June 2008

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, Jacques Steinberg wrote about the resurfacing of an old issue in journalism: should reporters be required to identify themselves to the sources they talk to?

In particular the article discusses Mayhill Fowler, who writes for the Huffington Post and is most notable as the source for the following recent political hot topics:

1. Bill Clinton calling the author of a recent Vanity Fair article “sleazy” and “dishonest.”
2. Obama claiming that some people cling to guns and religion out of bitterness.

In both of these cases Fowler did not identify herself as a journalist, and Obama’s quote came from an event to which the media were not invited.

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Perhaps because of some collective media groupthink, the internet is often seen as the deathknell for magazines and newspapers and news media of all kinds.

That’s bull. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Jon Friedman at MarketWatch wrote a column about it as a follow up to a presentation he made at the annual meeting of City and Regional Magazines in Mississippi:

There is no excuse for magazine editors and publishers to be uneasy about the Internet. They talk as if it’s some strange, exotic instrument that nobody quite understands.

And then he goes on to present eight excellent guidelines for finding success with your web site. I’ll let him share the details of each point in his own post, but here’s the fly-by:

1. Have an attitude
2. Make it easy to read
3. Stress interactivity
4. Entertain
5. Maintain an identity
6. Live in real time
7. Be true
8. Experiment

Of course a lot of this advice makes a lot more sense for magazines than it does for a large portion of newspaper reporting (some news, for example, should definitely be presented sans attitude). But as far as understanding what works on the web? It’s a damn good list.

I would add two of my own:

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Jon Talton, a journalist of 27 years, writes that local-local journalism is an exercise in stupidity. I’ve already made my case for hyper-local news coverage here, but Jon makes some good points and I think it’s worth clarifying why he’s wrong.

He uses the Washington Post’s ill-fated LoudounExtra.com as an example of why local-local is not worth your time (I could just hold up MySeattlePets as a counter-example, of course, but what fun would that be?).

If you really see hyper-local journalism the way the WSJ describes it:

It embraces the idea that a high-school prom is as newsworthy as a debate over where to build a hospital, and that Little League deserves major-league attention. And it promises to let visitors to the site shape the news through blogs and photo and video submissions.

then yes, you’re going to run into a few problems. The fundamentals of what is interesting to people and what is important to a community have not significantly changed. What has changed is that as a newspaper you need to find a community to engage with.

Hyper-local coverage, to me, means that you cover what matters to your local audience, which may or may not be the same thing as what score the high school football team got.

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In the Washington Post yesterday, Steve Ballmer was quoted on the future of media, in conjunction with technology and what Microsoft is doing:

In other words, it’s all about the capabilities of the medium. Television and print are both one-way mediums that don’t easily allow people to form communities and interact with each other and even help produce what’s on the screen (or page).

I think 10 years is a bit fast, but I think he’s right about the direction.

I wrote a post the other day about thinking beyond text and images with online journalism. Looking back, I sound a little bit grandiose while talking about something that some newspapers are already excelling at.

The New York Times‘ rent or buy real estate calculator is one example that I’ve been aware of for some time.

Right now, there’s an interactive graphic on the New York Times home page that elegantly displays the breakdown of various voter blocks in the democratic primary. Want to know how women in their 30’s voted by state? Click. Cool.

What I should be able to do is treat that graphic like a YouTube video, and embed it on my site. That way anyone who comes through here can play with the Times‘ brand, data, and journalism, and cool graphics can spread virally across the internet.

You could embed a directory of related graphics, so that people can play with a series of connected pieces. They could click through to nytimes.com for associated articles or more detailed explanations.

As it is, I can’t even figure out how to find a permalink to the graphic they have up right now. The best I can do is show you a picture (top of the post). Once they move it from the home page, it is lost.

Step one is creating really cool interactive content. Step two is leveraging the viral power of the internet to build your audience and get your content everywhere.

I recently wrote an e-mail to Seth Godin asking him about his opinion of journalism. I was reading his book, The Dip, which more or less advises all journalists to jump ship:

If you work at a big city newspaper, you can see that there’s no light at the end of that career-choice tunnel. Circulation is dropping, and it’s going to drop ever faster. most papers have little chance of replacing their traditional business with an online alternative.

You can see his response on his blog here, where he introduces a great question that all newspapers should be asking themselves: what are you defending?

If you’re clinging to a paper product, you are facing a dead end. If you’re spending time and resources trying to defend the practice of printing and delivering, instead of discovering new ways to deliver and monetize your content, you are wasting your time.

Especially because what you’re really defending is the printer, not your own business.

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