches about the future of newsrooms:

1. Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
2. Breaking news — especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city — will be covered first by non-journalists.
3. The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
4. Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
5. Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
6. Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
7. The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
8. Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis.
9. Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
10. Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.

All of these things are true. You should also consider that breaking news of the chaotic sort is always difficult to sort out as it happens. Facts like fatalities, wounded or attackers are seldom as they seem during the actual event, as you might have noticed if you followed this story as it unfolded. This will require a cool head on your part and considerable editing prowess whether you are in the field or riding a desk during coverage of tragic events.

Deborah Howell asks, in The Washington Post,  “What makes a good reporter?”

Here are some of answers in bullet form, but you should read the entire piece:

Endless curiosity and a deep need to know what is happening.

Reporters go where the story is

Good reporters are committed to telling the story.

Good reporters are savvy enough to find sources they can trust

Good reporters know how to get access to people and documents

In which of these areas do you think you’ll do well? Where might you find yourself lacking and in need of improvement? How do these traits carry over into reporting and writing in your online journalism?

Chris O’Brien is writing about the new newsroom they’re looking to build at Duke. It sounds like they have the sort of situation where they can customize it to their needs and wants from the ground up. While that is great news for The Chronicle, it also makes them think about what they want the principles of their newsroom of the future to be:

Community: The community should be at the center of a newsroom. That can mean physical spaces for training, spaces for public events, and social spaces. But it also means making the community an integral part of the news and information gathering, discussions and production.
Multi-platform: The ideal newsroom should embrace all platforms — online, print, broadcast, mobile — on an equal footing. Any newsroom that organizes around a single platform, and considers the others to be secondary, risks becoming stagnant as those platforms change and new ones emerge.
Innovation: We’re entering an era of increasingly rapid change. The ideal newsroom today won’t be the ideal newsroom of 2012. So any newsroom needs to make innovation a priority and find ways to create the capacity for constant experimentation.
Collaboration: Because any newsroom will be one among many in its community, it’s critical that it figure out how to work with others in the news and information ecosystem, whether that’s linking, teaming up on strategic stories, or finding other ways to cooperate when its strategic.
Transparency: The explosion of information and news creates an enormous challenge for people to figure out which sources they can trust. The best way for a news organization to approach this problem is to become as transparent as possible. In the case of some new newsrooms we examined, that meant a transparent structure that allowed the public to see inside and invited them in. But in terms of content, that also means being as open as possible about your processes, sources, decisions and content.

Think they got  everything? Overlook something? Overthink something? Those are sound concepts, something they’ll likely be very proud of as they grow into their professional careers.

You can see their complete plan.

Anil Dash writes about how Six Apart could help journalists now swimming through uncharted waters. That little blog post is turning into an interesting enterprise because of passion for the craft:

A lot of people are thinking about how journalism is going to evolve online, and many people are passionate about making sure journalists make the leap.

[...]

Overall, there’s an optimism which indicates that having a starting point to do something proactive and positive will be a great first step for many journalists to take control of their careers in an industry that is going through enormous upheaval.

[...]

The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to singlehandedly preserve the career and income of every working journalist who has a job today. And frankly, the response has been so overwhelming that we won’t be able to accept every application at first.

But what we can do is give journalists the tools to take control of their own presence online. This program will let a lot of the most eager writers and reporters learn the ropes about how to be more effective and successful on the web.

What we’re all going to be in the future is one-part journalist and one part marketer. There’s no better place — plenty of tools, low barrier of entry and an immense network — than the internet.

And you’re using many of the available tools already. Facebook, Flickr, blogs, personal websites, Twitter and more can be used for much more than just chatting with friends and broadcasting personal pictures. Think about putting those instruments together in such a way to help you get the next big job, build professional credibility, land a big scoop, listen to a community of sources and more …