Saddled with silos

Amy Gahran has been looking at The New York Times decision to cover the annual BlogHer conference in the Styles section rather than in the main news or technology pages. Some see a glass ceiling in a decision not to cover a major confab of a dynamic organization in the news pages. It’s a fair question, and Gahran has rounded up the details on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits here and here.

Gahran’s second post gives some insight into the Times’ decision that bears attention from anyone running a newsroom, especially a large one with departments that operate as silos. At The Times, Gahran reports, this is how the decision played out: A freelance writer pitched the story to the Styles editors because she knows them (doesn’t know news side folks). No editor in Styles thought to explore whether the story might better fit in another section. Since the story was for Styles, the writer included lots of “girly” detail, including crowded restrooms, lactation rooms and child care.

In the comments, I gave my take on what this story process says about the organization and how it can limit the best stories:

-- Organizational silos inhibit sharing and the development of the best possible ideas. The Times, like most large newsrooms, is not exempt. This is usually a failing of leadership to define the mission in a dynamic and expansive way—instead of letting it be defined by default as getting “our” section out.

-- The story destination usually sets the story frame. Every writer (and editor) has a conception (right or wrong) of what a particular newspaper section wants. So a story destined for a section that focuses on lifestyles (and beauty and fashion, etc.) is more likely to pull on details that might be interesting in a different context but end up trivializing the story at hand.

In the old, newspaper-only world, the silo mentality drove production but inhibited creativity. As traditional news organizations struggle to succeed online, structures that reinforce silos make even less sense. The Web is about networks and links rather than sections and silos. How newsrooms organize themselves will play a role in how well they adapt. If you were starting from scratch to build and online newsroom that produced a print newspaper, what would it look like?

Link: Tweeting the quake

If your news organization has not been using, or at least following, micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, Jack Lail’s ”Twitter as personal news wire” gives ample reason why news organizations need to pay attention. These are powerful tools, not only for pushing out breaking news feeds but for monitoring eyewitness accounts when news breaks.

Lail noted that the Associated Press moved a story nine minutes after the quake hit Southern California on Tuesday. “By the time AP moved a story, Twitter already had thousands of first-hand reports. Twitter has often been described as micro-blogging, but the Twitter blog says that for many people, the concept of Twitter is evolving to personal news-wire. We’ve seen this all along, but it’s growing.”

Update: Chris O’Brien, who is heading up the Next Newsroom project, posts his thoughts on Twitter, the earthquake and implications for newsrooms. It’s worth reading in full.

Newspapers “do it right”

Editor & Publisher has announced its annual “10 That Do It Right”—news organizations that are innovating in today’s tough media environment. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tops the list for its investigative team that blogs and focuses on quick hit projects, databases and consumer protection issues.

Other winners got props for revamping their circulation systems, experimenting with social media, using reader forums to localize international and national issues, innovating with online video, creating a reader rewards program and developing job recruitment sites.

For more on the winners, you’ll find a quick list of the 10 at Journalistopia. Editor & Publisher has stories on the winners here and here.

Newark video takes the next step

If your newsroom is looking at different ways to use video on the Web, check out Ledger Live, a daily noon (Eastern) video news show that debuts today.

John Hassell, deputy managing editor at The Star-Ledger and nj.com, says the news organization wants to produce something distinct from television news programming. Hassell hopes for more interactivity and less formality.

“Let’s make one thing perfectly clear from the outset: This is not local TV news.

‘This is local video news for the web. It’ll be conversational, interactive and draw constantly on the community of users at NJ.com and bloggers, vloggers and podcasters across New Jersey.”

----

“… We hope the show can bring people into the newsroom each day for a quick take of the day’s top news, a dose of some good video stories, and a sampling of comments and contributions from viewers. As we go forward, we hope viewers will play a larger role in suggesting stories and helping report them.’’

The Star-Ledger newsroom jumped into video this spring, with intensive training for staff members who quickly began producing regular video features for the Web. Shot from the middle of the newsroom, the news show represents a next step in the evolution as well as an opportunity to showcase some of the fine video the staff is producing.

You can learn more about the show and watch some funny (not always intentionally so) clips of a final test run here. Catch the live show here.

Is your newsroom experimenting with video? What’s working? What’s not? Please share your experiences in the comments.

Tech to track

Digital strategist Amy Webb presented 10 tools she recommends journalists get acquainted with as the Knight meeting wrapped up Tuesday.
Here’s her presentation. There’s more on the official conference blog.

Defining “niche”

One topic for last week’s KDMC leadership conference was the increasingly difficult dance of keeping the print newspaper robust and moving aggressively online. One strategy may be to re-define the print newspaper as a “niche” product for a specific audience. Different newsrooms and markets will have different ways of defining this.

Here’s a first run at the definition from Carla Savalli, an editor at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, who participated in the leadership conference:

A niche newspaper is more narrowly focused than the mass market daily.

It may be smaller in size and news hole, and it may even be less frequent than seven days a week. It very likely will be sold for a premium price, almost certainly more than $1 per day.

But it’s most distinctive characteristic will be its content, which will be targeted to the readers who want it and who will be willing to pay for it. Rather than a range of content, a niche paper will focus on so-called franchise topics that can only be produced locally by a skilled staff of journalists. For example: Municipal and state government; schools and education; watchdog reporting; local sports; arts and entertainment.

The niche newspaper will be edited to be explanatory and analytical. Readers will come to the newspaper to learn not ‘what happened,’ but ‘why it happened.’ Its second-day, in-depth nature will be a complement to the 24/7 nature of the newsroom’s online and mobile operations.

On the business side, a niche newspaper will be but one of several platforms that comprise a media portfolio. More important than method of delivery will be the news organization’s brand. In our case, The Spokesman-Review will increasingly become an news and information company whose brand is considered to be smart, timely, relevant and unflinching local journalism. That journalism will be published across multiple platforms, known and to be developed, rather than on any single flagship publication.

Production will be right-sized for the product. The full-scale production apparatus necessary to produce a mass-market daily newspaper is not necessary for a niche product. Resources across the room, then, will be reapportioned according to the needs of the platform.

The overriding goal is to provide news and information to people whenever and however they want it, recognizing that each platform has unique story-telling characteristics which editors and reporters must learn to customize.

Spokane Editor Steven A. Smith reports on his blog that the discussion of the newspaper as niche is a challenging one for his newsroom, as I suspect it will be in many others. Read more of Smith’s post here.

Knight’s new mission

Access. Innovation. Experimentation.

That’s how Alberto Ibarguen, president and CEO of the Knight Foundation, described the foundation’s mission as digital media transform journalism.

Knight has long focused its journalism grants on fostering best practices through training and other initiatives. That has changed, at least for now, Ibarguen said. “When the world is changing so quickly that it’s virtually impossible to talk about best practices, we’ve opted to focus at least for time being on innovation and experimentation..... on access over content.”

Ibarguen said the foundation remains as committed as ever to journalism, to preserving it and to seeing it migrate successfully to the Web. “The question is not ‘How do we save newspapers?’ The question is ‘How do we help save the communication that communities need to manage their affairs in a democracy? How do we save journalism in the digital age?’”

To that end, Knight has committed $100 million to media innovation initiatives in the past three years.

(Disclosure: I am a consultant to the Knight foundation on a separate project.)

Broadly, Knight is focusing on:

-- Innovation and experimentation, with funding for media entrepreneurs through the Knight 21st Century News Challenge.

-- Information about the needs of communities, with a high-powered commission to study the issue and a new fund for challenge grants to motivate community foundations to fund local news and information projects.

-- Developing sustainable models for public access to the Internet via the Knight Center for Digital Excellence.

Throughout, Knight is attempting to create information models that are self-sustaining and that can be replicated in other places.

Ibarguen said Knight will continue its efforts to protect journalists around the world. But he resisted the idea that Knight should be fostering more international journalism at a time when many strapped news organizations are pulling back.

He noted that John S. and James L. Knight required that each of the newspapers they owned be unique in reflecting their local communities. In his travels in the United States, Ibarguen said, he has been “amazed at the thinness of local reporting and amazed at the sameness of local newspapers, local radio and even local television.”

He noted that a young person today is a lot more likely to know about the crisis in Darfur than about a problem with the local school board. International news, he said, “is an area I think the World Wide Web will help along in a way that it will not help along local information.”

Video tips

I’m at the big Knight Foundation meeting for grantees at Unity in Chicago. Kristin Taylor, Knight’s online communities manager, shared some video tips that might be helpful to newsrooms. Taylor says: “Be on YouTube and everywhere else. People treat YouTube as a giant public access service.”

She lists these free embeddable video players
1. YouTube. Quality is a problem. Has audience share.
2. blip.tv. Good for series or similar topic shows. Video bloggers use this. Intro, logo, branding is there.
3. vimeo: HD and internal interface (comments). Offers liking, sharing, embedding.
4. viddler: Ability to comment into the timeline of the video. Looks good (comparable to vimeo) but does not have HD.
5. flickr. Photo site. Added video. Limit to 90 seconds. (Check out the Fishstick video)
6. TubeMogul. Uploads a file to multiple services.

Taylor’s best practices
1. Context the video as you would a blockquote
2. When possible, indicate file size and format (so people know how long it will take to download)
3. If there is an HD version available, link to it
4. Explain player functionality for new users
5. Plan for comment moderation

Link: Growing ad revenue

Ken Doctor offers one advertising exec’s ”Nine Imperatives for New Growth.” Something to share with the revenue side of your organization?

Cost - benefit analysis

Knight Digital Media Center‘s annual Leadership Conference wrapped up Friday but I’m still playing catch up on a few presentations and a lot of notes and ideas.

Ashley Wells of MSNBC.com offered a highly instructive look at the cost to produce different types of multimedia—slide shows, interactives, video and map mashups. Then he projected the size of the audience it would take to make the effort worth the time. Wells was quick to note that such comparisons don’t drive journalistic decision-making. But I think they can help people think twice about how they’re using their time. The short message: Simple may be better. Click through the whole presentation here. It’s instructive.

Wells finished up by noting that online news sites operate under heavy pressure to build both audience and revenue. What does he need to accomplish that?

“Gimme a:
Flexible publishing platform with great editorial tools
Cross-functional team with cross-functional people
License to experiment withthe intent to scale”

What’s your multimedia strategy and who is implementing it in your newsroom? Please share your ideas in the comments.

PEJ: State of the newsroom

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced a rich study of the state of the U.S. newspaper newsrooms at a key moment in their migration to the Web.

The findings testify to the growing adaptiveness of newsrooms. At the at the same time, the report raises questions in my mind about whether newsrooms—and newspaper revenue departments such as advertising—are moving quickly and boldly enough to beat the economic clock that is undermining a key competitive advantage—large news gathering staffs.

The report, ”The Changing Newspaper Newsroom,” also speaks to the determination I saw among editors at the Knight Digital Media Center‘s leadership conference last week.

“When it comes to ... the quality of the work, many of these editors express a remarkable - at times eerie - optimism despite the adversities they have faced. In general, the editors we talked to tend to look beyond what their newsrooms have lost in recent years and instead focus on the new vistas that technology has suddenly opened to them and the new energy and purpose of a faster-moving newsroom.”

What these newsrooms have lost is considerable, the report shows.

Here are two lists based on PEJ’s findings—“Less/fewer” covers reductions in staff, resources and coverage. “More” tells what’s growing.

Less/fewer
Staff size (reductions are much sharper at large metros than at smaller newspapers.)
Age and experience of staff
Smaller news hole and newspaper size
Foreign, national news
Arts and features coverage
Institutional memory as older journalists take buyouts
Copy editing
General and specialized editing
Photographers

Meanwhile, editors expect to cut more staff. More than half the the large-paper editors said they expected more cuts; nearly a third at the smaller papers did.

More
Community, state/local news
Education coverage
Investigative, enterprise coverage
Early-in-the-day teams that focus on Web content
Videography
Web-only editing
Database journalism
Mobile journalists
Micro sites
Staff blogs

The changing profile of the journalist
Here is what editors say are the top five “essential skills” in the newsroom:
Writing skills
Overall computer skills
Ability to file quickly
Multimedia skills
Data analysis skills

Key quotes:

On the changing print newspaper:

“In effect, America’s newspapers are narrowing their scope ambitions and becoming niche reads.”
--
“Together, these two developments - shorter news stories and richer enterprise - reflect part of a new, evolving role of the print newspaper in an era of growing online access to news virtually as it happens. In this environment, the role of the print edition of daily newspapers is becoming less a vehicle to convey news developments and more a source for analysis, texture, and context to help readers better understand those developments.”

Staffing and culture:

“The culture of the daily newspaper newsroom is also changing. New job demands are drawing a generation of young, versatile, tech-savvy, high-energy staff as financial pressures drive out higher-salaried veteran reporters and editors. Newsroom executives say the infusion of new blood has brought with it a new competitive energy, but they also cite the departure of veteran journalists, along with the talent, wisdom and institutional memory they hold as their single greatest loss.”

On the quality of the journalism:

“Amid these concerns—and despite the enormous cutbacks and profound worries—editors still sense that their product is improving, not worsening. Fully 56% think their news product is better than it was three years earlier.
“ ‘I believe the journalism itself is discernibly better than it was a year ago,’ said the editor of a large metropolitan daily, whose paper last year lost 70 newsroom employees. ‘There’s an improvement in enterprise, in investigations and in the coverage of several core beats.’ “
--
“The bottom line culturally is this: In today’s newspapers, stories tend to be gathered faster and under greater pressure by a smaller, less experienced staff of reporters, then are passed more quickly through fewer, less experienced, editing hands on their way to publication. Some editors—but far from a majority of those interviewed—said they could see the costs.
“ ‘I read the stories (in my own paper) today and I see more holes, questions I want answered that are not,’ lamented the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper. ‘I see more stories...that aren’t as well sourced as I’d prefer.’ ”

Editors’ view of the Web

“Although several editors voiced concerns about the web as a distraction that deflects resources from the print edition, overall, the view of the web appears to be increasingly positive.
“Editors’ responses indicated, often with a sense of surprise, that the growth of newspaper websites has also had a positive impact on the content of the newspaper itself. Interviews and survey results strongly indicated that—contrary to early conventional wisdom—the print and website versions of today’s daily newspapers can be complementary and mutually strengthening.”
--
“Increasingly, the web today is seen as a newspaper’s ally, not an adversary. Because of this, it is helping counter sagging morale as newsrooms shrink. At larger papers, where staff cuts have been deepest and the newsroom moods darkest, fully 57% of those surveyed say “web technology offers the potential for greater-than-ever journalism and will be the savior of what we once thought of as newspaper newsrooms.” By contrast, just 4% expressed worry that the web’s pressure on immediacy might undermine the accuracy and values of journalism.”

These news organizations appear to be making significant progress toward the Web and it’s encouraging to see how greatly it has come to be seen as an opportunity rather than a fad to be wished away. Still, the report in many ways underscores the extent to which the print newspaper still drives revenues and staffing—and that may be slowing digital transformation when it needs to be speeding up.

The PEJ report also discusses the changing relationships of newsrooms with the advertising department and with citizens. I’ll post some thoughts about those issues soon.

Meanwhile, how is your organization handling the print-online balance. What are you giving up? What are you adding?

Loop management

If you ever participated a newspaper redesign, you know this sad truth: Product development in the newsroom tends to take on a life of its own, and it is often a very, very, very long life.

That tradition is a significant obstacle in the online world, and editors are fretting more and more about “time to market” when their organizations come up with good ideas for online. As if technological and sometimes corporate constraints aren’t enough, the cautious culture of news organizations is a significant obstacle.

Stacy Lynch, a project director with Media Management Center and former Innovations Director at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, has seen the problem up close. And that experience informed a presentation at Knight’s Leadership conference that I think editors everywhere will find very valuable.

A few key points:

Looping

Someone has an idea (run Auto section inside the Friday entertainment section to save production costs). It goes from the production department to the operating committee, which forms an interdepartmental team. The team explores the idea and reports pros and cons. The fun begins. Different groups and departments see how it will impact them (losing color positions, earlier deadlines...). The questions and new requirements (keep the color positions and the deadlines) pile on - what Lynch calls “process looping”— and the committee may be mired in research and discussions of tradeoffs for weeks. Meanwhile, the new requirements significantly reduce cost savings are not that significant.

And importantly, “process looping” makes idea vetting take far longer than it’s worth. Too often, Lynch says, that means key newsroom people are working for weeks and months on a small idea, expending valuable time and brainpower that would be better spent elsewhere.

The auto section effort was a small idea, Lynch said, when the organization should have been “asking ‘what is the best thing we could do to lower production costs?’ “

To eliminate the loops, Lynch recommends working all options simultaneously. “This isn’t a waste because it leads to better decisions and guarantees that you’ve have a workable option available.”

“Multiple options force creativity and depersonalize decisions.”

Innovation traps
Lynch listed three traps that kill innovation (based on the work of Michael May in “Elegant Solutions.")

- Swinging for the fences, “homerun or bust.”
- Getting too clever, too many “bells and whistles.”
- Solving problems frivolously with misguided creativity.

I think this is a particularly valuable caution for newsrooms. With their tendency to be perfectionists, newsroom groups too often load up every project with every conceivable possibility. We like long lists. Great. Learn to edit them down.

The alternative, Lynch suggests, is to “embrace iteration,” meaning breaking projects down into components or chunks and rolling them out one at a time. So a new Web channel might start with core information, add social networking a few months later, and keep adding features until it’s finished. That’s a smarter, faster approach than waiting until every conceivable piece is ready to launch.

And even if it means making mistakes, Lynch says, they are more than offset by the value of getting the product out the door.

Who is the D?

Another problem that plagues newsroom project development, Lynch says, is that everyone wants to make decisions and nobody wants to make decisions. So decide at the beginning of the process who gets to decide and stick with it. This is part of a process called RAID, which I saw used effectively in Atlanta. Go to Lynch’s presentation for more detail.

Change. More. Faster.

Steve Smith, editor of The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, has posted on his blog some thoughts about industry change and changes to come in his own newsroom following this conference. Says Smith:

“If we don’t change more dramatically and faster, there will not be an industry to support the sort of value-driven journalism that is at the heart of our craft.

“The encouraging news is that the tools we need to make the needed changes are readily available to us and that our ability to deliver quality news and information can only be enhanced...if we make the bold leaps.

“And there is the rub. Are we willing to make the bold moves.

“In the SR newsroom, we MUST understand and then embrace the notion that print is no longer our primary focus. As advanced as we are in the digital delivery of news (and this conference confirms for me that we are ahead of the industry curve, as innovative and progressive as any newsroom ), we are still too print focused.

“We need to devote FEWER resources to print. Our editors need to spend far less time worrying about print. And all of us need to be focusing on how to improve and expand the scope and quality of our digital news and information (and that includes radio).

“This is a huge cultural leap. The push back will be extreme. Work schedules will have to change. Skills will have to be refined or re-taught or learned for the first time. Many of us will have to fundamentally question what we do, why we do it and how it must be done differently.

“The editors who push this cultural change forward will not earn many friends in the newsroom. I think that understanding has been sobering for all of us.

“My hope is that our journalists will understand that we must change our practices, while holding true to our news values.

“That will be our only chance and only hope.”

Thursday, each of the newsroom teams at the conference explored key change initiatives for their newsroom. I will be posting some of their ideas over the next several days.

Low hanging harvest:  Just do it

Thursday was less about expert presentations and a lot more about planning by editors participating in the Knight Leadership conference. In one exercise, we asked editors to brainstorm “low-hanging fruit,” or changes they could make fairly quickly and easily in their newsrooms. Some are pretty ambitious and I think that demonstrates how energized these editors are feeling after an infusion of tools and expertise.

Here’s a sampling:
Develop headline writing optimized for search.
Do a Google content search for our market, link to it and use as content guide
Reward section editors for growing page views of sections to which they are assigned
Identify audiences we’re not reaching. Set up site and see if can capture them (test sites on Ning)
Study Bettertogether.org - full of examples of things to do to increase people’s relationships with each other
Analyze our metrics and share them - make sure we have the right ones
Explore creating evergreen sites
Get more info about community foundation money for coverage
Implement visual designation of breaking news box most viewed by users.
Add supplemental links in and out, embed more links
Explore Facebook and myspace groups to disseminate news, getting story ideas
Template beyond slide shows - interactives, timelines that can be reused
Create a small business directory
Establish metrics for audience, traffic and revenue
Build a simple, effective product development process
Organize around franchise products
Hire community interface managers
Develop specific training to support tactics
Seek appropriate content and technology partners
Establish accountability and incentives
Describe new roles and hire for them
Use Eyetrack
Create a product development team
Create individual performance expectations for section editors to help drive traffic pages on their site.
Monetize video content as wholesale commodity
Re-evaluate use of multimedia and use more smartly
Launch fast and fix on the fly, build speed into new idea generation process
Rebuild from blank sheet newsroom structure, rethink idea of management
Develop coherent strategy for mobile
Focus on the change agents in the room, reward and promote and empower
Spend less time focusing only on print—especially in senior management

As you check out their lists, I hope you’ll be making your own. What’s on your list? Please share ideas in the comments.

Innovate this

Innovation doesn’t come easy to news organizations. They were built to produce a single product and their assembly-line culture is often highly resistant to new ideas (or even old ideas that didn’t work at some distant point in the past). Editors at the Knight Leadership Conference heard from several practitioners of innovation in media, including Chad Dickerson of Yahoo. Dan Pacheco of the Bakersfield Californian, and Bill Gannon of Lucas Films. Here are presentations by Dickerson and Pacheco. (I hope to get Gannon’s tomorrow.)

I think the big message for newsrooms from these talks is that failure is an acceptable outcome. Do it. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, stop doing it. That’s an increasingly tough proposition for editors with dwindling resources, but good advice nonetheless. Learning always has value in the long haul.