Why my new year’s resolution is to learn about programming
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:
- How Programmer/Journalists Are Changing the News, by Leah Betancourt. Mashable, Dec. 11, 2009.
- The programmer as journalist: A Q&A with Adrian Holovaty, by Robert Niles. Online Journalism Review, June 5, 2006.
- 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers, by Paul Bradshaw. Online Journalism Blog, Aug. 29, 2008.
- A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection, by Steve Buttry. (With related posts.) Pursing the Complete Community Connection, April 27, 2009.
5 things I’ve learned about online story comments
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:
- “Why commenting on news sites still stinks,” by Ryan Sholin. Invisible Inkling, Jan. 10, 2009.
- “‘Big Mouth’ comments and editor listens,” by Chris Biondi. GateHouse Newsroom, July 10, 2009.
- “Birmingham Post Reaps Benefits of Responding to User Comments,” by Paul Bradshaw. Poynter Online, Aug. 13, 2009.
- “Plain Dealer Creates New Comment Policy, Encourages Staffers to Interact,” by Patrick Thornton. Poynter Online, Oct. 14, 2009.
Verification, context and “slow news”
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.”
Confessions of a curmudgeon: Why I used to mock Twitter, and what changed my mind
I admit it — I can be a curmudgeon sometimes.
I’m rarely the first to jump on a technological bandwagon. I didn’t own a CD player until 1995, nor a DVD player until 2002. I didn’t register a Twitter account until June 1, 2009, after one of the school districts I cover started using it to distribute information, and I didn’t make a single post of my own until July 27.
Here are a few of the reasons I dismissed Twitter at first — and a few of the things that changed my mind.
REASONS I DISMISSED IT
1. The name. No, this wasn’t a big factor, but it probably didn’t help that “Twitter” sounds less like a serious communication tool and more like a group of sixth-grade girls giggling in a hallway.
2. The initial concept: that people would use Twitter to answer one question — “What are you doing?”
“Look,” I said. “If what I’m doing right this instant is even remotely interesting, I’m going to be doing it, not ‘tweeting’ about it. Therefore, by definition, anything I ‘tweet’ about will be dull.”
Or, expressed in pictures:
3. Seeing it misused. I think the first time I saw Twitter used in a news context was one afternoon in the newsroom, catching bits of a CNN newscast out of the corner of my eye. Rick Sanchez was covering a plane crash, and underneath the heading “OMG! PLANE CRASH” was a scroll featuring such insightful commentary as “I once twittered from a Bon Jovi concert” and “I once twittered from the shower.”
Rick Sanchez on CNN might be the most egregious offender. As someone always balancing the fine line between being an adventurous news professional and circus geek (”Okay, Taser me!!”), Sanchez has breathlessly turned his daily broadcast into a clearinghouse of meaningless shorthand, from his desk at Twit Central.
“Let’s go to our Facebook page and see what they’re Twittering on MySpace. Here’s what FlannelGuy21 says about our story on Iraqi military strategy- ‘Rick, the Iraqis can’t control their own country.’ Interesting thought, FlannelGuy21. And ChiChiChi in Elko sent this about our story last hour on Octomom – ‘Rick, she needs a lobotomy.’”
… When I’m watching the news, I don’t care what the viewers have to say.
If I wanted to hear what others have to say when I’m watching the news, I’d call up my friend Myles Berkowitz and listen to him yell at his TV screen.
And before anyone gets up in arms thinking that’s elitist – if I sent my own 140-character Twitter comment into a news show, no one should care about my “Tweet” either.
… When I watch a situation comedy, I don’t want it interrupted every few minutes with “Great joke! – CarpetBlogger186″ scrolling by. I expect no less from a newscast.
THINGS THAT CHANGED MY MIND
1. A post from one of my favorite bloggers. In this post from July 27, 2009, Doug Fisher took a writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education to task for complaining that 140 characters isn’t enough to convey more than the bare basics of a story:
Why do we have so much trouble getting our heads around the idea that you use the best tool for the job you need to do? If you want a hole, use a drill, not a screwdriver. Other businesses get it. Why do journalists continue to cling to the idea that all they have is a screwdriver? The problem with that, of course, to continue the metaphor, is that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thus, to too many journalists, everything has to look like a “story,” instead of acknowledging that much of what they do is not story but factual exposition, and maybe if they stripped those factual expositions down, they’d actually have time to do stories — you know, those things that people really do like to read, with natural, not forced, beginnings, middles and ends, and usually with some kind of complication and resolution that gives insight to the human condition or is just a “good read.”
… And, no, a news article can’t be crafted in 140 characters because it is not a news article! It is a Tweet. Nothing more, nothing less. A basic version of the facts. Stop confounding the two.
In other words: Complaining that a 140-character tweet can’t possibly convey a situation in all of its complexity is like complaining that a photograph can’t do the same thing. Sure, a photo can’t explain the city budget or analyze competing claims in a political campaign. But do you completely dismiss photography as a worthwhile medium because of it?
2. Actually starting to use the service — and realizing what people are doing with it. I haven’t found that many people who tweet about every mundane minute of their lives, and while I’m sure they’re out there … I don’t have to follow them.
I’m pretty selective about who I follow. If I look at someone’s feed and see page after page of tweets about their cornflakes, I’m not going to follow them. As a result, most mornings, I can go to TweetDeck, check everything that’s been posted since the last time I looked, and probably find at least a few links of interest.
3. Getting good story leads. Like this story, which I first read about on the @adrianmaples feed. Or the time a few weeks ago when a fatal accident happened during one of the rare periods when our newsroom is unstaffed, and the only reason I found out about before Monday morning was that I had a TweetDeck search constantly running for the word “Lenawee.”
Hearing about things via Twitter before I hear them through any other medium … for a reporter, that’s a clincher.
Footnotes:
- “News for Twits,” by Robert J. Elisberg. Huffington Post, March 17, 2009.
- “Twitter – angst over ‘is it journalism’,” by Doug Fisher, Common Sense Journalism, July 27, 2009.
(Cross-posted to Wired Journalists.)
The death of narrative? Not really.
From Dan Conover comes a great essay titled “Narrative is dead! Long live narrative!”
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the piece Conover is responding to: a Washington Post story complaining that “in our modern click-and-skim world, there’s dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative.” It’s a lament I’ve heard before, whether from people mocking USA Today for its charts-and-graphics approach to the news, or from people under the impression that Web users are nothing but a bunch of espresso’d-up 14-year-olds with ADHD and the attention spans of gnats.
There are two problems here:
1. The assumption that in order to be serious journalism, a piece must consist of inches upon inches of dense prose.
2. The assumption that inches upon inches of dense prose, even when they’re appropriate (and I do think there are times when they are), can’t grab the attention of today’s reader.
Here’s Conover:
The current mainstream assumption is that we have to dumb down journalism to survive in the digital era. Dave Kindred seems to have reached that conclusion and accepted it in a column that made me want to reach through the screen and shake him. The answer isn’t dumbing down, and Baseball Hall of Fame sportswriters ought to be the first people to understand this.
Did the invention of the box score ruin sportswriting? No? Why not?
Could it be that human beings process different types of information in different ways, with different needs at different times?
… Do you get it now? Today’s revolution isn’t about killing narrative, but about inventing box scores for actions that don’t take place in ballparks.
Narrative isn’t dead. If we see less of it, that’s because we’re finally figuring out that there are times when it’s appropriate and times when it isn’t. And I believe readers will continue taking the time to read long-form narrative — if we’ve proven that we respect their time enough that we won’t ask them to sit through 2,000 words of copy unless it’s really worth it.
Stories vs. content
Katie Rogers of Medill News Service writes:
Peter Perl, assistant managing editor for personnel at The Washington Post, visited our newsroom and didn’t exactly sugarcoat the current state of the news business. (Just suffice it to say we didn’t file out of the conference room with a corner office on 15th.) It’s called content now, not stories, Perl said. Processing content rather than newsgathering and writing. It’s a new language he admits has taken some getting used to.
“It’s like the stages of grief,” Perl told us. “You have to make peace with that.”
Maybe I’m misreading this, but I don’t think a switch from talking about stories to talking about content is anything to grieve. Instead, isn’t it just a recognition of the fact that journalism takes many forms, and the conventional story is only one of them?