Weekend reading

Mark Potts has a practical list of ways news organizations can go to news consumers in “Follow the audience.”
Jack Lail summarizes new research on “Millennial journalists embracing social media as a news tool.”
Lail and Scott Karp offer this illustration of the relationship between robust linking and robust traffic.

Links: Bad news covered well on social networks

In the shifting dynamic of news gathering and dissemination, established news organizations sill have a role to play in pulling together news reports and analyzing events. But, as the unfolding disaster in Mumbai illlustrates, social media and the citizens who use those tools, bring unprecedented immediacy to the story, and that immediacy may allow us to understand distant stories better than ever before.

To learn more, check out:

”India’s Mainstream And New Media Tell Story Of Mumbai Terror Attacks,” a round-up Joe Gandelman. (Link via Jay Rosen on twitter, @jayrosen_nyu)

Amy Gahran at Poynter Online offers tips for Twittering the news when reports are confusing and numerous.
discusses the need to check Twittered news before passing it along.

Last but not least, one of my main sources for Mumbai news and an ongoing source of perspective about international doings, is Global Voices Online.

Update: Here is a story from cnn.com about social media coverage of the Mumbai attacks.

Update: Jay Rosen of New York University is on top of the Mumbai/citizen reporting story with links on Twitter (@jayrosen_nyu). Here are a couple of Tweets with links from Jay on the new media mix:
- “Wall Street Journal does the Mumbai-on-Twitter story without all the “is this journalism?” hysteria.”
- “On the mark is Om Malik’s “With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context.” How Twitter works (and doesn’t) during big events.”

Update: Mindy McAdams offers an excellent “Twitter, Mumbai and 10 facts about journalism now.” Here is what McAdams tells her students about journalism today:

  1. Breaking news will be online before it’s on television.
  2. Breaking news—especially disasters and attacks in the middle of a city—will be covered first by non-journalists.
  3. The non-journalists will continue providing new information even after the trained journalists arrive on the scene.
  4. Cell phones will be the primary reporting tool at first, and possibly for hours.
  5. Cell phones that can use a wireless Internet connection in addition to a cellular phone network are a more versatile reporting tool than a phone alone.
  6. Still photos, transmitted by citizens on the ground, will tell more than most videos.
  7. The right video will get so many views, your servers might crash (I’m not aware of this happening with any videos from Mumbai).
  8. Live streaming video becomes a user magnet during a crisis. (CNN.com Live: 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST today (Nov. 28), according to Beet.tv.)
  9. Your print reporters need to know how to dictate over the phone. If they can get a line to the newsroom, it might be necessary.
  10. Your Web team must be prepared for this kind of crisis reporting.

Is your newsroom ready for crisis reporting now?

Do these stories suggest uses for social media in reporting news from your community? Please share ideas in the comments.

Link: Zell reconsidered

Before you join the stone-throwers who are pounding Tribune’s Sam Zell for his comments about the dismal sales record for Pulitzers, read Alan Mutter’s “One exec’s savvy take on the news biz.” (Now, if only Zell and Lee Abrams or anyone else could come up with some coherent solutions.)

Comments: RSVP

I was delighted to see this post from News-Record Editor John Robinson announcing that the news site was moving to enable user comments on news stories. As Robinson noted, the move was a long time in coming—but faster than most news organizations judging from what I’ve seen.

Here’s Robinson:

“That gives us one more way to talk with, listen to and help our readers, to say nothing of letting them help us. As you know, our ultimate goal is to help build a community of people who want to talk with each other in a safe, civil environment. As the local newspaper, we can provide that.”

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Then Robinson, in a memo to staff republished on his blog, moves to a key link in the communications chain—how journalists respond to the comments:

Your ownership of your story doesn’t end when it is published. You have introduced the story into the community, and you maintain some responsibility for hosting the conversation.

When you participate in the conversation—answering questions, correcting assumptions, acknowledging commenter corrections of you, and encouraging people to help you—you show you care about your story and the community. It also gives the discussion more credibility because people know that the person who wrote the story is there to talk with.

We do not expect the toxic atmosphere that you may have read about elsewhere taking over the site. As the host of the Debatables blog for the last year, I can assure you that 99% of the comments are not only worth publishing, but they also provoke a good discussion.

Remember John Lennon: “The love you take is equal to the love you make.” So be professional and respectful. Your civility will be contagious. If you have a problem with a comment or a commenter violating our terms of service, holler. We aren’t afraid of deleting offensive comments or banning violators and trolls, if it comes to that.

My expectation is that when you’re working in the office you check your story for comments throughout the day. More likely, you’ll be in and out all day. At a minimum, check in before you leave for the day. (Unlike the blogs, you won’t get an e-mail every time someone leaves a comment.) You don’t have to respond every time a comment is left, but don’t be a wallflower, either.

Robinson’s memo itself is a lesson in leadership. He states the reason for the new practice as well as the benefits. He gets in front of potential concerns and addresses them. His temperate tone is a model for journalists who may be responding to user comments for the first time. Then he sets a minimum expectation (“check in before you leave”) but refrains from micro-instructing, which could only strengthen any resistance by a) insulting the intelligence of his folks or b) closing off opportunities for interaction that Robinson cannot anticipate.

This bodes well for the News-Record staff’s response to this new adventure. (Robinson’s been ahead of the curve on blogging and other online practices, so I suspect his staff is open to this.)

Robinson’s memo also sums up the new role of engagement that every journalist must tackle and that part bears repeating:

“Your ownership of your story doesn’t end when it is published. You have introduced the story into the community, and you maintain some responsibility for hosting the conversation.

“When you participate in the conversation—answering questions, correcting assumptions, acknowledging commenter corrections of you, and encouraging people to help you—you show you care about your story and the community. It also gives the discussion more credibility because people know that the person who wrote the story is there to talk with.”

Robinson practices what he preaches. He’s received a few comments on his blog about enabling them—and he has responded! Take a look here.

Does your site enable comments on news stories? How does your staff respond? What are your tips for successful interaction with commenters?

A future for news

Jeff Jarvis has come up with a thoughtful and comprehensive summary of the emerging news landscape. Read the entire post. Then reread and discuss it with your newsroom. Link to it from your web site and invite comments about what your users think is important for your Web site.

I’m going to start today with Jarvis’ first bullet point, because I think all flows from here:

“The next generation of local (news) won’t be about news organizations but about their communities. News is just one of the community’s needs. It also needs elegant organization. News companies and networks can help provide that. The bigger goal is to provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together. News will become a product of the community as much as it is a service to it.”

As more people discover their ability to create community online, it follows that they will identify and prioritize common problems (the way news editors and editorial pages have done), explore solutions (the way news organizations were supposed to) and join together to push for change (editorial page, again). Does online community, then, replace traditional news organizations? It’s not an either-or equation. Instead, the successful news organization must reinvent its relationship with its community. Among other things, Jarvis says, communities will still need dogged beat work and investigative reporting. As the new system for news emerges, traditional news organizations can lend structure and coherence to the network.

Jarvis rightly points out that the power of the news organization of the future may lie more in its unique contribution to the community network rather than on the scope of its original news report. Speaking specifically about investigative reporting, Jarvis says: “In a link-and-search economy, you must create unique content with strong value to get attention and audience.”

This is a call for news organizations to focus on the emerging landscape, identify their critical roles and go for it. I have described a key obstacle to significant change in newspaper culture: the reluctance, even inability, to identify and let go of outdated practices. With many organizations now consumed day in and day out with the business of multiplatform production amidst downsizing, it gets harder to see how the typical newsroom can plot the survival it needs today and the future it needs yesterday.

At best, Jarvis summary offers your organization ideas for plotting a future beyond the next layoff. At least, it offers a template for plotting your own ideas about the future role of your organization in a community that is still being defined.

Your thoughts about the role of your news organization in emerging online communities? Please share them in the comments.

Weekend reading II

Be sure to check out a “Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project,” a new report that suggests that young people gain significant learning and social interaction online. In addition to the full report, Maryn McKenna lists highlights on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

Do these findings bust any stereotypes you’ve harboring? How can you apply them in your news organization?

Weekend reading

Mark Luckie offers “Amazing Photojournalism: Where to find the best in news photography,” a collection of sites well worth a look. (While you’re at it, take a look at Luckie’s work as well. This savvy and prodigious blogger and multimedia guy just saw his job evaporate.)

Poynter Online has started, Screenshot Slideshow, a daily collection of page grabs from news Web sites. Check theirs out and submit your own. What a resource!

Philly.com has launched a news blog. Looks good. Will be interesting to see how it evolves.

Knight Stanford Fellowships program is getting a remake. The program will foster innovative projects that promote good journalism. Director Jim Bettinger has the info in a new blog.

Ken Doctor looks at CNN’s new wire service. CNN is inviting editors to check it out in Atlanta Dec. 1.

Sarah Evans writes about “How to Build Community on Twitter” and the obligatory followup: “How Not To.” (Pointer from Amy Gahran.)

Speaking of Gahran, she has tips on how to use hashtags to cover live events, something that could come in handy for newsrooms.

Join an open conversation

Way back in the day, when I was a newspaper ombudsman (The Oregonian, 1996-1999), I was stunned to learn how much our critics felt we left out of the newspaper when I, like most of my colleagues in the newsroom, wanted them to admire what we put in. We were capturing crime problems in local neighborhoods, for example, but missing community discussions about why crimes were happening and what citizens could do about it. We were capturing the angst of youth, but failing to give young people much of a role in the discussion.

The issue wasn’t so much to be nice or to be fair, although those are good things. The issue was to be relevant, to create a news report that was meaningful to people where they lived. That’s usually a very different place than the newsroom. Sure we would give regular people a starring role in our newspaper movie, but only if they followed our script.

I learned of these omissions, not by waiting for people to call and complain. Instead, I went looking for trouble, hosting and joining conversations around Portland and by strong-arming and sweet-talking other journalists to join them as well. Knowledge grew. Perspectives changed. And, key to change at that time: Journalists find a wider circle of sources upon which to draw. They get more comfortable with the untitled people and their unfamiliar points of reference and the important linkages of community. They let others write parts of the script.

These insights have stuck with me for more than a decade now. They have been refreshed by my old-journo efforts to learn about digital media and the untitled people and important linkages of the online world. They hit me hard last week when I joined a different conversation, an online conversation occasioned by a closed-door meeting of news industry executives hosted by the American Press Institute and the McCormick Foundation. The “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis,” apparently consisted of a couple of presentations by business experts (and, yes folks, the business outlook in the newspaper industry is dire) and a pitch by API for its Newspaper Next program (a useful approach to innovation that has not caught fire in the industry). You can read API’s report here and a follow-up by Amy Gahran on Poynter Online here.

The gist of the main presentation at API, by turnaround expert James Shein, is that there are five stages of industry decline and much of the news industry is in the fourth stage, crisis. The fifth stage is dissolution. Ominously, says the API summary, “failure to take action at any point on the curve means the enterprise inexorably moves to the next point. As an organization moves down the crisis curve, it will find executing a recovery plan more difficult, and will have less time to do it.”

Another Shein comment that resonated: “The biggest hurdles to progress the industry’s senior leadership, including some of the people in this room. I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes.”

That’s pretty ironic, given an array of “fresh eyes” that were outside the room having an online debate keyed to the summit. One of the news executives in API’s invitation-only session was Charles M. Peters, president and CEO of The Gazette Company. Peters decided to try to blog the session live via CoverItLive on Twitter. Peters, who had never live blogged before (I have and I can tell you it is very demanding, at least at first.) What ensued was a lively discussion about moves the industry might make to rescue itself. Peters has posted an initial summary here and plans to write up highlights and I’ll post links as they come up. The transcript, all seven hours, is here.

What struck me about the online conversation was how similar it was to what I saw way back when as an ombudsman. This time, of course, I was outside with the untitled people and their unfamiliar points of reference and the important linkages of community. I didn’t presume to have answers—I don’t think any of the 30 plus people in that online conversation did. But there was a wealth of ideas. Some might have been worth a try by one of the organizations represented inside the room. Some might have sparked even better ideas inside the room.

The people inside might be playing the role of journalists in the newsroom—unwittingly trapped in their own self-reinforcing conversations with one another, failing to see the value of difference and change. Above all, failing to see a crisis in their growing (rightly or wrongly) irrelevance. I wondered how many of the ideas from outside they’ve already heard, dismissing them—like the newsroom often dismisses community suggestions—as too small, too different, too….
A lot of small and different could turn into something big. My idea in the conversation was that each company might take on responsibility to push one big experiment and then quickly share results with the others. Journalist (and Twitter friend) Tim Windsor said it well after API canceled a news conference because its meeting had failed to reach a consensus. There “shouldn’t be consensus,” Windsor said, “But a steady rain of divergent ideas to try.”

Peters attempted to bring his fellow executives into the online conversation. I believe it was displayed for a time on a screen in the conference room but it didn’t sound like the room layout or conference format encouraged engagement. I think it would be better for the executives to join online conversations and networks and participate in them regularly, if they are not already doing that. As I’ve said before, I have learned from blogging and being on Twitter that you only really understand how the Web works when you are there. You only learn the power of the network once you join it.

That’s another small suggestion, and one that demands time and attention—both in short supply right now in the news industry. It’s time well spent for those who want to build tomorrow’s news organization. Hard to say how people will be getting their news five years from now. But you can bet it will be on some Web not yet imagined, not on dead trees. If you understand how it works now, you’re that much more able to keep up. If you don’t bother, you’re that much farther behind. Shein’s curve may apply: The farther behind you get, the bigger the solution must be and the smaller to time available to find and implement it.

Here are two additional posts about the API meeting that I found interesting:

Jane Ellen Stevens offers a “10-Point Road Map for API Execs”
Steven A. Smith gives a newsroom editor’s perspective in “The secret API meeting: Do we laugh or cry?”

The Eagle’s ‘online first’ copy desk

After I wrote about the tension around the copy desk in times of digital transition, I heard from Michael Roehrman, deputy editor/production at The Wichita Eagle, about that news organization’s efforts to integrate its copy editors into its online efforts (Editors from The Eagle participated in Knight Digital Media Center’s annual leadership conference in July and I periodically query participants about newsroom issues and strategies.)

Roehrman described a three-step process that has given copy editors the lead role in vetting stories for the Web:

1. Reporters send breaking news for the Web directly to a copy editor, bypassing the line editing desk.

2. Copy editors immersed themselves in search engine optimization techniques.

3. Most of the 10 copy editors are individually responsible for overseeing a portion of the main Web site, Kansas.com sites such as WichitaPaws.com.

“The traditional process of reporter-line editor-copy editor doesn’t lend itself well to the urgency of getting breaking news on the Web. So, the first thing we did was eliminate the line editor from the process. The thinking here was that accuracy and eliminating potential libel were greater concerns, so copy editors are the ones to work reporters’ copy and then post the items. Line editors can go back into the story and work their magic after it’s online,” Roehrman said in an e-mail.

“We also gave all copy editors access to the online publishing tools system. This authority allows them to go right into the code and fix any errors they spot. An area where this is particularly helpful is cutlines. The system we have uploads the photographers’ cutlines, which are embedded in the photo files they send, and they are often not everything they should be.”

I asked Roehrman about the inevitable challenge of changing culture and practice.

“The biggest initial challenge, particularly among our more-seasoned editors, was one of perception; a close second was time management. The first was overcome by consistently reinforcing the idea of one job but multiple platforms and pointing out the professional advantages of having experience publishing different ways. With copy editors, you can never underestimate the appeal of learning something new.  I’m still delighted that my editor with the most seniority - he’s been in the business for more than 30 years - was the one who embraced the changes with the most enthusiasm.

“As for time management, that was a more gradual process. One breakthrough was in the realization that reverse publishing eliminated the need for redundant copy editing. In other words, if an article was already edited for the Web, considerably less time needed to be spent editing it for print.”

The Eagle has 10 copy editors, including Roehrman.  The workload?

“It sounds like a lot, and it is. The trick, however, was that everything was phased in over the past couple of years—some of the tasks started out as goals. The most important thing is that each member of the desk is fully behind both platforms. They embrace the changes we’re going through and are excited about the possibilities ahead.”

So far, the approach is working.

“As far as I’m aware, there haven’t been any repercussions from our method of online editing. Most in the newsroom realize the importance and value of what copy editors do, so they’re in agreement with the process. When I’ve spoken with editors at other papers, they’re amazed that we’ve adopted this philosophy. To me, it’s a logical idea. And yes, it’s quite empowering.”

Efficiency and empowerment. What a combination.

What’s your formula for integrating your copy editors into the digital mix? What’s working in your newsroom? Please share tips and ideas in the comments.

Six competencies of news organizations

I sat in on a Webinar by the Media Management Center at Northwestern University this week. Annette Moser-Wellman presented in information-rich outline of “Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization.”

Moser-Wellman’s list provides a great blueprint for organizations that are looking beyond the next round of cutbacks to becoming an organization that can thrive five years from now. To set the stage, Moser-Wellman gave an overview of just-around-the-corner technologies. She gave particular emphasis on the growing role of mobile in virtually everything we do, including the way we consume media and the way advertising finds us.

Here’s my shorthand version of her list of roles for the next-gen news organization:

1. Platform strategist. Know the platforms, know the players, know how users consume information and what content works best where. Start by looking at what people need and develop strategies to meet those needs.
2. Marketer. It’s all about establishing your brand by showing how your content is different and targeting information to specific groups.
3. Community builder. The traditional role of the news organization in a community is changing online. It requires the ability to connect people with like interests and to engage them in news gathering.
4. Data miner. Organizations must build capacity to store, access and retrieve information through meta data such as tagging. Organizations can develop new revenue streams by repackaging information in different ways. Semantic technology on the horizon will increase the potential for properly tagged content to find interested users.
5. Complete storyteller. Communication is becoming more visual, as evidenced by maps and timelines and interactives that report news and put it in context.
6. Entrepreneur. News organizations must operate in a selling environment. “News organizations will need to figure out what the end consumer is going to want and what they are willing to pay for.”

Which ability is most likely to separate successful news organizations from an unsuccessful one?
“My personal penchant would be this ability to be an entrepreneur and think like an entrepreneur,” Moser-Williams said. “What that means it the culture has to have a certain tolerance for risk,” to take on innovative projects and “throw a little bit of money at something that might not pan out.” Organizations “that focus best on the entrepreneurship will be the winners.”

This list seems like a great starting point for a discussion of emerging roles of news organizations. What do you think? Are these or other roles important in your organization’s future? What roles will you emphasize? How will you help your organization take them on?

Moser-Wellman has put together an indepth report on the “Six Competencies.” She blogs about emerging technology and media practice at Media Management’s Media Info Center. Vivian Vahlberg, managing director of Media Management Center, said Moser-Wellman will do additional Webinars for interested companies or associations. Contact Vahlberg at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or 847-467-1790 for more info.

Getting past “mixed messages” in the newsroom

Newsrooms need collaboration more than ever. The assembly line model of print production must give way to a more dynamic, multitasking organization. Increasingly, too, cutbacks dictate efficiencies.

Jill Geisler has a terrific post at Poynter Online about four obstacles to collaboration she has observed in newsrooms (and many other organizations). Her list: Distance, Dominance, Dissonance and Discomfort.

Each plays strongly in organizational resistance to more collaboration. Geisler concludes:

“Distance, dominance, dissonance and discomfort translate into: I don’t see or hear you, I’m on a different level than you, I have different marching orders and I don’t really know you or understand what you do.

“All this can kill collaboration.”

For leaders who seek more collaboration in their newsrooms, I would focus in particular on Geisler’s third obstacle: Dissonance: “I have different marching orders than you.”

In my experience, dissonance in the message or “mixed messages” from leaders holds organizations back—and adoption of clearer, more consistent message is one of the ways leaders can unleash tremendous potential that’s just waiting for clear direction.

Mixed messages occur when:
—Staff members hear different priorities from a top editor. Who hasn’t met the editor or managing editor who jumps from problem to fresh idea and back to another problem, leaving staff members scratching their heads about their direction.
—Staff members hear different priorities from different editors in the leadership group. Or the leaders recite the same priorities but reward only their favorite ones. Of course each editor has her area of focus, but it’s important for each leader to embrace and foster the big picture for the staff. So breaking news on the Web may be job one for the ME/online. But it mustn’t diminish her respect for print enterprise—and the time it takes to produce it.
—Mid-level editors do not fully understand the priorities of the leadership group. In the world of the frontline editor, urgency and importance tend to blend. Without clear direction from the top, important priorities—acting on them and communicating them to the staff—will give way

What’s the solution? There’s no quick fix. But more attention to communication is a challenging and effective way to improve collaboration in your organization.

First, talk with the senior leadership group in the newsroom. Come to a consensus about three or four top goals for the newsroom—Call it “What we’re all working on together right now.” It may be more breaking news for the Web, more local focus in print and online, tighter storytelling for time-challenged users. Work together to figure out how each senior editor will emphasize these priorities and keep them fresh in her areas of responsibility.

Second, discuss the priorities with frontline editors. That’s different from telling them a set of rules. Get their views: What do these editors think about the priorities (and let them process any resistance)? How will they play out in their daily work? How to best communicate them? What does the staff need from the leadership to reach the goals?

Third, put together multidisciplinary groups of staff members to discuss the priorities and get to know how they affect the work of colleagues. Encourage them to brainstorm together and learn from each other what practices may accomplish the goals. Breaking down newsroom silos is a route to collaboration—especially if the leadership is clear about what the collaboration is supposed to produce.

What are your tips for fostering collaboration? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Spot Us: Re-connecting the public to local journalism

Spot Us, which officially launches today, is a Web site where people, including journalists, propose reporting projects in the San Francisco Bay Area, and members of the public vote with their pocketbooks on which ones get done. The project is the brain child of journalist David Cohn and is funded with a grant of $340,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

The process is simple: People offer story tips and journalists propose stories, pledges of contributions to pay the reporter determine what stories get done, and the stories are distributed via the Web.  Here’s the New York Times writeup.

Example: A pitch from one reporter to explore “How safe are San Francisco Bay beaches and water a year after the Cosco Busan oil spill?” carries a price tag of $445 and it’s about 75 percent funded. Another pitch—“When The Longevity Revolution Hits Your Town.” A three-part series—is asking $330 for the reporter and has a ways to go.

I like Cohn’s idea because it:
—Tests the notion that people will pay for journalism, one story and one small contribution at a time. This approach reduces the cost of journalism to its essence—a transaction between an information-seeking collection of people and an information-finding journalist.
—Injects community priorities into a decision-making process that has been dominated (and not always to the best effect) by a professional class of journalists. In a way, the process gives journalism access to a broader group of community sources and a way to gauge which issues are most pressing. As more people in a community vote for certain stories—and perhaps reject some journalist pitches—journalism gains a window into community concerns and priorities.

Spot.Us is piloting in the San Francisco Bay area, and by definition, the experiment is local. The model might work at a national level too—I cannot count the times I have been willing to contribute a few bucks upon reading a really good New York Times investigation even though I do not want to subscribe to the newspaper. But I think the local focus promises the truest test of the ability of the model to work and to create journalism that reflects community concerns and taps a local market of freelance journalist expertise. Cohn says the project is committed to local journalism and San Francisco is just the start.

Local news organizations can be part of the effort as well. Most stories will be available for publication at no charge. A contribution of 50 percent assures first publishing rights to a story. A contribution of 100 percent assures exclusive rights.

Spot Us, like any big experiment, is bound to engender skepticism, especially from established news organizations. But Spot Us seems like a worthy partner for organizations that are now struggling to cover local issues. I hope some Bay Area news organizations will join the promising experiment.

Update: Amy Gahran addresses skepticism about community funded journalism here.

Fading print

I highly recommend you read Steven A. Smith’s post about how his news reading habits have changed in the month since he left the Spokesman-Review newsroom. As a longtime newspaper editor who now relies almost exclusively on the Web for news, I found his transition a great reminder to all editors in newsrooms that the role of the morning edition is evolving more rapidly than their products.

I think the print newspaper will be around for a while to come. But as editors think about how to deploy fewer newsroom resources, it’s important to take into account the diminishing utility of the newspaper, even to many hardcore readers.

Here is Smith’s version of that transition:

“I find myself spending far less time with my morning newspapers than in the past. As a civilian, I find myself jumping through the A section in just a few minutes. Out of a newsroom and away from direct wire feeds to my computer, I go to the net to read national and international news. Yahoo has become an oft-visited site. It was never on my favorites list before. I also go regularly to CNN.com and its various branches.

“By the time the paper arrives, there just isn’t anything in the national/international report that I haven’t already seen or heard.

“And this isn’t just about my local paper. On the road the last couple of weeks, I had the same experience with the New York Times, several local papers and USA Today. Even that last paper’s A section, snappy and readable as it is, held less interest.

“Of course, this problem has been noted endlessly by any number of people and organizations, particularly the online-only lobby.

“But, still, for an editor, the experience is unsettling and a little sad.”

And the clincher:

“But the fact is, if my several newspapers disappeared tomorrow, my life would go on, a bit emptier for the loss of routine and tactile experience, but no less informed.”

As Smith notes in his post, none of this experience is new. Many who have left print newsrooms, myself included, came to find much of their news away from the beloved morning newspaper. Especially discouraging is the extent to which most newspapers still report news of previous cycles on the front page every day. I am always surprised to see mostly first-day headlines on the news—even non-local news—on the front page.

You would think the immediacy of the Internet would liberate print editions from that and enable editors to make more adventuresome and analytical choices for the morning newspaper.

Why isn’t that happening more? Do print readers miss those first-day headlines in the morning? What are the best practices for local newspapers? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Twitter is my election ‘newspaper’

I have an Election Day confession to make:

In the final weeks of the campaign, I got most of my election news from Twitter.

That’s right. Not the New York Times. Not CNN. Not the local newspaper to which I dutifully subscribe.

Instead, my Number 1 news source was Twitter, the online blogging service that allows people to send short messages to the people who follow them and receive messages in turn from those they follow.

I’ve written before about the potential of Twitter and other social networks as a tool for newsrooms—both to gather news and to distribute it. Now I feel like living proof of the distribution part of the equation.

It didn’t happen overnight. I typically follow cnn.com for headlines and nytimes.com for depth. As news coverage became increasingly formulaic and annoying (the hourly horse race gets old fast) in the last couple of months of the campaign, I found I was learning all that I needed by following links recommended by folks I follow on Twitter (I still glanced the headlines of major mainstream news sources just in case.)

Consider:

- I got links to campaign analysis, campaign events and speeches minus the CNN-hype, plus links to off-the-beaten-track reports like this. (thanks @sjcobrien)

- I got links to contrarian analysis of the financial bailout and questions about the candidate economic proposals that weren’t finding their way into mainstream media (thanks @howardowens)

- I got running commentary and links on how the press was dealing (or not) with campaign stonewalling (thanks @jayrosen_nyu and your #spinewatch)

- I was the first on my digital block to know about the election polling site FiveThirtyEight, 10 days before it showed up on Poynter Online (thanks @matthewburton)

- Politics aside, I first learned on Twitter that the Phillies had won the World Series (thanks @ckrewson)

All this—and a few other of my pet topics—from about 30 people I follow on Twitter. In many ways, it’s a reader’s dream. You chose your “editors”, people who recommend news and information they think their followers may want to see. Their Twitter comments tell you where they are coming from and if you decide you don’t like their recommendations, you can turn them off any time. You get bragging points: My non-Twitter friends are astounded at the constant supply of interesting links I e-mail to them.

I’m not alone in my increasing reliance on digital media for news. The Pew Research Center just reported that more and more people are hitting the internet for campaign news:  “Television remains the dominant source, but the percent who say they get most of their campaign news from the internet has tripled since October 2004 (from 10% then to 33% now). While use of the web has seen considerable growth, the percentage of Americans relying on TV and newspapers for campaign news has remained relatively flat since 2004. The internet now rivals newspapers as a main source for campaign news.” (By the way, I got that link in a tweet from @jayrosen_nyu.)

Of course, Twitter is just one tool, and not a widely used one at that. Twitter itself is hardly the future of news, especially the future of producing in depth public service journalism. But Twitter illustrates a larger point about consumption and delivery of news. People increasingly believe that news will be there for them on demand or find them when they aren’t even looking.  Twitter and other social media tools (Delicious, for example) enable consumers to get recommendations from people they trust.

Selecting important news used to be the role of the local newspaper. Now anyone can do it. That doesn’t necessarily push traditional newsrooms out of the game. Any newsroom can improve on becoming its users primary trusted online source of recommendations. It’s another example of how aggregating and linking to other sources adds value to the news report.

Is your newsroom taking on this role? Please share your ideas and experiences in comments.

If you want to check out get Twitter, this post from Amy Gahran is a good first stop.

One way to check out its news-gathering potential on Election Day is the Twitter Vote Report, people can report problems at polling places. Kristin Gorski describes the idea here on the Huffington Post. (Yes, I follow @kristingorski on Twitter as well and she posted the link there.) Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits explores the effort as well.