Embrace ‘iteration’

Last month, Knight Digital Media Center brought together teams from 12 news organizations to learn more about digital media and make plans for moving their newsrooms forward online. Now those editors are back in their newsrooms making changes—and I will be reporting on their progress in the coming months. In the meantime, I’m preparing a report on the conference—something KDMC can put online to benefit other editors.

As I review my notes and the conference presentations, I will blog chunks of the conference materials and discussions. I hope comments from participants and other editors will enrich the final report.

Here is the report from the 2007 conference. I plan to use a similar format of lists—key takeaways, tools, quotes and questions.

I want to start with the idea of “iteration” from a presentation by Stacy Lynch, a project director with Media Management Center and former Innovations Director at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Lynch focused on decision-making and the difficulty news organizations have in making them quickly because of unproductive loops in the typical process.

“Iteration,” is one antidote. It’s a process of breaking a project into stages and launching them one at a time.

Lynch noted that it’s a model that works in other fields. “In most software development, 60-80% of work is done post ‘launch’ as new versions emerge.”

Those of us who are native to print will have a hard time imagining how that might work on the printed page. And the perfectionistic culture of newsrooms may frown on launching something that is not fully nailed down. But the process seems remarkably simple and suited to online.

Lynch used the example of building a new entertainment site to illustrate iteration:
1, Initially, launch only an events database. Fix any bugs.
2. Add a rating component.
3. Enable users to upload photos from different events.
4. Build in files associated with different performers.

“From the very beginning, say what it will have, but say it’s going to come out in different chunks,’’ Lynch advises.

The process helps prevent overspending resources at the beginning—perhaps adding features that users don’t really want. It builds in flexibility and allows you to get feedback as the project develops. Perhaps most importantly in the digital world, it speeds time to market.

Lynch presented a second tool, called RAID, to speed decision-making. I’ll write more about RAID next week.

Let’s get local

Joe H. Bullard, a former managing editor of The Denver Post, wants to see more local news in the Denver newspapers. Here’s his formula from ”Getting local coverage in gear.”

“I’d fire a third of the editors and convert another third of them to being reporters and give them a laptop. I’d send all my reporters home with a laptop. I would tell each of them his beat is now a circle with a radius of 12 blocks and the center of the circle is his house. I want to know everything that happens within those 12 blocks.

“I don’t want to see you in the newsroom, unless your editor or I summon you. I will count bylines. If you don’t submit at least one story a day, I will be unhappy. If you go a week without a byline, you will be fired. I will expect you to know how to use a digital camera and I expect you to submit at least one picture a day from your circle.

“Because all the reporters and editors are college graduates and have been making a good living for a good number of years, they all live in upscale portions of the metro area, which will limit the news that gets reported. This is a good thing because it would give me the opportunity to hire blue-collar reporters that care about what goes on in their neighborhoods.

“They would be much more concerned about why their Johnny can’t read and why his classroom has 39 kids, one teacher and no aide. Or why their street never gets swept, nor the snow removed. In short, we would start reporting news that is relevant to my readers.

“What do I do with all this news? Put it on my web site as a zone section.”

Is this an organizing principle for the future? Is your newsroom already doing something like this? Please share your experiences in comments.

(Thanks to Ryan Sholin for the pointer.)

Link: Innovation in the newsroom

Chris O’Brien is a business columnist at The San Jose Mercury News and winner of a Knight 21st Century News Challenge grant to study the newsroom of the future. From that vantage point, he offers ”Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom.”

O’Brien says:

“No one can simply order up innovation on demand. Wish as you might, the innovation fairy won’t sprinkle pixie dust on your newsroom while you sleep. But you can encourage innovation, nurture it by lowering barriers, supporting those employees with entrepreneurial drive, and providing a fertile environment for their ideas.”

His list:
1. Make it a priority
2. Create a process
3. Foster new collaboration
4. Offer incentives
5. Evaluate and learn

I think it all flows from 1. Make it a priority. Too often, newsrooms are so wound up in getting out that next edition or that next online update that thinking about and creating for the future falls by the wayside day after day after day.

Setting aside time for the future is a choice, a discipline and an imperative.

As O’Brien says:

“If 100 percent of your newsroom’s time is devoted to just producing your current products, then you’re already doomed, even if it isn’t immediately apparent. This is true whether you’re a traditional newspaper newsroom, or an online first newsroom.”

How does your newsroom foster innovation? Please share your thoughts in comments.

Old grocery store, new marketplace

Today seems to be a day for analogies about grocery stores and the news(paper) industry.
Analogy 1. This morning, I stumbled across a comment by Vin Crosbie (thanks to Tom Pellegrene at The Journal Gazette for recording it from last month’s KDMC Leadership Conference).
Crosbie likened the traditional newspaper business to a grocery store that is trying to sell bags already full of items (not necessarily of the choosing of the consumer.) That analogy is both brilliant and scary to a traditional newspaper person like me. It goes to the heart of the challenge: The mass audience with its mass consumption of the traditionally prescribed diet is ebbing away in favor of customized news and information. (That is not the same thing as saying the appetite for good journalism is waning.)
2. This afternoon, I noticed a David Cohn post about the confusion he experienced at Safeway trying to find his two favorite cereals on a veritable wall of product:

“I was almost at a standstill. As if the overabundance of information caused my brain to shut down. Later I laughed at myself and wondered if this is how my mother feels when she is online, bombarded with colors, slogans and icons when really all she wanted was a specific piece of information, ‘what happened in West L.A. yesterday.’
“Traditionally news organizations (newspapers) were how people would find the information they wanted. If you wanted to know what happened in the world you either turned on the TV or checked the headlines in your morning newspaper. Google has them beat. It’s too late to try and become the aisle sign (the first thing people go to). But there is still room to become the helpful employee roaming the aisle. That’s where news organizations can still make their mark.”

I like the idea of the helpful employee because it reflects an ideal of traditional journalism: A mission of serving the community. So let’s extend the idea. Here’s my analogy for the future:
3. The former grocery store becomes a local specialty shop, offering unique and high quality products. The shopkeepers also provide a referral service—if they don’t have a product, they can tell the customer where to find it.
For the organization formerly known as the newspaper, this means finding out what other organizations—nonprofits, citizen sites, other online publications and (yes) even businesses —are providing, linking to it and putting it in context. More importantly, it means shaping the news and information the traditional organization produces to cover gaps in the community news fabric rather than trying to cover it all. It also means being nimble enough to shift inventory (topics covered) as the need arises.
Is there a business model in this? I’m not sure. I do know this: Right now, I live in a very small town (maybe 4,000 people) and I shop local even though prices are higher because a) I want to support local business and b) if a merchant doesn’t have something, she can almost always tell me what other shop has it. That’s value.
Please add your thoughts (more analogies always welcome) in the comments.

Link: Using Twitter

Ryan Sholin makes it easy for newsrooms to get started with Twitter with ”Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter.”

Mindy McAdams offers some perspective with ”Twitter is Growing on Me.”

Think you don’t have time? Try this: Open a Twitter account and sign up to follow Sholin and McAdams (five minutes). Check the account a couple of times a day (five minutes). See where it leads (one potential window into the future of news gathering and delivery)

Are you using Twitter? Please share experiences in the comments..

Link: 10 ways to improve comments

Derek Powazek offers ”10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments,” in a post worth reading in full.

Here’s the quick list:
1. Require Accounts. Make people register but don’t worry about anonymity.
2. Set and Enforce Rules. Delete bad comments and promote good ones.
3. Employ a Community Manager to monitor comments, participate in discussions and remove offensive comments.
4. Sculpt the Input. Ask for more on a comment, or less.
5. Empower the Community to help monitor comments.
6. Link Stories to Comments.
7. Enable Private Communication so people can vent.
8. Participate and get your staff to participate.
9. But Don’t Feed the Trolls, learn when and how to join the fray and who to ignore.
10. Give Up Control, expect surprises.

(Thanks to Notes from a Teacher for the pointer.)

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?