ErikGable.com

Building reference material into news sites

Erik Gable — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:49:05 +0000

Two recent posts dealing with building static (or relatively static) reference material into news sites to augment the flow of day-to-day news … and, yes, this is one of those posts that’s more for my own future reference than anything else:

Robin Sloan writes at Snarkmarket about the economics concept of stock and flow and relates it to media:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Ryan Sholin writes at Invisible Inkling about how this relates to online news:

“Breaking News” is the treadmill. It’s the “flow” that keeps your audience engaged, coming back, checking your site or your blog, turning on the TV, visiting your national news site on their phone first thing in the morning to check if anything has blown up overnight, subscribed to your hyperlocal blog’s e-mail updates, checking their RSS feeds to see what’s new. And that’s crucial to building and engaging online news consumers.

But it doesn’t last. The stuff that does last? The most obvious answers include investigative and enterprise reporting, but I think there’s room these days for great infographics and data visualizations, too. …

Recommended: Find the balance, online producer, between churning out a steady stream of content and taking time to build something of lasting value beyond the next few hours.

For a lot of sites, it probably wouldn’t take more than a few hits per day for a piece of “stock,” over the course of a year, to yield just as much traffic as the average “flow” story.

Why my new year’s resolution is to learn about programming

Erik Gable — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 04:42:57 +0000

I’ve found myself quoting Steve Buttry a lot lately, particularly his posts about innovation in the news business. In an August 2009 post titled “Newspapers’ original sin: Not failing to charge but failing to innovate,” he wrote:

The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.

We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.

For a long time, the way much of the newspaper industry handled the Web made about as much sense as trying to run a TV news broadcast by sending a newspaper reporter out to write a story, then feeding the text into an Amiga and making people watch as it scrolled across their TV screens. Or trying to make a TV commercial by pointing a camera at a Sears circular and filming as someone turned the pages.

But was this due to a failure of imagination on our parts — or was it something else?

Here’s what I keep coming back to:

If somebody in our building comes up with a unique idea in print — whether it’s for editorial, advertising or both — there are at least a half dozen people in the newsroom, and a half dozen more in the composing department, who know how to make it happen. But if it’s a unique idea for the Web … well, none of us are developers. Maybe we could make it happen, but maybe not.

The first newsroom I worked in after college had four full-time people in the newsroom. Every single one of us knew how to use QuarkXPress; every single one of us could lay out a page. I imagine it’s the same way at nearly every small paper: Working there and not knowing how to design a page would be almost unthinkable. But the chances of a small paper having a Web developer on staff are slim to none.

Most newspapers, regardless of size, are equipped to try new things in print. We have the tools, and we know how to use them. Online, not so much.

So this is my goal for 2010: to become as proficient with HTML and CSS — and Flash would be great as well — as with the tools of the print medium. I don’t need to become a programmer or developer, any more than I can currently claim to be a graphic designer. (I can’t, because I’m not.) But I want to reach a level of basic competence, enough so that if somebody says “Hey, can we experiment with this new way of doing something?” I can confidently say “Yes, we can make that happen.”

Further reading:

Notes on Pew’s “where news comes from” study

Erik Gable — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:24:35 +0000

A “where news comes from” study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that the vast majority of original reporting on six major news stories in Baltimore, Md., came from newspapers.

A nice little ego boost, certainly, for those of us who work for conventional media outlets. But what does it really mean — and what doesn’t it mean?

What it means:

That the bulk of original journalism on important news stories is still coming out of large organizations — primarily, though not exclusively, those that produce pulp-and-ink newspapers. (Although there is some disagreement on whether the study’s definition of news is valid or leads to the study being a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

What it doesn’t mean:

That the bulk of original journalism comes from newspapers because pulp-and-ink newspapers are inherently superior. Let’s not confuse the organization with the medium here — presumably most of the news organizations in question operate Web sites as well. Why give sole credit for these stories to the print medium? (A partial argument for this interpretation can be made by noting that, at most organizations that operate both a print product and a Web product, the print product still generates most of the revenue. But that’s not necessarily the way it will always be.)
That original journalism would go away if pulp-and-ink newspapers went away. To reach this conclusion, you would have to assume that no other medium would ever be able to fill that gap. It’d be like saying “Microsoft Windows is on 91% of all computers, so if Microsoft went away, computers would go away too.”

I love newspapers. I always have. I also believe there’s value in the existence of large newsgathering institutions with plenty of resources.

But, hey, old-media colleagues — let’s not make this study out to mean more than it really does, OK?

Further reading:

My first journalism job

Erik Gable — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:57:58 +0000

From 1989 to 1992, Pamela Hughes’ class at the Waldorf School of Cape Cod published a class newspaper called The Waldorf Weekly. We published 11 editions in all: six in third grade, four in fourth grade and one in fifth grade.

Headlines were mostly handwritten, stories were mostly typed on a manual typewriter, printing was done by photocopier, and the paper was illustrated primarily by clip art. (And I don’t mean the Microsoft Word kind of clip art — I mean the kind of clip art that had to be literally clipped from a page.) Sports stories were accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations; we didn’t run any photos until the final issue, in 1992.

At the risk of being self-indulgent, here’s a collection of pages from The Waldorf Weekly, from the first issue to the last:

[View with PicLens]

The news as food: An analogy for the citizen journalism debate

Erik Gable — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:12:29 +0000

Jay Rosen recently interviewed Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist, about that publication’s December 2009 editorial, titled “Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’.”

Others have done a far better job than I can of addressing the editorial’s arguments (see both story links above), but I want to zoom in on one particular passage:

We advocate abolishing the term “citizen journalist.” These people can call themselves “citizen news gatherers,” but it is no more appropriate to call them citizen journalists than it would be to sit before a citizen judge or be operated on by a citizen brain surgeon.

That analogy struck me as a poor fit. I believe in the value of what journalists do, but it’s just not analogous to the work of a judge or a brain surgeon. So I started thinking: What comparison would make more sense?

Here’s what I ended up with. I think it demonstrates both the function and value of citizen journalists and the reasons why those of us who get paid to do journalism full time don’t need to find the concept of citizen journalism threatening.

Does the analogy work? Let me know.

SCENARIO: GABLE’S GROCERY AND DELI

I’m the owner and proprietor of Gable’s Grocery and Deli, a nice little store in Analogytown, USA. I employ a dedicated team of talented sandwich artists who can make you the best lunch you’ve ever had. I also have a supplier who sends a load of delicious, fresh produce to the store every morning for you to buy and take home.

The grocery and deli: A traditional news organization. The sandwich artists: Reporters, photographers and editors. The produce supplier: The Associated Press.

CASE 1: MRS. JOHNSON’S BROWNIES

Some of my customers would love to have a little dessert to polish off their lunches. Now, I have limited oven space … and besides, my small staff doesn’t have enough hours in the day to add baking to their list of responsibilities. Since profit margins in the grocery business are generally pretty slim, I can’t afford to hire anyone else.

But I happen to know that my neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, makes excellent brownies. She certainly wouldn’t mind a little extra income, so we enter into a little business deal: Every night, she’ll bake a fresh tray of brownies, wrap them up, and bring them by the store in the morning for me to sell. She benefits because she has a place to sell her products; I benefit because I can offer my customers something I couldn’t before; my customers benefit because now they can buy brownies to go with their sandwiches.

Mrs. Johnson: A correspondent or freelancer.

CASE 2: DOUG’S TOMATOES

Doug owns a big patch of land just outside town. He’s known for his huge vegetable garden, where he spends at least two or three hours a day.

This year, Doug has a bumper crop of tomatoes. I mean, the yield is huge. It’s way more than he and his wife could ever eat, even if they canned some for winter. He tells me he’s thinking about setting up a little roadside stand to sell off some of the excess, but I ask him if he’s like to sell his tomatoes inside my store.

Doug: A citizen journalist.

CASE 3: THE HIGH SCHOOL BAKE SALE

The students at Analogytown High School want to hold a bake sale on Saturday. (They’re raising money for new SAT prep materials — just because they live in Analogytown doesn’t mean that stuff comes easy.)

They could set up in the school parking lot or in somebody’s front yard, but let’s face it — they wouldn’t get much traffic besides a handful of parents. So they ask if they can set up their table outside the grocery store. All Saturday, they do a brisk business, and so do I.

The bake sale organizers: Again, citizen journalists.

WHERE IS THIS LEADING?

As the owner of this fictional grocery store and deli, I can respond two ways to, say, the idea of a high school bake sale or Doug selling his tomatoes at a roadside stand.

I can immediately go on the defensive: “What — somebody else selling food in the area? That’s competition! Why would I let you use my property?” Maybe I can even make a stink about them not having the appropriate permits, and tell people that amateurs getting into the food business will ruin everything.

Or I can realize the advantages I could reap by hosting to the bake sale and bringing Doug’s excess tomatoes into my store. In the case of Doug’s crops, people will remember that my store is where they got all those delicious tomatoes last summer. In the case of the bake sale, chances are several of the students will have a parent or grandparent stop by … and not all of those parents and grandparents will be people who’ve been to my store before, meaning I have a chance to get them hooked on my award-winning Reubens.

Am I going to consider laying off my purchasing manager on the grounds that now I have Doug bringing in tomatoes? Of course not. Doug’s tomatoes are great, and they’re a valuable addition to my store, but they’re only available a few weeks out of the year. I need both that seasonal variety and the dependence of year-round produce to make my business healthy, and I know it.

We can view the development of more and better tools for citizen journalism as a threat — or we can see it as an opportunity. I think I have a pretty good idea which way will turn out better.

(All photos from stock.xchng. Grocery store by OBMonkey, brownie by tazzmaniac, tomatoes by edmondo, cupcakes by tam_oliver.)

90K print jobs lost? What’s a “print job”?

Erik Gable — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:10:03 +0000

Gawker says: “Nearly 90,000 print jobs have been lost in the last year.”

I say: “What’s a print job?”

Newspapers and magazines are considered part of the print publishing category. Which makes sense to a large extent. But I suspect most news organizations have very few people who can be defined as working exclusively in “print jobs.” Which means that even though “internet-based jobs” are excluded from the count, the characterization of everything that remains as a “print job” is not entirely accurate.

I’m looking at The Daily Telegram’s staff directory right now. Except for a few people in circulation and the press room, there’s hardly anyone whose job is exclusively focused on print. In the newsroom, there’s not a single person who isn’t engaged in producing content for two different platforms. But because our jobs span two platforms, they’re apparently considered “print jobs” (and thus, if we get laid off, anyone who’s pushing the print-is-dead narrative will have another statistic to feel vindicated by).

So, do I have a “print job”? No, I don’t. I work for a news organization that operates across more than one platform, and my job is to produce and edit content — no matter what medium it’s distributed in.

“Raise your hand if you’ve ever been in the paper”

Erik Gable — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 04:30:46 +0000

My boss from 2002 to 2005 — Jeff Wilson, publisher of The Fairfield Ledger — had a question he would always ask when groups of children toured the newspaper offices.

It was this: “How many of you have ever had your name or picture in the paper?”

Usually, about half of the kids in the group raised their hands.

This stuck with me because it seems like such a simple, elegant way of gauging just how close a community news organization is to the community it serves.

Now, I do think that when a person’s name or photo is in the paper, it should have some sort of significance or context — it should be connected to recognition of an achievement, for instance, or coverage of a community event. (Otherwise, we could just publish the phone book.) And, of course, if getting local names in the paper is all we’re focused on, we’ll be missing the boat in other ways.

But in general, I think the closer a news organization is to its community, the more people will be able to raise their hands and say that the coverage reflects not just life in the community, but also their lives on a personal level.

So if you run a community news organization, the next time an elementary school class or Scout troop comes to your office for a tour, why not give this question a try?

How do you think you’ll do?

5 things I’ve learned about online story comments

Erik Gable — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:25:36 +0000

This post was originally written for GateHouse Media’s GHNewsroom.com.

1. Comment threads can be part of our journalism.

We’re accustomed to thinking of a story as a complete package: We went out, we discovered what there is to know, and we presented it to our audience. But what happens when someone asks a question we didn’t think of?

Comment threads can be a legitimate part of journalism and a good means of distributing information.

In the past, maybe a reader would call us on the phone to ask — but probably not. Even if someone did call, the bits of information that weren’t originally covered probably wouldn’t rise to the level of a followup story. And because stories used to be our only real vehicle for presenting information, those bits of information probably never saw print.

Now, if somebody asks us a question, we can answer it right in the story’s discussion section, turning that information into part of the permanent record. Take this story we ran in November. The story was about several positions being eliminated at a local school district. Readers wanted more details, so we went and got them. The new details didn’t rise to the level of a followup story, but they definitely contributed to painting a more complete picture and making our coverage better.

Story discussions can also be useful for rumor control. During a recent robbery spree rumors were flying that a local grocery store was among the victims. In cases like this, our comments section serves two purposes. In addition to alerting us to rumors so we can check them out, it also provides us with a way to quickly distribute correct information when we find out a rumor isn’t true.

2. It’s OK to engage.

It can be tempting to just leave comments alone — to keep ourselves above the fray and let people squabble amongst themselves without getting involved.

There’s some merit to that. If reporters get involved in arguments about the subjects they cover, it can taint their objectivity. But if we can go into our forums and play the role of what Steve Yelvington calls the “town expert,” then why not do it?

3. People aren’t saying anything they didn’t say before.

The public officials we cover occasionally complain that our Web site provides a forum for people to snipe anonymously at their actions — for anonymous commenters on a Web site to take potshots at the people in the news, who are very much not anonymous. It’s also easy for us to bristle when we ourselves are criticized.

What we need to remember is that our comment section didn’t create these complaints. People aren’t saying anything on our comments section that they didn’t say before. It’s just that without our comments section, they’d be saying those things to their friends over breakfast instead. We wouldn’t hear the critical remarks, and we also wouldn’t get a chance to refute comments based on incorrect information.

In this respect, comment sections are among our best tools. Instead of people grousing quietly to themselves, they’re airing their grievances in public — and when they’re wrong, we now have a chance to set the record straight.

4. Participating in discussions can turn people from critical to appreciative.

This year, for the first time, we published a pullout special section on Veterans Day. The editorial department wrote profiles of several local veterans, while the advertising department sold tribute ads to people who wanted to recognize a specific family member who had served in the armed forces.

In retrospect, we should have realized that this would look bad, and a letter writer took us to task for it. We could have just let it be. Instead, I posted a comment in the thread explaining how the situation arose and how we’ll probably do things differently next year.

The result: People who previously had been harshly critical of us — both in this thread and in other past discussions — appreciated that someone from the paper took the time to address their comments. And they posted to let us know that they appreciated it.

5. It doesn’t take that much time.

We’re a relatively small newsroom — not the smallest in the GateHouse Media chain, but certainly not the largest either. The prospect of taking on another responsibility, like engaging in comment threads, isn’t something we take cavalierly. Our knee-jerk response is likely to be “OK, so what do you want me to stop doing to make time for this new task?”

But it’s actually not that big a deal.

First of all, taking part in comment threads doesn’t take that much time. Most of the time, when a reader poses a question, I can get the answer just by craning my neck and asking a reporter one or two desks over. Chances are, there’s someone in the newsroom who either knows the answer off the top of their head or can lay their hands on it pretty quickly. And when this isn’t the case, answering the question is usually just a matter of taking 60 seconds to send a two-line e-mail to a school superintendent or city manager.

Second, it’s very easy to squeeze comment management in between other tasks. A little bit here, a little bit there, in spaces like the five-minute gap between the 1:30 p.m. phone call and the 2 p.m. staff meeting that really isn’t useful for much else.

Third, here’s one way to look at it: If a reader called you on the phone to ask a question, you’d answer them, wouldn’t you? Then why not do the same in comments, where your answer can reach all of the people who thought of the same question but didn’t pick up the phone to ask it?

Finally — everything we do takes time. It’s just a question of priorities. If you spend three hours this month helping to create a robust comments section that serves a useful purpose, maybe it’s OK if the tradeoff is that you write one less local editorial this month. You’re not taking time away from producing content — because your Web site’s comments section is part of your content.

Further reading:

Verification, context and “slow news”

Erik Gable — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:30:43 +0000

As news sources proliferate and the methods used to deliver the news become faster and more efficient, twin problems arise. First, when every rumor and unconfirmed report can spread like wildfire almost as soon as it’s generated, how do you figure out what information to trust? And second, if you’re neither able nor inclined to spend every waking moment plugged into a half dozen news streams, how do you stay informed?

Here are four links looking at various aspects of this issue:

Toward a Slow-News Movement
Mediactive | November 8, 2009
In this post, Dan Gillmor proposes augmenting the round-the-clock news cycle with a movement toward “slow news” — news that’s less up-to-the-minute but more verified and trustworthy.
Quote: It comes down to this: The faster the news accelerates, the slower I’m inclined to believe anything I hear – and the harder I look for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation.

A short defense of daily publishing
editor.blogspot.com | May 13, 2009
Howard Weaver writes that while the daily news cycle is outdated as a vehicle for reporting facts as they arise, a daily newspaper still has a valuable role to fill if it steps beyond blow-by-blow descriptions of events.
Quote: I’ve been arguing for years that newspapers – yes, printed, daily newspapers – have a good long horizon on the value curve if they shift their focus to the value they already do best: summary, briefings, orientation, authentication. If a printed product did that well, the fact that it’s a once-a-day product would be a strength: a starting point, presumably first thing in the morning, which helped readers orient their day and prepare to parse and interpret all the fact-clotted data that would wash over the ceaselessly for the rest of the day.

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
Newsless.org | August 19, 2009
Matt Thompson writes that although news stories always tell us what just happened, they tend to be less reliable at providing context and meaning.
Quote: As long as the news is structured solely around what just happened, journalists are going to be fighting a rough battle. With a latest-news-only approach, we stoke demand for journalism by trying to snag people’s attention with each new development. There’s another way, one that leads to a more informed and more loyal public, and allows us to do better work.

How do we serve both engaged community members and casual audience members?
Wired Journalists | November 4, 2009
This is a discussion I started the other day on Wired Journalists, dealing with how to best serve the people who aren’t following the news every minute of the day and don’t want to hunt through a dozen different pages to find the basics of what they need to know.
Quote: We’re all news junkies here, so I think we need to remind ourselves once in a while that not everybody is like us. That there are people who will say “Look, I don’t want to have a conversation with the news — I just want to take 10 minutes in the morning and find out what’s going on.”

Stop lamenting — the printed word isn’t going anywhere

Erik Gable — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:48:37 +0000

In a New York Times column titled “Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word,” Susan Dominus joins the ranks of those bemoaning the state of today’s media landscape:

Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.

I went back and reread the essay the other day because the title, final and nostalgic, has been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis. I hear it, for example, every time I go to a party and run into a writer or editor I admire who has recently been laid off. So many people in the world of book and magazine publishing greet every such piece of news with a flash back to 12 or 20 years ago. Back then, if anyone with a flair for stringing sentences together lost a job, it was a given that he would land quickly on his feet at an online publication or a small publishing house. But now, goodbye to all that. I have the same thought when some 22-year-old wants help placing a 6,000-word article: Goodbye to all that. When old friends and colleagues from the industry meet up at some sort of gathering, we look at each other and laugh and shrug and marvel at the changing landscape. We mourn more seriously in private.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know anything about the New York literary scene, but I’ll tell you this: In small and mid-sized markets around the country, the printed word is alive and well.

Out here, we live in a different reality from the culture Ms. Dominus describes at places like Conde Nast: being encouraged to eat out and put the tab on your expense account; being reimbursed up to $15 for eating lunch at your desk. If you’re used to that kind of atmosphere, which Ms. Dominus accurately describes as “glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence,” then yes — you’ll probably be disappointed when it all comes crashing down.

But is the culture of the printed word fading? I don’t think so.

I have, sitting on my desk, a copy of a local lifestyle magazine we publish. The cover story is an interesting, well-crafted feature by Sue Van Fleet about two Dominican nuns who have built a reputation together as first-class designers of churches and other sacred spaces across the country. Would the topic impress the Manhattan cocktail set? Maybe not. But the care that went into crafting that story demonstrates nothing but reverence for the beauty of language, the nuances of words.

Looking to place that 6,000-word article? Well, if it’s 6,000 words worth of self-indulgence, I wouldn’t bet on your chances. But if that 6,000-word feature is well-written and relevant to a community’s life, you’ll find a market.

And maybe that market won’t be a Conde Nast publication. But it just might be one of the many small publications that cover the nation outside New York — there is a nation outside New York, you know! — and that in some cases are managing, even in a brutally punishing economy, to grow.

I agree with Jacqueline Carney when she writes:

To the wanton greed I say, with relief, “Goodbye to All That.” But unlike Dominus, who concludes that “even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that,” I say I am. and I am ready to welcome the era of the internet that will hopefully put more commercial endeavors on an even plane so that the executives and the foot soldiers are equally rewarded. The essence of cars–transportation–will not disappear; and the essence of literary culture will be just fine. People, by their very nature, crave to tell and read stories, to fantasize, to learn and to opine. So while the paper industry and the bookshelf industry might suffer, the new scene–the internet and the electronic media–will enable literature to thrive on an equal, if not larger, scale and it will be possible to make a living providing it. We just won’t be able to gorge on the pocketbooks of the general public like we used to.

To the folks in those literary circles — please don’t think that the demise of the things you’re used to means the demise of literary culture or the end of valuing the written word. Sure, the future may not be what you’re used to. Maybe you can’t get paid handsomely to spend your evenings kibbitzing about literature over cocktails anymore — but that was never the reality outside of a tiny little circle anyway. The printed word is not dead, and if you spend more time looking at the possibilities of what’s new and less time complaining about what’s been lost, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.