Our new leadership report is out today!

The Leadership Conference is a highlight of Knight Digital Media Center’s annual training calendar. Newsroom leaders come to the center to hear from experts in digital media, innovation and newsroom change. They return to their newsrooms with strategies and ideas for moving online.

Today, KDMC is pleased to release a report compiled from the July 2008 Leadership Conference and an earlier leadership gathering in 2007. The report is organized as a series of lists and bullet points—tools, takeaways, quotes and action steps, for example—designed to spark new thinking among newsroom leaders and link them to resources that will help them develop their ideas.

I hope you’ll take a look at the KDMC Leadership Report. Here’s a sampling:

From Takeaways:

Stacy Lynch, a consultant and project manager for the Media Management Center, warns traditional news organizations against “the sucking sound of print” as they transition to online while attempting to maintain the newspaper.

“Print will take over every ounce of energy you have,” Lynch said.  The brutal truth is there’s nothing in print that has no value. Everything has a little bit a value. Every cut hurts. You just have to figure out what hurts less.”

From Tools:

Key performance indicators provide more meaningful information on site traffic than simple counts of visits or visitors. Dana Chinn, a faculty member at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, details KPIs and their uses:

Often, that KPI is not a simple number such as time on site or unique monthly visitors. Instead, the most meaningful information may be from a ratio or comparison of two different numbers.

From Culture changers:

Change will only come from the bottom up. Command-and-control hierarchical systems of management have worked well for getting the daily paper out on time, but executive pronouncements do little to build long term change. The old structure burdens top editors with making too many small decisions instead of working on long term strategy. Perhaps more significantly, it discourages initiative - and possible innovation - from the ranks.

Also see Quotes, Reading, Action Steps

We envision a report that can grow and evolve as the challenges of newsroom leadership change. Please add your ideas in the comments.

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.