Link: Web design tips

BusinessWeek Magazine has come up with “The 10 Commandments of Web Design,” a nifty list of must dos and don’ts distilled from interviews with Web usability experts. A shorthand of the list:
1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.
2. Thou shalt not hide content.
3. Thou shalt not clutter.
4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.
8. Thou shalt be social.
9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.
10. Thou shalt make content king.

What are your top rules for effective Web design?

Does HelloKittyLove08 play in print?

Pat Thornton has launched an interesting discussion over at beatblogging.org about whether news organizations use online comments in print and whether they require strict attribution. Thornton’s survey of five news organizations indicates the old gold standard of strict attribution in print may be melting. He asks:

“Maybe we need to get used to online handles like HelloKittyLove08. Is that really that much less reliable than me telling a print reporter my name is John Smith when I’m interviewed at the gas station? Or does my name change the quality of my comment?”

I have railed against the unfairness of granting anonymity to the powerful (think Beltway) while publishing the names of more vulnerable people who wandered unintentionally onto the public record (think crime victims). So the idea that the Web may be leveling that playing field intrigues me (even though in my old-fashioned journalistic heart, I’d prefer strict attribution).

That said, I think use of non-attributed quotes may be OK when they are representative of the overall online response. An example might be people’s online comments about why they support one presidential candidate over another or what issues are most important to them as voters. Or comments about why a news organization’s coverage of a local issue misses the mark. In cases like these, the fact that many people express an opinion makes up for the lack of a named source.

I’m less enthusiastic about cheap shot comments - such as personal attacks on individual public figures - that may enliven the report but add little meaning to the conversation.

How does your organization deal with unattributed online comments in print? Please add your thoughts in comments below or visit www.beatblogging.org to join the discussion.

Link: The Big Picture

Boston.com has started a terrific photo blog, The Big Picture, to much acclaim. Check out how The Big Picture covers Mars discoveries, the Celtics’ NBA Championship, or Iowa flooding.

Worth reading, too, is this interview with Alan Taylor, the Web programmer who came up with the idea and produces the blog.

That a programmer could be doing journalism at a big outfit like The Boston Globe is an encouraging sign that old-school journalists (and I’m one of them) are opening up to new ideas from outside the traditional club.

Some newsroom leaders have mentioned to me that they have trouble attracting good programmers because of all the bad financial news about the news industry. Taylor offers this counterpoint:

“Yeah, I had a lot of friends who looked at me like i was crazy when I joined the Boston Globe a few years ago. But it’s precisely this sort of opportunity I was hoping for. The access to great storytelling resources, a great platform, and the ability to contribute to that, albeit in a more technical role. I saw the opportunity and ran with it, with everyone’s blessing. It’s a very hard question—how to attract programmers to journalism roles. For me, it’s just far more interesting than, say, working on a massive financial services backend system.”

How does your organization attract programming talent? Can programmers help reshape journalism in the digital age? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

(Thanks to Howard Weaver for the pointer.)

Vaulting into video

“What do you think, can a newspaper newsroom produce quality web TV?” That’s a question posed by John Hassell on his exploding newsroom blog. And Hassell and his colleagues at The Star-Ledger and NJ.com in Newark are about to find out.

The Star-Ledger newsroom recently launched an aggressive strategy to grow audience with news and enterprise video.

“We want to produce great video journalism in New Jersey and to showcase local video of all sorts, whether it’s produced by our staff or not. New Jersey has been traditionally under served by the local network TV outlets in New York and Philadelphia, and that presents an incredible opportunity to build audience and revenue around video content,” Hassell says.

To get started, the newsroom invested in HDV cameras and intensive boot camp training for 20 veejays in May. Within the first few days of training, participants were producing video and Hassell says the quality is improving all the time.

“We believe quality is key when you’re talking about telling stories with video. Our newly trained veejays are still cutting their teeth, but the level of their work is already quite high and rising every week. The visuals should be compelling, the writing taut and the arc of story clearly drawn. Storytelling is really at the heart of what we’re doing, and we feel we bring a lot to the table. All of that said, there is also plenty of room for short clips where production and storytelling values give way to the simple act of witnessing something newsworthy, fascinating or just plain weird.”

The training also attempted to address and help avoid post-production logjams that many newsrooms have experienced in the rush to video.

Hassell explains in an interview with “Newspapers & Technology:”

“The class teaches students how to bridge the gap between gathering news intended for both video and print distribution, Hassell said.

‘What a lot of people do is when they first get a video camera and are sent out to shoot video they come back with a lot of video and that creates an inefficient post-production result because you get back and have three hours of footage that you have to watch and edit,’ said Hassell. ‘We are teaching people how to think about what they need to shoot for the story they want to tell so that the process of producing video stories’ becomes more efficient.’’

The newsroom also shifted three print-oriented journalists to manage the new video enterprise: AME/Video, with overall responsibility for video efforts; Video Enterprise Editor, with a mandate to keep the standards high; and a new veejay who becomes a full-time producer and host of the daily noon web cast that launches next month.

You can link to a recent progress report on the effort by Hassell here and to one example of a new veejay’s work here.

Hassell says it’s too early to tell whether the video strategy is paying off.

“We’ll judge ourselves on the quality of our work, the traffic it generates, the revenue it produces and the extent to which we can build and nurture a network of New Jerseyans who are making and sharing video. It’s early to judge the results, because we only recently launched a video platform at NJ.com, but the viewership trends and number of user submissions are encouraging.”

Link: The online community manager

An emerging role in many newsrooms is the job of gathering and maintaining online community, whether it’s a Reader Exchange Editor at MiamiHerald.com or the Managing Editor at MyTopiaCafe.com. Tish Grier on E-Media Tidbits has a terrific post about what to look for in an effective online community manager, including commitment to the cause, love of people and a willingness to learn and embrace technology and online culture.
Who is building your online community?

Link: From hub to web

The Associated Press is facing criticism for its efforts to limit how much AP copy bloggers can quote. As The New York Times reports, the AP will “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”
It’s a dispute that may not seem urgently relevant to local newsrooms, but Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has a provocative post about how AP’s efforts may benefit the local news organizations who provide copy to the AP. That’s because, Karp predicts, bloggers will simply go around the AP to the organizations that produce the material and link directly to them. That, in turn, could increase their site traffic. Karp gives this example:

“Take the story of flooding in Iowa, for example. The AP is covering this story extensively, as you can see in this Google News search result. But local news media in Iowa is also covering the story extensively, as you can see in this search limited to Iowa sources—the story is happening in their own backyard, giving these local sources a unique perspective and knowledge.

“So if a blogger wanted to discuss the Iowa floods and needed a source to cite, they can easily find an original local source instead of the AP story. And they can think of the link and the traffic they send as a contribution to the local news outlet’s original reporting, particularly the local newspapers struggling with new economic realities.

Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine ups the ante: He proposes that the Associated Press “immediately begin linking to all its sources for stories, especially to members’ original journalism.”

It’s an interesting example of how the Web really is a network of connections that doesn’t need a hub. And that’s a challenge for news organizations that succeeded for so long as hubs.

Making the message stick

I tend to make long “to do” lists. I load them up with a lot of small stuff and get a sense of accomplishment as I check things off and move on. This practice serves me well in managing myself. It serves far less well in managing others because they may not be able to distinguish the most important priorities from the items that can wait.

I have seen this play out in more than a dozen newsrooms. The top editors are smart, energetic people who can see lots of needs and opportunities. They juggle a lot of priorities. For their staff’s, that often translates into “Everything’s a priority” or nothing is.

This is a follow up on my post ”In a culture of perfectionism, it’s hard to let go.” I wrote about how the perfectionism of traditional newsrooms all but guarantees that people will have trouble giving up doing things they’ve always done in order to make room for the new things they need to do. When staff members see lots of priorities or feel they’re getting mixed messages, they most likely will return to their comfort zone.

Here are steps newsroom leaders can help their staffs adapt to the new:

1. A few good goals. Come up with a short list, say three to five significant goals that you want the newsroom to move on. Forget the lofty mission statements. Goals should pose significant challenges but be specific enough that people can act on them. Focus the goals on what you want your staff to produce. The systems and behaviors that produce them may change as well, but they should be in a supporting role. The goals should reflect an affirmative strategy, urging the staff to do more of something good rather than less of something less good. So a goal might be: Double the number of staff-produced videos on the Web site within the next three months.

2. Stay on message. Repeat the goals over and over again in the newsroom. Daily, even hourly.  Give examples of the kind of work you want. Put resources behind the goals: More video? Who gets equipment and training? Widen the conversation beyond the core working group, in this case the shooters. What does the staff need to know about the goal and who should be contributing ideas? Compliment successes and use them to illustrate and reinforce the goals.

3. Let go of the old. Most leaders have a couple of bad habits they will need to let go of. One, no adding goals to the list until something falls off of it, either because the newsroom has achieved it and incorporated it into practice or because it’s not working out. In our video example, this might be that site users don’t flock to the videos. Two, refrain from offering public criticism, either of the goals work or other work. Sure, it’s OK to examine ways to improve. But the routine criticism that goes on in newsrooms tends to mix the message.

Example: I once consulted in a newsroom where the top editor wanted his staff to take more risks, to be bolder in storytelling. And every morning he posted on his office window tear sheets of the newspaper with poor headlines, typos and other mistakes carefully marked in red ink. The message? Let’s be the risk-averse perfectionists we’ve always been.

How do you juggle priorities? How do you make the message stick? Please share your ideas in comments.

Tracking Twitter

Twitter, the micro-blogging service that enables people to send small messages or “tweets” to people who sign up as their “followers,” is taking hold in the news industry. Reporters are using it to consult with sources and experts. Howard Weaver at McClatchy recently reported how The Wichita Eagle tweeted a criminal trial. Michael Arrieta-Walden at The Oregonian (my alma mater) reports the newsroom has used Twitter effectively, including reporting on Clinton and Obama appearances in Oregon in advance of the primary election. Other newsrooms, including The Sacramento Bee, have automatic news feeds on Twitter.
Now graphic designer Erica Smith has created a site that is tracking news organizations offering twitter feeds and the numbers of people who are following them. The numbers are small but it’s still a healthy sign of experimentation with new ways of delivering the news.
It’s easy (and free) to check it out. Even if you don’t want to “tweet,” you can follow others to get acquainted with Twitter. I’ve been on it a few weeks. I don’t post much but I am following 15 people, mostly journalism innovators, and picking up a sense of the flow and the possibilities.
(Note: Funny line from David Cohn - “The people who follow you on Twitter are your tweeple.")
Is your organization using Twitter to gather or disseminate news? Please tell us about it in comments.

Hyperlocal: It’s the people, stupid

Journalism blogs are abuzz following a Wall Street Journal article dissecting LoudounExtra.com, a less than successful Washington Post/Rob Curley experiment in hyperlocal news. It appears to be another case where the journalist/developers overlooked the people factor while they chased digital success.

Curley, the uber nerd of local news, acknowledges as much:

“From the second I was contacted by the Wall Street Journal for the story, I knew exactly what I wanted to say in the interview, which was to point out that I thought the two biggest problems with LoudounExtra.com were poor integration of the site with washingtonpost.com and not enough outreach into the community ... ala basically me speaking with every community group that would have me.

“And that both of those problems were my fault. Completely.”

Looking for specifics on how to connect with community, I found these two posts particularly insightful and useful:

John Hassell of The Newark Star-Ledger at the exploding newsroom:

“If we’ve learned anything from our own hyperlocal experiment at MorristownGreen.com, it’s the importance of that consistent local engagement. The site is built as a collection of blogs written by members of the community, including a local attorney and politico named Paul Bangiola and a jeweller named Bill Braunschweiger.  It’s orchestrated by veteran Star-Ledger reporter and Morristown resident Kevin Coughlin, who spends virtually every waking hour running around town, reporting, recruiting contributors and organizing events.

Kevin is always bursting with ideas to give people in town more ways to share their stories, but one of my favorites was his inspired notion to donate two Flip video cameras to the Morristown & Morris Township Library so residents could check them out and record videos to upload to our site. When it became clear after a couple of months that no one was taking us up on this, he persuaded the library staff to produce a short movie with one of the cameras and then throw a world premier party at the library.’’

Check out Hassell’s post for photos of the premier.

Michelle Ferrier at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits, recalls her experience living in a small rural community where people waved at neighbors whether they knew them or not. She relates this to her approach as managing editor of MyTopiaCafe.com for the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

“I regularly do what (I) consider to be the online equivalent of waving to my neighbors—logging on and ‘stroking’ (via comments) contributors who have shared their content. I publicly acknowledge their participation. Also, I use contests and rewards to encourage participation. And I pick up the phone to talk to users about their posts. I ask them whether they’ve encountered any technical obstacles with the site, and let them know that we are listening for their feedback.

“Even more often, I’m out in the ‘real world’—at field trips, photographing school dance troupes, talking to nonprofit organizations about partnering on events, in K-12 classrooms and higher education lectures talking to everyone about MyTopiaCafe.com and what it can do for them—and, especially, listening for their responses.

“I’ve found that ‘What do you want?’ is not the right question to ask your community. Instead, I ask ‘What do you want to do?’ I also look for ways to use existing functions or build new ones to service my neighbors and new friends. And that takes a listening posture, without agenda and with humility, that many mainstream journalists and sites lack.”

Coughlin and Ferrier are meeting the community in energetic ways that most journalists probably wouldn’t consider. No doubt Curley will be doing the same in his next assignment.

Has your news organization found ways to connect with and gather community? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Link: Streamlining mobile journalism

Zac Echola has an impressive post on tools for streamlining mobile news gathering and newsroom work flow. The tools—mostly free programs such as Google Calendar and Reader (both of which I recommend highly, especially the sharing feature), Ning and Del.icio.us—can help reporters, photographers and editors keep track of their work and each other on the run. Today’s post is the first of two parts.

Echola says:

“In order to truly become a mobile newsroom, internal communication becomes much, much more important. The first post in this series deals with how to build an internal communication infrastructure. It will help reporters stay on top of their sources and help editors stay on top of what their reporters and other editors are working on. The second post will deal with how to radically transform your news gathering process, generate more traffic and discussion on your sites and build better, more relevant top-tier products.’’

Newsroom confidential:  The reality of frontline editors

Rupert Murdoch says a “ridiculous” number of editors—8.3 to be astonishingly (or perhaps facetiously) exact—deal with an average story in The Wall Street Journal. I’m not sure what “deal with” means. Counting a couple of assignment editors (one launches the story, another plays cleanup later in the day), a copy editor and a slot, multimedia editors, and perhaps someone who posts to the Web, it’s easy to see how the number who briefly touch a story could add up. On the other hand, if 8.3 editors are routinely revising and tweaking a single story, that does indeed seem like a lot.

It is true that newspapers by tradition have let too many editors massage too many stories too much, often to with little or no improvement. I am big on the idea that a good line editor (a job I had for about 25 years) approaches every story with a skeptical eye and aggressively challenges facts, omissions and underlying assumptions. But I think editors sometimes try to put their own stamp on the story or there is perfectionist editing by committee—and that can spell death to any personality and creativity the writer has brought to the piece. The unintended message to writers is that they should give up taking chances or figure out a way to avoid editing. I once consulted at a well-respected metro newspaper where several writers told me they tried to avoid pitching their stories for the front page because the “serial editing” of these stories was such a hassle for them and damaging to their stories.

What a message. “Don’t try.” A good editor must always be ready to pull a story back from a precipice. But she also must encourage the reporter or photojournalist to step to the edge of the cliff and look up, down and sideways.

Murdoch’s editor-to-story ratio tells only part of the story. A sad reality of newsrooms is how little time many line editors actually get to spend on editing. So the more important issue for newsrooms in transition (and I am thinking more about the many local newsrooms that are crossing the digital divide than the few national ones like WSJ) is to fully understand the wide-ranging and powerful role assigning editors can play in fostering change and innovation as they work 14-hour days six days a week, decide what gets covered and what gets left out, deploy and coach the staff, field calls from readers, learn about audience and multimedia, tend to administrative details such as scheduling, foster creativity, put out the daily fires of poor planning or interpersonal disagreements, attend overly long daily and weekly meetings, encourage young journalists, keep the newsroom trains running on time, counsel colleagues in crisis, and, yes, edit stories.

In ”News, Improved: How America’s Newsrooms Are Learning to Change,” we devoted a full chapter to the job of the frontline editor and, in particular, to this editor’s role as the guardian of newsroom culture. We wrote:

“This editor touches virtually everything and everyone in the newsroom, and that touch can push change forward or hold it back.
More than anyone else, these editors translate their understanding of a newsroom’s mission into its daily work. They can foster honest give-and-take. They can open the door to culture change and creative risk. They can be evangelists for staff development and drive newsroom goals into the news itself, into both print and online. Or not.”

A complicated role continues to change and deepen and that translates into a steep learning curve for many editors from a print background.

“In the old culture, editors trimmed stories, editors held stories and editors exercised something called ‘news judgment’. In the new culture, we need editors who can enhance stories, editors who can speed stories along and editors who can present readers with a wide variety of choices,” says Bob Rose, deputy managing editor for presentation and online at the St. Louis Post Dispatch. “It’s too early to say whether the new job is more demanding. It’s worth acknowledging that both types of editing require a great amount of skill. It’s also worth noting that those skill sets don’t necessarily transfer over.”

Steven A. Smith, editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., says he is searching for ways to help editors in his fast-evolving newsroom because they are critical to the newsrooms ability to deliver news in multiple ways.

“The burden of the cultural transition falls mostly on the editors, particularly the line editors,” Smith says. While reporters and photographers learn to use new technology to cover the news, the demands on editors are more challenging. “The editors have to be constantly thinking about how this content may play across platforms.”

This is a moving target. But for now, perhaps, the best strategy is to encourage frontline editors to tinker (in the traditional sense of editing) less, less, less and experiment, learn and grow more.

I think that’s a more productive approach than Murdoch’s editor-to-story ratio. You tell me. How are you helping frontline editors in your newsroom learn, cope and grow? Please add your thoughts in comments.

Link: A “new architecture of news”

Jeff Jarvis analyzes plans of several Ohio newspapers to trade and publish each other’s stories as part of an emerging—and positive—trend of traditional news organizations linking on their Web sites to the news content of other journalists and news organizations.

Here’s a snippet:

“In the ecosystem of links and the new architecture of news that it spawns, I believe it is vital that we as an industry find ways to point to and give credit to original reporting. That is how original journalism will be supported, in the end: by monetizing the audience that comes to it, whether through advertising or contributions.

“This leads to a new Golden Rule of Links in journalism—link unto others’ good stuff as you would have them link unto your good stuff. This emerges from blogging etiquette but is exactly contrary to the old, competitive ways of news organizations: wasting now-precious resources matching competitors’ stories so you could say you’d done it yourself. That must change.

“This ethic of the link will become all the more important as news organizations pare down to their essence. I’ve said often that they will have to do what they do best and link to the rest.”

What is your strategy for linking to content your organization doesn’t produce?