Hypercrit

The alpha and the omega

Michael Becker — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 05:02:43 +0000

Plagiarism has come up as a subject of discussion again recently, leading some critics to ponder the reasons why journalists lie, cheat and steal, purposefully or “accidentally.”

Matthew Ingram tackles plagiarism from another point of view, saying that if journalists thought more like bloggers and truly valued hyperlinking, then they wouldn’t get themselves into such messes.

I especially like what Ingram has to say about how print journalists tend to see themselves:

Traditional print media workers are used to thinking of themselves as the be-all and end-all of information, the only source that anyone could possibly need (despite the fact that many stories are based either wholly or in part on reporting by wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters), and are loathe to give anyone else credit. That has to change.

There are all sorts of reasons why journalists do and don’t link. Web tradition says they should. Business sense suggests they shouldn’t. Whatever. Allowing yourself to “accidentally” include someone else’s words in your work without crediting them is the result of lazy journalists with poor notation skills. Period.

The Web strategy hamster wheel

Michael Becker — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:34:11 +0000

Today our company’s CEO paid us a visit. To mark the occasion, we had a meeting to talk about how much content our paper should be putting online.

Our corporate owners have a policy about how much content we and the other papers should be putting online for free. I won’t give a number, but suffice to say, it’s not much. It’s also a loose policy, it seems, since our paper puts almost all of our content online.

The purpose of holding back content is, of course, to make the printed version more valuable. If customers can’t get the news anywhere else, they’ll be forced to buy the printed paper or pay for a subscription to our PDF-based electronic edition.

This strategy would work if we were the only source of news in our community. We are not.News has come to us that our major competitor, a local TV station, is about to hire a couple more reporters and a second Web producer. Management sees this as an omen, a sign that TV is starting to take the Web seriously, a sign that they think they steal away some of our Web supremacy.

While we beat them consistently on traffic numbers — if the figures from Compete.com are to be believed — the TV news team consistent beats us to the Web. They are always minutes or, in some cases, hours ahead of us online. Their goal, I think, is to position themselves as the place people should turn to for news first.

I think they are making good progress toward that goal, despite our best efforts.

It is in this atmosphere that we met today to talk about how much content to put online. In reality, we talked about a much bigger subject: the uncertain balance between paper and electrons and how to invest in the future while keeping the doors open today.

The viewpoints:

The advertising guy believes wholeheartedly that he can make the Web make money — someday. We just have to have a popular Web site he can sell high-value ads on.
The IT guy thinks that we do too much mirroring of content between print and the Web. The products aren’t different enough to make either one of them special enough to “sell” to readers.
The managing editor is worried that what we really need to do is put in more effort (somewhere), but we don’t have the time or people to do more.
The circulation director is worried that putting too much effort into the Web site erodes demand for his printed product, meaning that we lose paying subscribers.
I, the Web editor, worry that if we cut back on the Web, we lose traffic and eventually worth, a loss we might not be able to recover — thereby endangering my job and putting my family in risk of winding up on the street, begging for hamburgers and dancing for money.
The publisher is chiefly concerned about the competition with the TV news and how that affects our current supremacy.
The CEO wants the entire chain of papers to move forward as a unit, with a centralized policy, designed by committee and then tailored to each paper.

Solutions? None, of course, but a few ideas. Among them: paywalls, reducing the number of articles posted to the Web, metered access, making the Web and print versions distinct products and thinking ahead to other content platforms like the iPad and Kindle.

My favorite suggestion: an information wall. Keep the online content free, but require users to log in to see it all. That way, we gather information about our readers that we can use to sell targeted advertising — that is, more valuable advertising that people might actually want to see.

The only practical thing that came out of the meeting today was that we don’t know enough about what we’re talking about to make any rational decisions about it. We need a readership survey. We need to know about our market and our audience, how they’re getting our news and how they want it from us, how often they’re getting it from our competition, etc.

Maybe this will happen. I hope so because I don’t want us making business decisions blindly. That’s just bad business.

The perils of centralization

Michael Becker — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:33:00 +0000

My paper’s Web site is down tonight. I don’t know if it’s scheduled maintenance or not. I assume if this is scheduled maintenance that I didn’t get the memo. As the Web editor, I should get those memos.

I think it likely that it’s not scheduled maintenance, and here’s why. The main Web site for the company that developed and built and maintains our Web site is down. Now, if it was scheduled maintenance, why would they take their own homepage down? Why take their support site down?

Maybe I don’t understand the details of how to maintain servers. Maybe.

Here’s the thing, though. The same company has managed to sell Web sites to almost every other major newspaper in Montana. That means that, by my count, these papers are down tonight:

The Billings Gazette (largest in the state)
The Missoulian
The Montana Standard (Butte)
The Helena Independent Record
The Bozeman Daily Chronicle (my paper)

(And that’s just in Montana. This company operates across the country.)

It seems that the Great Falls Tribune and Flathead Beacon remain unaffiliated with our Web company, as their sites remain online tonight.

Let me just pose a hypothetical here. What if something major happened in one of those cities (or across the entire state) during this downtime? A significant portion of Montana would be without online news — from the newspapers, at least.

It would be a field day for the television stations, whose Web sites are not hosted by the same company. No, sir. They are online and functional tonight.

I understand the benefits of going with a big company for your Web site needs. It saves money, ultimately, because you’re paying for expertise in bulk. These sites are like the Sam’s Clubs and Costcos of tech. Budget constraints force papers to shop there because they can’t afford to buy the best — hand-crafted, artisan stuff.

But it’s a night like tonight, sitting in the middle of a black hole of news, that I wonder whether it might be a good idea to widen our gaze next time we redesign the site. Maybe we shouldn’t just choose from whoever happens to have a booth at the trade show. Maybe we should see if there’s something we can do for ourselves and keep things in-house.

Just a thought.

Info about Twitter for journalists

Michael Becker — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:35:56 +0000

An absolute bevy of information for journalistic uses of Twitter from Mr. Steve Buttry. Read it, and read the article he links to by Julie Posetti; it’s an analysis of Twitter use by Australian journalists.

New Web Site

Michael Becker — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:49:21 +0000

My newspaper just launched its new Web site, so I’m spending a lot of time answering e-mails, training news staff and squashing bugs. Excuse me if I’m quieter than usual on the Web.

Oh, and if you want to see the new Web site we’ve hatched, check it out.

On a sadder note, my brand-spanking-new 27-inch iMac at work seems to have fallen prey to one of the model’s display problems. The Mac repair guy’s coming by today to rob me of my precious, though he thinks it likely that he can have it fixed in a day. Yay!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet

Michael Becker — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 06:02:04 +0000

via vimeo.com

Cross-posted from my Posterous site at Becker’s Online Journal

Listen and talk, but listen more

Michael Becker — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:00:37 +0000

Jason Fry at Reinventing the Newsroom uses a strained metaphor to suggest a good idea: that news organizations start listening as much as they are talking.

Yes, most news sites and blogs allow commenting these days, and many journalists are using sites and services that let them deliver the news immediately, which is when readers seem to want it.

But Fry says that even though the technology and its adoption has grown, journalists are still doing the same old thing, getting news out to readers. “We have to see that our old mission is now part of something larger, figure out how to expand that mission to reflect this change, and change our culture so that we can meet its challenges and unlock its possibilities,” Fry writes. “But at the risk of sounding touchy-feely, it’s clear that it begins with less talking and more listening.”

Social media is the key, he says. It can’t be all about the news organization and its message, and we can’t force readers to make our news sites the home for the conversations. “To see the news organization’s site not as a starting point for building a community, but as a potential part of a vibrant community that already exists,” Fry says.

The problem I see is that I have known too many journalists who see their jobs as just getting their stories out on time. It’s not Journalism for them; it’s a job. That’s OK, of course, but it’s a mentality that doesn’t leave a lot of time for engaging with their readership and building an online community.

I think what I’ve seen is a common problem, but things are changing gradually — in some cases drastically. I do happen to like what the BBC’s global news chief wrote to his staff:

“This isn’t just a kind of fad… I’m afraid you’re not doing your job if you can’t do those things. It’s not discretionary. … If you don’t like it, if you think that level of change or that different way of working isn’t right for me, then go and do something else, because it’s going to happen.”

Maybe that kind of bluntness flies in Britain. I don’t think it will work in Montana, but I suppose we haven’t tried yet. Critical mass can’t come soon enough for me.

Update: I found another post of interest on the same subject by Robert Quigley at Old Media New Tricks. He’s got some good explanations of why Twitter, Facebook and site comments can be useful, explanations that might even convince a hardened Luddite of a journalist.

Best paragraph is the last:

Before social media, good journalists listened to what their neighbors were saying, what people were saying at the coffee shop and what city officials were telling them. Think of social media as a way to extend your reach.

It just makes sense.

Survey: Nearly one-third of journalists don’t use social media or read blogs

Michael Becker — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:26:20 +0000

- More than 30 per cent of journalists do not use social networking sites.

- 52 per cent of journalists don’t use Twitter.

- One-third of journalists do not read blogs.

- More than half don’t watch videos online.

- 75 percent of journalists do not listen to podcasts.

Yet 91 percent “agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent.”

via blogs.zdnet.com

Some rather crazy numbers from the Second Annual Middleberg/SNCR Survey of Media in the Wired World, as reported by Tom Forenski.

Note: This is the third survey I’ve come across in as many days that I need to sit down and read. My PDF pile grows tall.

Cross-posted from my Posterous site at Becker’s Online Journal

Nielsen: News is somewhere between the stuff people will and won’t pay for online

Michael Becker — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 05:59:09 +0000

A Nielsen poll showed that consumers are more likely to pay for content online that they have paid for offline, such as movies, music and games. They are less likely to pay for things that can be generated at home for little or no cost, like blogs and social networks, Nielsen says.

One problem:

In between are an array of news formats—newspapers, magazines, Internet-only news sources and radio news and talk shows—created by professionals, relatively expensive to produce and, in the case of newspapers and magazines, commonly sold offline. Yet much of their content has basically become a commodity, readily available elsewhere for free.

This is the second report I’ve come upon today that I have to find time to sit down and read. I hope to come back with some more ideas tomorrow or over the weekend.

Pew releases its ‘Millenials’ report

Michael Becker — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:42:54 +0000

Pew Research released its report on the “Millenial” generation today. I’ve downloaded it (you can too) and I look forward to reading it and commenting on it tonight. Related posts:Pew Report: Most Americans wouldn’t care much if their local newspapers disappeared City of Bozeman releases report on hiring policy investigation Thoughts on Pew statistics Related posts: